Chapter 8
Elaine Gardner eyes Nora across the counter while running the espresso machine at the Chat & Brew in Rabbittown Square. She’s known Eleanora Clanton as long as Eleanora has been alive, and she’s never heard that girl hum anything, but here she is. At the counter. Humming a tune from God knows where. She has always been polite, and she tips well, but she’s…Elaine tries to think of the right word. “Careful” is what she comes up with. Even when she was a child. All of the other kids would run around the Square screaming like heathens, but not Eleanora.
Elaine starts to feel guilty for judging her like that. People are allowed to hum. This is a free country, after all. Then Nora starts nodding her head to whatever she’s humming, and Elaine can’t help herself.
“What’s gotten into you?”
Nora jerks her head up. “Me?”
“I don’t see anyone else carrying on their own concert.” Nora’s cheeks redden, and Elaine feels like she’s looking at Anita Clanton. Like she’s serving coffee to a ghost.
“Sorry,” Nora mumbles.
“No apology needed,” Elaine says. She pours steamed oat milk into Nora’s cup, places the plastic lid on top, and slides the cup across the counter to Nora. “Seems like you’re in a good mood.”
“I guess I am.” Nora smiles. “Have a good day.”
“You, too.”
Nora laughs to herself as she crosses the street to open the store. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and everything is going her way. In her head, at least.
Nora’s good mood goes out the window with the sound of the first storm siren before she even makes it to her desk. She spends the day watching the local news, trying to understand the timing and locations of the storms sweeping through the state of Alabama. The meteorologist gives warning after warning to be cautious, and so do Jean, Margaret (stopping by on her way home from the pharmacy), Ms. Annie, and Grandpa.
She texts Garrett to make sure he’s paying attention to the radar. She hadn’t been fully awake when Garrett left her house that morning, but he had promised to come back over once he was done with his appointments for the day. Or did he say meetings? She still didn’t know what he did all day.
No one is shopping for a casket in the rain and with a tornado warning, so Nora has all day to obsess over the weather, just like everyone else in town. Rabbittown’s biggest storm threat should hit later in the evening, so Nora gets the store ready before she packs up. This means pacing through every area of the store and sliding everything from the top of her desk down into the drawers, as if drawers would stop a tornado. It tricks her into cleaning up the back room and filing the papers she has left strewn about. She rolls the model caskets to the back of the store and unplugs the electronics before locking the door to head home.
Nora wanders around her house nervously. She gathers pillows and cushions and tosses them into the hallway in case she needs them later. She makes sure all of the windows are closed and locked, as if they had been opened in years. Eventually, she gives up on the preparation and forces herself to sit down. The meteorologist on TV points out a swath of red and green heading straight for the Rabbittown area.
Nora reaches for her phone to call Garrett but fumbles, her phone clattering to the floor. The noise brings her wandering mind back to the present moment.
“What are you doing?” Nora asks once he answers.
“I’m working. What are you doing?”
“Watching the weather.” She leans back on the couch, letting her head hit the top of the cushion. “You know there’s a tornado coming, right?”
“Yes, I know.” A door closes on his end of the call.
“Where are you?”
“I’m about to go home.”
“You’re getting in a car right now. I heard the door.” For a moment, an image of him at some secret place enters her mind, but she doesn’t let it take over. It doesn’t matter where he is. He shouldn’t be in a car. “Did you not hear the part about the tornado?”
“Are you worried about the storm? Everything is going to be fine.”
“I didn’t call so you could help me feel better. I wanted to make sure you’re paying attention.”
“I’m paying attention.”
“People die when tornadoes come through Alabama.”
“I know that.”
Lightning draws Nora’s attention to the living room windows as a clap of thunder sounds, startling some of her mom’s porcelain knickknacks on a shelf in the corner. It startles Nora, too, even though she had known it was coming. Thunder has always startled Nora, despite the fact that lightning is a pretty good indicator that you can expect thunder.
“Can you at least tell me you’re driving home?” she asks, her voice coming out higher than usual. “Your car is the worst place you can be. I don’t care how fancy it is.”
“I promise I’ll go straight home.”
“Right now?”
“Soon.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed.”
He sighs. “I’m not dying tonight, and neither are you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. I’m going to call you in thirty minutes, okay?”
“We’re going to talk about this. You better not be a second late. I’m not kidding.”
“I won’t be.”
Nora curls up with a blanket to watch the local news coverage and to wait for the thirty-minute timer on her phone to go off.
The meteorologist has ditched his jacket and tie, signaling that he has a long night ahead of him. Nora has never fully trusted meteorologists—she can’t even count how many times she has gotten caught in a rainstorm that was nowhere to be found on the radar—but when he zooms in to follow the storm’s path, she recognizes the communities that are usually too small to be picked out on the weather maps. None of them are that close to Rabbittown, so she has no reason to worry about her own safety, although faces and names of those who might be in danger come into her mind.
Nora tries to stop worrying about Garrett, but her mind wanders to her parents. They had been in a car, too. So was Ethan. It hadn’t even been raining either of those times. Is this what death has done to her? Is this her life now? Worrying every time someone she loves is in a car?
But this isn’t about the car, is it? It’s about the tornado tearing through the area with no rhyme or reason. This had been death, too. She was following what she knew after spending most of her life in Alabama. Watching the weather and waiting for the meteorologist to say, “If you’re in Rabbittown, you need to be in a safe place.” Her safest place was the basement, where she has stashed her laptop, chargers, pillows, candles, flashlights, and an old bicycle helmet. Tornadoes really do kill people. Nora has seen it her whole life, and Garrett had just blown it off like it was no big deal.
Nora thinks of confidence as something you put on from the outside, like a jacket hanging in her closet. She can’t fathom what it must feel like to have confidence bubble up from within, to feel like you were well equipped to handle whatever was coming. Surely she’s felt it before, but the older she gets, the less she trusts the world around her to be predictable enough to let her be confident about anything.
She opens Facebook, and as usual, she immediately regrets it. Reports about the storm are everywhere. There won’t be photos until morning, but the maps of the storm’s path and the descriptions of people’s experiences are enough. The news outlets seem sure that there will be deaths. There always are.
Another flash of lightning. A clap of thunder. A flash of light closer to her window. Suddenly Nora is sitting in the dark. She turns on the flashlight next to her and scans the room. She should have gone to her grandpa’s or Jean’s or even to a neighbor’s house. She isn’t usually afraid of the dark, but there’s something different about the power being out. It’s like the dark has you trapped, and you have no idea when you’ll get out. The usual things that go bump in the night are compounded by the not knowing what happens next.
Nora lights an old lantern of her mother’s and moves into the hallway, onto a pile of cushions, just to be safe. If the storm were closer, she would go to the basement, but it’s scary down there. Always has been. Listening to the sounds of the rain and wind outside, she wonders if she will be able to sleep tonight. If the storm will be over soon. If it has already done its damage. She thinks about phoning Garrett, but she doesn’t want to be that anxious girl calling her boyfriend to rescue her, especially when her thirty-minute timer hasn’t gone off yet.
If she was honest, what she really wants is the same thing every heroine in this sort of story wants: for Garrett to want to be with her in intense moments like this without her having to ask. If she asks, there’s a chance that he’ll say no. There’s a chance that things aren’t the way Nora thinks they are with Garrett, and this isn’t the way she wants to find that out. By being too much. By confirming that their relationship can’t withstand the weight of her needs.
As a modern woman, she feels guilty about this. Shouldn’t she be able to take care of herself without the help of a man? But she does take care of herself. All the time. Does it really set humanity back if she wants the person she loves to be around when she’s having a hard time? And, if so, how does she change that part inside of her?