Chapter 29 #2
“Oooh, what's this?” Dinah said to herself as she pulled two books out of a gift bag from Dad.
“Hidden Patterns: Finding Meaning in Chaos,” she read off the front of the first, and then the other: “The World Isn't Random: Uncovering Life's Secret Order.” She looked up at Dad with an “are you serious” face.
“I heard about them on a podcast. They might help you regain a sense of control, you know?”
“Control over what?”
“Uh…” Dad looked over at Mom, who glared at him.
“Oh! I get it. This is about my divorce,” Dinah said. “Thanks, Jake! How are things with you and Lily? Get into any good fights lately?”
“Dinah, please!” Grandma begged.
“We just want you to be happy, okay? Whatever way we can do that for you…” Mom chimed in, looking a little concerned that my dad would buy Dinah such books.
“Do you think you're better than me because you get to say that?” Dinah asked.
My mom shook her head with a knowing look that catastrophe was afoot.
“You're not better than me! You're a run-of-the-mill, blanket-knitting, happy housewife. A real Pollyanna! Voted Most Likely to Succeed in high school! Look where that got you, Kitchen Karen.”
“Okay, enough! I need to wash the dishes.” Mom left the couch and escaped through the kitchen door to prevent this conversation from snowballing out of control.
When I walked into the kitchen, my parents were quietly arguing.
“You seriously thought it was a good idea to buy those kinds of books for her in her current mental state?” my mom asked my dad.
“I thought they might give her some perspective,” Dad said.
“She's physically incapable of perspective except for what's going on in her pea brain at any given moment,” my mom barked back.
When my parents came back out of the kitchen, Dinah was sobbing. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know I'm always the villain. That's probably why Mason left me for that whore in HR. I'll read the books Jake got me.”
“Stop,” Mom said. “You're my sister. I will always love you. Let's have a beautiful Christmas together.” She squeezed her with a hug.
Dad pulled out his phone and handed it to Grandma. “Let's take a picture in front of the tree, okay?”
As we posed in front of the tree, Dinah wouldn't stop crying.
“Dinah, how about you go sit next to Jake's dad and pick something festive for us to watch?” Mom said.
I shook my head wildly. The one time of year Dinah didn't watch Christmas movies was Christmas itself. She always forced us to watch some old eighties movie called Flashdance every year, about a nightclub dancer who dreams of becoming a ballerina.
“I don't want to watch Flashdance again. Please don't make me watch it,” I begged my mom in a whisper, but she shot me down with a “don't screw this up” glare.
Dinah wiped her tears and took a seat next to Grandpa. She was only ten minutes into Flashdance when the world came crashing down.
“This couch feels warm. And wet. Did some—” Dinah said, scanning the area around her thighs. Oh no. I could see the dark spot in Grandpa's pants.
“Oh, shit. We forgot to put his diaper on,” Dad said.
“He pissed on me? I got piss on my fucking elf costume?”
Dinah jumped off the couch and threw the remote at Grandpa.
“YOU RUINED MY ELF COSTUME!”
“Don't hit him!” Dad shouted.
“Dinah, please, it's our fault, not his,” Mom pleaded.
“Oh dear, I'm sorry about this,” my grandmother cried frantically, holding her wrinkled hands over her cheeks. “Maybe it's best if we go back to Oyster Pit.”
Everybody agreed, and Dad grabbed the rest of their presents and helped them pack into Dinah's car while Dinah smoked a cigarette at the edge of the driveway.
Fast-moving clouds rolled across the sky, tinted in a weird shade of green. They looked bubbly, like marshmallows hanging overhead. I could hear mild cracks of thunder and see flashes of lightning coming from the north side of town.
“Weird,” Dad said. “The forecast never said anything about storms. You might want to get back quickly so you don't get caught in the rain.”
“Wade, go help your dad get Grandpa ready for bed while I say goodbye,” Mom told me.
After Dad and I cleaned him up, we got him on the bed, where he stared into whatever abyss a senile grandfather can see.
“Play him some music,” Dad told me.
Grandpa liked listening to the “Goldberg Variations” by Bach. A slow, thoughtful piano piece that sounded like something you'd hear from an antique music box. I sidled up next to him and stared at the wall with him.
We listened for twenty minutes. By then, the sky through the window was pitch black, with the occasional flash of lightning. Grandpa looked me in the eyes and said something that he often told me when I was little: “You're my little champ.”
I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed real hard. I loved those moments when he became lucid again. I listened to the rhythmic thumping of his heart.
When I let go and looked at him, he went back to that dead-eyed stare. “Who are you?”
Well, while they lasted, at least.
A flash of white lit up the room. For a second I thought our outside Christmas lights exploded. Thunder rumbled.
“Storm's a comin',” I told Grandpa as I stood near the window. He taught me how to calculate my distance from lightning when I was little.
A long bolt of lightning stretched through the clouds.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, I counted.
A clap of thunder, louder than before, rattled the windowpane and vibrated the floorboards.
Another flash.
I could barely get out another Mississippi before a blitzkrieg of lightning bolts turned everything into an x-ray white. The thunder boomed and shook my house, and I leapt back from the window.
We were used to rough thunderstorms in December. There was something different about this thunder—something angry and ominous. The silence between the booms was equally unsettling.
“Jake, come outside quick!” Mom shouted.
Dad's feet thudded across the living room and out the front door. I thought maybe a lightning bolt struck something and started a fire, so I left Grandpa at his bed and followed.
I walked across the lawn, carefully stepping over the extension cords that powered our decorations. The unbearable heat and humidity from earlier was gone. A cool, dry air had taken its place.
“My god. Look,” Mom said, pointing north, miles beyond the farmstead across the highway.
In between the moments of pitch black, the flashes of lightning exposed what resembled smoke from several fires billowing from the ground. Each plume started wafting around another one.
“Is something on fire?” I asked.
“That's vapor and dirt swirling around. Like dust devils,” Dad replied.
They didn't look like funnels. The clouds above were roiling, but there was open air between them and the dirt.
“Tornadoes?” Mom asked.
Dad rubbed his eyes and looked again. “It can't be. Maybe it's scud clouds.”
As I tried to film it with my phone, the swirls began to peter out. We waited for a moment until they disappeared.
“The front is probably not strong enough for tornadoes. One in our home is enough for the day, anyway,” Dad said.
Mom started for the house. “That's a relief. I need to dry the dishes and take something for my throbbing headache.”
I stayed outside for another few minutes to film the lightning so I could send it to Tramel. The sky went dark except for a few small bursts of lightning. I was hoping to catch another prolonged stretch of lightning roots.
I kept thinking about what Tramel's mom said about the air being haunted. She was right. It just felt so weird.
A series of flashes in the sky revealed that the billowing from the ground had started again. The dirt, thicker and more defined this time, separated into four vortices. They grew from the ground all the way up to the sky, like a sketch artist was drawing them in real time.
They looked like ghosts. They spun around each other, similar to two pairs of legs folded together in a tango.
“It's like they're dancing,” I said out loud to my phone.
Right as another stretch of lightning roots lit up the sky, the vortices quickly condensed into one fat turkey leg. The front was strong enough after all.
My mind froze. I had never seen an actual tornado before. Between every lightning strike, the funnel grew larger. A fourth of a mile wide. Half. Three-quarters. A mile. All this in the span of thirty seconds. It stayed still, like it was contemplating the best path, and expanded under every flash.
Everything around me went silent. The wind stopped. The air felt still, felt charged.
The front door opened and Mom peered out. “Wade, come back inside so you don't get struck by lightning.”
Curious about what I was filming, she approached me from behind, and the brightest bolt of lightning yet hit the field in front of the highway, followed by a crash of thunder that almost knocked us off our feet.
She saw it and screamed for Dad.
By the time he came out, you could hear a deep bellowing, like a rocket launch, in the distance.
“What now?” he answered impatiently.
“Holy fuck, Jake, do you see it?” Mom ran her fingers through her hair anxiously. Several more lightning strikes revealed the tornado in its enormity and wide gusts of dirt flowing from the ground into the funnel.
The color drained from Dad's face. “Oh no. Oh boy. I've never seen one that big. Can you call your mom and sister and make sure they're okay? There might be more.”
“It's moving south this way,” Mom insisted, but Dad shook his head.
“These things move northeast. I'm from rural Minnesota, Lily. We get them, too,” Dad yelled.
“It doesn't look like it's moving. That's when it's coming right at you!” Mom insisted. The last few words seared into my brain.
The wind picked up again. First slowly, then in gusts that tousled our hair. Dad's garden gnome tipped over, and the wind chimes above it rang louder than I'd ever heard them. The thin trees on our street bent over sideways as if they were bowing.