Jennifer Brown: Torn Away

“Mom?” I said.

But she didn’t answer. I could hear her shouting, “Get your heads down! Get your heads down!” and lots of screaming and crying. I thought I might have heard glass breaking.

And then I heard nothing but the drone of the sirens outside my window.

“Mom? Mom!” I kept yelling into the phone, even though I knew the connection had been lost. I tried to call again, but the line wouldn’t connect. I realized that my hands were shaking, and my fingers didn’t want to work around the phone’s keypad anymore. I dropped it twice and then tried to call Ronnie, but that call wouldn’t go through, either.

The sirens screeched one last time and then abruptly stopped, and I could hear wild clicking against the window—hail—and something else. Something louder. Thumps and thuds and scrapes against the house, like larger items were slamming up against it. Metallic clangs and broken sounds.

For a moment I sat there, frozen on the couch. I thought I heard what sounded like a train rumbling down our street, and I remembered one time in fourth grade when our teacher read us a book that described the sound of a tornado as being something like the sound of a locomotive. I hadn’t believed it at the time—it didn’t make sense that a tornado could sound like anything but blowing wind. But there it was, the sound of a train passing. I held my breath in frightened anticipation.

The moment stretched around me—the noise getting louder and then muting as my ears began popping—and I gripped my cell phone like I was holding on to the side of a cliff. I tried to be still so I could listen. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe it was my imagination and there was no train sound out there. I was hearing what I was scared to hear.

But then something really huge hit the house. I heard the tinkling of glass breaking upstairs, on the other end of the house, over where Marin’s bedroom was. A loud metallic grating noise seared the air outside as something was pushed down the street. I only had seconds to think about Kolby, to wonder if he was still out there, when the basement window suddenly shattered, ushering in an enormous roar of noise.

I screamed, my voice getting lost in the din. I instinctively covered my head and then scrambled under the pool table, pulling my backpack and cell phone with me.

Noise blasted in and I rolled up in a ball, cradling my head with my arms. I squeezed my eyes shut. There were great, loud creaks and bangs. Glass shattering and shattering and shattering. Thunks as things spun and flew and hit walls. Groans and wooden popping sounds as walls gave, bricks tumbled. Crunching thuds as heavy building materials hit the floors.

I heard these things happening, but it was unclear where exactly they were happening. Was it in the basement? Upstairs? Down the street? Space and time were distorted, and even the most basic things like direction didn’t make sense.

Wind whipped the hem of my shirt and pulled at my hair, and I felt out in the open, as if the tornado had somehow gotten into the basement.

Small items blasted across the floor and battered me. I opened my eyes and saw one of Ronnie’s work boots thud against my side. Papers whipped around me, bending over my arms. A wall calendar screamed past. An empty milk crate, which had spilled its contents, tumbled up against my shins. An ashtray knocked me in the back of the head, making me cry out and inch my fingers over to where it had hit, feeling the warmth and wetness I was sure was blood. The pool table spun half a circle and came to rest again.

It felt like a never-ending stream of chaos. Like my whole world was being shaken and tossed and torn apart, and like it would never stop. Like I would be stuck in this terror forever.

I was confused, and my arms, legs, back, and head stung. I coiled into myself, gripping my head and crying and crying, half-sobbing, half-shrieking. I don’t know how long I stayed that way before I realized it was over.

When I opened my eyes, at first I stayed in my safety position. I could hear rain now, pelting the ground, only the ground seemed very close. It was still dark, still windy, but had already lightened up some since the tornado had passed.

At last, I forced myself to let go of my head and felt around for my cell phone. It was lodged between my backpack and my stomach and I pulled it out, my fingers white and shaky as I clung to it. I tried to call Mom.

No connection.

I tried Ronnie.

Same.

911.

Nothing.

I tried Jane. Dani. Everyone I could think of.

I was getting no bars. No cell service.

I lay there for a few more minutes, trying to catch my breath and quell my panicked sobbing. My arms and legs felt tingly from adrenaline and fear. I listened. I could hear talking and loud cries and car alarms bleating. A stuck police siren. A plea for help. And off in the distance, just maybe, the growling chug of the funnel cloud moving on.

Growing up, we were taught over and over again what steps to take in case of an approaching tornado. Listen for sirens, go to your basement or cellar, or a closet in the center of your house, duck and cover, wait it out. We had drills twice a year, every year, in school. We talked about it in class. We talked about it at home. The newscasters reminded us. We went to the basement. We practiced, practiced, practiced.

But we’d never—not once—discussed what to do after .

I think we never thought there would be an after like this one.

It seemed like forever before the rain and wind stopped. It was still gray around me, but the sky had lightened up enough that I could see fine without the flashlight, which I’d dropped in my scramble to the pool table.

Kolby. I would go get Kolby. See if he could call my mom from his phone. Slowly, I uncurled myself and, after a moment of hesitation, slid out from under the table and sat up.

At the opposite end of the basement, where Ronnie’s workbench normally sat, there was no ceiling. The floor I had been standing on while rummaging for a flashlight just fifteen minutes before was now buried in a dusty pile of rubble—what used to be our kitchen, except the table was gone and the walls were gone and the plates had all fallen out of their cabinets, which were also gone, and now lay in a heap on the concrete basement floor.

What was worse—I could see sky where the kitchen used to be. Wires and broken pipes jutted out here and there. Water gushed from somewhere.

“Oh my God,” I said, pulling myself up to standing, unsure whether my wobbly legs would keep me that way. “Oh my God.”

I took a few steps toward the rubble. The closer I got, the more sky I could see. The kitchen walls, they were gone. Completely and totally gone.

I could have walked right up the rubble pile to the outside if I’d wanted to, but the sight of my broken kitchen was so foreign, the bare and jutting wires so frightening, I couldn’t make myself approach it. The basement stairs were still standing, and for some reason walking up them and through the basement door into the house seemed like the right thing to do, so I made my way over to them, a part of me hoping that maybe if I went up the stairs, the rest of the house wouldn’t be as bad as the kitchen looked.

The couch had been pulled to the rubble and turned up on its side. There were clothes strewn everywhere.

I glanced down at my hands, my fingers streaked with dried blood, my right hand wrapped around my useless cell phone. I stuffed the phone into my pocket and reached around to the back of my head again. It was sticky and my hair felt kind of matted, but it didn’t really hurt or anything, and it wasn’t gushing blood, so I ignored it, trying to keep things in perspective. It was just a cut. It could wait until Mom got home. Everything would be fine once she got here.