Jennifer Brown: Torn Away

He stood up and peered down toward Church Street, with its trickle of refugees heading away from the destruction.

“I know,” he said. “It’s just… holy cow.”

“How far do you think it went?” I asked.

He shook his head but didn’t answer.

“Kolby? How far do you think it went?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice sounding flat and croaky. “Looks like far.”

“Do you think…?” I started, but I trailed off, afraid to finish my question, afraid that the answer would be no.

Do you think Mom will be able to get to me?

The next few hours went by in a blur. Some of the men were going house to house, cocking their heads and listening for cries for help under the rubble. Every time they heard even the tiniest noise—the mew of a cat or the wooden click of a board settling or anything that might have sounded like a whimper—they fell on it, down on their knees, ripping things apart with their hands, their faces dripping with sweat and determination. A yell went up every time a hole to a basement was found, an expectant and grateful face peering up out of it.

And then they found Mrs. Dempsey.

Too fragile to make it to her basement, the old lady had cowered in her bathtub to ride out the storm. She’d even brought some pillows in with her. They found her there, pillows still surrounding her but a central air unit crushing the top half of her body.

They pulled the air conditioner off her, and Mrs. Fay found a shower curtain and they draped it over Mrs. Dempsey’s body.

After that, the mood got very somber and people started wondering aloud when the emergency vehicles were going to come help us. We could still hear them braying and warbling in the distance, but the sounds weren’t getting any closer. We thought we even heard the staccato bark of someone talking through a PA system or megaphone, but none of us could make out the words. It was all very muffled and so very far away. Why were they so far away?

The rescue efforts got slower. People started saying they were thirsty, or tired, and spent more time sitting or picking through their own things halfheartedly. I had no doubt that after all that digging, the men were thirsty, but I had a theory that the new focus on preventing dehydration was a way of not admitting that they were really afraid of finding another dead body—only the next time it might be a toddler or a teenager or someone they’d had lunch with just last week.

I stayed on my cinder block, watching them. Every so often I would try my cell phone again. Wait for it to ring, which it never did. Peer down the street for Mom’s car, which never turned the corner. Kolby’s shadow fell over me.

“We’re going for a walk. You wanna come?” he asked, touching me lightly on the shoulder.

I shook my head, not looking up.

He waited a moment. “You sure? We want to see how bad the damage is, and see where everybody’s going.”

I saw his shadow gesture toward Church Street, but again I shook my head.

“Will you be okay by yourself?” he asked, shuffling the toe of his shoe awkwardly against the cinder block I sat on. “I can stay.”

“No,” I said. “Go ahead. I’m fine. It’s just if I’m not here when Mom gets back, she’s gonna freak out.” But even I wasn’t sure how honest that statement was. Part of me knew I was staying because I was afraid to see how far the damage went. I didn’t want to know why a steady stream of people continued to trickle down Church Street.

After he left, I tried not to let my mind wander, tried not to think about the small things I’d lost in the tornado, especially not with Mrs. Dempsey covered by a shower curtain a couple houses down, but I couldn’t help myself. My clothes, my earrings, my music. Granted, I didn’t have trendy clothes or expensive earrings, but if it had all blown away… I had nothing. Even a few cheap somethings is better than nothing.

How much of Mom’s stuff was gone? How much of all of our stuff was gone? And how long would it be before we got it back?

I looked down at my feet and noticed that one was resting on a photo. I picked it up, pulled it out of the grime, and studied it. I wondered where our photos had gone, if our past would end up under a stranger’s foot, would be tossed in the garbage.

The thought left me cold. It seemed impossible to still have a past if your memories were resting beneath blackened banana peels in a landfill.

I stared at that photo for a long, long time. A family, dressed in matching T-shirts and jeans, stood by a tree. The little boy up front mugged for the camera. He was smiling so hard around gaps of missing teeth, his eyes were pushed shut. His mom’s hands were on his shoulders protectively. An older sister with long, straight hair smiled sweetly with her dad’s arm around her waist. A whole, happy family. I wondered if the tornado had hit them, too. If it had done to their house what it had done to ours. I wondered where their street was. Where that tree was.

A jolt went through me and I stood up. The trees.

For the first time, I noticed that they were gone. Not just a few broken or blown over here or there, which happened pretty regularly during spring storms in Elizabeth. They were gone . Big holes where some had been. Snapped-off trunks. Stripped branches. Our once-tree-lined street had been robbed of all things green. I turned in circles, craning my neck to see around and above the mounds of boards and broken houses. I couldn’t see any trees.

I dropped the photo back onto the mountain of junk and plopped down again.

The afternoon stretched on, and then evening began to set in. My stomach started to twist with hunger and I idly thought about the hamburger I’d left in the pan on the stove when the storm hit. I wondered what we’d do for dinner, and the thought prompted me to try my cell phone again. Still no service. Still no Mom.

Kolby and his mom and sister came back, their figures shadowy under the graying sky of evening combined with what looked like another approaching thunderstorm. Slowly, people who’d stayed behind crawled out of the rubble to greet them, dropping whatever bricks or boards or old appliances they were holding, curiosity winning out on their faces. I got up and walked toward them, too.

“Gone,” Kolby was saying when I reached them. He was out of breath, his eyes bright and cheeks gritty. “Gone,” he repeated. He shook his head. His sister clutched the hem of her mom’s shirt.

“We walked at least a mile,” his mom said, her voice loud and take-charge. The emergency sirens had finally stopped, leaving us in a blanket of confused silence. “Everywhere it looks like this. And there’s people…” She paused, her jowls trembling. “Dear Jesus, please be with those people,” she whispered.

“Are the ambulances…?” Mrs. Fay asked, but tapered off when Kolby shook his head.

“No way they can get to us. The streets are covered. Like this one. The houses are gone. And it looks like it goes on forever. I can’t even see Bending Oaks. It’s gone, too. A whole school.”

Bending Oaks was the junior high Kolby and I went to. It was a good three miles away, but it sat atop a hill, so it was visible from almost anywhere in Elizabeth. I had a hard time wrapping my head around what the hill would look like without the big building silhouetted in the sun.

When I tuned in again, Kolby was saying, “… a two-by-four through his leg. He was trying to drag himself out of his house, and his neighbor found a wheelbarrow. But they said the hospital’s been hit, too, so nobody knows where to go. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”

I thought back to all the people I’d seen walking along Church Street. About the man who had collapsed. They’d been trying to make their way to help, but what if there was no help? How far would they have to go before they found it?