Hannah Pittard - Listen to Me

After a little while, Mark turned away from her. Maggie cracked the front window and the car howled. This got Gerome’s attention. He stood, stretched, then sniffed at the air, at all the midwestern smells filtering in. Chickens. Hay. Cows. Manure.

They were on US-35, headed southeast into Ohio. The sun was slanted low and bright to their right, in spite of the copper clouds ahead of them. The air itself was tea-toned, a pinkish brown, almost shiny. The angle of the light seemed funny, somehow off, as though the sun were being reflected back and forth by the darkening storm clouds and its position wasn’t exactly what it should have been. A magic trick. A sleight of hand. Prestidigitation in the sky.

This — US-35—was the ugliest leg of their trip, and they’d be on it for the next couple hundred miles or so, until it dumped them into West Virginia and onto Interstate 64. Maggie almost always drove this stretch. She didn’t mind the reduced speeds, and she wasn’t too bothered by all the stoplights. They were punctuations in an otherwise uneventful trip. Don’t misunderstand: she didn’t actively enjoy these 200-some miles — who could? — but she didn’t… Well, she didn’t take their ugliness personally, the way Mark sometimes seemed to.

To her, Ohio was just sad. Sad and neglected. A state that didn’t know it was already dead. Like animals at a kill shelter. They didn’t know that all that water and all that food didn’t mean anything about the possibility of a future. All it meant was that some good people were fighting a war they’d already lost. What the animals couldn’t know: they were already dead.

As a pre-vet, she’d been acutely aware of the rancor non-pre-vets felt for kill shelters. But Maggie and her peers never chimed in when the outsiders started up. They understood, and Maggie in particular — without any of them then having all the facts — that kill shelters existed in the same way no-kill shelters did. Nobody wanted to kill the animals — nobody who volunteered at a shelter, anyway: she’d read the article last week about those kids up in New York who poured lighter fluid on a three-legged dog and then set it on fire. But that was different. With kill shelters, the reasoning was straightforward: the money and space simply didn’t exist to maintain the animals while they might have waited to be adopted. The idea that volunteers at kill shelters were happy about all those soon-to-die kittens and puppies? A preposterous notion, which brought her back to Ohio: just because you were born there, just because you had been raised there and hadn’t had the sense or opportunity to get out, that didn’t mean it was your fault. In the game of geography, you and yours simply hadn’t lucked out.

Mark, though — and Maggie knew the diatribe by heart because she’d heard it dozens of times before — he believed that Ohio deserved itself. Those first few times during the early years of their marriage when they’d made the mistake of stopping at major travel plazas and witnessing firsthand the overweight families in their over-large T-shirts eating their oversized meals in their over-tall cars — the sight had filled Mark, every time, with a noiseless sort of rage that could last all the way to Virginia, to his parents’ farm. And Maggie knew this for a fact because she’d felt the noiselessness in those early years; she’d been the recipient of its meanness. She, not Ohio, was the one who handled that odium, and so, very quickly, she established a new route — one that favored the smaller, slower roads they were taking now — and she volunteered to drive the segment so that Mark might sleep his way through.

Ahead, in the far, far distance, there was a crack of lightning.

“Did you see that?” said Mark.

Maggie rolled up the window. They car sealed itself with a whump. A sign on the side of the road indicated that the speed limit would reduce in the next mile.

Mark messed with the radio. “We should try to get Gerome to do something sometime soon,” he said. He stopped at a weather station. Local schools were already being canceled on Monday. It was only Saturday.

Maggie nodded. “I agree,” she said. “You were right. We’ll need a hotel.”

“I should have let you find us one online,” he said. “You’d have gotten us a deal.”

“A smoking deal,” she said. It was a phrase Mark’s parents used indiscriminately, on anything from a Parisian hotel room to a bundle of asparagus purchased at the local farmer’s market.

Maggie put a hand on Mark’s knee, and he, without a moment’s hesitation, reached down and squeezed her fingers.

See? That was just the thing. The thing that kept them together. He understood her. He, too, recognized that though they might approach their opinions — say, of Ohio or even the GPS for that matter — from different directions, ultimately those directions landed them in the same place, with the same result. Each knew that the other was theirs. Two brains thinking one thought. Two brains following one final wave of logic. She felt a nearly animalistic sense of intimacy at that moment.

It was true, regrettably so, that in the last few weeks Maggie’s brain had been going out of its way to seek out extra tangents, to explore other prospects — darker, more disturbing possibilities — but that was her brain. That wasn’t her. And her brain was beyond her control. You can do what you will, but you can’t will what you will, another aphorism she’d been taught by her therapist.

But therapists and aphorisms aside, the takeaway was this: Mark was hers and she was his, and everything, ultimately, in one way or another, would always work out between them.

The radio went silent. There was another crack of lightning in the distance. Then there was static. Then, with no formality or warning, the radio issued several long low beeps. A tornado watch was underway in southeast Ohio.

In 1840 the Great Natchez tornado killed 317 people in Natchez, Mississippi. In 1925 the Tri-State tornado ran a path of 219 miles for nearly four hours, from Missouri to Illinois to Indiana. More than 600 people died. In 1989 roughly 1,300 people were killed by the Daulatpur-Saturia tornado in Bangladesh. Twelve thousand people were injured. Eighty thousand were left homeless.

The tornado — that funnel-shaped weapon capable of moving at nearly 70 miles an hour with internal rotational winds of sometimes 250—is no laughing matter.

Maggie pulled the car into a small Shell station. They were somewhere in New Lebanon — population 4,000—a place where US-35 felt more like a side street than a highway. Squat ranchers, secondhand shops, the occasional empty bank.

Next to the station, thankfully, there was an overgrown field of grass. Maggie had only just turned on the windshield wipers. The rain wasn’t too bad yet.

“I’ll walk him,” said Mark. “Unless you want to and then I’ll top up the tank instead.”

“Your choice,” she said.

Gerome was standing with his front paws on the center console. He was whining, asking a question— whu, whu, whu —whose end he couldn’t achieve. Gerome hated to get rained on probably as much if not more than Mark. They had that in common. Smart boy, thought Mark.

“Smart boy,” said Mark, massaging the dog’s chin. “You think this is shit, too, eh?” He turned in his seat, dug around in the floorboard behind him, and found Gerome’s leash. The dog continued his plea.

To Maggie, he said, “I’ll do it.” Mark’s knees were cramping; a short walk would do him good.

Maggie got out and started the pump. After a second, she ducked her head back inside the car where Mark was still fidgeting with the leash. “You want anything? The card reader’s not working. I have to go in to pay.”