Cote Smith - Hurt People

“Stay down until I tell you,” my mother said. I peeked out of my position and saw the black shape of my mother, leaning on a washer, watching the storm light up the stairwell wall. The siren was fainter down here, but we could hear the dark sky grumble, low and without pause. I tucked my head and covered my ears to shut out all the noise. I imagined the red mass passing our complex, and let myself believe the storm was over, that if there was a tornado, it had somehow skipped the Frontiers. But when I uncovered my ears the wind still howled, louder than I had ever heard it before. The walls shook and creaked, like a large hand was slowly wrenching out each nail. I looked for my mother again. She blew out the candle, got down, and balled herself up next to me. She started saying things, words I couldn’t quite make out. I scooted closer so I could hear her. I put my head next to hers. Please, she said. Please. She wasn’t talking to me. She was praying.

Something shattered. I heard the spray of broken glass. It was the stairwell window, finally giving in to the wind. The outside grew even louder, the low grumble now a relentless roar. In class, the day of each drill, we asked our teachers what it was like. What’s it really like to be in a tornado? And each teacher had her own tale, her own set of memories. A green sky. A cloud like an infinite wall. But they all had one thing in common. When they described the sound of the tornado, it was always the same. It’s like a train, they would say. The shaking of the earth, the whistle of the wind. It’s like someone laid tracks right where you live. You didn’t notice because you were busy. Maybe you were at school or at work. Maybe you were picking up the kids. But when you finally did figure it out, when you heard the warning, it was too late. The train was coming through and you couldn’t get out of the way.

My mother put her arm around me and pulled me into her. She covered my entire body with hers and whispered things I couldn’t hear over the train’s violent whistle. But they were nice things. They felt good in my ear. They got me away from my imagination, from thinking about what would happen if the roof fell, if the tornado picked me up and threw me somewhere nobody would ever find. Curled over me, my mother only let me think about her. We rode the train out like that.

* * *

The tornado went away before the siren did. The whistle faded. The walls rested. I asked my mother if it was safe. “Wait,” she said. She stood, but kept her shoe on my back so I wouldn’t move. The siren eventually died, restoring our apartment’s silence. “OK,” my mother said, “you can get up.”

She helped me to my feet, and I followed her to the stairs. The lights flickered on and off, and it wasn’t long before we saw the first sign of damage. At the ground level the window above the building’s pea-green door was missing. The door itself hung by one hinge. I didn’t have my shoes on, so my mother picked me up, carried me over the broken glass, and set me safely on the hall carpet. Be careful, she said.

Upstairs, the pictures of flowers had been knocked off the wall, their frames broken. We hurried into our apartment. The electricity was out completely, so my mother lit each of us a candle. Let’s see what’s left, she said, and floated into the darkness. I took my candle and went my own way. From what I could see, everything looked the same. The bookcase stood, the encyclopedias were still in place. The sliding glass door remained closed, locked and intact. I walked into the kitchen. The square table hadn’t moved either. My cereal bowl was right where I left it.

“It missed us,” I said, out of shock, and went back into the living room, where my mother was looking up.

“No, it didn’t,” she said. She held her candle up to a gigantic crack in the ceiling, running diagonally corner to corner, spanning the entire living room. We could hear the wind breathing through the opening, invading our apartment. “This isn’t safe,” my mother said. “We have to go.”

“Where?” I said. “Rick’s?”

I didn’t know why I said that, why I had guessed Rick’s. I hadn’t even thought about it, but now that the option was out there, the choice hung in front of us, a fork in the road.

“No,” she said. “It’ll have to be your dad’s. For now.”

“Why?” I said.

She looked at the ceiling’s crack again, put her hand up to feel the cool air. “Because,” she said. “Now go to your room and grab some things. And be quick.”

* * *

When I opened the door to my room, I knew I would never live there again. There was no way. The gigantic crack from the living room tracked across our ceiling too, and the bedroom window was completely gone. In its place was a black square of night, through which a chill air seeped in. My brother’s bunk bed had been knocked off mine and lay on its side in the middle of the floor. I picked up his blanket and wrapped it around me. The outside temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. In what was left of our ruined room, I realized I hadn’t cried yet, about anything. I hadn’t taken the time. But here, among the wreckage, I let the tears go.

When I was done, I put my shoes on and made my way around the mess. I tried not to look at what was once the room I shared with my brother, or think anymore about what this all meant. That time is over, I told myself, and packed my bag like I was going to stay the weekend with my dad. This is a normal weekend, I thought. This is an ordinary life.

* * *

On our way to my dad’s we saw a glimpse of what the tornado had done. The damage it had left behind. Tall trees were shredded to splinters. Street signs lay broken, or spiked into front yards. The farther we drove, the more we realized how random the destruction was. How none of it made sense. The city would be pitch-black one block, perfectly lit the next. On one street every house had its roof ripped off. Then we took a left and everything seemed fine.

“What about the prisons?” I said. I imagined the tornado knocking down prison walls, letting loose the country’s worst. I imagined the Stranger waving at his former roommates, laughing and saying our time has come.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” my mother said. “Those buildings are very old. In a time like this, a prison is probably the safest place to be.”

From what we could see that night, it seemed she was right. None of the prisons had lost power. The federal penitentiary still shone on its hill, loomed over the rest of the city. Other personal landmarks weren’t as lucky. The city’s grocery store had a parked car flipped through its front. At the city park, the tornado slide was bent in half, into an L. On almost every street we drove we saw debris, broken bits of somebody’s property. Pieces of someone’s life.

“This isn’t half of it,” my mother said. “We won’t know how bad it really is until morning.”

We turned onto my dad’s street. The old people’s home was still standing, though its fence, the one my brother and I once hit home runs over, was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t until we were four duplexes away from my dad’s that we found it, coiled across the street like a big metal snake. We got out of the van and tried to move it, but we weren’t strong enough, and no one came out to help. We left the van parked on the side and walked the rest of the way.

My dad’s duplex was fine. The door was locked when I tried it, but my mother had a key. My dad had given it to her a long time ago, she said. Just in case.

We went inside and I felt like I had to show my mother around. So I showed her the kitchen, the grill out back, which miraculously hadn’t moved. I took her upstairs and showed her my dad’s room, the unmade bed where he slept. I figured she might want to go to sleep soon. I thought she was tired like me.