The Stormchasers: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I - KARENA, JULY 2008

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART II - KARENA AND CHARLES, 1988

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  PART III - KARENA AND CHARLES, AUGUST 2008

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  EPILOGUE: AUGUST 2009

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY JENNA BLUM

  Those Who Save Us

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd,

  24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, June 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Jenna Blum

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Blum, Jenna.

  The stormchasers : a novel / by Jenna Blum.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-42962-4

  1. Twins—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Manic-depressive illness—Fiction.

  4. Storm chasers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.L863S76 2010

  813’.6—dc22

  2010012471

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For JRB

  Wondrous and beloved always.

  Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  PART I

  KARENA, JULY 2008

  1

  Karena Jorge’s birthday starts as a quiet affair, but she doesn’t mind. That’s the way she likes it. She does have a couple of treats planned for later, an onscreen revival of Gone with the Wind tonight, dinner tomorrow with her best friend, Tiff. But generally Karena tries to keep this day under the radar, and it has gone mostly undetected for years, which is why on the afternoon of July fourteenth she is truly surprised to be called into her editor William’s office on the pretext of discussing a story and finding most of the Minneapolis Ledger staff assembled there, along with a cake on William’s desk so laden with flaming candles that Karena is fairly sure it’s against fire code.

  She laughs and sketches a little curtsy as they clap. “Thanks, everybody,” she says. “Though I’m sorry to say someone made a mistake. There are way too many candles on that cake—I’m only twenty-nine.”

  “Again?” somebody calls.

  “Really?” says Annaliese, the intern, looking anxious.

  Karena’s editor, William, a beautiful, haggard lion of a man, wiggles his eyebrows at her over his glasses. He knows very well Karena is thirty-eight.

  “The question is, young lady,” he says, “are you going to make a wish so we can eat the damned thing?”

  “Most definitely,” says Karena, and gathers her long hair back behind her ears with both hands. Then she pauses. She takes wishes seriously and believes they are not to be made on the fly. Happy birthday, Charles, she thinks. I sure as hell wish I knew where you were. Then she fills her lungs and blows.

  All the candles go out except one, which threatens to remain stubbornly alight and then extinguishes itself at the last second—poof! Everybody applauds.

  “Whew,” says Karena. “Thank goodness I gave up smoking.”

  Annaliese starts cutting slices, which the reporters fall on and bear away to their desks, pausing, if they’re not on a tight deadline, to give Karena their good wishes. She chats with them all, smiling, meanwhile mounding her cake—yellow, vanilla frosting—to one side of her plate with her fork.

  “Sorry,” says her friend Lisa when the room has mostly cleared. She leans in as much as she is able—Lisa is a week from maternity leave.

  “I’ll have you know none of this was my idea,” she murmurs. “It was that intern. You know how overzealous they get.”

  Karena smiles. “That’s okay,” she says. “This was really sweet, actually. Plus I’ve been working on that Hot Dish! piece all day and could use the break.”

  Lisa gets what Karena thinks of as her reluctant-source look, head tipped back, eyes half closed as if to say, Go on, tell me another.

  “You miss your brother, don’t you,” she says.

  Karena is startled by the prick of tears, though she’s not sure whether it’s the reference itself or the fact that it’s unexpected.

  “I do,” she admits. “Always, but today more than most days.”

  “Then it’s time for your real present,” Lisa says. “I think the coast is clear.”

  They canvass the r
oom. Everyone has filtered out except the intern, who is stuffing paper plates into a garbage bag, and William, who is hunched over his desk devouring an enormous slice of cake seemingly without chewing it, like a dog.

  Lisa leads Karena downstairs into the little-used ladies’ bathroom in the Ledger basement, where she presents her husband’s plaid fishing thermos. In it Karena finds a very dirty vodka martini, complete with three bobbing olives. She laughs.

  “Thank you,” she says. “You always know just what to get me.”

  “Cheers, birthday girl,” Lisa says. She rubs her belly, which is at the stage of pregnancy that fascinates Karena, so enormous it seems like an optical illusion. “And don’t forget you’re drinking for me too.”

  She watches jealously as Karena takes a swallow. “What’s your brother’s name again?” she asks.

  “Charles,” says Karena.

  “It must be so weird, being a twin.”

  “I don’t know,” says Karena. “I’ve never not been one, so I can’t tell. It is strange not knowing where he is, though.”

  Lisa wrinkles her nose sympathetically. “What is that like? I’ve always meant to ask. If you don’t mind talking about it, I mean.”

  “No, that’s fine,” says Karena. “It’s kind of like . . . tinnitus. You’re always off balance, but you learn to live with it.”

  She smiles down at her friend’s stomach. “Can I say hi?” she asks.

  “Go ahead,” says Lisa, and Karena bends over Lisa’s belly button.

  “Greetings,” she says. “This is your aunt Karena speaking.”

  A knob pokes at Lisa’s stretched wine-red shirt, then streaks across it.

  “Whoa,” says Karena. She laughs. “I love that. It’s so amazing. Elbow or knee?”

  “Heel, I think,” says Lisa. “He loves you. He’s always super-active when you’re around. You’re going to be such a good mom.”

  Karena rolls her eyes. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, I do,” says Lisa. She winks and tips a finger at Karena like a politician. “All you need is a good baby daddy. Now drink up.”

  Back in the newsroom Karena swims pleasantly through the afternoon’s primary task, which is interviewing a source for her Hot Dish! feature on Minnesota’s regional foods. The source is sharing her recipe for lutefisk casserole, which combined with the vodka makes Karena’s stomach churn. She is Norwegian through and through; she and Charles were fed floury rommegrod pudding and lefse bread in their high chairs, but this has only enhanced Karena’s fear of the traditional rubbery cod boiled in lye. She smothers a martini belch with a hand and says, “Hey, here’s something I’ve always wondered. What’s the difference between a hot dish and a casserole?”

  The source tells Karena that a casserole is covered and a hot dish is not. Karena thanks her and goes on to the next question on her list, commenting at appropriate times, writing the answers by rote. Meanwhile she keeps checking the Storm Prediction Center website, always open on her laptop, peering at the green computer-generated clouds as if she could see beneath them to where Charles is. And she finds herself thinking of a birthday back when she did eat cake, when she and Charles were—what, three, four? Young enough to still be in booster seats, anyway, bumped up to the table on their red plastic thrones side by side, in the dining area of their New Heidelburg house. Karena very clearly remembers seizing a fistful of cake, examining it, then reaching over to stuff it in her brother’s ear, and Charles turning to boggle at her with comical surprise, then bursting into his deep baby chuckle and doing the same to her. Back and forth they went, mashing cake into each other’s hair and eyes and mouths, laughing and laughing, until the adults quit snapping pictures and their mom, Siri, had to drag them apart, scolding, You two never know when to stop. The memory makes Karena smile, but as the afternoon wears on she feels herself descending into melancholy, a sadness at play in her like a wind. It is not like her. She is normally a very cheerful person. She blames it on the date and the alcohol.

  2

  After work, Karena decides to skip the movie and go for a drive. Being in the car has always soothed her—when she and Charles were fretful as infants, the only way they would sleep was loaded into their bassinet in the back of their parents’ Dodge Dart, and as a teenager Karena liked to sing as she drove, harmonizing with her best friend Tiff, cruising up and down the empty farm roads. Now Karena listens to NPR as she navigates her Volvo out of the city, taking 494 toward the airport and cutting south over the Mendota Bridge. She doesn’t have a plan, and it’s not until she passes the single spire of the Lone Oak Church that she realizes she’s leaving the exurbs behind: the new housing developments; the upscale strip malls with their shops for lattes and sushi and artisan bread.

  Karena merges onto Highway 52 South, which would take her first to Tiff’s in Rochester, then home to New Heidelburg if she’d let it. She passes the natural gas refinery with its thousands of twinkling lights—Nintendo City, she and Charles used to call it—and the truck stop whose sign just says FOOD. Finally, across from the House of Coates bar, Karena sees what she has been looking for all along without knowing it. She pulls over, parks with her hazards on, and gets out on the shoulder.

  Standing by itself in the middle of a field is a limestone arch. It was the first sign Karena and Charles had as children that they were really nearing the Twin Cities, which they did four or five times a year to visit their Uncle Carroll. There’s the Arch to Nowhere! whichever twin spotted it first would sing out, and in the front seat Frank, their dad, would clear his throat in a way that meant he might be laughing, and their mom, Siri, would turn to face them, her long nutmeg-colored hair swinging over the seat like a scarf. Who can tell me what that arch used to be? she’d ask, and Charles and Karena would say in unison, A church!

  That’s right, and who built that church?

  The pioneers!

  And who is related to the pioneers?

  We are!

  You bet, said Siri, and don’t you ever forget it. They were brave, strong, uncomplaining people, and we need to be just like them, and then she’d face front again.

  Karena tries to summon the awe she used to feel looking at the Arch to Nowhere, the sense of it being one of the few remaining signs of the past, a tangible relic of her family’s history. She and Charles had long, whispered conversations about what might have happened to the church the arch was once attached to. Charles, of course, thought a tornado had taken it, and Karena still thinks this might have been true. Like most souvenirs of childhood, though, the arch no longer holds the magic it once did, and Karena now wonders how long it will be before it is knocked down for a subdivision or new mall. She thinks of the people who constructed it, carrying stones in their wagons and setting one atop the other, and of the disasters that likely befell them: illness, rattlesnake bite, the loss of children.

  She sighs and puts her hands up to shield her face from her hair, which the wind from the west is whipping into tassels. The land is open here, and as flat as a game board, and the sunset over it is spectacular, a blaze of fluorescent orange and yellow. Popsicle colors streaked with purple clouds. Her brother is out there in the direction Karena is looking, somewhere in Tornado Alley. That’s all Karena knows for sure. She doesn’t know what Charles is doing for work—probably he’s a prep cook or janitor, a transient job that pays him under the table, money for his expensive summer stormchasing habit. He isn’t married, at least not legally, or Karena would have found those records. But is he alone? Is he lonely? Most importantly, is he hurt, is he curled in a ball in a motel room somewhere, is he all right? “Where are you, Charles?” Karena says. “I hope you’re okay.”

  There is the hiss of truck brakes behind her, and when Karena turns she sees a man leaning across the cab of his eighteen-wheeler. “You all right, miss?” he asks.

  Karena smiles and waves. “I am, thank you,” she calls.

  “Just admiring the sunset?”

  “Yup, that’s abou
t the size of it.”

  “Well, it is a beauty,” says the trucker. “You want some company to share it with maybe?”

  Karena laughs. “No thanks. I was just about to head home, actually.”

  “All right,” says the trucker. “Just checking. You have a good night now.”

  “You too,” says Karena, and watches him pull off. He gives her a double blast on his air horn as he gets back on the road, and she walks back to her Volvo, feeling a little foolish. Well, what else did she expect to happen, standing on the side of the highway talking to herself. Of course somebody would think she needed help.

  Still, it’s nice to know she can stop trucks at thirty-eight. Karena twists the rearview to look at her reflection. Her long pale hair is wind-blown, her cheeks reddened. From the truck cab the guy wouldn’t have seen the lines on her forehead, the circles under her slate-colored eyes. He would have just noticed a blonde—the Hallingdahl women don’t go gray. “Not bad,” says Karena, then crosses her eyes at herself and takes out her cell to call Tiff.

  “I have officially become pathetic,” she says when Tiff picks up. “I’m sitting on the shoulder of Highway 52 congratulating myself for being trucker bait.”

  “What?” Tiff says. There is a shriek behind her and she says, “Mommy is on the PHONE.” Tiff has five sons, ranging in age from fourteen to seven months.

  “What’d you say?” she says. “Why are you on Highway 52? I thought we were going out tomorrow night, in your ’hood.”

  “We are,” says Karena. One of Tiff’s boys emits a vibrating scream and Karena holds the phone away from her ear, wincing. “Sorry,” she says. “Bad time?”

  “It’s always a bad time at Testosterone House,” says Tiff. “I cannot wait to come see you and drink about a hundred—do not hit him,” she says. “Do NOT. Put your hand down, NOW.”