The Stormchasers: A Novel Read online

  “I was married once,” she tells Kevin now. “It just didn’t work out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” says Kevin. “What happened?”

  “You’ve obviously never been married,” says Karena.

  Kevin has put his aviators back on, and he pushes them down again to squint at her. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because if you had been, you’d know there’s no one answer to that question,” Karena says. But she gives Kevin her standard line: “He was a great guy, but we got married way too young. No kids.”

  “Ah,” says Kevin.

  “So are my psychic powers still intact?” asks Karena. “Was I right?”

  “About what?”

  “About your never having walked down the aisle.”

  “Oh, I walked,” says Kevin. He crosses his arms. “I walked that plank, all right.”

  “So I was wrong,” says Karena.

  “No, you were right,” Kevin says grimly. “I just never took the plunge. She didn’t show up.”

  “Oh,” says Karena.

  “Yes, oh,” says Kevin. “Neither did my best man.”

  “Oh no,” says Karena, wincing. She looks at Kevin, but he is staring straight ahead, the hills reflecting in his lenses.

  “I’m so sorry, Kevin,” she says.

  Kevin shrugs. “Not your fault,” he says. “You didn’t know. And neither did I, obviously. You know what they say. The groom’s always the last to find out.”

  Karena shakes her head. “That’s horrible,” she says.

  “Yes,” says Kevin. “It was. Big ouch. Very big ouch. It took me a while to get over it. I’d say trust issues was a major understatement.”

  “I can imagine,” Karena says.

  They are quiet for a while, watching the van surf up and down the big green hills. The clouds in the west are piling up over the sun, and the light dims a little, Karena’s mood with it. So here’s what he’s got. Kevin’s fault line is trust issues. How could he not, after what he’s been through? And could there be anyone worse for him than Karena, with what she has to hide? There could not. So much for this one, she thinks. Down, girl. Leave the poor man alone. But she is sad about it. She really doesn’t want to.

  “Yoo-hoo, KB1 SLM,” says Dennis on the radio.

  “Go,” Kevin says into the handset.

  “Since we don’t have to be anywhere in a hurry, and since Dan’s already booked us rooms in Valentine, the van is voting to swing by Carhenge,” says Dennis. “How does the Laredo vote?”

  In the background the tourists are chanting, “CAR-HENGE! CAR-HENGE!” Kevin looks at Karena, who shrugs and nods.

  “Laredo votes as the van votes,” says Kevin. “KB1 SLM, clear.”

  He puts the handset back and turns to Karena.

  “Boy, do I know how to spoil a mood or what,” he says. “I’m really sorry.”

  “No, not at all,” says Karena.

  “Au contraire, Laredo. A minute ago you were smiling to beat the band. Now suddenly you’ve gone all pensive on me.”

  “I’m just thinking,” she says. “It happens.”

  “About what?” says Kevin. “Ah, there’s the smile. You must be envisioning my alternate career as a male dancer.”

  Karena laughs. “That’s it,” she says. “Am I so transparent?”

  “Not at all, Laredo,” says Kevin, “in fact, quite the contrary. I find you a great mystery.”

  The sun comes out again, flooding the landscape with those brilliant Maxfield Parrish colors, so that Cherry County becomes a dream in which everything is wondrous, if not exactly comfortable.

  “So okay,” Kevin says, “here’s my last question—you ready?”

  “Do I have a choice?” says Karena.

  “Nope. Here it is: What’s your real relationship to Chuck Hallingdahl?”

  Karena’s smile winks out. She clutches the wheel.

  “You tricked me,” she says. “I don’t like that. Why didn’t you just come out and ask?”

  “I’m sorry, Laredo,” Kevin says. His voice is sheepish. “You’re right. My bad. But I wanted to work up to it because it seems like a ticklish topic. You’re good,” he adds, “and I don’t doubt you’re here because you want to write a helluva story for your paper. But something about your face last night when you asked about Chuck made me think. . . . Plus it’s just a feeling I had, something not adding up.”

  Karena looks stonily ahead. Her face is flaming now too, probably as red as Kevin’s, as the corn nuts and the Jeep. She has the terrible feeling of being revealed in a lie—caught with her pants down, her dad would have said.

  “So you’re psychic too,” she says.

  “Maybe,” says Kevin. “Anyway, I just wondered how you knew him. You don’t have to tell me if it’s too personal.”

  Karena sighs and relaxes her hands, then flexes them. There’s no point in keeping this from Kevin anymore. It’ll just be a bigger mystery if she doesn’t tell him. Besides, for whatever reason and although she may be making a huge mistake, she trusts him. At least enough to want to give over this much.

  “He’s my brother,” she says. “Charles is my brother.”

  “Your brother!” Kevin says. He whips off his shades again, and Karena can feel him studying her face.

  “Now, that I would not have guessed,” he says, more to himself than to her. “I thought maybe ex-husband or boyfriend, but—the name,” he says, “you have different last names. I guess that threw me off.”

  “I kept my married name,” says Karena. She restrains herself from touching her hot cheeks. Being beneath Kevin’s scrutiny is like sitting under a sunlamp.

  “So you must be the twin sister Chuck talked about,” he says.

  “I am,” says Karena. She glances at him and sees his hazel eyes, intense and curious, scanning her face. And there’s something else there—pity? respect?

  “You sound like you know him pretty well,” Karena says.

  “I did,” says Kevin absently. “As well as anybody did, I guess. We used to chase together quite a bit . . . Wow,” he says, running his hands over his hair and exhaling. “Okay. Now I totally see it—it’s like one of those trick pictures, you know? Find the twenty things in this drawing. Your smile’s the same as his, and the way you talk, and the shape of your face. . . .”

  “Thank you,” says Karena. “But when was the last time you saw him?”

  “Oh,” says Kevin. “That would’ve been back in . . . ’02? ’01? The year of the Guymon storm, so ’01, it must have been. Yeah. You?”

  “Not for a long time,” says Karena.

  “How long?” says Kevin, then adds, “Sorry, sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Karena says. She has the feeling of having pushed off down a hill and now traveling faster and faster, unable to stop. “I’d prefer this didn’t leave this Jeep, okay? But—twenty. Twenty years.”

  Kevin lets out a low whistle.

  “But I’m trying to find him now,” Karena says quickly. “And it’s really important that I do, so do you think . . . could you please help me?”

  “Sure,” says Kevin. “Of course. But Karena, do you mind if I ask why—”

  “KE5 UIY,” says Dennis over the radio.

  Kevin swears and grabs the handset. “Go, God damn it!”

  “Jeez, SLM,” says Dennis, “what’s got your undies in a bunch? I was just going to tell you about this purty rainbow we’re going to stop and take pictures of, but if you’re going to be all like that about it, I won’t.”

  Kevin leans forward and looks up through the windshield. “Rainbow, photo op, copy,” he says shortly. “SLM, over and out.”

  He hangs up and turns to Karena, who is gliding the Jeep to a stop on the shoulder behind the White Whale.

  “To be continued, okay?” he says.

  “Okay,” she says. She suddenly feels very tired.

  Kevin pats her forearm and gets out. Karena watches him slide his shades back on and hitch his sh
irt down as he walks over to the van, from which the tourists are stiffly climbing. They move in the dazed, zombielike way of people who have been sitting a long time, stretching their necks and legs, and Karena tests herself to see if she knows their names. In addition to Fern and Alicia, there’s Marla of the cat’s-eye glasses and her husband, Pete, Iowans on this trip to celebrate Marla’s fiftieth. The teenage boy is Alistair, also British, a mild autistic who has seen Twister 1,408 times and who’s accompanied by his aunt Melody. The woman with the halo of curly blond hair is Scout, a Californian, who told Karena she’s on this tour because she likes riding in vans with strangers. And of course Dan Mitchell, and Dennis, who steps out of the Whale and lights a cigarette. Kevin goes over to him and Dennis claps him on the shoulder.

  Then Alistair hoots and starts waving upward, and everyone oohs and ahhs and takes pictures. Karena gets out of the Jeep to see too. A spectacular double rainbow is arcing between two hills behind them, its spectrum vibrant and shimmering against the purplish sky. Karena admires it, then glances over at Kevin. She can’t help it. She shouldn’t like him, but she does. She feels happy suddenly, standing at the bottom of this huge inland sea, as if in comparison to the hills her problems are as tiny as she is and maybe, just maybe, solvable. She turns back to the Jeep for her camera and notices as she does the spot on her arm where Kevin touched her, leaving a powdery barbecue imprint.

  13

  The tour stops that night at the Sandhills Lodge & Suites in Valentine, Nebraska. Fern and Alicia ask Karena to triple up with them again and Karena happily agrees, but she begs off going for a sit-down dinner with the group. She has to file notes for her story, and she wants to make the usual round of calls to local motels about Charles. As much as she likes Fern and Alicia, she would rather do this without them in the room. Karena is feeling nervous enough about having let even Kevin in on her ulterior motive for this trip, as though she has invited a jinx.

  She sits at the ubiquitous round table to work, under a scratchy gold-shaded hanging lamp. The Sandhills, like many of the motels Karena has seen out here, seems to be a refugee from the fifties, enhancing her impression that the farther they travel into the country’s interior, the places that can be reached only by driving, the more they go back in time. Karena is sitting on an orange vinyl chair; the walls are paneled in knotty pine like an old station wagon, and the TV has rabbit ears. She is charmed by this. She describes it for her story, along with the Sandhills’ billboard being the shape of an artist’s palette and the playground with its old-fashioned wooden swings, then closes her piece and opens up Stormtrack. Charles has not posted anything since the Sapp Bros photo. But Karena’s twindar is still pinging her, gently and insistently.

  She sits staring at the screen without seeing it, twisting a lock of hair the way she always does when puzzling something out. She is thinking of the noncommittal responses she got from the chasers at the Ogallala travel plaza, of Dennis referring to Charles as a crazy mofo, of Kevin’s expression in the Jeep today when he discovered Charles is Karena’s brother. Karena thinks she has parsed Kevin’s look now: one part pity and two parts wary respect, as if he had discovered she had a lifelong job handling nitroglycerine. Given what Karena knows of Charles’s behavior, this isn’t surprising. What she wonders is how much Kevin and the other chasers know about Charles’s disorder. Karena hasn’t said anything about it because, unfairly or not, bipolarity still carries a stigma. She hasn’t wanted to out Charles if he isn’t open about it. Besides, she has been raised to protect him, to keep it quiet. We don’t talk about this, Frank said grimly while they were driving back from the Mayo after Charles’s first major episode. This is family business.

  This happened when the twins were fourteen, during the Father’s Day dinner at the Starlite supper club—though everyone had always known Charles was different. Karena had heard him called so many things: wild, a handful, the evil twin, a live wire. That one’s trouble, Grandmother Hallingdahl always said. Charles marches to his own drummer, was Siri’s explanation. When the twins were ten, Siri took them up to the Cities to have their IQs tested, and Charles scored off the charts. He was a genius, which generally excused his behavior. But in the days leading up to the Starlite incident he had been acting even stranger than usual. His moods turned on a dime: He was chattering and laughing one minute, talking a hundred miles an hour about things nobody could understand, then screaming the next because there was no root beer in the house. He stopped eating. He didn’t sleep. At night Karena could hear him pacing in his lair downstairs like a caged animal.

  So that afternoon at the Starlite she wasn’t surprised when Charles lost it. She could feel it coming. The air around Charles was charged with it, a kind of dark energy. He was sitting across from Karena, at the round center table her family was sharing with the Budges, Frank’s partner Don Budge and his wife Ann, and their pale, quiet daughter Amelia, and the whole table was shaking with Charles’s leg beneath it. He was slouched in his chair, arms folded, looking at all of them with a disbelieving half-smile as though he just could not believe the idiocy of the people he was surrounded by, and when the light faded and the TV over the bar went beep beep beep and a thunderstorm warning started crawling across the bottom of the screen, Charles said, See, what’d I tell you! I told you, I told you before, but you were all too dumb to believe me, and he leaped up, overturning his chair.

  Frank, sitting next to Charles, cleared his throat. Charles, sit down, he said.

  No way, Pops, said Charles, although he knew Frank hated to be called Pops. You stay there if you want, but you’ll be sorry. Because it’s coming, I can feel it, and it’s going to be a big one too, an F3 or F4, and he bolted for the door.

  Charles Oskar, you come back here, Siri called, as people looked up from their dinners to watch Charles with surprise. This kid’s going to be the death of me, Frank, she said, standing. Don’t just sit there, do something!

  Frank put his fork down.

  Oh dear, said Mrs. Budge, that poor boy, and Amelia wrinkled her nose and said, What’s he even talking about?

  Tornadoes, Karena said to her chicken dinner. She was glaring at her plate, totally mortified. He’s talking about tornadoes, and by then they could hear Charles yelling to somebody outside, It’s coming! Tornado—yeah, big one! You’d better get in there and take cover!

  Karena, said Frank, and Karena looked up.

  Let’s go, Frank said, and Karena threw her napkin down and grabbed her purse, and she and Frank walked through the dining room to the bar. Which was mostly empty, because if the diners hadn’t wanted to interrupt the chicken drummie dinners they’d paid good money for, the drinkers wanted to see the action.

  Outside Charles was already at the end of the lot climbing into Frank’s Mercedes—he must have hooked the keys right out of their dad’s pocket, Karena thought, how oblivious could Frank be?—and Charles was right about one thing, there was a gust front moving in, driving dust and corn chaff through the air. In the southwest, just over the border in Iowa, a cloud bank towered, the sun glaring through a keyhole in it. The wind was preventing any would-be heroes from going after Charles into the lot. They stood on the Starlite’s steps or just below them, screwing their faces up against the grit.

  Charles, Siri called. This was before she had cut her hair, and it blew straight out to the side. She cupped her hands around her mouth to be heard. Charles Oskar Hallingdahl, you come back here right now. I mean it!

  In answer Charles gunned the engine of Frank’s Mercedes. He didn’t have much experience in stealing cars yet and he banged a dent in the door of Mrs. Russert’s Buick as he backed out of the space.

  Oh, crap, laughed two of the guys watching, and one of them yelled, Floor it! Floor it, Charles!

  Siri turned on them. You shut your mouths, she said, you ought to be ashamed, and then she looked up at Frank and Karena on the top step.

  Frank, she said, and Frank put his hand on Karena’s shoulder.

  Go get
him, Karena, he said. You’re the only one who can.

  And Karena knew this to be true, from the nights she was the only one who could sing Charles to sleep, the only one who could coax him off the roof, keep him from climbing the water tower, make him stop chanting that song, stop bouncing that ball, stop kicking that door. She ran out into the lot, tasting the dirt in the air, positioning herself between the rows of cars where Charles would either have to stop or run her down on his way out.

  Charles, she shouted, trying in vain to tuck her hair behind her ears—it was whipping all over the place. She held out one hand like a crossing guard. Charles, stop!

  Luckily, he remembered which was the brake and which was the accelerator, and the Mercedes lurched to a halt with its bumper six inches from Karena’s knees.

  Wait for me, Karena yelled, and ran around to the passenger’s side. Charles popped the lock up.

  Hey, sistah, he said, as if they were just hanging out in their yard. Want a ride?

  Sure, said Karena, climbing in. Except let’s not go very far, okay? Let’s just drive to the end of the lot and you can show me the storm.

  Okay, said Charles, somehow piloting the big car around the others without dinging too many bumpers and plunging onto the grass bordering the lot, where he threw on the brakes. Karena caught herself on the dashboard.

  Okay, said Charles, okay, okay, see, K? There it is. There’s the anvil, and there’s the overshooting top, and there’s the wall cloud, see it? See? And holy shit, he yelled, grabbing his hair, there it is, dropping right in front of us, oh my God, I don’t believe it! Check it out, K! Check out that funnel!

  Karena looked at the cloud bank, then back at her brother, and goose bumps popped out on her arms. He believed it. He really thought it was there.