The Meteorologist Read online

  They traveled in silence for another mile.

  “I mean, did I do something? Because I thought we were having a pretty good time this morning, but now—”

  “No, of course not.”

  “We weren’t having a good time?”

  “No, I mean you didn’t do anything.”

  She stared out her window.

  They cruised south on Highway 23, and the quiet had grown cancerous by the time the headlights of the RV swept across the porch of Melanie’s farmhouse. He shifted into park and turned back the ignition. Melanie unbuckled her seatbelt.

  “Hold on,” Peter said.

  “What?”

  He wanted her out of the RV. Wanted nothing more than to drive back to the motel, crawl into bed.

  “This is my fault,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was my idea. I invited you.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “I thought…”

  “What?”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”

  Melanie put her hand on the door.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said, reaching across the open space between the seats, almost touching her, letting his hand rest instead on the edge of her seat. “I just thought I was capable of doing this.”

  “Of doing what? Being with me? Is it so difficult?”

  “Being with anyone is, but when I saw you in the café last night…I don’t know…something shifted. I’ve said more to you in the last couple days than I have to anyone in twenty years.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “If you understood, if you could be in my head for two minutes, it would.”

  The interior lights cut out.

  Peter said, “This morning, you asked me where I lived, and I told you I was from Providence.”

  “So?”

  “That wasn’t really the truth. I lived there a long time ago, but I don’t really live anywhere now. I bought this RV in 1987. Been my home ever since.” Out Peter’s window, a lightning bug flared against the glass. “It’s the hardest thing right now for me not to ask you to get out.”

  Melanie opened her door.

  “I’m not saying I want you to.”

  “I need some air.”

  She climbed out of the Winnebago and walked across the gravel drive, easing down on the front porch steps. Peter looked at the keys dangling from the ignition. He touched them. Opened his door and stepped down into the grass.

  Lightning bugs everywhere.

  A lone cricket screeching maniacally.

  He sat beside her on the steps. Cool and he could smell warm hay carried on the breeze.

  Said, “In the winters, I seek out ice storms and blizzards. Tornadoes and hurricanes in the summertime. I was in Charleston when Hugo roared ashore in ’89. I was in Florida for Andrew in ’92. The Lower Ninth Ward last summer when the levies broke. I’ve spent winters at Paradise Lodge on the south slope of Rainier just to watch it dump nine hundred inches of snow. A couple years ago I stayed a month at the observatory on Mount Washington. Stood in a hundred and forty mile-per-hour wind that almost blew me off the mountain. I feel…dead…all the time, except when I’m in the middle of some storm, watching the clouds swirl, feeling the snow or rain pelt my face. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but this is what I do, and I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and I came to Hoxie to do it, and then I met you, and for a minute—I don’t know why—I wanted to share it with you.”

  “Do you have family, Peter?”

  The question caused him to flinch. “I don’t have anyone. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing to offer you. I know that. I just want you to understand that it’s not your fault. Has nothing to do with you. The reason it turned out like it did today is ’cause I—”

  “You have issues.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A lot of them.”

  “Now why are you crying?”

  “’Cause you hurt my feelings, dummy.” She wiped her face, got up, and hurried into the house, the door slamming after her. He could hear her crying through the thin walls.

  Pushed himself onto his feet and climbed the two flimsy steps to the stoop, where he pulled open the screened door and knocked on the wood of the inner door.

  “Melanie, come on. Can we talk please?”

  The cries more distant now, lost inside the house.

  “I’m coming in, all right?” He tried the door. The knob turned, hinges creaking as he let it swing open. “Melanie?”

  He stepped into a foyer, the air redolent of cardboard.

  There were boxes everywhere—stacked to the ceiling on either side of the hallway that ran past the stairs into the kitchen, leaving the walkway so tight he would’ve had to sidestep to pass through. At first, he thought Melanie must be in the process of moving, wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it before, but then his eyes fell on the living room.

  He’d never seen anything like it.

  Four television sets, three DVD players, what probably would have formed a cubic yard of DVDs had they not been spread across the room.

  A leather couch buried beneath stacks of National Geographic and The New Yorker.

  A coffee table caved in under the weight of several full sets of encyclopedias.

  Out from under the couch, a gray cat darted over a pile of clothes that still bore their price tags, disappearing into a dining room paralyzed for the stacks of newspapers, eight grills, still in their boxes, and what he estimated to be over five hundred unopened packages of plastic utensils monopolizing every square inch of table space.

  He made his way through the cramped hall, and as he neared the kitchen the smell of rotting food became overpowering. He held the side of his arm across his nose and mouth, and standing in the doorway, wondered how Melanie even made use of the Fridge and the sink and the oven range what with the linoleum buried under hundreds of pounds of canned food and sacks of flour and sugar, thirty cereal boxes, and on the countertops, a component of the stench—clusters of bananas and apples and what might have been oranges, all shriveled and glazed with blue mold.

  “What are you doing?”

  He spun around.

  Melanie stood at the foot of the stairs, her face red.

  “I knocked on the door, I—”

  “Did you hear me say come in?”

  “No.”

  “Get out.”

  “Melanie—”

  “Get out of my house!” Tears ran down the sides of her face and she breathed so hard he could see her chest billowing under her button-down shirt.

  “All right,” he said.

  He started down the hallway between the walls of cardboard boxes, Melanie backing toward the stairs as he approached the foyer. She collapsed on a lower step and buried her head between her knees, her shoulders bobbing as she wept.

  At the door, Peter glanced back. Melanie hadn’t lifted her head, and that cat was slinking between her ankles in figure-eights and purring like it meant to sooth her.

  He said, “For the record, I think you’re beautiful.”

  She wouldn’t lift her head, and her words came spliced with tears. “Please, Peter. I just need you to leave. I can’t stand this. I can’t stand you seeing this.”

  “It’s okay, Mel. You don’t have anything—”

  “What?” She looked up. “To be ashamed of? Is that what you were going to—”

  “No, I—”

  Her eyes bugged, her face darkened into scarlet, and she sprang up off the stairs and grabbed his shirt, balling the fabric in her hands and shoving him into the doorframe.

  “Do not fuck with me,” she whispered.

  “I’m not. I swear.”

  “No one. No one has come in here…” It felt like two concurrent slaps, both hands slamming into his cheeks, open-palmed, squeezing his face, drawing it down, her lips barely chapped, her tongue warm. She didn’t kiss him as hard as he feared, though since he hadn’t t
ouched his lips to those of another human being’s in twenty years, three months, and eight days, a point of reference was lacking.

  They broke apart, breathless.

  Melanie leaned her forehead against his sternum, and Peter stared over the top of her head at the cat who watched him from midway up the stairs.

  “Do you want me to leave?” he asked.

  “Yes. No.”

  He touched the point of her chin. Lifted her head. She stared up at him through a sheet of tears that evacuated from her eyes when she blinked. “I haven’t always lived like this.”

  “Me either.”

  “When you walked into the restaurant…I don’t know how to put it in—”

  “You don’t have to put it any way. I know.”

  “Are you lonely, Peter?”

  “All the time.”

  “Do you want to come upstairs with me?”

  “Melanie, I haven’t…in a long time.”

  “Makes two of us.”

  “I’m not even sure if—”

  She put her finger to his lips.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not about that.”

  He came almost instantly and he told her he was sorry, that he knew this would happen and that he had tried to warn her. He lay between her legs in the dark in an upstairs bedroom, his hamstrings trembling, their chests heaving against each other.

  “Peter, shut up. It’s okay.”

  He pulled away but she clasped her legs around his back.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

  He rested his head on her shoulder as the bedroom flashed with electric blue. Out on the prairie it sounded like someone was moving furniture around—distant thunder.

  “Do you want to leave?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “It is actually.”

  He turned his head so he could see the lightning flicker across the stacks of boxes that diminished the bedroom into something the size of a walk-in closet.

  “Peter?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why’d you leave Providence?”

  “I was the head meteorologist at WPRI. Two months after...”

  When he didn’t finish the sentence, she ran her fingers through his hair and said, “After what?”

  “Can I just leave it at that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Two months after, I had a nervous breakdown on-air. You can find the footage on YouTube. Over a half-million views last time I checked. I left town, never looked back. How long have you lived here?”

  “Nine years. You want to know what happened?”

  “Do you want to tell me? Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I can feel your heart beating against my chest. It feels good.”

  Later, they lay in bed listening to the rain on the tin roof, Peter sliding his fingers down the side of her arm as he had touched his wife in a previous life, and telling her about the time he almost died when Hurricane Bertha hit Kure Beach on the North Carolina coast. He’d ventured out to the end of a seven hundred-foot pier in the eyewall, clinging to the rail as twenty-foot waves crashed into the framework and hundred mile-per-hour rain and seaspray lacerated his face. He’d heard the outer pilings begin to crack and started the long crawl back to shore, just reaching the beach as the wind and waves tore the pier off the pilings.

  He told her about the night he spent on the summit of Mount Mitchell in the ’93 Superstorm, about the time he almost killed himself when a southern blizzard didn’t pan out, about the calm and silent eye of Andrew and its perfect black circle of starry sky, about a December night in Fairbanks, Alaska, when the thermometer hit -58° F, and in the freezing fog his spit would crackle midair, striking the pavement as a blob of sleet. She laughed at that one, thought he was pulling her leg.

  They didn’t belabor, as Peter had feared, the circumstances that had brought them to this moment. As she’d said, it wasn’t about that.

  Exhaustion and contentment brought increasingly expansive lulls. Then they lay in silence, both facing the tall window beside Melanie’s bed. When the lightning came and the prairie flashed into existence through the heat-warped glass, Peter would catch the fleeting sense that this house and the two of them lying naked upstairs in bed was all that was left of the world.

  Glass rattling in the sill wrenched Peter out of sleep and he returned to consciousness as the peal of thunder faded out.

  He sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

  The darkness through the window tinged with gray.

  A jag of lightning split it down the middle.

  Melanie moaned, half-asleep, “What are you doing?”

  Peter swung his legs over the side of the bed and stepped into his briefs and jeans, still conjoined on the floor.

  “I need to go read the Goodland advisories.”

  “It’s…five-twenty in the morning.”

  “Those sound like major storms out there.”

  They hurried down the front porch steps, the grasses thrashing and the air making their eyes water, filled with dust and slivers of chaff.

  In the RV, Peter opened the laptop and pulled up the National Weather Service page he’d bookmarked upon his arrival in Hoxie.

  “Oh, man,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Come look.”

  BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED

  TORNADO WARNING

  NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GOODLAND KS

  517 AM MDT MON JUL 17 2006

  THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GOODLAND HAS ISSUED A

  * TORNADO WARNING FOR...

  NORTH CENTRAL SHERIDAN COUNTY IN NORTHWEST KANSAS...

  * UNTIL 630 AM MDT

  * AT 510 AM MDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING A TORNADO 15 MILES NORTHWEST OF HOXIE...OR ABOUT 8 MILES WEST OF SELDEN...MOVING EAST AT 15 MPH.

  * THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR...

  SELDEN AROUND 610 AM MDT...

  IF YOU ARE AT HOME...SEEK SHELTER IN A BASEMENT IF POSSIBLE. OTHERWISE...GO TO A SMALL INTERIOR ROOM ON THE LOWEST FLOOR. AVOID WINDOWS AND PROTECT YOURSELF FROM FLYING DEBRIS.

  IF IN MOBILE HOMES OR VEHICLES...EVACUATE THEM AND GET INSIDE A STURDY SHELTER. IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE...LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS.

  “I have to go,” Peter said.

  “Right now?”

  He closed the laptop. “Right now.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  “This will be dangerous, Melanie.”

  “I know. But I want to see it. Just let me go change into something.”

  “We don’t have time.” He jumped up from the sofa and moved into the front of the RV, sat down behind the wheel, fished the keys out of his pocket. “Bring the laptop please,” he said. “You can help me track it.”

  They sped through dreaming Hoxie, the wet streets of the hamlet vacated, the houses still dark. Peter ran the single traffic light at the center of town and raced north up Highway 23, pushing the Winnebago harder than he had in years, the RPMs edging into the red.

  “There it is,” Peter said.

  “Where?”

  He pointed out the windshield. To the northwest in the strengthening light, a thunderhead towered over the plain—concentric circles of green-tinted clouds spiraling into the upper reaches of a 60,000-foot supercell out of the bottom of which a curtain of pale gray draped to the prairie floor.

  “God,” he said.

  “Is this a special one?”

  “You never see them like this.”

  “On the radar, it looks like the storm is moving just a bit more to the north.”

  “Is it still on track to hit Selden?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then we’ll try to intercept on Highway 9.”

  They entered Selden at 5:57 a.m.

  Houselights shining. Families gathered on porches to stare at
the sky and listen to the eerie wail of the tornado alarm that blared through town. Peter bypassed the miniscule business district and turned onto Highway 9. They screamed east for three miles, Selden shrinking in the rearview mirror, and then he eased off the highway where it intersected with a dirt road.

  “Let me see the laptop.”

  He studied the radar loop for thirty seconds and handed the Mac back to Melanie.

  “Are we good?” she asked.

  He could feel his heart pulsing against the back of his eyes. “Perfect.”

  Peter drove the RV across the intersection and onto the opposite shoulder so they faced west toward Selden and the storm. He cut the engine and opened his door and stepped down. Walked twenty feet out from the Winnie, straddled a slash of faded yellow paint in the middle of the road.

  Checked his watch: 6:04.

  They’d pulled over at a point of prominence on the prairie, the land falling gently away in every direction, so they could see for miles. The front passenger door slammed. He glanced back, saw Melanie walking toward him in a pair of slippers and a lavender nightgown, the thin cotton flickering in the wind.

  She smiled, took hold of his hand.

  At their backs, the sun crept over the horizon, and when its light hit the storm, the leading shelf cloud turned dirty pink.

  It sounded like Selden was getting shelled, the tornado alarm reduced to a dial tone from this distance.

  Raindrops specked the pavement.

  The alarm hushed.

  The swarthy clouds over Selden turned black and a substation exploded in a burst of loose electricity.

  Melanie’s grip tightened around Peter’s hand.

  Already you could see the counterclockwise churn of debris growing more profuse with every second, and then a black column emerged from the town, carrying pieces of Selden in its swirl which curved for several thousand feet into the sky.

  Melanie said, “Oh my God.”

  Pellets of hail had begun to bounce off the pavement, a breathy roar becoming audible.