The Meteorologist (3 page)

“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.

“Should we go?”

He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “The
twister’s going to come right down this highway. Right over this
spot.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

He handed her the keys to the Winnie. “Head
east as fast as you can.”

“Peter—”

“Listen to me. It’s a slow-mover, and there’s
a northerly component to its trajectory, so it’ll eventually veer
north of the highway.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Melanie, I’ve been trying to get myself into
this position for ten years. This is a once in a lifetime kind
of—”

“What position? Getting yourself killed by a
tornado?”

“I don’t expect you to understand, but I am
asking you to please just let me have this moment. Let me do this
without interference. I think about it every day. I dream about it
all the time. This is what I want. This is all I want.”

“So I just step back, let you commit
suicide?”

“I could’ve shot myself years ago. This isn’t
about suicide, Melanie.”

“Then what’s it about?”

The twister sounded like sustained thunder,
even from three miles away, the condensation funnel widening and
darkening, cluttered with all it had scoured out of Selden—cars and
stoves and splinters of siding and so many airborne shingles they
resembled a flock of birds and God knows what else.

“You better go.”

She shook her head.

“Goddammit, you aren’t going to change—”

She framed his face with her hands. “I’m not
trying to change your mind. I honest to God want to stay with
you.”

“Melanie.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t you do that. We haven’t
known each other long, but I get you, and I think you get me. We
aren’t here to save each other, Peter. You know that. That’s not
what this is about.”

He stared at her, the wind whipping her hair
across her face, pea-size hail clinking on the RV. For a second he
considered what it might feel like to love her, but the attendant
pain and fear was cost-prohibitive.

He swiped the keys out of her hand, started
running toward the RV.

“Buckle your seatbelt,” he said, cranking the
engine.

Through the windshield, Selden had vanished
behind a shaggy funnel a quarter-mile across.

Peter accelerated toward it, the tornado
expanding until it consumed the view west.

He said, “Christ, it’s big.”

“How far?”

“About a mile I’d say.”

He drove another quarter mile and then
brought the RV to a full stop in the highway.

“What are you doing?”

“Just having one last look out in the
open.”

Peter left the engine running, shoved his
door open against the wind, and jumped out.

He ran down the middle of the road for thirty
seconds and looked up.

A wall of rotating gray.

Godlike noise.

A thousand jet engines amplified through
megaphones, and already the wind slinging roadside trash across the
pavement and filling the air with dust. He counted the telephone
poles that ran along the highway. After fourteen, they disappeared.
The fourteenth vanished, and seconds later, the top half of number
thirteen snapped off and was sucked up into the vortex in a spray
of blue sparks.

He sprinted back to the Winnie and climbed up
into the seat. Slammed the door. Strapped himself in. Melanie’s
face was white.

“You’re sure you—”

“Yes, just go.”

Peter shifted into drive, pushed the
accelerator into the floorboard.

Melanie produced a deep exhalation and
grabbed the edges of her seat.

By the time they’d gone the span of four
telephone poles, the oncoming roar drowned out the straining
engine.

Two hundred yards from the funnel, grains of
dirt and sand began to patter the sides of the RV, the sky rotting
into darkness.

At a hundred yards, uprooted grass streamed
sideways through the sky and he could feel the north wind in the
steering wheel, muscling the side of the Winnie which had begun to
rock imperceptibly on its shocks.

He glanced at Melanie, her eyes shut,
knuckles blanching.

The speedometer needle trembled at
eighty-five as they entered the vortex and he thought he heard
Melanie scream but it was the hysterical voice of the twister.

The RV pitched and slammed onto its right
side, pavement skinning metal, debris hammering the undercarriage.
Peter could feel the pressure drop in his ears and his lungs, and
Melanie had her legs drawn into her chest, head buried between her
knees, bracing, yellow sparks firing on the other side of her
window.

In the swirling gray madness, a potted plant
shot past with the velocity of a cannon ball and the walls of the
RV creaked and a window exploded in back.

Then the sparks disappeared and the grinding
went quiet, the sudden acceleration beyond anything Peter had
experienced, pressing him into the cushion of his seat, the roar
escalating to a screaming hiss, now pitch black through the
windshield and nothing to see but the glow of the dash.

Lightning flashed and the view out his window
made him cry.

It would have been invisible but for the
lightning. The RV was upright and tilted left. At an inconceivable
speed, they orbited the center of the tornado—a cylinder of still,
clear air with walls of rotating clouds made brilliant by the
ribbons of lightning that streaked across the funnel. Inside,
smaller tornadoes were constantly forming and writhing and dying
away, and he glimpsed a gray thread at the base of the funnel that
he realized was Highway 9, eight hundred feet below.