Welcome to the Greenhouse (4 page)

“Kaylee, get down. Get under the blanket and hold that pillow over your head.” Fleece and Roscoe are both whining now; Jane slides out of the low chair onto her knees and stretches herself out on top of Fleece, with her arm tight around Roscoe and terrified Kaylee; she pulls the blanket up over all of them.

The roar becomes deafening. There’s pressure in Kaylee’s ears, she can feel the floor vibrating. The house blows up.

After the shaking and roaring have stopped, and they’ve thrown off the blanket, Kaylee can’t see anything through the cracked but miraculously unbroken patio doors but a tangle of branches full of new green leaves. The basement has held together, though light is coming through some new cracks in the aboveground foundation block. “Kaylee, let me look at you. Are you okay?” Jane says worriedly.

“I think so.” She feels lightheaded with relief that the tornado is over, but nothing hurts when she moves her arms and legs. She automatically checks her SmartBerry, still in her hand, but there are no bars at all. Dismayed, she reports to Jane, “I’m not getting a signal. We can’t call anybody.”

“I expect the tornado took out the cell tower. Phone line too. Keep the dogs in here with you—I want to check things out, all right?” Holding to the shelter’s doorframe, Jane hauls herself up, grimacing, steps carefully out into the basement and looks around. “Looks like we were lucky. The ceiling’s still in one piece, far as I can tell.” She moves a few cautious steps farther and stops. “The stairs look solid but they’re full of junk, I don’t think we better try to get out that way. Let’s see if the patio doors will open.” She goes over and tugs at the sliding door, but it won’t budge. “Frame’s bent. The window frame may be bent too, but I’ll check before we start breaking glass.”

Startled, Kaylee says, “You’re bleeding! Jane, you’re bleeding!” There’s a big spreading bloodstain on Jane’s shirt and jeans on one side.

“I am? Where?” Jane looks down, sees the blood on her clothes, sees it dripping onto her right boot. “Hunh. Now how the dickens did that happen? I must have cut my arm on something.” She comes back toward Kaylee. “There’s a plastic tub with a lid, see it? Way inside, back where the stairs almost come down to the floor? That’s the first-aid stuff; can you pull that out here? Fleece, Roscoe, come. Down. Stay. Get out of Kaylee’s way.” The dogs, both panting now, slink out of the shelter, very subdued, and slump down on the basement floor by Jane’s feet without an argument. Fleece has some blood on her woolly white back but seems unhurt. Apparently the blood is Jane’s.

There are three or four plastic tubs with lids back there, all blue. “Which one?”

“The closest one, nearest the door. Just drag it out here.” Suddenly Jane leans against the wall, then reaches into the shelter, pulls out the camp chair and sits in it.

Kaylee backs out with a tub. “This one?”

Jane snaps off the lid and looks in. “Yep. Thanks.” She rummages around inside, gets out a packet of gauze pads and a pressure bandage, and rips the seal off the packet. She starts unbuttoning her flannel shirt. “Do you faint at the sight of blood? If you don’t, maybe you can help me find the cut. The back of my arm is numb, I guess I cut a nerve.”

Kaylee isn’t crazy about the sight of blood, but this is no time to wimp out. But the cut makes her feel a little sick. It’s high up on the back of Jane’s left arm, deep and triangular, and thick-looking blood is welling out of it. She can’t help sort of gasping through her teeth. “I see it. It’s pretty bad. What should I do?”

“Put the pads right on it and apply pressure, don’t worry about hurting me. The important thing is to stop the bleeding.”

Gingerly, Kaylee presses the pads against the wound, but they’re saturated in seconds; the cut is really bleeding. “Do you have anything bigger? These aren’t really big enough.”

“Use my shirt while I look.” She paws through the box. “There’s this sling thing, but that’s not very absorbent, or very big, come to that. And some cotton balls. I guess we could pack the cut with these.”

Kaylee suddenly says “Oh! I know!” and lets go of the shirt, which Jane grabs and tightens with her other hand. “Sorry,” says Kaylee, “only I just remembered, I’ve got some, well, some maxipads in my backpack, because you know, just in case… anyway—” she fishes in her pack and pulls out a plastic bag triumphantly.

“Perfect!” Jane says. “Brilliant!”

Kaylee flushes, embarrassed but gratified. She snatches away the shirt and slaps a pad onto Jane’s wound, wrapping it around her arm. Then, showing further initiative, she says, “Hold that like that,” and puts another pad on top of the first, and binds them both to Jane’s arm with the pressure bandage. “There! Just hold that really tight. If you bleed through the first one there’s another one all ready to go”

“I will,” Jane says. “Thanks.” She looks around. “I need to sit still while this clots. Do you want to see if the window will open? I don’t like to have you walking around down here till we know for sure the house isn’t going to cave in on that side”—her voice catches and Kaylee thinks for the first time,
Her house is totally wrecked, her perfect little house!—
“but it should be okay. Just pry up the levers and try turning the crank. It kind of sticks. If anything shifts or falls, jump back.”

What felt like an explosion turns out to have been a humongous old hickory tree smashing down right on top of the house. The tornado only clipped one corner, peeling back part of the roof and tearing the screened porch off, but it dumped that hickory right in the middle of the crushed roof, where it’s hanging with its branches on one side and its roots on top of Jane’s car on the other. The car is crushed and plainly undrivable, but even if it could be driven there would be no way to get it down to the road; Jane’s steep quarter-mile driveway is completely blocked with downed trees.

In fact, the world has become a half-moonscape. Everything on one side of the house just looks about the way it might look after a really violent windstorm, but everything on the other has been toppled and ripped and broken to pieces. “We must have been right on the very edge,” Jane says, holding her wounded arm with her other hand. “And this must have been one hell of a big tornado.” There are no trees standing in the creek valley below Jane’s house: none. They’re all laid down in the same direction, pointing uphill on this side and downhill on the other. The road that follows the creek, the only way there is to get to Jane’s house, has completely vanished under a pile of trunks and branches, broken and jagged, piled many feet deep on top of each other.

The sight of this world of leafy destruction has obliterated Kaylee’s spurt of competence. She’s shaking and crying in little sobs, arms wrapped about herself. “I need to talk to my mom,” is all she can think of to say, “I need to find out if she’s okay.”

Jane says soothingly, “The best thing you can do for your mom and dad right now is just take care of yourself and stay calm. They know where you are, and they know you’re with me. Eventually somebody will come looking for us. It might take them a few days—if that twister hit any population centers, all the emergency equipment and personnel are going to be very, very busy for a while. We have to give people time to get things up and running again. But they’ll be along.”

“But the road’s covered with
trees!”

“I’m betting on a helicopter ride long before they get the road open. The good news is, lots of people know where you are. We just have to hunker down and wait.”

Kaylee pictures KY 44 as it looked before the tornado, two lanes, no shoulders, a steep wooded bluff on one side and Indian Creek on the other, with another wooded bluff across the creek. The road follows the creek. If all the trees on both sides of the valley went down the whole way to town, like they did here, she can’t imagine how they’ll
ever
get the road open again. Worst of all in a way, her wonderful new SmartBerry, her Christmas and birthday presents combined, that keeps her continually connected her to everything that matters, is useless. She’s worried to death about her family and friends, and there’s no way to find out if they’re okay. From being in constant touch with everybody, suddenly she’s out of touch with everybody! It makes her feel lonely and frantic, and furious with Jane, because of whom she’s stranded in this war zone. “How can you stand living out here all by yourself?” she yells. “Something like this happens and you’re stuck, you’re just stuck!” When Jane reaches toward her she jerks away and takes off running, crying hard, down the mowed path to the garden where things still look almost normal, away from the wrecked house and jagged devastation in the other direction.

She’d changed out of her sneakers into flip-flops after visiting the nests. Running in flip-flops on a path grown up thick in clover and scattered with broken branches doesn’t work, so she’s walking and crying when she gets to the path box, which is down on its side, metal post bent and half uprooted. It’s empty, the baby bluebirds fledged over the weekend, thank goodness. The box in the garden has been knocked over too—but that one’s not empty, Kaylee remembers now, there were six new hatchlings in that one this morning. She shakes off the flip-flops and runs to the gate, left open in Jane’s haste. The latch on the box popped open when it hit the ground; the nest has fallen out, scattering tiny pink bodies and loose feathers on the grass. Quick as she can, Kaylee stands the nest box up and steps on the base with her bare foot, to jam it back into the ground. She picks up the nest, built entirely out of Jane’s straw garden mulch—square outside like the square nest box, a soft lined cup inside—and fits it back in. Then, one by one, with extreme delicacy, she picks up the fragile, weightless baby birds, puts them back in their cradle, and latches the front. She can’t tell whether the tiniest are even alive, but a couple of others twitch a little bit when she’s handling them. It’s a warm day. Now, if the parents come fast, most of them ought to make it.

But then Kaylee thinks, Where
are
the parents? She’s never once checked this nest, not while it was being built and not while the eggs were being incubated and not this afternoon, when the parents weren’t carrying on something terrible. There’s been no sign of them. With a sinking feeling she faces the truth: They were almost certainly killed in the tornado.

She hears footsteps swishing through the clover and starts to explain before Jane even gets to the gate: “The garden box was down and the nest fell out, and I was trying to put everything back together, but the parents haven’t come back—what should we do?”

Jane comes in carrying Kaylee’s flip-flops, looks into the box, then scans the sky, then shakes her head. “I doubt the parents survived. These babies won’t either unless we hand-raise them, which is a big job under ideal conditions and right now—nature can be ruthless, Kaylee. You did the right thing, and if the parents had come through, they could take over now. But as it is—”

“You said we could hand-raise them? How?”

Jane makes a pained face. “I’ve never tried it with swallows. With robins or bluebirds you make a nest, using an old bowl or something lined with paper towels. Then you soak dry dog food in water and feed them pinches of that
every forty-five minutes,
for a week or ten days. You have to change the paper towel every time you feed them, because they’ll poop on it. When they get bigger—”

“Do we have dog food?” Kaylee says. “I want to try! I’m sorry I behaved like such a creep,” she adds contritely. All at once she desperately wants to try to save these morsels of life, helpless and blameless, from the wreckage of the world. How badly she wants this amazes her. She can see Jane thinking about it, wanting to refuse.
“Please!”
Kaylee says. “I’ll do everything myself, well, I will as soon as you teach me how. Do we have paper towels? Please, Jane, I just have to try this, I just
have
to.”

With a rush of relief she sees Jane make up her mind. “Well—we do have dog food. Very expensive, low-fat dog food. No paper towels, but toilet paper and tissues. We can manage. But Kaylee, listen to me now: even experienced rehabbers commonly lose about half the baby birds they try to rear, more than half when the babies are so young. You can see why, when they’ve been stressed and banged around, and gotten chilled—I don’t want you to set your heart on this without understanding how hard it is to be successful.”

Kaylee nods as hard as she can. “I understand! Really, I really do, I won’t go to pieces if it doesn’t work. Oh, thanks, Jane, thank you, I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d said no.”

“But if we’re going to do this we need to act fast. We’ll take the whole nest,” she says. “Back to the house. It takes a little while for kibble to soften up, so we’ll start with canned; these babies need to get warmed up and fed ASAP.”

“How come you’ve got all this stuff stashed under the stairs?” Kaylee asks Jane, when the little swallows are safely tucked into their artificial nest (Roscoe’s bowl, lined with Kleenex).

First she and Jane had to hold the hatchlings in their hands, three apiece, to warm them up enough so they could eat; Jane said little birds can’t warm up by themselves when they first hatch out, which is why the mother has to brood them. “Normally we do this with a heating pad or a microwaved towel or something.” Then she opened a can of Hill’s Prescription Diet w/d, under the intense scrutiny of Roscoe and Fleece. “Watch this time, then next time you can help. Their gape response isn’t working, but it should come back once we can get a bite or two down the hatch,” Jane said. And sure enough, when Jane carefully pried a tiny beak open and pushed a bit of canned food as far back as she could with her little finger, and closed the beak to help the baby swallow, the beak opened again by itself.

Now they had all been fed. (They hadn’t pooped, which probably just meant they hadn’t eaten since before the tornado.) And Kaylee, yearning over their bowl, thought to ask Jane about the supplies.

Jane sits back in her chair, then stiffens. “Oh!” she says,
“That’s
what I cut myself on, that bracket on the shelf there. Wedged between paint cans. Can you push it back out of the way?” Kaylee gets up, holding the bowl carefully, and tucks the bracket out of sight; she is helpfulness itself. “Last summer,” Jane says when Kaylee sits back down on the mat, “after I’d been down here with the dogs three times in about three weeks, I started thinking, What if this was the real deal? All I’ve got in the way of emergency supplies is six jugs of water!” So I took a weekend and made a list and went shopping. Good thing I did.”