Eye of the Storm (2 page)

“Unfortunately, no,” Dad says. “Looks like Phase Two is going to be delayed a bit.”

“What's Phase Two?” I ask.

“Phase One of Placid Meadows is full, and we have two dozen families waitlisted, so we're going to expand the development.
If
we can get the land we need.”

Lou chuckles. “Those farmers getting you down?”

Dad isn't smiling anymore. “Honestly, why someone would be crazy enough to stay here to run a dying farm is beyond me. And
why
anybody
would turn down an offer that's five times what the property is worth . . .” Dad shakes his head, then looks at the dashboard clock. “I'd better get Jaden home.” He lifts two fingers from the steering wheel in a wave.

When he drives through the Placid Meadows gate, it's like driving from Kansas into the Land of Oz.

From the minute I stepped off the plane, Oklahoma has been a place of charcoal skies and yellow-gray clouds. It's like Florida when the hurricanes started getting bigger; no one lives here anymore unless they're too attached to family farms or they can't afford to leave. The oil wells were abandoned a decade ago when the international fossil fuels ban took effect. The sprawling cattle ranches are ghost towns. It's a state abandoned, except for a few farms, storm-torn mobile home parks, and corrections department energy farms, where convicted criminals ride generator-cycles outside in the daytime and sleep in StormSafe bunkers at night. It's a black-and-white world, with shades of brown.

But Placid Meadows blooms in full, all-of-a-sudden color.

A billowing garden of bright flowers divides the street. In the middle is a fat boulder with a bronze plaque affixed to it. WELCOME TO PLACID MEADOWS, A STORMSAFE COMMUNITY, it says in calm, loopy cursive. All around, the garden bursts with reds and pinks and fuchsias. Tall purples tip their heads, and spreading silver-blues creep along the curb.

“It's beautiful.” I lower my window to breathe in all that brightness, and for the first time since I said good-bye to Mom at the airport in Burlington, I almost feel calm.

Dad pulls over and smiles, and his face relaxes into something I almost recognize from the Dad I had before. “Isn't it the most gorgeous garden you've ever seen?”

I nod, but this new glimpse of Dad is more interesting than the plants now. The DataSlate man from the car seems to have been sucked into a folder deep inside him. Now he looks like someone who might order rainbow sprinkles on an ice cream cone again someday. Between that and the flowers, I feel my heart lift. Maybe this summer will be all right.

“The flowers are so perfect.” I lean out my window.

“Of course they are. Everything we plant is DNA-ture; it's the best.” He puts the HV back in gear. “We better go. Mirielle's making an early dinner.”

Mirielle. The stepmom I've only seen on my DataSlate videophone, and always with my new half sister, Remi, in her arms.

Dad pulls away from the garden, farther into the development.

The street is lined with StormSafe houses, concrete structures tinted mauve, slate blue, and sea green. They have windows, which surprises me a little; they must be made of glass that's engineered not to shatter under pressure. And there are bigger buildings, without windows.

“Are those houses, too?” I ask.

“Nope—that one's the community warehouse.” Dad nods toward a big brick-colored structure as we pass. “DNA-ture delivers food orders once a week so we don't need to go out to the regional grocery store.”

No wonder the farms Dad mentioned to Lou aren't doing so well.

Dad points out my window. “Here's the entertainment dome.”

He slows down as we pass a building that looks like the big skating rink at home. The electronic sign outside has a schedule of showings. Movies. Sporting events. Ballet and theater streamed in live from the National Arts Center in New York. And something called Museum Night, with Natural History: Jurassic Period on Tuesday and American History 1900–2050 on Thursday.

“What's Museum Night?” I ask as Dad pulls away.

He smiles a little. “Do you remember when you were really small—I think you were three—when we took you to closing ceremonies for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City?”

“Kind of.” I remember walking through a room with huge dinosaurs and another one with all kinds of rocks and gems. And Mom was crying. “Mostly, I remember Mom being sad.”

Dad nods. “It broke her heart when the government decided most of the major museums needed to close so artifacts could be protected in underground bunkers until the storm crisis is resolved. But this place”—he looks in the rearview mirror—“is the museum of the future. It's all holograms, so it changes every night. What did it say for this week?”

“Jurassic and American History.”

“Great shows; you should go,” Dad says. “You walk a path through the dome, and you'll see dinosaurs approaching. The T-Rex
looks like it's about to eat you for dinner.” He chuckles. “They're just holograms, so they don't bite, but they're realistic. American History is fascinating, too. You meet history makers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Al Gore—and former presidents, too. I think they have Barack Obama and Grace Farley in this show.”

“Interesting,” I say, and it is. But then I have another flash of memory from the museum's closing night—the feel of a cool, rough dinosaur tail under my hand when I ducked under the velvet rope to touch it, even though the signs said not to. It felt real, like it might come alive and roar any second. A hologram could never feel like that.

We turn a corner, and Dad slows down. “That's Risha Patel, the girl I told you about on our video-call last week.”

The girl looks about my age. Her long black hair has a bright green streak along one side. She must have a BeatBud in her ear because she's bobbing her head back and forth to something fast and playing imaginary drums in the air, right above the handlebars of her bicycle as she rides along, hands-free.

Dad speeds up again, but I turn in my seat and stare.

She is riding a bike.

Nobody rides bikes anymore at home. The storms churn up so fast, there's not a kid in our neighborhood who's allowed to ride more than halfway down the block, so why bother? Amelia was the last of my friends to give hers up. She held out right through last summer and never cared how ridiculous she looked riding up and down the street, back and forth, alone. When we laughed, she told
us that in her mind, she was going all over town, through the woods past the big tree house where our moms used to camp out when they were little, branches brushing her cheeks as she flew down the trails. But at the end of the summer, we got our StormSafe Mall and Teen Center, and even Amelia figured that was better than imaginary trails. The recycling crew picked up her bike at the beginning of October.

Was this girl imagining faraway places, too?

“Does she live right around here?” I ask Dad.

He shakes his head. “The Patels live on the other side of the development. Closer to the Eye on Tomorrow campus.”

“Wow.” I scan the horizon. The storm we just saw has already barreled off, but there are more clouds churning in the west. “She's far from home for a storm day.”

Dad laughs. “I see it's going to take you a while to get used to being a StormSafe kid.” He slows down and pulls into the driveway of an adobe-colored concrete box. “It's different here.” He presses a button on the dashboard, and a dome-shaped mouth yawns open on one wall. He pulls the HV forward into what must be the Storm-Safe version of a garage. Three bicycles are lined up inside, one in my favorite color, electric blue.

“We ride bikes all over the place here. In fact,” he says, nodding to the fleet along the wall, “it was supposed to be a surprise, but the blue one's yours. You'll love having that freedom again.”

“But . . . how can that be safe? I know the
houses
are safer here, but if you're outside . . . I mean, the storms are even worse than at home, so—”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Dad shakes his head, smiling. “While you are inside the gates of Placid Meadows, you are safe. Totally and completely safe.”

He presses another button on the dashboard. The garage door rumbles again, and behind us, the mouth on this safe, safe house slides shut.

When Dad opens the kitchen door, French disco music bursts out to meet us. Mirielle is twirling around the room barefoot in a long flowered skirt and lemon-yellow tank top. Remi is six months old now and swaddled in a big, every-colored scarf slung around Mirielle's neck like she is part of the outfit.

Mirielle presses a button to send the potatoes down for peeling and—“Oh!”—almost twirls into me on her way back for the carrots. “Jaden, you're here!” She leans in to kiss my cheek. I smell Remi's head—soap and baby. Mirielle turns to Dad. “Did you get caught in the storm? I hate when you have to go out there.” She says it as if “out there” and “in here” are totally different planets.

“I know, love.” Dad steps up to the biometric panel on the refrigerator. He presses a finger to the reflective glass and taps impatiently, waiting for it to identify him by his print. “We spent about ten minutes in a safety lot. No problem.” For some reason, relief cools my face when the fridge sends Dad out a glass of iced tea. He still drinks it with lemon, and at this point, anything that hasn't changed is welcome.

“You want something to drink?” Dad asks.

“No thanks.” I look past him and wonder where my room is.

Mirielle catches me peering into the living room. “Would you like to see the rest of the house?”

“Go ahead.” Dad steps up and rests his finger on another biometric panel just outside a steel door on the wall opposite the kitchen appliances. “I'm going to check in with headquarters before dinner.”

I stand by the door for a second and see a bank of computers inside before I realize Dad's office won't be part of my tour. Then I follow Mirielle out of the kitchen and up a spiral staircase to a sleeping loft. It's bigger than mine at home, but it has a bedspread of the same bright blue. I wonder if they did this on purpose, tried to make my room look like home so I wouldn't miss Mom so much.

But then Mirielle pulls open the little drawer on my nightstand, and what I see inside makes me miss Mom even more.

It's a book. The hardcover kind with pages you turn by catching the corner with your fingertip. We have this one at home, but I didn't bring any paper books; Dad says reading paper books is like driving on square, stone wheels. He's been reading exclusively on his DataSlate since before I was born.

This book is by Rita Dove, an American poet who loves math as much as she loves words. In the photograph on the book jacket, she's beautiful and maybe around Mom's age, but she must be in her nineties now. I sit down on the bed and flip through the pages to find my favorite, “Geometry.” It's about what she feels like when she proves a mathematical theorem.

. . . the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling
floats away with a sigh.

When I first read this poem, the ceiling part freaked me out a little. Then Mom told me it was written way back in 1980, before most people knew what it was like to have the roof blow off your house for real.

I run my hand over the raised letters on the book's cover. “Did my mom send this?”

Mirielle smiles and sits next to me. “She thought you might miss your books, so she had your great-aunt Linda pick up a copy at the antique shop and drop it off when your father wasn't home.” Mirielle glances toward the door. “She suggested I tuck it away for you.”

“Aunt Linda? Really?” Even though she's technically my great-aunt, I've always known her as Aunt Linda. I haven't seen her in years, though. She paints and gardens, and I'm not surprised she likes poetry, too. She took care of Dad when he was little, pretty much raised him. I put the book down next to me. “How close does she live?”

“About twenty miles. But she and your father don't really talk.”

“How come? Won't I get to see her? It's been a long time.”

Mirielle's pretty green eyes cloud over. “Your father thought Linda should move to Placid Meadows, but she'd have no part of it. He was furious, and so no . . . she doesn't drop in for dinner.”

My disappointment must show on my face. Mirielle reaches out and touches my arm. “But she is your relative, too, no? Maybe we will have a visit one day while your father is at work.” She stands
up, tucks the book back in the nightstand, and gently closes the drawer. She smiles like we're sharing a secret, and I realize we are. We both know Dad wouldn't want paper books cluttering up his house.

Besides, it's poetry. Dad always says a world like ours needs science to save it, that pretty words never protected anybody from a storm.

Which reminds me. “How do I get to the safe room from here?”

“There is no one safe room,” Mirielle says. “Everywhere is safe.”

The ugly concrete designs make perfect sense now, and so does Dad's promise to Mom. The whole
house
must be a giant safe room.

“I will show you the living room instead, yes?”

On the way downstairs, we pass the bathroom, and I peek inside. It's enormous, and there's no liter-meter on the wall, like at home. Could the Placid Meadows water rations be so much higher that we don't even have to keep track? I add longer showers to the list of good things about living here for the summer.

“Here we are.” Mirielle steps into the living room. One whole wall is an entertainment window. There are plush black chairs, an antique rocker, a leather sofa, and bookcases like ours at home. But no books. Here, the shelves are full of digital frames. Most are storm shots, black-gray blurs of tornadoes from Dad's research trips all over the world, but the two frames on the end have a slideshow of family photos.