The Meteorologist (2 page)

Melanie emerged and spent a minute locking
the door after her. Came down the bowing steps and through the
weeds onto the drive as Peter leaned across the seat to open her
door, the pair of coffees he’d bought at the gas station steaming
into his face.

“I could barely sleep I was so excited,” she
said as they rolled along the dirt road toward the highway.

“Could turn out to be a bust,” Peter warned.
“I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

“Well, it’s all about the journey,
right?”

They drove west on the interstate, the sun a
blood blister in the side mirrors, its light so watery and diffused
you could stare it down. Adult contemporary droned through the
speakers at a reasonable volume, the small talk coming just often
enough to keep the stretches of silence from passing the point of
no return.

They crossed the border into Colorado at a
quarter past eleven and Peter pointed through the windshield. “You
see that?”

“You mean those clouds?”

“The one that looks like an anvil is going to
be a thunderstorm when it grows up.”

“This is good?”

“Very good. Major convection underway.”

Melanie squealed and clapped her hands,
something free and childlike in her excitement.

He took the next exit and pulled over so they
could track the gathering storm cells on the laptop—irregular blobs
of green with nuclei of hot pinks and fuchsia.

“They’re still maturing,” he said, running
his finger along the screen, tracking the loop of their
northwesterly movement on the radar. “We’ll take 385. Should
intercept them in about forty minutes. If we’re lucky, they’ll be
booming.”

They went north. The summer sky turned dark.
Peter lowered his window, let the musty air rush in. Straining to
hear thunder over the engine.

They pulled onto the shoulder on the
outskirts of Wray, Colorado. Peter killed the engine and glanced
over at the computer, now in Melanie’s lap.

“We’re in position,” he said.

The first fat drops of rain splattered on the
windshield as Peter squinted at the screen.

He opened his door, got out, crossed the
road.

Melanie joined him.

Strings of lightning bent down and rain
sagged from the clouds in ragged black tendrils.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said, and he
wondered if she really meant it, if it touched her with even a
fraction of the intensity it touched him, or if she was saying what
she thought he wanted to hear. He looked up at the clouds streaming
over them.

Lightning touched the plain a mile away, the
blast of thunder vibrating the ground beneath their feet.

Melanie clutched his arm.

“Should we go back to the car?” she asked,
and he couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. You embraced a
storm by standing in the middle of the goddamn thing, feeling the
rain beat down on your face, letting the wind bully you, trying not
to flinch when the thunder dropped right on top of your head.

“Sure,” he said. “We can go back.”

They experienced the storm from inside the
RV, everything reduced to gray through the rain-streaked glass and
nothing to see beyond fifty yards as thunder detonated all around
them, the Winnebago creaking and listing against the stronger
gusts.

Melanie reached over and pried Peter’s right
hand off the steering wheel and laced her fingers through his. Her
hand was small and warm, and he was afraid if he looked at her she
would kiss him.

When the storms had passed, they went on,
taking backroads into Kansas, the late afternoon sky going bright
and clear, Peter feeling with every passing breath like the RV was
shrinking, the air being compressed from his lungs.

Thirty miles north of Hoxie, he pulled off
onto the side of the road.

“Why are you stopping?” Melanie asked.

“I just need some air.”

He walked around the front of the Winnebago,
the overworked engine pumping eddies of heat through the radiator.
Twenty yards from the road, he stopped. The only disruption in all
that prairie a grain mill several miles to the east. Peter took
deep breaths until the mayhem in his head had gone quiet and he
could hear the grasses scraping at his jeans.

Melanie said, “You all right, Peter?”

The sun had dipped below the western
horizon.

“Yeah. You?”

“Uh huh.”

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 touched 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.