The Stormchasers: A Novel (4 page)

The phone rings and rings in the Widow’s restored Victorian, which Karena entertains herself by mentally revisiting as she waits. The army of stone creatures, squirrels and chipmunks mostly, peeking from the front bushes. The cardboard lady bent over in the garden, presenting her polka-dotted underpants to visitors. The boy and girl trolls kissing over the plastic wishing well in the yard. The sign on the porch announcing THE HALLINGDAHLS, FRANK~N~LOIS. As much as Karena wants to find her brother, she almost hopes Charles hasn’t learned of Frank’s remarriage and stroke, hasn’t been to the Widow’s house. It might just push him over the edge.

Karena is just about to give up and try again later—maybe the Widow is at bridge night—when the Widow answers.

“Helloooooo,” she says, putting an extra-cozy spin on the -
o
.

“Lois? It’s Karena.”

“Oh!” the Widow says, and there’s a muffled clatter as if she has just dropped an armload of cutlery in the sink and is stirring it around. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Karena hears her muttering.

“I’m sorry, who’d you say this is?” the Widow says. “You’ve caught me doing supper dishes.”

“It’s Karena.”

“Oh,” the Widow says. “Karena.”

The line ticks. Karena waits for the Widow to continue, to say
Hi, how are you
, and tries to remember the woman isn’t all bad. The Widow has plenty of reasons to be angry, none having anything to do with Karena. But Karena can’t help picturing the Widow in her kitchen, in which everything matches: yellow gingham border entwined with vines, yellow gingham dish towels, yellow gingham vinyl on the chair seats. The Widow will be standing by the sink, round and poised as a doll, her little mouth smiling sweetly and poisonously at nobody.

“Well!” the Widow says finally. “This is a surprise. What can I do for you? It’s a little late for a social call, isn’t it?”

Karena looks out the window at the sunset, atomic peach striping the sky. The bedside clock says eight fifteen.

“I guess,” she says. “Sorry, Lois. I didn’t mean to disturb your evening. But I’m looking for my brother. Charles. You haven’t heard from him by any chance, have you?”

There is a frosty pause.

“No,” the Widow says.

“He hasn’t been looking for my dad? Nobody’s seen him around town?”

“No,” the Widow repeats. “Although, you know, I’m not sure I’d even recognize him. It’s been so many years since anyone here has seen him.”

Karena closes her eyes and massages them.

“I know what you mean,” she says. “But if anyone you think might be Charles does show up, any strange guy on your doorstep, would you let me know right away, please? It’s urgent.”

“Okay,” the Widow says.

“Let me give you my cell number.”

“Oh, goodness no,” the Widow says brightly. “I couldn’t possibly remember. Even if I write it down, I’ve got so many numbers floating around already, what with my kids and grandkids and all, it’s a wonder my head’s still screwed on straight! Say,” she adds, “did you get the birthday card I sent you?”

Oh, crap, Karena thinks. She did indeed receive a card from the Widow, a week ago. It featured a cartoon teddy bear in a striped hat dusted with sparkles and a banner reading
For You Hunny Bear on Your Special Day!
The Widow had also enclosed a check made out for thirty-nine dollars, Karena’s age plus a year to grow on. On the memo line in her former schoolteacher’s round cursive she had written
Frank’s daughter’s birthday.
The card itself was unsigned.

“I did get it, Lois,” Karena says, “it was a lovely card, thank you very much.”

“Oh, good,” says the Widow in her sweet little croaky voice. “I was worried you hadn’t received it. The mail up there in the Cities can be so unreliable, especially when money’s involved. . . . And when I hadn’t heard from you, I just assumed . . . But now I know you got it, so I’ll sleep better at night.”

“That’s good,” says Karena.

“I brought it to the Center to show your dad before I sent it,” the Widow continues. “I could tell he thought it was real nice.”

Karena tries not to remember Frank as she last saw him a month ago, listing sideways in his wheelchair, his pink scalp visible through the cobwebs of his hair. Utterly unresponsive no matter how Karena pressed his hands and smiled and talked to him. One eye staring at the birds hopping and chirping in the nursing home’s lobby aviary, the other fixed straight ahead.

“How’s he doing this week?” Karena asks.

“Oh, the same,” the Widow says. “Of course, if you’d come down, you could see for yourself. I know he’d appreciate a visit.”

Karena makes a face at herself in the mirror across from the bed and pulls her hair.

“As soon as I can,” she promises. “Listen, Lois, I’ve got to run, but please, you’ll remember what I said about Charles?”

But the Widow says brightly, “Well, bye now!” and hangs up.

Karena takes the phone from her ear and looks at it, then tosses it aside on the bed. She stares at the TV. Well, Karena hasn’t expected much from the Widow, and her expectations have been met. If the woman weren’t so loathsome, Karena might feel sorry for her—maybe. The Widow had three husbands before Frank, the first purportedly beating her senseless night after night on their farm before suffering a fatal threshing accident. With each successive spouse the Widow has traded up financially and in community status, and she must have thought she’d struck gold with Frank Hallingdahl, Foss County’s most successful attorney. Those twins were a negative, especially that crazy son, Charles. A threat. An embarrassment. But the Widow would have known Charles hadn’t been heard from in years and Frank saw his daughter only for the occasional lunch. What the Widow could not have predicted was Frank’s stroke two years into their marriage—an especially bad joke, considering Frank was a jogger and health nut long before it became fashionable. Now the Widow is in limbo, caring for her shell of a husband, unable to marry again.

Karena suddenly wants to see her dad so badly she can hardly stand it, not Frank as he is now but as he was when she and Charles were young—a skinny, tough little man gleefully rubbing his hands together and chortling over the facts of a particularly nasty lawsuit. Frank may have been an absentee dad, his motto being
Justice Waits for No Man
, but still, he’s the only one Karena’s got. Even more, though, Karena longs for her mom, Siri, with an intensity she hasn’t felt since the days following Siri’s death, when Karena felt she could spend the rest of her life wandering black-clothed through a desert, tearing her hair and howling, and it would still not express the dimension of her grief. If Siri were here, the two of them would drink white wine from the plastic bathroom cups, chilled with ice from the machine down the hall, and share a pack of Marlboros—although Karena quit years ago. They would laugh over the Widow’s bile and uselessness. They would analyze the Charles situation and bitch about it and make a plan together. Karena lies back and closes her eyes.

T
hat night Karena wakes suddenly, as fully alert as if she had never gone to sleep at all. She turns to the bedside clock: yes, four thirty A.M. on the dot. Just like at home. This happens to her almost every night, every unresolved thing in her life babbling away in her head at once
.
It’s quite a party going on up there. An e-mail to a forgotten source. A response to a neglected wedding invitation. Heated arguments during which Karena says everything she wasn’t brave enough to say during the day—
Why do you have to be so awful?
she asks the Widow
, I know your life’s been hard but I didn’t do anything to you. Can’t you help me?
Then there are the usual suspects, such as, why is Karena alone in this motel room in the middle of the night? With no husband, no child? Thirty-eight years old and almost out of time, this is not how it was supposed to be. And, always, there is Charles. Charles, Charles, Charles, the fact of her absent twin like a radio signal that’s sometimes stronger, sometimes fainter, but one Karena never stops hearing.

Tonight the signal is especially powerful because of her near miss.
Find him. Find him. Find him
. Karena gets up and goes into the bathroom for two aspirin and a dropper full of Bach Rescue Remedy, which is supposed to contain soothing flower essences but is, she’s pretty sure, about 90 percent brandy. Sometimes this helps. Tonight it doesn’t. Lying very still, Karena reminds herself she can’t do anything about any of these situations tonight. She’ll tend to them tomorrow. At five thirty, she turns on the light, throws back the sheet, and pads across the room to her laptop.

She looks first to see if Tiff is online, since sometimes Tiff likes to have a virtual chat while nursing her youngest, Matthew. But Tiff is nowhere to be seen. Karena opens her e-mail next, but of course there’s nothing new since midnight when she last checked it because all the normal people are asleep. She dashes off the messages she was composing in her head, saving them in her draft file. Then she visits the weather websites, the Weather Channel and Storm Prediction Center and Wunderground, and finally Karena lands on Stormtrack.

Stormtrack is the stormchasers’ forum, where the chasers have lively discussions of where severe weather will occur next and post accounts of chases they’ve just had. For a year Karena has been banned as a participant after one too many attempts to find Charles, the moderators letting her know in no uncertain terms that Stormtrack is for people looking for severe weather, not other people.
But I’m Charles Hallingdahl’s sister,
Karena wrote,
and I’m trying to find him. I can’t reach him any other way. Won’t you please help me?
The reply was a week in coming, and then it was a terse
We have no way of verifying you are who you say you are, and our members’ privacy must be protected.
Then, as an afterthought,
Sorry. Good luck.

Karena goes to the Forecasts & Nowcasts page, hoping against hope that Charles will have contributed something, but she knows it’s a long shot. It has been a dry summer for tornadoes, and there’s no severe weather predicted anywhere in the country until the following week, in the Dakotas, so the message boards are quiet. Karena scrolls through the old posts anyway, in case she has missed one by C_HALLINGDAHL, but there’s nothing. So she permits herself to do what she does on nights when missing Charles is particularly bad: She visits the Stormtrack archives. There are Charles’s storm photos from earlier this summer, proof he is still chasing, until yesterday the only evidence Karena had that her brother was alive.

She clicks on each photo to enlarge it, although she has memorized them, their colors and composition, sometimes sees them floating on the backs of her eyelids as she tries to sleep.

The herd of white horses fleeing an oncoming storm:
rosebud county, montana, C_HALLINGDAHL.

The Amish children gathered on a dirt road, their upturned faces fearful beneath their straw hats and bonnets, above them a triple fork of lightning:
near sioux city, iowa, C_HALLINGDAHL
.

A ghostly tornado in a rain shaft, backlit by lightning, white on gray:
cimarron county, kansas, C_HALLINGDAHL
.

That’s it, for this year. And that’s all Charles ever writes, the captions beneath his photos.

Karena looks at them until her head begins to ache, these images she would have guessed were her brother’s even if he hadn’t provided his name, because the wild and lonely and beautiful way the photographer frames the world is signature enough. She has tried so hard to find Charles. The private investigators she has hired—two of them, highly recommended, extremely expensive, and both useless—are just the tip of it. Karena has placed ads in all the Personals sections in every Tornado Alley newspaper, asking for information. She has done the same online. She has visited the weather websites, corresponded with a handful of stormchasers who say they have seen her brother here and there but he’s pretty much a lone wolf, likes to keep to himself, happy hunting. She has used the
Ledger
databases, search engines that churn up every documented fact of a person’s life, from birth to bankruptcy, felonies to divorces, weddings to addresses. Yet Karena has been unable to find anything on Charles. He has never owned property, never had an insured car, never paid taxes. He has lived entirely off the radar.

Karena puts her face in her hands and rubs, making a little whimpering sound. She wishes to God she had retained her childhood ability to always know where Charles was, so that whenever some grown-up asked, Karena could say of her more adventurous twin,
He’s under the porch
or
He’s up on the roof
or
He’s over by the water tower.

“Where are you, Charles?” she says.

The slice of window beneath the drapes is starting to glow gray. Karena clicks the refresh button to see if, by some miracle, C_HALLINGDAHL has posted something within the last ten minutes. The first part of the page to load is an advertisement, a brown tornado spinning across the top of Karena’s screen, leaving WHIRLWIND TOURS: THE ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME! in its wake. The debris settles to reveal a white van, its hazards blinking as it watches the tornado dwindle, wreaking havoc in the distance.

“Oh my God,” says Karena. She shakes her head. How could she have been so stupid? How could she not have seen it before? This is how she’ll find her brother. She clicks on the Whirlwind link.

A
lthough she has excellent reason to be, Karena doesn’t consider herself phobic about storms. Like every native Minnesotan, she has more than a nodding acquaintance with them. She’s accustomed to lightning, thunder, hail. She knows how to recognize a wall cloud, the lowered part of a rotating storm from which a tornado might come. She’s used to her summer evening programming being interrupted by the network meteorologists using Doppler radar to show her where the dangerous weather will be. If the sky turns green, if the sirens crank up, Karena goes to the basement.