Here is where Odette jammed her shovel in the ground. Here is where the police said pennies glistened in the headlights, and no one knew why.
I reach in my pocket for my change from Dairy Queen and pick out a penny. I close my eyes and throw it as far as I can over the fence.
“It’s a little late to be wishing,” Wyatt says.
“A wish … is just hope,” I say, but I’m not sure he can hear me over the thunder.
Wyatt glances up. “You done? Better go.”
“Was something buried here?” I spit out. “Something important?”
“Yes,” he says. “There was. Never ask that question again. There’s a price for being curious.”
I watch him stride back toward the truck. All around me, the painting is finished. Every blade of grass is still and electric, waiting. The sky is finally full, an angry ocean turned upside down.
Wyatt’s in the truck, revving the engine. Before I can think about jumping out of the way, the truck is shooting in reverse. Gravel scatters up my leg, bites my cheek. Wyatt has braked ten inches from my body, my face perfectly even with the passenger window.
He reaches over and shoves open the passenger door.
Is that what Odette did? Get in?
44
My decision, my choice, is pulsing.
Wyatt is pressing 85 miles an hour, trying to outrun the clouds. There are urgent tornado warnings on every radio station, which Wyatt flips through, then turns off. Two cops, lights flashing, zip around us.
On the highway, almost every car has its headlights on, a bad sign. We’re flying by fields with huddled cow orgies, another bad sign, a warning as clear as the crazy crows.
We’re on the highway because Wyatt announced that he wanted to show me the spot in the field where he found me. And I wanted to see it.
Full circle. That’s what he said this little trip down the highway was about. Now maybe we’re going to die for it. That’s a full circle.
A bale of hay gives in to the wind, barreling across the road in front of us. Wyatt screeches the car into a ditch and my body slams forward, stopping just short of the dash. I can feel my heart beating in my eye.
“We’re not going to make it,” he says grimly, pulling back on the highway as the first rock of hail hits the windshield. “But I know a place.”
I’m staring into a much bigger hole than the end of a shotgun. This is what happens to girls like me. Odette. Trumanell.
When girls disappear, their mothers are always on TV afterward, blaming themselves. They are trying to imagine the single moment that, if they were there to slap it away, would have turned things around. And this is it. This is the kitten I shouldn’t pat, the spiked drink I shouldn’t sip, the hand I shouldn’t take.
“Are you coming?” Wyatt, ahead of me, is reaching up, already on the steps disappearing down into the storm cellar. The rain is falling in sheets, streaking down his face, plastering his hair so I can’t see his eyes. There’s blood on the hand he is offering up, a scrape from tugging up a door that looked like it had been rusting shut for fifty years.
His T-shirt is clinging to every muscle and reminding me one more time what I’m up against if Odette was wrong about him.
I desperately memorize the blurry wet scene above the earth—a red farmhouse and a bunch of little outbuildings that Wyatt says belong to an old friend who is out of town. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think Wyatt has old friends.
I tell myself what I always tell myself. Pick the best of your bad choices. Survive this moment.
And this is a solid storm cellar, set away from the house, dug into the earth.
I had always dreamed of my aunt owning one.
I pet the kitten.
I chug the drink.
I take Wyatt’s hand.
Above me, I can hear Wyatt fighting the wind, trying to slam the door to the cellar. He got me settled first—even scanning the flashlight from his iPhone around the cinder-block walls, checking for anything crawling. I am grateful for this. I’ve seen people in Oklahoma with spider scars, untreated, that look like shark bites.
Before he leapt back up the stairs, he’d grabbed a Tupperware box from the corner that held matches and candle supplies. He watched my hands shake while I lit two candles and placed them in two brass holders hooked to the walls.
I take out one of the candles and run the flame along the slimy walls and dirt floor. No suspicious stains. No food. No water. Just two candles, two candle holders, a small box of kitchen matches, a pretty scrappy first-aid kit, a whistle, a Bible, and my backpack.
While Wyatt yelled at me, I had spent extra precious seconds to throw it on my back.
A final slam echoes down the stairs.
I don’t know which side of the door Wyatt is on.
I hold my breath until his phone is casting a little stream of light down the stairs. I hear the clump of his boots. I realize I want him on this side of the door. I count every clump so I know the exact number of stairs in case that becomes important.
As soon as he emerges at the bottom, he switches off his phone, so all that’s left is candlelight. Our shadows are bouncing off the walls like extra people. This is both comforting and scary at the same time. I wish I had my phone. I know exactly where it is—in the cup holder of his truck, forgotten.
“Saving the battery,” he explains about his own phone. “In case debris covers the top of the door and we’re trapped for a while. Reception doesn’t work down here anyway. We’re going to put out those candles in a minute and save them, too. You’re shivering. You got anything useful in that backpack? Another shirt?”
I don’t answer. I’m not about to change shirts when the most space between the two of us—with my back flat on the wall—would be about four feet.
“I saw a twister touch,” he says. “In the distance. Looked like an F2. Maybe an F3. Couldn’t really get a sense of which way it was deciding to go. Like a woman. Like a bitch. My father used to say you can’t fix a bitch.”
Is Wyatt making up that tornado just to scare me? How could he decide it was an F2 on sight alone? I’ve been through countless tornado warnings in my lifetime. Only one turned into the real thing. I was seven. It was a fat, shapeless blob that looked nothing like the perfectly drawn funnel on The Wizard of Oz. It was an F all right, and it stood for my aunt screaming fuck at the top of her lungs.
Wyatt’s head is scraping the top of the ceiling. As he slides to the floor, he makes a little animal noise, and I get a full view of his shirt, smeared with red. Blood is dripping from his hand onto the floor. It reminds me of things I don’t want to remember.
“I’ve really messed up my hand,” Wyatt says. “But that’s all that’s bleeding.”
I realize I’m staring. I wait a few seconds before reaching around for my backpack, the only thing between me and the chilly, sticky wall.
I pull out a bottle of water, half-gone. A package of sour gummies, four left. A plain blue scarf with a black fringe edge, one of the least hideous my aunt has ever given me, mailed for my eighteenth birthday a month ago with a card that said “To a darling niece.” I didn’t even know she knew the word darling. I begin to rip the scarf into strips.
“Hold out your hand,” I say when I’m done, picking up the bottle of water. “Palm out.”