Jocie Villanueva reached to the dashboard to turn on the radio. She loved listening to the gardening call-in show and had a history of disagreeing with the master gardener.
A caller was asking about garlic. “Should I plant it now?”
“Wait a month,” said the master gardener. “The first week of October, get at it.”
Jocie crossed her arms. “No, not till October 21st.”
Jocie's daughter, Mimi, was in the middle back seat of the family SUV. She glanced in the rearview mirror at her husband, Derek Coulter, who was driving. His eyes smiled back at her.
“So, October first?” asked the caller.
“Wait at least two more weeks,” said Jocie.
Derek, who knew almost nothing about gardening, said, “One more week should be more than enough.”
Jocie's eyes slid left.
Derek casually drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Ten days, tops.”
Jocie watched, waiting, until he cracked.
“Pah!” She swatted his arm, and they both laughed, how this game always went.
Neither of Mimi's children were paying attention to the going-ons up front. Nine-year-old Michael, in the passenger side seat, was gazing out the window, watching the world wash by. On the driver's side, four-year-old Lizzie, having been unable to convince Gabriela–her black-haired, slender-limbed doll–to stand upright in the storage well of the door, was now stuffing her in upside down.
The Coulter-Villanuevas were headed to Niagara Falls. They had crossed the skyway at the western end of Lake Ontario, with Hamilton's steel mills dark and sinister in the distance, and were approaching Grimsby, an orderly town of small houses lined up along the lake. To the west, the Niagara Escarpment loomed, a ragged limestone ridge that would wander away from the highway and then reappear just before the falls. As the SUV entered a stretch of pancake-flat farmland, a man asked the master gardener about black spots on peaches. Was there an organic treatment?
“You might want to give jojoba oil a try,” said the master gardener.
“Ha, good luck with that,” said Jocie.
It had been Derek's suggestion that she come along. Jocie lived downstairs from the others, or at least slept there. A selling feature of their house had been its bright, fully-equipped, freshly renovated basement suite with sliding doors that opened onto a sunny, sunken patio. Recently-retired Jocie could comfortably live there, a third caregiver for the children, yet not fully in their lives every minute of every day. But Jocie rarely used the downstairs stovetop or oven, saying it was silly to have to clean two kitchens, and would come upstairs to cook. This annoyed Mimi, who had long dreamt of a kitchen to herself. Derek, traitor, instead of reminding Jocie of her kitchen downstairs, would stand next to her asking eager questions about Filipino food preparation, wanting to try his hand.
A crackle on the radio was answered half a minute later by a heavy rumble.
“Thunder? Already?” Derek leaned against the wheel to see as much of the sky as possible. “That's not what they said.”
They had checked the forecast the night before. A hot, sunny day with a chance of late afternoon thunderstorms. It wasn't even half-past ten.
Michael twisted around to scan the northern sky. “Dad, behind us, back there, I think it's a wall cloud!” Taking after his zoologist father, Michael was a science boy, a fan of animals, volcanoes, the solar system, robots—anything sciency. He regularly watched a television program called Wild Weather!
Derek squinted into the rearview mirror. “A wall cloud?”
“It's like a shelf ahead of the higher clouds.” Michael was almost backwards in his seat. “I think it's following us.”
Derek again squinted into the mirror. “It's definitely dark back there. Lucky we're going in the opposite direction.” The sky ahead was clear and bright.
Mimi touched Michael's arm. “Turn around, honey, sit properly.”
Michael sat properly and said, matter-of-factly, “Tornadoes come from wall clouds.”
The gardening show's next caller was troubled about her hydrangeas. Overnight, half of the blooms had changed from blue to pink. She was cut off mid-sentence by a deep and serious voice.
“This is a Severe Weather Warning from Environment Canada for the Niagara Region. A tornado warning has been issued—”
“What happened?” Jocie pushed a button, sending the radio through its seek-and-find routine, only to end up where it had been. The serious voice was finishing up, “…and are advised to take shelter immediately.”
Mimi leaned forward. “What was that? That was for here?”
“There aren't tornadoes in these parts, are there?” Derek had lived in southern Ontario for only eight years, not long enough to dispel his belief it was a tornado-free zone.
“It's from the wall cloud, like I said,” said Michael.
Mimi thumped Derek's seatback with her fist. “Daddy, get us away from the wall cloud.”
The engine's revving overrode the gardening show's closing theme. Jocie, reaching for the radio off switch, was pushed back into her seat.
“Leave it on, Mama, in case there's more bulletins.” Mimi looked in the rearview mirror at Derek. He wasn't looking back. She could read his thoughts anyway and was thinking them too, easily done with Michael next to her–a dark-haired, dark-eyed replica of his fair-haired, pale-eyed father.
#
Thirty years ago, when Derek was almost exactly Michael's present age, he was taken to his uncle and aunt's almond farm near Sacramento to spend the weekend. Without him, his parents visited an elderly relative in Bakersfield, 300 miles south. Two nights later, as they drove back north on the I-5, a fierce wind swept down the western slopes of the Sierras and across drought-ridden rangeland. A weather bulletin wasn't issued because known experience and existing technology couldn't predict what was about to happen. A smothering dust cloud enveloped the interstate, causing multiple pile-ups and seventeen fatalities, among them Robert and Elizabeth Coulter.
Derek was adopted by his uncle and moved to the almond farm. With few playmates nearby, he befriended the turtles, snakes, foxes, and birds he met along the irrigation ditches. It was inevitable he would become a zoologist, with research taking him to Mexico, Panama, and then, Bermuda.
#
“Lightning, more lightning back there,” he said. Thunder followed more swiftly this time and was louder.
#
Ten years ago this month, Mimi had been the teaching assistant for an archeology field course from the University of Toronto. The study site was a crumbling, 400-year-old British fort on uninhabited Tea Kettle Island, Bermuda. The instructor's name was Adrian Lyon. He was Mimi's PhD advisor and also, although eleven years her senior, her fiancé.
Jocie detested him and would say to Mimi, “You're with the wrong person.”
Two days ahead of the students, Mimi and Adrian landed on the island just before sunset. They were not expecting to encounter a young zoologist from Berkeley–there to study a rare, endemic lizard–passed out drunk on top of a weathered rampart, completely naked. Adrian poked him with a broken tree branch.
Derek jerked awake and hurled his last unopened can of beer, which caromed off the side of Adrian's head. Though Adrian lay felled, Mimi couldn't take her eyes off the man kneeling on the rampart. Lean and bearded, hair long and sun-bleached, a naked, blond Jesus. Maybe her mother was right.
A week later, Adrian temporarily left the island for a job interview in England, and Mimi and Derek came together. In a quiet moment, Derek told her about his parents, about growing up angry they hadn't taken him with them to Bakersfield so he could have died with them and not been left behind.
She held his face with both hands and whispered, “I'm glad they left you behind.”
#
Another roll of thunder overtook them as they passed slower vehicles, one a hulking cement mixer with its barrel whimsically painted like a watermelon. Near the city of St. Catharines, traffic thickened. The optimistic blue above had narrowed, pinched by high clouds from either side.
“I think we're good,” Derek said, “although it's still spooky black back there.”
Instantly, the car was pelted with pea-sized hail that bounced off every surface in a crazy, hissing clatter.
“Yikes,” he said, and slowed further.
Michael shouted, “The tornado must be close! Hail storms come with tornadoes! Dad, the tornado's coming!”
“It's probably just regular hail, honey,” said Mimi. “It'll pass.”
Michael slipped from his shoulder strap to peer over the seatback. “No, look!” He pointed out the back window. “The tornado's coming! It's coming right at us! That big black cloud is it!”
Eyes in the mirror, Derek said, “I think he could be right.”
Mimi unfastened her belt and spun up onto her knees. “They look like that?” Black as burning tires, the thing covered half the sky.
“Big ones do.”
“Exactly!” Michael shouted. “It's a wedge tornado! They're the worst kind! Dad!”
“We're okay, Mikey, it'll probably continue on out over the lake.” His eyebrows jumped at Mimi. He was guessing.
Mimi squirmed between the front seats for a better view. This particular road—a separated highway, lined on either side by tall stone sound barriers dropped between metal uprights—was a bad place to be with a wedge tornado on your tail. The radio had forgotten about the tornado. Two men who laughed a lot were talking about baseball.
#
Back in Bermuda, Derek would again be left behind, and again a storm would punctuate his life. Hurricane Luisa struck the archipelago two days after Adrian returned from England. To Derek's deep disappointment, Mimi had gone back to him. Wrong person or not, it had seemed the practical thing to do, at least in the short-term. Derek? From far-away California? Their time together had been a fling, a disconnected thing in a disconnected place. She hadn't expected him to fall in love with her.
A Bermudian fisheries officer named Matthew Spencer boated out to Tea Kettle Island to transport the archeologists and Derek to safety. Heartbroken to the point of irrationality, Derek remained on the island. At the height of the storm he sheltered in an abandoned stone cistern, treading sour water. A chunk of masonry broke loose and fell, fracturing the right side of his skull and paralyzing the left side of his body.
#
They passed an exit that would have afforded an escape. Mimi pointed, “There! We could have got off there!”
Derek shook his head. “I couldn't cut across.”
In the distance was an overpass, maybe an off-ramp.
Mimi pointed again. “Go! Faster!”
Other vehicles sped past in the fast lane, the slow lane, even the shoulder. Derek eased off the gas.
“Derek? No, faster!” Mimi looked ahead and understood. Those reaching the overpass were pulling over and parking on the shoulders and within the adjacent lanes. Derek made a last-second lane change to get to the off-ramp, accomplishing nothing. It also passed beneath the overpass and cars had parked there too.
The watermelon cement mixer lumbered by, then swerved into their lane, followed by two cars. Every tail light turned red and doors flew open. People fled their vehicles—singles, couples, families, a woman in a fluffy dress with a small dog beneath each arm—all on a single-minded dash to the shelter of the overpass.
Derek turned off the ignition. “This is as far as we get. Everybody out. Leave everything behind.” He looked again in the mirror. “We have to get out and run.”
No one reacted until he unbuckled, turned around and shouted, “Get out now! Lizzie, hold Mama's hand as hard as you can! Michael, out! Jocie, get out!”
Jocie blinked at him. Derek never yelled.
“Mama!” Mimi fumbled left and right to unbuckle her children. “Mama, get out, GET OUT!”
Derek unclipped Jocie's seatbelt, reached across her to flick the door latch, placed a hand on her shoulder and shoved, shouting, “Out, Lola, we have to GO!”
Michael burst out his side as Mimi hustled Lizzie out the other. Wind pushed in every direction at once, tossing her hair across her eyes. Hailstones crunched and skidded beneath her shoes. The sky directly overhead was grey-green, the noise terrifying, a building, pummeling howl. She looked over her shoulder into the blackness. Things belonging on the ground were airborne, sailing left to right—sheets of wood, traffic cones, a shed? Mimi dragged Lizzie by her soft little wrist around the front of the car, urging, “C'mon, baby, we have to run, really fast.”
Lizzie balked. “Gabriela!”
Derek brushed past. “C'mon, hurry!” He ran to Jocie, barely five feet tall, disoriented in a canyon between two pickup trucks. Michael hovered, arms out, keeping track of everyone.
“This way!” Derek beckoned frantically.
Michael rushed to him, tugged his shirt. “No, Dad! Not the overpass!”
“It's the only shelter!”
“We'll get sucked through like a straw! The wind speed will be unbelievable! All the stuff in the air will rip through us like bullets! We'll all get killed! I saw it on Wild Weather! NEVER EVER TAKE SHELTER UNDER AN OVERPASS!”
Derek listened, hands on Michael's shoulders, then spun, seeking alternative cover.
“There!” Michael pointed off the highway, seemingly at the narrow space between the base of the sound barrier and the wooded hillside that rose to the top of the overpass.
“The wall will break apart,” said Derek. “It's not solid!”
“Not the forest!” Michael meant the hillside, its grove of half-grown pines and weedy deciduous trees. “A forest provides shelter!”
Mimi wasn't sure the meager patch qualified as a forest, but Derek said, “Yes, go!” They snaked through two lanes of cars, dodging others hell-bent for the overpass. Derek helped Jocie over a thigh-high concrete barrier as Michael placed a foot on top and jumped.
Mimi lifted Lizzie over, but as she stepped on the rounded top her foot slipped sideways. She stumbled but regained her balance and caught Lizzie in the crook of her arm. Holding her close, she followed the others, pushing through shrubs, deeper into the trees.
“Go, go, go! We have to get away from the wall!” Derek pulled Jocie as Michael, slipping ahead, held branches aside. The wind screwed upward, and the trees began to dance.
Two steps behind her mother, Mimi could only trust that Derek knew what he was doing: dragging her family, her babies, into a cluster of trees, pursued by a roaring terror that allowed no false turns. The treetops dipped, sprang back, dipped, sprang back, each dip deeper and faster. Michael suddenly sank, followed by Derek and Jocie. They'd tumbled into a shallow depression.
“Lie down!” Derek pushed Jocie flat to the ground. He slapped the base of a small tree. “Lola, hold on here, use your whole arm, like this, hold on, real tight!” He turned, reached for Lizzie, placed her next to her grandmother. “Baby, hold onto Lola's arm!” He grabbed Michael's arm. “Mikey, here, lie face down!” Derek pushed him against his sister. “Arm around Lizzie! Hug her real hard!” He took Mimi's hand. “Lie over them, cover their heads, hold this tree as hard as you can!” He sprawled on top of them all.
The forest exploded.
Wind and grit and stonework ripped through the trees. They clung to each other and to two small tree trunks with Derek's weight pressing down. The wind roared then screamed until for a second all sound disappeared, as if the air had disappeared, and at the same terrifying second, Derek's weight on Mimi's back vanished.
No. Not Derek, not now. Their life together flooded Mimi. Derek drunk, naked, beautiful on a stone wall. The blissful nights on the island. Losing each other then finding each other again. His strong hand holding hers in childbirth. His devotion to the children as they grew. His tolerance, maybe over-tolerance, of her mother. Waking next to him every morning.
Please don't let this wonderful life end.
Then, thank God, his weight pressed down again.
Almost rudely it was over, the air calm, the only sounds dripping water and dropping twigs. Derek lay immobile across Mimi's back. She pressed her hands into the soil and pushed up, rolling him off.
“Oh,” he said. He seemed stunned.
She poked his thigh. “You hurt?”
Derek jiggled his head as if to recalibrate it, rubbed the back of his neck, and examined his palm. “No, it's…mud.” He pulled on a tree trunk to stand but his hand slipped and he sat back down.
The others rose slowly. Mimi's hands shook as she held her trembling children and kissed the tops of their heads, saying “We're okay, we're all okay.” She turned to Jocie. “Mama?”
Jocie swatted dirt from the knees of her jeans and said, “Thank you, Jesus.”
Derek sat, his eyes climbing the remains of the trees. The tops of the pines have been neatly snapped off and carried away. On some, the bark was gone. The deciduous trees were naked sticks bearing flecks of green, like saplings in early spring.
They picked their way out of their ravaged sanctuary and re-entered a mangled, manufactured world. The top third of a hundred-meter length of sound barrier was scattered across three lanes. Bricks were embedded in windscreens or perched on dented hoods. Cars were pushed into each other, a few on their sides or even upside down–some so damaged it was hard to tell what kind of vehicle they were, even what colour.
The air was cool and stung of gasoline. The sky above was cloudless, mid-day blue.
Three or four vehicles remained beneath the overpass, the others jettisoned, leaving a frightening gape. From beyond, already, came the wails of approaching sirens.
“Where are the people?” Derek asked. Lizzie was on his hip, her head beneath his chin. “We should go help.”
“No,” said Mimi. “Think what they'll see.”
He gazed back down the road, then turned away. “Right,” he said.
The cement mixer lay on its side like a slain rhinoceros. The family walked to where their SUV had been, as if from there they could pick up its scent.
“My wallet was in the car,” said Mimi, “and my phone and my keys.”
“My handbag,” said Jocie.
Lizzie, now comprehending the fullness of the event, wailed into Derek's neck, “Gabrielaaaa!”
“Here, take her.” Derek passed Lizzie to Mimi, lifted his shirt, and wrangled Gabriela from a belt loop. “Baby, here.” He held the doll to Lizzie's face.
She stared in amazement, then, straining frantically, almost spilled from Mimi's arms.
“How will we get home?”
Mimi and Derek looked at Michael then at each other.
“Hey there, hello!”
Two men in t-shirts, cargo shorts, and baseball caps were on the far side of the sound barrier, in a gap where a section had collapsed almost all the way to the ground. One looked to be in his sixties, the other late thirties. The younger one called, “You folks okay?”
“Come on, they will help us,” said Jocie.
As they approached the men, the younger man asked, “Where's your car?”
Derek swirled his hand at the sky. “Gone.”
“Is everyone alright?” the older man asked.
Jocie smiled sweetly. “We're fine, thank you.”
Charmed, the older man took her hand to guide her through the rubble, saying, “Here we go, dear.”
They stepped over and around broken concrete onto a grassy verge that lined a narrow street parallel to the highway. This side of the sound barrier was a wildly different reality: a quiet string of brick bungalows with decorative stonework facades and large front windows. Lawns were evenly mowed and garden beds overflowed with flowers. Nothing was out of place. They had stepped from ravaged Kansas into pristine Munchkinland.
“Oh, Art, are they okay? Are they all okay?” A woman, possibly the older man's wife, wove back and forth with arms held wide as if needing to embrace someone. At last she placed her fingertips on Lizzie's back and said, “Precious child.”
#
Derek was found unconscious on the ground outside the cistern. He would never be able to explain how he climbed out when he should have simply sunk to the bottom and drowned. He was still in the ICU when Mimi left Bermuda, freshly single. Adrian had accused her of sleeping with Derek and, when she didn't deny it, broke off their engagement, dropped her as his graduate student and took the next flight out.
Three weeks after moving back into her mother's house, Mimi took a pregnancy test. The following spring, Michael was born. One look answered a nagging question. Despite the complexity of the situation, Mimi was happy.
“He's Derek's.”
“Who?” said Jocie.
Mimi emailed Matthew Spencer, who had been keeping in touch with Derek, to ask how Derek was doing. The reply was disheartening. He could only walk a few steps at a time using handrails. Mimi guessed he wouldn't want to know about their child, about being a father. She prayed he didn't hate her.
#
In boxers and a t-shirt, Derek slid beneath the cotton sheet. A pedestal fan blew warm air straight at the bed. He closed his eyes and said, “I read four books to Lizzie, a new record, and Michael had a lot to say. The upshot is he intends to change his focus to climate science. He also wants to know what kind of car we're going to buy. He downloaded a list of hybrids and EVs. I asked him to pick his top five and we could talk about them tomorrow.”
Mimi sat up and arranged Derek's arm to rest her head against him.
“On the plus side, they both loved the GO Train and want to go on it again.”
Mimi said, “The most amazing thing you did today, in the midst of all that chaos, was save Gabriela. Lizzie would have been inconsolable if she'd blown away.”
Derek stroked her hair. “You learn what to fear the most.”
Her head rose and sank with his breathing. “What are you thinking about?”
After a moment, he said, “How's Jocie? While I was putting the kids to bed, I could hear you and your mom talking in our kitchen.”
“Mama's okay. She's tough.”
“Mm,” he said, but nothing more. He was dwelling. He'd let something into his head.
“You checked the news.”
He didn't answer.
She snapped the waistband of his boxers. “Didn't you?”
He twitched. “Those people.”
“It's not your tragedy, not this time.”
He rubbed his eyes. “We could have been…I did all the wrong things.”
“When?”
“Going was my idea. I should have paid more attention to the weather.”
She held him. “Daddy, no. You did the right thing. We're all okay. You saved your family.”
Her head rose and fell twice before he said, “I saved a doll. Mikey saved our family. I would have led us under the overpass, which easily could have gotten us all killed—or maybe just them. They weigh nothing. We could never hold on to them in such wind. He saved you, and me, and Lizzie, and himself, and your mother. He saved three generations. He's the boy who saved the world.”
“No,” said Mimi. “He's just a very smart boy who watches the right TV programs.”
Derek didn't respond, as if the conversation had ended, but Mimi wanted to speak of the most terrifying moment.
“There were those seconds when you disappeared. I thought you were gone.”
His hand dropped from her hair.
“Honey?”
He remained silent.
Mimi ran the arch of her foot up and down his leg.
Almost reflexively, he shifted his hips to the side and rolled to hold her with both hands. As he lifted her up, angling beneath her, the door handle jiggled.
They froze.
It jiggled again.
Derek eased her back aside, then, pausing to adjust his shorts, went to the door. “Hi.”
The children were side by side, Lizzie clutching Gabriela with both hands.
Michael asked, “Can Lizzie sleep with you guys? She's upset about our car getting blown away.”
“Oh,” said Derek.
Mimi patted the mattress. “C'mere, baby.”
Lizzie scrambled into her mother's arms as Michael remained in the doorway. Lizzie had been a ploy.
“You too, mister,” said Mimi. “I want my boy here.”
Michael bounded to the bed and clambered onto the space meant for his father.
Derek squeezed on, barely.
“Good night, my loves,” said Mimi.
“Good night, Mama,” they answered.
All were settled and quiet until Michael said, “I hear voices in the fan.”
They listened to air being twisted and thrown by the blades.
Mimi asked, “What are they saying?”
“They're calling for help. They sound scared.”
“I don't hear them,” said Lizzie.
Mimi said, “Daddy, turn off the fan and open the windows.”
“I'll have to bypass the zone on the alarm.”
“Can you?”
Derek clicked off the fan and went downstairs to reset the alarm. After returning, he raised the sashes of the room's two windows and settled next to the others.
Mimi reached above the children's heads to find Derek's fingertips reaching back. Eventually the children's breathing slowed, and Derek's hand slipped away. He rolled off the bed, catching himself on all fours and tip-toed from the room. She waited, listening. It was taking too long. “He's with Mama,” she muttered. Derek shared things with Jocie he should have shared with her. Her mother met Derek in Toronto first, a head start Mimi had yet to overcome. A sleeping child on either side, she used her heels to scoot off the end of the bed.
#
Eventually Matthew Spencer told Derek about Michael and sent Mimi's home address and phone number. Able to walk short distances using a cane, Derek didn't phone. He flew to Toronto and on a snowy day in November pressed the little white doorbell button of an old brick house in a neighbourhood of tightly spaced old brick houses. Mimi was out, downtown at the Faculty of Education, replacing her lost archeological career with a teaching degree. Jocie opened the door and recognized her six-month-old grandson in the face of the unsteady stranger on her front step. Derek later told Mimi, “She grabbed my sleeve and hauled me inside like she was landing a tuna.”
#
His voice drifted upward as Mimi descended the stairs. Reaching the ground floor, down the length of the hall she saw his bare leg crooked, his foot planted on the floor. He was at the kitchen table, the room illuminated only by the light from the range hood. She entered to find her mother across the table wearing a cotton nightie two inches too short and twenty years too old.
“Okay, what's going on?”
They looked at her, both suddenly shame-faced, hands clasping open bottles of beer.
Derek pointed. “I found this lady stealing my beer.”
“So you thought you'd have one too?”
“I twisted his arm.” Jocie smirked.
Mimi opened a cupboard, plucked out a glass, took Derek's beer and poured out half. She returned the bottle and he swirled it, peering through the glass. She was about to pull back the middle chair when Lizzie cried out.
“Mama! Daddy!”
“I'll go.” Derek gulped what she'd left him, stood up from the table and escaped into the dark.
Once silence resumed upstairs, Mimi sat in Derek's empty chair. “What was this about?”
Jocie waved her hand. “He needed to talk.”
“About what?”
“About the wind, about Elizabeth.”
“His mother?”
“Hm.”
“What about her?”
“She was there.”
Mimi stared. “When?”
“When it went over, when we were in the trees. The wind pulled Derek off us, but a hand in the middle of his back pushed him back down.”
Mimi didn't blink. “He told you this.”
Jocie sipped her beer.
“And it was his mother? Did he see her?”
“Only felt her hand.”
“You believe him?”
“Hm.” Jocie nodded.
Mimi wasn't sure what to think. Was her mother telling the truth? Was Derek? And most importantly, why had he told this detail to her mother, not her? She hated being jealous of her own mother. Her eyes started to fill, which she also hated.
“He didn't tell you.” Jocie reached across the table to hold her wrist.
Mimi shook her head and wiped her eyes.
“Because you wouldn’t believe him. You're still too much of a scientist like him, and if he talks about this to you, you invent a scientific answer, not what he needs. What he needs is a crazy old woman to tell him what he wants to hear: his mother is still with him, which isn't crazy, actually, because she is.” Jocie released Mimi's wrist. “So I tell him yes, his mother is with him. I remind him mothers never leave. The California people didn't tell him enough when he was a boy. His mother never left him and never will.” Jocie sat back and crossed her arms.
Mimi pressed her hands against either side of her glass. “It's good that mothers never leave,” she said, “but it's also good when they cook in their own kitchens.”
Jocie's face went blank. She then burst out laughing and slapped the table. She finished her beer, carried the two empty bottles to the sink, rinsed them and put them in the dish rack. She gave Mimi a one-armed hug and a side-of-the-head kiss, almost bumping her off her chair. “Sweet dreams, baby,” she said, then was gone down the stairs to her suite.
Mimi got up, poured the beer down the drain, rinsed her glass and left it in the sink, then clicked off the light and headed for the stairs to the second floor. She paused in the blackness, one foot on the bottom step—in the middle of this house, in the middle of her life, in the middle of this family, which she had thought was just the four of them plus her mother. But what if? She took a breath, hesitated, then said, “Good night, Elizabeth.” Wanting to feel her mother-in-law's hand on her back, and terrified that she would, she counted–one, two, three–then lost her nerve and ran up the stairs.
Hugh Griffith
The Overpass
Jocie Villanueva reached to the dashboard to turn on the radio. She loved listening to the gardening call-in show and had a history of disagreeing with the master gardener.
A caller was asking about garlic. “Should I plant it now?”
“Wait a month,” said the master gardener. “The first week of October, get at it.”
Jocie crossed her arms. “No, not till October 21st.”
Jocie's daughter, Mimi, was in the middle back seat of the family SUV. She glanced in the rearview mirror at her husband, Derek Coulter, who was driving. His eyes smiled back at her.
“So, October first?” asked the caller.
“Wait at least two more weeks,” said Jocie.
Derek, who knew almost nothing about gardening, said, “One more week should be more than enough.”
Jocie's eyes slid left.
Derek casually drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Ten days, tops.”
Jocie watched, waiting, until he cracked.
“Pah!” She swatted his arm, and they both laughed, how this game always went.
Neither of Mimi's children were paying attention to the going-ons up front. Nine-year-old Michael, in the passenger side seat, was gazing out the window, watching the world wash by. On the driver's side, four-year-old Lizzie, having been unable to convince Gabriela–her black-haired, slender-limbed doll–to stand upright in the storage well of the door, was now stuffing her in upside down.
The Coulter-Villanuevas were headed to Niagara Falls. They had crossed the skyway at the western end of Lake Ontario, with Hamilton's steel mills dark and sinister in the distance, and were approaching Grimsby, an orderly town of small houses lined up along the lake. To the west, the Niagara Escarpment loomed, a ragged limestone ridge that would wander away from the highway and then reappear just before the falls. As the SUV entered a stretch of pancake-flat farmland, a man asked the master gardener about black spots on peaches. Was there an organic treatment?
“You might want to give jojoba oil a try,” said the master gardener.
“Ha, good luck with that,” said Jocie.
It had been Derek's suggestion that she come along. Jocie lived downstairs from the others, or at least slept there. A selling feature of their house had been its bright, fully-equipped, freshly renovated basement suite with sliding doors that opened onto a sunny, sunken patio. Recently-retired Jocie could comfortably live there, a third caregiver for the children, yet not fully in their lives every minute of every day. But Jocie rarely used the downstairs stovetop or oven, saying it was silly to have to clean two kitchens, and would come upstairs to cook. This annoyed Mimi, who had long dreamt of a kitchen to herself. Derek, traitor, instead of reminding Jocie of her kitchen downstairs, would stand next to her asking eager questions about Filipino food preparation, wanting to try his hand.
A crackle on the radio was answered half a minute later by a heavy rumble.
“Thunder? Already?” Derek leaned against the wheel to see as much of the sky as possible. “That's not what they said.”
They had checked the forecast the night before. A hot, sunny day with a chance of late afternoon thunderstorms. It wasn't even half-past ten.
Michael twisted around to scan the northern sky. “Dad, behind us, back there, I think it's a wall cloud!” Taking after his zoologist father, Michael was a science boy, a fan of animals, volcanoes, the solar system, robots—anything sciency. He regularly watched a television program called Wild Weather!
Derek squinted into the rearview mirror. “A wall cloud?”
“It's like a shelf ahead of the higher clouds.” Michael was almost backwards in his seat. “I think it's following us.”
Derek again squinted into the mirror. “It's definitely dark back there. Lucky we're going in the opposite direction.” The sky ahead was clear and bright.
Mimi touched Michael's arm. “Turn around, honey, sit properly.”
Michael sat properly and said, matter-of-factly, “Tornadoes come from wall clouds.”
The gardening show's next caller was troubled about her hydrangeas. Overnight, half of the blooms had changed from blue to pink. She was cut off mid-sentence by a deep and serious voice.
“This is a Severe Weather Warning from Environment Canada for the Niagara Region. A tornado warning has been issued—”
“What happened?” Jocie pushed a button, sending the radio through its seek-and-find routine, only to end up where it had been. The serious voice was finishing up, “…and are advised to take shelter immediately.”
Mimi leaned forward. “What was that? That was for here?”
“There aren't tornadoes in these parts, are there?” Derek had lived in southern Ontario for only eight years, not long enough to dispel his belief it was a tornado-free zone.
“It's from the wall cloud, like I said,” said Michael.
Mimi thumped Derek's seatback with her fist. “Daddy, get us away from the wall cloud.”
The engine's revving overrode the gardening show's closing theme. Jocie, reaching for the radio off switch, was pushed back into her seat.
“Leave it on, Mama, in case there's more bulletins.” Mimi looked in the rearview mirror at Derek. He wasn't looking back. She could read his thoughts anyway and was thinking them too, easily done with Michael next to her–a dark-haired, dark-eyed replica of his fair-haired, pale-eyed father.
#
Thirty years ago, when Derek was almost exactly Michael's present age, he was taken to his uncle and aunt's almond farm near Sacramento to spend the weekend. Without him, his parents visited an elderly relative in Bakersfield, 300 miles south. Two nights later, as they drove back north on the I-5, a fierce wind swept down the western slopes of the Sierras and across drought-ridden rangeland. A weather bulletin wasn't issued because known experience and existing technology couldn't predict what was about to happen. A smothering dust cloud enveloped the interstate, causing multiple pile-ups and seventeen fatalities, among them Robert and Elizabeth Coulter.
Derek was adopted by his uncle and moved to the almond farm. With few playmates nearby, he befriended the turtles, snakes, foxes, and birds he met along the irrigation ditches. It was inevitable he would become a zoologist, with research taking him to Mexico, Panama, and then, Bermuda.
#
“Lightning, more lightning back there,” he said. Thunder followed more swiftly this time and was louder.
#
Ten years ago this month, Mimi had been the teaching assistant for an archeology field course from the University of Toronto. The study site was a crumbling, 400-year-old British fort on uninhabited Tea Kettle Island, Bermuda. The instructor's name was Adrian Lyon. He was Mimi's PhD advisor and also, although eleven years her senior, her fiancé.
Jocie detested him and would say to Mimi, “You're with the wrong person.”
Two days ahead of the students, Mimi and Adrian landed on the island just before sunset. They were not expecting to encounter a young zoologist from Berkeley–there to study a rare, endemic lizard–passed out drunk on top of a weathered rampart, completely naked. Adrian poked him with a broken tree branch.
Derek jerked awake and hurled his last unopened can of beer, which caromed off the side of Adrian's head. Though Adrian lay felled, Mimi couldn't take her eyes off the man kneeling on the rampart. Lean and bearded, hair long and sun-bleached, a naked, blond Jesus. Maybe her mother was right.
A week later, Adrian temporarily left the island for a job interview in England, and Mimi and Derek came together. In a quiet moment, Derek told her about his parents, about growing up angry they hadn't taken him with them to Bakersfield so he could have died with them and not been left behind.
She held his face with both hands and whispered, “I'm glad they left you behind.”
#
Another roll of thunder overtook them as they passed slower vehicles, one a hulking cement mixer with its barrel whimsically painted like a watermelon. Near the city of St. Catharines, traffic thickened. The optimistic blue above had narrowed, pinched by high clouds from either side.
“I think we're good,” Derek said, “although it's still spooky black back there.”
Instantly, the car was pelted with pea-sized hail that bounced off every surface in a crazy, hissing clatter.
“Yikes,” he said, and slowed further.
Michael shouted, “The tornado must be close! Hail storms come with tornadoes! Dad, the tornado's coming!”
“It's probably just regular hail, honey,” said Mimi. “It'll pass.”
Michael slipped from his shoulder strap to peer over the seatback. “No, look!” He pointed out the back window. “The tornado's coming! It's coming right at us! That big black cloud is it!”
Eyes in the mirror, Derek said, “I think he could be right.”
Mimi unfastened her belt and spun up onto her knees. “They look like that?” Black as burning tires, the thing covered half the sky.
“Big ones do.”
“Exactly!” Michael shouted. “It's a wedge tornado! They're the worst kind! Dad!”
“We're okay, Mikey, it'll probably continue on out over the lake.” His eyebrows jumped at Mimi. He was guessing.
Mimi squirmed between the front seats for a better view. This particular road—a separated highway, lined on either side by tall stone sound barriers dropped between metal uprights—was a bad place to be with a wedge tornado on your tail. The radio had forgotten about the tornado. Two men who laughed a lot were talking about baseball.
#
Back in Bermuda, Derek would again be left behind, and again a storm would punctuate his life. Hurricane Luisa struck the archipelago two days after Adrian returned from England. To Derek's deep disappointment, Mimi had gone back to him. Wrong person or not, it had seemed the practical thing to do, at least in the short-term. Derek? From far-away California? Their time together had been a fling, a disconnected thing in a disconnected place. She hadn't expected him to fall in love with her.
A Bermudian fisheries officer named Matthew Spencer boated out to Tea Kettle Island to transport the archeologists and Derek to safety. Heartbroken to the point of irrationality, Derek remained on the island. At the height of the storm he sheltered in an abandoned stone cistern, treading sour water. A chunk of masonry broke loose and fell, fracturing the right side of his skull and paralyzing the left side of his body.
#
They passed an exit that would have afforded an escape. Mimi pointed, “There! We could have got off there!”
Derek shook his head. “I couldn't cut across.”
In the distance was an overpass, maybe an off-ramp.
Mimi pointed again. “Go! Faster!”
Other vehicles sped past in the fast lane, the slow lane, even the shoulder. Derek eased off the gas.
“Derek? No, faster!” Mimi looked ahead and understood. Those reaching the overpass were pulling over and parking on the shoulders and within the adjacent lanes. Derek made a last-second lane change to get to the off-ramp, accomplishing nothing. It also passed beneath the overpass and cars had parked there too.
The watermelon cement mixer lumbered by, then swerved into their lane, followed by two cars. Every tail light turned red and doors flew open. People fled their vehicles—singles, couples, families, a woman in a fluffy dress with a small dog beneath each arm—all on a single-minded dash to the shelter of the overpass.
Derek turned off the ignition. “This is as far as we get. Everybody out. Leave everything behind.” He looked again in the mirror. “We have to get out and run.”
No one reacted until he unbuckled, turned around and shouted, “Get out now! Lizzie, hold Mama's hand as hard as you can! Michael, out! Jocie, get out!”
Jocie blinked at him. Derek never yelled.
“Mama!” Mimi fumbled left and right to unbuckle her children. “Mama, get out, GET OUT!”
Derek unclipped Jocie's seatbelt, reached across her to flick the door latch, placed a hand on her shoulder and shoved, shouting, “Out, Lola, we have to GO!”
Michael burst out his side as Mimi hustled Lizzie out the other. Wind pushed in every direction at once, tossing her hair across her eyes. Hailstones crunched and skidded beneath her shoes. The sky directly overhead was grey-green, the noise terrifying, a building, pummeling howl. She looked over her shoulder into the blackness. Things belonging on the ground were airborne, sailing left to right—sheets of wood, traffic cones, a shed? Mimi dragged Lizzie by her soft little wrist around the front of the car, urging, “C'mon, baby, we have to run, really fast.”
Lizzie balked. “Gabriela!”
Derek brushed past. “C'mon, hurry!” He ran to Jocie, barely five feet tall, disoriented in a canyon between two pickup trucks. Michael hovered, arms out, keeping track of everyone.
“This way!” Derek beckoned frantically.
Michael rushed to him, tugged his shirt. “No, Dad! Not the overpass!”
“It's the only shelter!”
“We'll get sucked through like a straw! The wind speed will be unbelievable! All the stuff in the air will rip through us like bullets! We'll all get killed! I saw it on Wild Weather! NEVER EVER TAKE SHELTER UNDER AN OVERPASS!”
Derek listened, hands on Michael's shoulders, then spun, seeking alternative cover.
“There!” Michael pointed off the highway, seemingly at the narrow space between the base of the sound barrier and the wooded hillside that rose to the top of the overpass.
“The wall will break apart,” said Derek. “It's not solid!”
“Not the forest!” Michael meant the hillside, its grove of half-grown pines and weedy deciduous trees. “A forest provides shelter!”
Mimi wasn't sure the meager patch qualified as a forest, but Derek said, “Yes, go!” They snaked through two lanes of cars, dodging others hell-bent for the overpass. Derek helped Jocie over a thigh-high concrete barrier as Michael placed a foot on top and jumped.
Mimi lifted Lizzie over, but as she stepped on the rounded top her foot slipped sideways. She stumbled but regained her balance and caught Lizzie in the crook of her arm. Holding her close, she followed the others, pushing through shrubs, deeper into the trees.
“Go, go, go! We have to get away from the wall!” Derek pulled Jocie as Michael, slipping ahead, held branches aside. The wind screwed upward, and the trees began to dance.
Two steps behind her mother, Mimi could only trust that Derek knew what he was doing: dragging her family, her babies, into a cluster of trees, pursued by a roaring terror that allowed no false turns. The treetops dipped, sprang back, dipped, sprang back, each dip deeper and faster. Michael suddenly sank, followed by Derek and Jocie. They'd tumbled into a shallow depression.
“Lie down!” Derek pushed Jocie flat to the ground. He slapped the base of a small tree. “Lola, hold on here, use your whole arm, like this, hold on, real tight!” He turned, reached for Lizzie, placed her next to her grandmother. “Baby, hold onto Lola's arm!” He grabbed Michael's arm. “Mikey, here, lie face down!” Derek pushed him against his sister. “Arm around Lizzie! Hug her real hard!” He took Mimi's hand. “Lie over them, cover their heads, hold this tree as hard as you can!” He sprawled on top of them all.
The forest exploded.
Wind and grit and stonework ripped through the trees. They clung to each other and to two small tree trunks with Derek's weight pressing down. The wind roared then screamed until for a second all sound disappeared, as if the air had disappeared, and at the same terrifying second, Derek's weight on Mimi's back vanished.
No. Not Derek, not now. Their life together flooded Mimi. Derek drunk, naked, beautiful on a stone wall. The blissful nights on the island. Losing each other then finding each other again. His strong hand holding hers in childbirth. His devotion to the children as they grew. His tolerance, maybe over-tolerance, of her mother. Waking next to him every morning.
Please don't let this wonderful life end.
Then, thank God, his weight pressed down again.
Almost rudely it was over, the air calm, the only sounds dripping water and dropping twigs. Derek lay immobile across Mimi's back. She pressed her hands into the soil and pushed up, rolling him off.
“Oh,” he said. He seemed stunned.
She poked his thigh. “You hurt?”
Derek jiggled his head as if to recalibrate it, rubbed the back of his neck, and examined his palm. “No, it's…mud.” He pulled on a tree trunk to stand but his hand slipped and he sat back down.
The others rose slowly. Mimi's hands shook as she held her trembling children and kissed the tops of their heads, saying “We're okay, we're all okay.” She turned to Jocie. “Mama?”
Jocie swatted dirt from the knees of her jeans and said, “Thank you, Jesus.”
Derek sat, his eyes climbing the remains of the trees. The tops of the pines have been neatly snapped off and carried away. On some, the bark was gone. The deciduous trees were naked sticks bearing flecks of green, like saplings in early spring.
They picked their way out of their ravaged sanctuary and re-entered a mangled, manufactured world. The top third of a hundred-meter length of sound barrier was scattered across three lanes. Bricks were embedded in windscreens or perched on dented hoods. Cars were pushed into each other, a few on their sides or even upside down–some so damaged it was hard to tell what kind of vehicle they were, even what colour.
The air was cool and stung of gasoline. The sky above was cloudless, mid-day blue.
Three or four vehicles remained beneath the overpass, the others jettisoned, leaving a frightening gape. From beyond, already, came the wails of approaching sirens.
“Where are the people?” Derek asked. Lizzie was on his hip, her head beneath his chin. “We should go help.”
“No,” said Mimi. “Think what they'll see.”
He gazed back down the road, then turned away. “Right,” he said.
The cement mixer lay on its side like a slain rhinoceros. The family walked to where their SUV had been, as if from there they could pick up its scent.
“My wallet was in the car,” said Mimi, “and my phone and my keys.”
“My handbag,” said Jocie.
Lizzie, now comprehending the fullness of the event, wailed into Derek's neck, “Gabrielaaaa!”
“Here, take her.” Derek passed Lizzie to Mimi, lifted his shirt, and wrangled Gabriela from a belt loop. “Baby, here.” He held the doll to Lizzie's face.
She stared in amazement, then, straining frantically, almost spilled from Mimi's arms.
“How will we get home?”
Mimi and Derek looked at Michael then at each other.
“Hey there, hello!”
Two men in t-shirts, cargo shorts, and baseball caps were on the far side of the sound barrier, in a gap where a section had collapsed almost all the way to the ground. One looked to be in his sixties, the other late thirties. The younger one called, “You folks okay?”
“Come on, they will help us,” said Jocie.
As they approached the men, the younger man asked, “Where's your car?”
Derek swirled his hand at the sky. “Gone.”
“Is everyone alright?” the older man asked.
Jocie smiled sweetly. “We're fine, thank you.”
Charmed, the older man took her hand to guide her through the rubble, saying, “Here we go, dear.”
They stepped over and around broken concrete onto a grassy verge that lined a narrow street parallel to the highway. This side of the sound barrier was a wildly different reality: a quiet string of brick bungalows with decorative stonework facades and large front windows. Lawns were evenly mowed and garden beds overflowed with flowers. Nothing was out of place. They had stepped from ravaged Kansas into pristine Munchkinland.
“Oh, Art, are they okay? Are they all okay?” A woman, possibly the older man's wife, wove back and forth with arms held wide as if needing to embrace someone. At last she placed her fingertips on Lizzie's back and said, “Precious child.”
#
Derek was found unconscious on the ground outside the cistern. He would never be able to explain how he climbed out when he should have simply sunk to the bottom and drowned. He was still in the ICU when Mimi left Bermuda, freshly single. Adrian had accused her of sleeping with Derek and, when she didn't deny it, broke off their engagement, dropped her as his graduate student and took the next flight out.
Three weeks after moving back into her mother's house, Mimi took a pregnancy test. The following spring, Michael was born. One look answered a nagging question. Despite the complexity of the situation, Mimi was happy.
“He's Derek's.”
“Who?” said Jocie.
Mimi emailed Matthew Spencer, who had been keeping in touch with Derek, to ask how Derek was doing. The reply was disheartening. He could only walk a few steps at a time using handrails. Mimi guessed he wouldn't want to know about their child, about being a father. She prayed he didn't hate her.
#
In boxers and a t-shirt, Derek slid beneath the cotton sheet. A pedestal fan blew warm air straight at the bed. He closed his eyes and said, “I read four books to Lizzie, a new record, and Michael had a lot to say. The upshot is he intends to change his focus to climate science. He also wants to know what kind of car we're going to buy. He downloaded a list of hybrids and EVs. I asked him to pick his top five and we could talk about them tomorrow.”
Mimi sat up and arranged Derek's arm to rest her head against him.
“On the plus side, they both loved the GO Train and want to go on it again.”
Mimi said, “The most amazing thing you did today, in the midst of all that chaos, was save Gabriela. Lizzie would have been inconsolable if she'd blown away.”
Derek stroked her hair. “You learn what to fear the most.”
Her head rose and sank with his breathing. “What are you thinking about?”
After a moment, he said, “How's Jocie? While I was putting the kids to bed, I could hear you and your mom talking in our kitchen.”
“Mama's okay. She's tough.”
“Mm,” he said, but nothing more. He was dwelling. He'd let something into his head.
“You checked the news.”
He didn't answer.
She snapped the waistband of his boxers. “Didn't you?”
He twitched. “Those people.”
“It's not your tragedy, not this time.”
He rubbed his eyes. “We could have been…I did all the wrong things.”
“When?”
“Going was my idea. I should have paid more attention to the weather.”
She held him. “Daddy, no. You did the right thing. We're all okay. You saved your family.”
Her head rose and fell twice before he said, “I saved a doll. Mikey saved our family. I would have led us under the overpass, which easily could have gotten us all killed—or maybe just them. They weigh nothing. We could never hold on to them in such wind. He saved you, and me, and Lizzie, and himself, and your mother. He saved three generations. He's the boy who saved the world.”
“No,” said Mimi. “He's just a very smart boy who watches the right TV programs.”
Derek didn't respond, as if the conversation had ended, but Mimi wanted to speak of the most terrifying moment.
“There were those seconds when you disappeared. I thought you were gone.”
His hand dropped from her hair.
“Honey?”
He remained silent.
Mimi ran the arch of her foot up and down his leg.
Almost reflexively, he shifted his hips to the side and rolled to hold her with both hands. As he lifted her up, angling beneath her, the door handle jiggled.
They froze.
It jiggled again.
Derek eased her back aside, then, pausing to adjust his shorts, went to the door. “Hi.”
The children were side by side, Lizzie clutching Gabriela with both hands.
Michael asked, “Can Lizzie sleep with you guys? She's upset about our car getting blown away.”
“Oh,” said Derek.
Mimi patted the mattress. “C'mere, baby.”
Lizzie scrambled into her mother's arms as Michael remained in the doorway. Lizzie had been a ploy.
“You too, mister,” said Mimi. “I want my boy here.”
Michael bounded to the bed and clambered onto the space meant for his father.
Derek squeezed on, barely.
“Good night, my loves,” said Mimi.
“Good night, Mama,” they answered.
All were settled and quiet until Michael said, “I hear voices in the fan.”
They listened to air being twisted and thrown by the blades.
Mimi asked, “What are they saying?”
“They're calling for help. They sound scared.”
“I don't hear them,” said Lizzie.
Mimi said, “Daddy, turn off the fan and open the windows.”
“I'll have to bypass the zone on the alarm.”
“Can you?”
Derek clicked off the fan and went downstairs to reset the alarm. After returning, he raised the sashes of the room's two windows and settled next to the others.
Mimi reached above the children's heads to find Derek's fingertips reaching back. Eventually the children's breathing slowed, and Derek's hand slipped away. He rolled off the bed, catching himself on all fours and tip-toed from the room. She waited, listening. It was taking too long. “He's with Mama,” she muttered. Derek shared things with Jocie he should have shared with her. Her mother met Derek in Toronto first, a head start Mimi had yet to overcome. A sleeping child on either side, she used her heels to scoot off the end of the bed.
#
Eventually Matthew Spencer told Derek about Michael and sent Mimi's home address and phone number. Able to walk short distances using a cane, Derek didn't phone. He flew to Toronto and on a snowy day in November pressed the little white doorbell button of an old brick house in a neighbourhood of tightly spaced old brick houses. Mimi was out, downtown at the Faculty of Education, replacing her lost archeological career with a teaching degree. Jocie opened the door and recognized her six-month-old grandson in the face of the unsteady stranger on her front step. Derek later told Mimi, “She grabbed my sleeve and hauled me inside like she was landing a tuna.”
#
His voice drifted upward as Mimi descended the stairs. Reaching the ground floor, down the length of the hall she saw his bare leg crooked, his foot planted on the floor. He was at the kitchen table, the room illuminated only by the light from the range hood. She entered to find her mother across the table wearing a cotton nightie two inches too short and twenty years too old.
“Okay, what's going on?”
They looked at her, both suddenly shame-faced, hands clasping open bottles of beer.
Derek pointed. “I found this lady stealing my beer.”
“So you thought you'd have one too?”
“I twisted his arm.” Jocie smirked.
Mimi opened a cupboard, plucked out a glass, took Derek's beer and poured out half. She returned the bottle and he swirled it, peering through the glass. She was about to pull back the middle chair when Lizzie cried out.
“Mama! Daddy!”
“I'll go.” Derek gulped what she'd left him, stood up from the table and escaped into the dark.
Once silence resumed upstairs, Mimi sat in Derek's empty chair. “What was this about?”
Jocie waved her hand. “He needed to talk.”
“About what?”
“About the wind, about Elizabeth.”
“His mother?”
“Hm.”
“What about her?”
“She was there.”
Mimi stared. “When?”
“When it went over, when we were in the trees. The wind pulled Derek off us, but a hand in the middle of his back pushed him back down.”
Mimi didn't blink. “He told you this.”
Jocie sipped her beer.
“And it was his mother? Did he see her?”
“Only felt her hand.”
“You believe him?”
“Hm.” Jocie nodded.
Mimi wasn't sure what to think. Was her mother telling the truth? Was Derek? And most importantly, why had he told this detail to her mother, not her? She hated being jealous of her own mother. Her eyes started to fill, which she also hated.
“He didn't tell you.” Jocie reached across the table to hold her wrist.
Mimi shook her head and wiped her eyes.
“Because you wouldn’t believe him. You're still too much of a scientist like him, and if he talks about this to you, you invent a scientific answer, not what he needs. What he needs is a crazy old woman to tell him what he wants to hear: his mother is still with him, which isn't crazy, actually, because she is.” Jocie released Mimi's wrist. “So I tell him yes, his mother is with him. I remind him mothers never leave. The California people didn't tell him enough when he was a boy. His mother never left him and never will.” Jocie sat back and crossed her arms.
Mimi pressed her hands against either side of her glass. “It's good that mothers never leave,” she said, “but it's also good when they cook in their own kitchens.”
Jocie's face went blank. She then burst out laughing and slapped the table. She finished her beer, carried the two empty bottles to the sink, rinsed them and put them in the dish rack. She gave Mimi a one-armed hug and a side-of-the-head kiss, almost bumping her off her chair. “Sweet dreams, baby,” she said, then was gone down the stairs to her suite.
Mimi got up, poured the beer down the drain, rinsed her glass and left it in the sink, then clicked off the light and headed for the stairs to the second floor. She paused in the blackness, one foot on the bottom step—in the middle of this house, in the middle of her life, in the middle of this family, which she had thought was just the four of them plus her mother. But what if? She took a breath, hesitated, then said, “Good night, Elizabeth.” Wanting to feel her mother-in-law's hand on her back, and terrified that she would, she counted–one, two, three–then lost her nerve and ran up the stairs.