Torn Away

“No,” he finally said.

“No, you haven’t heard from her, or no, she’s not okay? Where’ve you been?”

“Ah, God,” he said, turning his face down to the floor and taking a few breaths. Then he looked up at me again. “You’ve been here alone this whole time?”

“Here and Miss Janice’s,” I said. “But I’m okay. I had Kolby.”

This was not Ro

“Is there anything worth saving?” he asked. “Have you looked through?”

“Some. But no, not really.” I didn’t tell him about Marin’s purse. He’d probably think it was unimportant, anyway. “I haven’t been to the other side. With the bedrooms.”

He rubbed one hand over his chin. “I can’t… I can’t…” he repeated to himself a couple times. “Do you want to look for anything? Clothes or anything?”

I thought about all the rain we’d had. How it had smelled out there yesterday afternoon, with the May sun baking a mildewy stench into everything. I couldn’t imagine that anything I had would be worth saving. But still I nodded.

I followed Ro

Together, we walked around the leaning front wall of the house, to the side where our bedrooms used to be. To my surprise, two interior walls remained standing. One in Marin’s room, and one in mine. Of course, the outside walls were gone, so most of our stuff was tossed and spun and pulled out and torn.

I scaled the mountain of mess to get into my room, and Ro

I pulled on some boards and tossed them, the way I’d done with Kolby the day before. I found a couple of old CDs, some clothes that had been stuffed in the back of my dresser, and—thank God—my cell phone charger. I found some old ribbons from elementary-school field competitions, but those didn’t seem important to me anymore—or at least not important enough to keep. In fact, not much of anything in my room seemed all that important anymore. Not after everything that had happened.

But as I stepped over my bookshelf, which had tipped and spilled books everywhere, something shiny caught my eye. I bent to pick it up.

It was a porcelain kitten—a black-and-white one with great staring blue eyes and a big, curvy 6 across its chest. I wiped the grit off it and held it up. It was in perfect condition, which seemed impossible.

I’d had sixteen of them—one for every birthday. Each kitten was different. Each one fragile and shiny, and each holding a large number across its chest. They came in the mail, always a few days before my birthday, always in a plain manila envelope, always wrapped in the comics section of the newspaper, and with no return address.

Marin never got a single one.

Mom’s mouth turned down at the corners every time one showed up, her face deepening into a bitter frown. I assumed they were from my father. Guilt gifts, I’d come to think of them. His way of pretending he hadn’t abandoned me after all.

But secretly I loved those kittens, and hung on to a warm hope that maybe the kittens meant my father did care a little bit. Like maybe they were a secret message that he still wanted to be co

“I want a kitten,” Marin had screeched when I’d gotten the last one. “I want a real kitten. A gray-and-white one with blue eyes. Can I get a kitten, Mommy?” My mom had rolled her eyes as, for the next two months, Marin had begged and begged for a kitten of her own.

“Ro

I could understand why Marin wanted a kitten of her own. I had a whole collection of them.

Carefully, I set the kitten down with the CDs, then used both hands to right the bookshelf it had once been sitting on, hoping to find the others. Instead, all I found was broken porcelain. Shiny pieces of trash. Six was the only survivor.

I heard the wooden clonk of boards being flung on top of boards over where Ro

“I’m ready,” I said as I rounded the wall. “I didn’t find much.…”

But I trailed off when I saw my stepdad, who was squatting next to the bed—which, oddly, didn’t appear to have moved an inch—his face pressed into the mattress, his hands holding something on top of it. He was crying, his whole body shaking.

I took a step forward and saw what he was holding—a framed wedding photo of him and Mom.

“Ro

I knew that Mom and Marin were gone.

CHAPTER

TEN

On the day of the tornado, Ro

But with the sky looking so ominous, he was anxious to get the customer out of the store so he could get home. There was a storm coming, and the weather radio had been saying the possibility of tornadoes was high.

Ro

But he’d gotten delayed. And by the time he’d hit the highway, it was too late.

“I could see it from the road,” he told me, the two of us sitting in shadows in our motel room. Neither of us had bothered to turn on the light. Neither of us would bother to turn it on for the whole next day, either. I think we were each afraid to see the other, afraid that our broke

It did, I thought. It swallowed my whole world. But I didn’t say anything aloud. I sat on my bed, staring at the wallpaper across the room, unsure whether the design was pineapples or diamonds, and listened.

“I tried to beat it home, I really did,” he said. “But it kind of veered off toward me and I had to stop the truck. Everybody was stopping their cars in the middle of the highway and ru