Filed to story: Love on the Sidelines (Natalie & Karl)
“Come on. Let’s head for the cellar.” He put his hand on my back and herded me toward our concrete hole in the ground.
“But what if they don’t make it home in time?”
“There’s nothing we can do about it, and they would want you out of danger.” He lifted the metal lid and laid it back against the ground, then descended the steps. There was the scrape of a match and the dim glow of the hurricane lamp filled the cellar before he rejoined me.
Together, we stood and watched the clouds roll and tumble across the sky. The wind began to howl, nearly lifting me off my feet with its violence, and the thunder was a constant, angry rumble, low and menacing. I was wiping the first splatter of rain off my arm when I saw the slender tail drop down, form a funnel and stretch toward the ground.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered.
Karl’s head whipped around and the next thing I knew, his arm was around my waist and he was dragging me down the stairs. The cellar door slammed shut and he shot the lock into place with a frantic push.
“Down in the corner! Hurry!”
We had both grown up hearing stories about twisters driving two-by-fours through concrete cellar walls, so I obeyed automatically. Karl crouched beside me, his arms wrapping around me protectively. I had always sworn that if I were ever interviewed on TV after a storm, I would not be one of those people who say things like, “It sounded just like a freight train running through my house.” But now I knew why they said it.
There wasn’t another way to describe the sound that came anywhere close to what I was hearing. It seemed to go on forever, getting louder and louder with every second that passed. When the cellar door started banging and shimmying in its frame, I screamed and did my level best to crawl inside Karl.
He was holding me so tightly that, if I hadn’t been scared out of my mind, I’d have worried about my ribs.
“It’s okay,” he murmured in my ear. “You’re gonna be alright. It’s almost over.” But I could feel him trembling against me.
The metal door stopped its dancing and settled back into place, and the noise faded away into the distance.
I raised my head and looked up at him, not quite ready to believe the nightmare had ended and we were still alive. He wiped my tear-damp cheek with his thumb.
“It’s okay,” he whispered again. An odd look lingered in his gray eyes as he gazed down at me, but I didn’t know he was going to kiss me until his lips touched mine.
I’d never been kissed before, and I doubted Karl had ever kissed anyone. At first, it was hesitant and clumsy, eager and endearing. It was a spontaneous reaction to our brush with danger, and while neither of us was experienced, we had instinct on our side.
My arms slid up until they curved around his neck, and when I felt his tongue touch my lips, it never occurred to me to resist. This was Karl. My Karl. A low, 41 agonized sound came from somewhere deep inside him as I returned the kiss, and his hand moved over my back, under my shirt.
I don’t know how long it lasted. It could have been hours and still not been enough to suit me. But suddenly he went still.
“No.”
The word ripped from his throat with more pain than I’d ever heard from someone his age, and I found myself alone on the cold, damp floor. Confused, my senses spinning from so many different emotions in such a short space of time, I clambered to my feet.
“Karl?”
He didn’t answer me. He was fumbling desperately with the lock on the door.
When it finally opened, he bolted. By the time I stepped outside, he was vanishing into the woods. He’d left me all alone, something the Karl I knew would never have done under circumstances such as these.
Upset, uneasy, and scared all over again, I turned on my shaky legs to look around me. The house still stood, but the windows were shattered and bare patches of plywood showed through missing shingles. Debris littered the yard; downed tree limbs, rocks, and some boards that looked as if they might have come from the front wall of the barn, were nearly covered by a million leaves. And the tree that had held my swing was gone, the twisted remains of its stump lying beside a huge gaping hole, roots exposed like skeletal arms unearthed from the grave. The rain fell in a fine mist now, and in the west the sun was already breaking through the clouds.
I stood there, frozen with shock, as Mama’s car peeled into the driveway on two wheels, followed hard by the Judge’s truck, then Aunt Darla’s sedan. I was passed around and hugged and fussed over until neighbors started to arrive and everyone went to check out the damage. The general consensus was that we were lucky the tornado had never reached the ground. It had only hovered in the air above the farm before being sucked back into the clouds.
Someone noticed I was shaking and a blanket was located and draped around my shoulders. Bobby Donovan, a local contractor and our nearest neighbor, had been one of the first on the scene. He was busily writing up repair estimates, conferring occasionally with Pete Townsend, our insurance agent, until they reached a mutually satisfying dollar amount, and Pete wrote the Judge a check. The repair work would start first thing in the morning.
But no amount of repair was going to fix the hollow feeling inside me. Something was desperately wrong for Karl to abandon me the way he had, and I was afraid of what he’d say the next time I saw him. I didn’t know it would be two weeks before he set foot on the farm again, or that he’d ignore me so completely when he finally did. It was as though I’d ceased to exist for him, and nothing in my life had ever hurt me as much as that did.
June faded into the hottest July on record. The windows in the house were replaced, the roof reshingled, and new carpets were put down to replace the water-soaked ones.
The hole where the sweet gum tree had been was filled in and smoothed over, and grass was already growing over the scar. The Judge even made me a new swing in another tree, but it was never the same and I only used it enough to keep from hurting his feelings.
Karl started using his room in the barn again, but he waited until all the lights were out in the house before he’d show up. The first time I slipped out to talk to him I found the door locked, and he wouldn’t answer me when I called to him.
It was right after that painful discovery when I began keeping a journal.
Somewhere in my mind, I thought that if I got the entire thing down on paper, maybe I could figure out what I’d done wrong and fix it so Karl would talk to me again. But I’d filled half the leather-bound notebook and was no closer to understanding than I’d been when I started.
I was miserable. My whole world had been turned upside down and a huge chunk torn out of it. Weepy and depressed, I pushed my hair behind my ear and stared down at the journal pages lying on the kitchen table.
“I bought some of those cookies you like,” my mother said. She was standing at the kitchen sink, hands buried in suds as she washed the lunch dishes.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re never hungry anymore. If you don’t start eating, you’ll dry up and blow away.”