The Stormchasers: A Novel (22 page)

Karena freezes. “No kidding,” she says.

“Where have you been?” Siri retreats to the scratchy green couch, but Karena knows Siri can move quickly if she wants to, could be in the kitchen in an instant to take a smack at Karena or flick a dish towel at her head.

“Nowhere,” says Karena. “Around.”

She opens the refrigerator to buy time. Besides, she’s thirsty. The cigarettes and beer have dried her mouth out. But Siri has drunk all Karena’s Diet Pepsi. There’s only one half-open can left, and it will be flat. Otherwise the fridge is littered with mystery dishes, Bakelite bowls containing two carrots, a handful of canned string beans, Jell-O. A moldy stack of olive loaf. Karena slams the door.

“Jeez,” she says, “doesn’t anyone ever go shopping around here?”

“You could go,” Siri suggests. “Nothing wrong with your legs.” She fires up a Marlboro, her lighter clicking and hissing. “Come over here so I can see you. I bet you’re drunk.”

Karena makes a
psht
noise. “You’re right, Ma. I am soooooo drunk. How’d you guess? By the way I staggered in here? By the way I can hardly stand up?”

“Get over here. Now.”

Karena minces with exaggerated care to the sunroom.

“There,” she says. “Happy now?”

Coolly, Siri surveys Karena from top to bottom, squinting extra-hard at Karena’s neck to check for hickeys.

“You look like a slut,” she says, turning back to the Golden Girls cavorting in the big old TV.

“I do not,” says Karena, stung. Of course, she does, and moreover, this is just the effect she was trying so carefully to achieve before she left the house. Not to be slutty exactly, but her acid-washed mini and matching jacket, her pink tank top with its glittering sequined heart, her hair permed and sprayed to twice the size of her head—all of this is meant to telegraph availability to a certain someone. But her mom is hardly the person Karena was aiming for.

“You know what that outfit says?” Siri continues. “It tells everyone your brains are between your legs. I suppose you were out necking with that Mike Schwartz again.”

Karena flushes.

“God, no, he’s a troglodyte,” she says. “And you’re so out of it, Mom. Necking,” she scoffs. “Please.”

Siri ashes in the waist-high ashtray. “Whatever you want to call it, Karena Lien, I know what you were doing. And let me tell you one thing: If you get pregnant, forget about college. Forget coming to me for help. In fact, don’t bother coming home.”

Karena’s mouth hangs open a little at the irony of this accusation. There’s no way she could get pregnant—she’s still a stupid virgin! She wasn’t even with Mike Schwartz tonight. She would have loved to have been. They did hook up over the weekend, in the backseat of Mike’s Bronco, doing what Karena and Tiff call Everything But. However, despite her best efforts Karena must not be very good at Everything But, because has Mike Schwartz called her since then? Has he talked to her even once? No, all he does is stand with his friends and laugh whenever Karena’s nearby, that mean, goatish boy laughter whose only intent is to hurt, and tonight Karena has been driving around with Tiff in Tiff’s dad’s truck, smoking and drinking beer from Tiff’s dad’s fishing cooler and trying to act as if she doesn’t care, as if she were just practicing on Mike Schwartz; trying not to ask Tiff what she did wrong and pounding warm Old Milwaukee as if her stomach were not one big cramping ball of misery.

“Don’t worry,” she tells Siri. “If I got pregnant I’d never come to you. I’d go to Dad.”

Siri laughs through her nose, exhaling.

“Really?” she says. “Great. Good luck.” And Karena has to concede the point. She hasn’t seen Frank for more than breakfast for months. Some big corporate case in Des Moines has been keeping him away.
Justice waits for no man
. And admittedly Frank is pretty useless when it comes to practical matters outside the law, like pregnancy. Karena imagines her papery little dad, with his glasses and iron-gray hair, confronted with this news. Clearing his throat and rubbing his hands together. Well, he would say. Well.

“All righty then, good night,” Karena says. “Thanks for the mother- daughter chat. I feel ever so much closer now.”

“Oh, don’t be so thin-skinned,” says Siri in one of her classic about-faces. “C’mere.”

She pats the cushion next to her. Karena stands in the doorway a moment more, then walks in and sits on the very edge of the couch. Is it a trap? What kind of mood is Siri really in? Covertly, Karena examines Siri while Siri watches TV. She is sitting cross-legged, a paperback novel tented on her thigh for the commercials. Next to her is a jar of cold cream, tweezers for pulling what Siri calls her witch hairs out of her chin, a couple of hair combs, and a soft pack of Marlboro Reds. This is all standard—Siri’s nests, Charles calls them. Siri makes them wherever she goes. But there is also a box of Kleenex, and when Karena tips forward she sees the ashtray bowl is full. Okay, what has happened with Charles?

Karena waits until the commercial comes on, then asks casually, “So, where’s Thing Number Two?”

Siri glances at her, and Karena is struck by the purple-brown half moons beneath her mom’s eyes.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” she says, and Karena thinks, Uh-oh. She tries to remember when she last saw Charles—this morning, at breakfast. Eating Lucky Charms straight from the box, scattering purple hearts and blue moons and pink diamonds all over the linoleum. Karena relaxes a little. That’s not so bad. Charles can’t have gotten into that much trouble in twelve hours. Then she remembers something else.

“Oh my God,” she says. “He took the Healey, didn’t he.”

Siri nods. “It was gone by the time I came back from Sandy’s,” she says. “He must have found Frank’s spare keys.”

“Holy crap,” says Karena, with some awe. The Healey, unlike the other cars Charles has wrecked, is her dad’s favorite, his pet. He drives it only on special occasions, in the summer, with the top down. He shines it with a chamois cloth.

“Dad’s going to go ballistic,” Karena says.

“Good,” Siri says with sudden viciousness. “Maybe when Frank runs out of cars, he’ll get his head out of his . . .” Then she shakes herself and takes a deep drag of her cigarette. “Don’t listen to me, honey,” she says. “I’m so tired, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“You do, though, Ma,” Karena insists. “And it’s okay. You have a right to say we need Dad’s help with Charles.” Although Karena can’t imagine anything Frank would do that would make the situation anything but worse. What could he do, bribe some judge buddy of his to lock Charles up? Which reminds Karena.

“Did you call the sheriff?” she asks, scissoring her second and third fingers together toward her mom’s cigarette.

Siri pushes the pack of Marlboros across the couch cushion. “Light your own,” she says, and Karena does. Siri exhales, staring at the silent TV. “No,” she says, “not this time. What’s the point? All he can do is bring Charles back and give him a slap on the wrist, and meanwhile there’s more public humiliation. I’m through with that. I’m so sick of people talking. Just for once I’d like to walk into the IGA without everyone pretending they don’t feel sorry for us.”

“Amen,” says Karena, because this is one part of the conversation she heartily agrees with. She too is so tired of the half-hidden grins when she enters a room, watching people labor to come up with some New Heidelburgian witticism about Charles’s chases.

Siri grinds her cigarette in the ashtray and immediately lights another. The first continues to smolder, so Karena reaches past Siri and puts it out. “I mean it, though,” Siri says. “I literally don’t know what to do anymore. What can we do with him? More drugs? Different ones? Should we . . . put him away somewhere? I can’t even stand to think about it.” She drags deeply, the ember lighting up and emphasizing the clown lines running from her nose to the corners of her mouth. She shouldn’t have permed her hair, Karena thinks with pity. Sure, it’s the style, but Siri looked so much better when her hair was a long, shiny sheet, or pinned up with combs. Now it is a pyramid of light brown frizz.

“What did I do?” Siri is asking. “Where did I go wrong? How did I make him turn out this way?”

Karena rolls her eyes, she hates these questions so much. “
Nothing
, Ma,” she says, exhaling an exasperated cloud of smoke. “You know that. Dr. H said it. Everyone says it, all the books. It’s a chemical thing, remember? It’s like—having a recipe not turn out right or something when you’ve made it a hundred times.”

Siri smiles wanly and reaches out to tuck Karena’s hair behind her ear, pulling her hand back when Karena ducks her head away.

“You’re sweet,” she says. “Thank you for trying to make me feel better. And I know you’re right, logically. But in here”—she thumps her chest and sips her Diet Pepsi—“you just feel so guilty,” she says, “when you’re the mother. You’ll never be able to stop feeling responsible for your child. You’ll see.”

Karena puts out her cigarette and stands up. If she doesn’t go to bed now Siri will start listing all the genetic predecessors, both on her side and Frank’s. The uncle who drowned in his boat on the Mississippi. The great-aunt who jumped down a well. Siri’s brother Carroll, who’s gay and God knows what else.

“It’s not your fault, Ma,” Karena says again. “Besides, you’re not coping with it alone. There’s me, remember?”

Siri squeezes Karena’s hand. Karena sits back down. “You are such a help to me,” Siri says. “You’re my good girl.” She shakes her head, her eyes reddening. “And Charles is good too,” she insists. “He is. Underneath it all he really is. What is going to become of him? Poor baby. What
can
become of him? What is he going to
do
in this world? How is he going to survive?”

“Don’t worry about it, Ma,” says Karena. “I’ll take care of him.”

“That’s not your job,” Siri says. But she is smiling again.

“Of course it is,” Karena insists. “He’s my twin.”

“Oh well,” Siri says, opening a new pack of Marlboros and adding the cellophane to her nest. “Maybe we’re just borrowing trouble. Maybe he’ll bring the car back tonight safe and sound and he’ll stay on his medications and get into college or get a job, and all of this worry will be for nothing. Right?”

“Right,” says Karena, though she seriously doubts it. She suddenly feels very heavy, as if her blood has solidified, weighting her to the couch. “Right, Ma.”

“So,” says Siri. “How was Tiff tonight?”

Karena lights another cigarette and tells her, and the two of them talk until the conversation winds down. Then they just sit together for a while, smoking in companionable silence, watching the news.

A
fter Karena kisses Siri on the cheek, leaning into her mom’s smell of night cream and smoke, she goes to the bathroom to lather up her own face with soap and wipe it down with toner, then retires to her room. There she switches off the lamp and hooks the ashtray containing her cigarettes out from under her bed. It’s her parents’ old party ashtray back from the days when Frank still smoked, bright red and about the size of a hubcap. Karena remembers sneaking into the hallway with Charles to watch the grown-ups shriek and laugh, the ashtray brimming the next morning. She sets it on the floor between the twin bed nearest the window and the wall, then wedges herself in there, on the blue-and-green shag rug. Siri has never said anything more about Karena’s smoking than
Don’t let the cigarette
hang
from your mouth like a farmhand, use your fingers.
And Frank, who is the worst kind of non-smoker, a former two-pack-a-day man, isn’t home enough to catch Karena and give her one of his interminable lectures. Ditto Charles, who has recently become Smoking Police, Jr. Still, caution is a habit, and Karena exhales through the window, dousing the room with Obsession body spray every few drags.

She curls her knees to her chest and props her chin on them, feeling terrible. She lied to Siri tonight—more than usual. A serious lie, a lie of omission. Karena should have spoken up when Siri mentioned Charles’s medication, because Karena knows Charles isn’t taking it, in fact has been hiding his lithium, and all the other pills Dr. H prescribed, in the very places Charles used to stash his Flintstones vitamins when they were kids. In the holes in the kitchen radiator. Dug into the dirt of the Norwegian pine by the front door. Beneath the davenport cover in the living room, worked into the couch’s seams. It was a full month ago Karena caught him stashing a prescription bottle into a Seagram’s liquor bag, which he stuffed under the cot in his lair the second he saw her.
Please don’t tell, K,
he said.
Please. You know how they make me get. I just get so sick. Please.
And Karena, who had watched aghast at the side effects the drugs had produced over the last couple of years, who had sorrowed in secret over her brother’s blackheads and rotten stomach and stutter and shaky hands, had said,
I promise
.

And she hasn’t told, but maybe she should have. Because what if Charles is lying in a ditch somewhere? Worse, what if he is curled in the front seat of the Healey, knees pulled up, crying in that very specific way—low and drawn out, almost too quiet to hear? What if he is deliberately aiming the little car toward the cement stanchion of an overpass or off a bridge? Karena thinks of Dr. H saying,
Ironically, it is when Charles is coming out of a depressive period that he must be watched most closely, for then he is capable of more than suicidal ideation. Then he has energy enough to carry out the act
. But Charles hasn’t seemed too down the past few days—has he? He hasn’t been lying in his lair with the lights off. Karena hasn’t needed to station herself down there. Maybe Charles is just off raising hell, as their grandmother Hallingdahl would have said.

Karena rubs out her cigarette, shoves the ashtray under the bed, then climbs on top of it. This is Charles’s old bed, which for some reason was never removed when the twins turned ten and were decreed too old to sleep in the same room, and Charles lobbied for and received his lair in the basement. Karena presses her face into the flowered coverlet and inhales. It doesn’t smell like her brother anymore, of course, but of dust and must and faintly of mildew. A comforting smell. She lies breathing it in and thinking that at least she did tell one truth tonight: Karena has no idea where Charles is. The thought causes her actual physical pain, a needle in her throat. Where are you, Charles? Karena thinks. Do you hear me? Answer. She tries to send out the twindar, imagines herself rising above the room and the house and the yard and the town, traveling across the dark land, peering down to zero in on where Charles is. But the twindar doesn’t work anymore. It seemed to evaporate about the same time as the belief in Santa Claus. All Karena knows is that her brother is out there somewhere without her.