Beautiful Chaos(38)

For a second, I didn’t know what to say. It was like she’d slapped me in the face. But like a slap, after the initial sting, everything was clearer. “Would you say that to Marian—or Mom if she was here? They’re a piece of our family—”

“Take a look before you lecture me about your family, Ethan Wate.”

When I followed her eyes past the library, I knew Amma hadn’t been taking stock. She already knew what we’d lost. I was the last one to figure it out. Almost.

My heart was hammering and my fists were clenched by the time Link pointed down the street. “Oh, man. Isn’t that your aunts’ place?”

I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t find the words.

“It was.” Amma sniffed. “Keep drivin’.”

I could already see the red glare of the ambulance and fire engine parked on the lawn of the Sisters’ house—or what used to be their house. Yesterday, it had been a proud, white, two-story Federal, with a wraparound porch and a makeshift ramp for Aunt Mercy’s wheelchair. Today, it was half a house, cut down the center like a child’s dollhouse. But instead of perfect arrangements of furniture in every room, everything in the Sisters’ house was upturned and torn apart. The blue crushed-velvet sofa was lying on its back, end tables and rocking chairs pushed up against it, as if the contents of the house had slid to one side. Frames were piled on top of beds, where they had fallen off the walls. And the eerie cutout faced a mountain of rubble: wooden boards, sheets of plaster, unidentifiable pieces of furniture, a porcelain claw-foot tub—the half of the house that hadn’t survived.

I stuck my head out the car window, staring up at the house. I felt like the Beater was rolling in slow motion. In my head, I counted what had been rooms. Thelma’s was downstairs, in the back, closest to the screen door. Her room was still there. Aunt Grace and Aunt Mercy shared the darkest room, behind the stairs. And I could still see the stairs. That was something. I ticked them off in my head.

Aunt Grace and Aunt Mercy and Thelma.

Aunt Prue.

I couldn’t find her room. I couldn’t find her pink flowered bedspread with all the little tiny balls on it, whatever they were called. I couldn’t find her mothball-smelling closet and her mothball-smelling dresser and her mothball-smelling rag rug.

It was all gone, as if some giant fist had come down from the sky and pulverized it into dust and debris.

The same giant fist had spared the rest of the street. The other houses on Old Oak Road were untouched, without so much as a fallen tree or broken roof shingle in their yards. It looked like the result of a real tornado, the way it touched down randomly, destroying one house while leaving the one next door perfectly intact. But this wasn’t the random result of a natural disaster. I knew whose giant fist it was.

It was a message for me.

Link guided the Beater to the curb, and Amma was out of the car before it even stopped. She headed right for the ambulance, as if she already knew what we were going to find. I froze, my stomach churning.

The phone call. It hadn’t been the greater Gatlin gossip grapevine, reporting that a twister had destroyed most of town. It had been someone calling to tell Amma that my ancient great-aunts’ house had caved in and—what? Link grabbed my arm and pulled me across the street. Practically everyone on the block was crowded around the ambulance. I saw them without seeing any of them, because it was all so surreal. None of it could possibly be happening. Edna Haynie was in her pink plastic hair curlers and fuzzy bathrobe, despite the ninety-degree heat, while Melvin Haynie was still wearing the white undershirt and shorts he had slept in. Ma and Pa Riddle, who ran the dry cleaner’s out of their garage, were dressed for disaster. Ma Riddle was madly spinning her hand-cranked radio, even though the power didn’t seem to be going out and reception didn’t seem to be coming in. Pa Riddle wouldn’t let go of his shotgun.

“Excuse me, ma’ am. Sorry.” Link elbowed his way through the crowd, until we were on the other side of the ambulance. The metal doors were open.

Marian was standing on the brown grass outside the open doors, next to someone wrapped in a blanket. Thelma. Two tiny figures were propped up between them, skinny whitish-blue ankles peeking out from under long, frilly white nightgowns.

Aunt Mercy was shaking her head. “Harlon James. He doesn’t like messes. He won’t like this one bit.”

Marian tried to wrap a blanket around her, but Aunt Mercy shrugged it off. “You’re in shock. You need to warm up. That’s what the firemen said.” Marian handed me a blanket. She was in emergency mode, trying to protect the people she loved and minimize the damage—even though her whole world was burning up a few blocks away. There was no way to minimize that kind of damage.

“He’s run off, Mercy,” Aunt Grace mumbled. “I told you, that dog’s no good. Prudence must a left the dog door open again.” I couldn’t help but look to where the dog door had been, and now the whole wall was missing.

I shook out the blanket and tucked it gently around Aunt Mercy’s shoulders. She was clinging to Thelma like a child. “We have ta tell Prudence Jane. You know she’s crazy ’bout that dog. We have to tell her. She’ll be angrier than a June wasp if she hears it from someone else first.”

Thelma gathered them in her arms. “She’ll be fine. Just some complications, like the ones you had a few months back, Grace. You remember.”