Chapter Text
The barrels finally open, and Kate lets her hands fall from the steering wheel. She stares through the windshield as dust and debris fly around her, and she thinks she’s going to die. She’ll never see whether this experiment works. She’ll never know if the people in town live or die. (From experience, it’s probably better that way.)
Resignation, that’s what she feels. Like this was always going to happen. The only cure to survivor’s guilt is death.
The truck hits on its side; her head hits the side panel; the windows practically explode out. Instinctually, she shuts her eyes. The glass hits her, and it feels like a thousand tiny paper cuts. The sound of the tornado presses into her eardrums and creeps down her throat. The truck flips again. The pressure builds in her head. Though the harness keeps her tethered to the seat, she starts to lose her sense of which way is up.
When, suddenly, it’s all over, she thinks she’s dead. Behind her closed eyes, there’s the bright light she’s always heard about. She doesn’t know how long she waits for confirmation, but she feels the blood rushing to her head, and she reckons that they don’t string you upside down in heaven. She squints her eyes open.
As if on their own accord, her hands claw at the harness buckles. She braces and lowers herself partially to the truck’s roof, which is now somehow below her, and begins to drag herself out of the broken window, trying to avoid the shards of glass. She feels like she’s in a kaleidoscope; everything keeps shifting and breaking. In the broken picture of her vision, she sees Javi and Tyler.
It worked, they tell her. She’s elated, invigorated, overwhelmed – she’s still alive, and again, left to wonder why. The adrenaline wears down; her smile falters. Her vision funnels, Tyler says, “I’ve got you,” and she’s done this all before.
Next time she comes to, Javi is at her side, and she’s in a hospital room somewhere. Javi explains that she’s got a mild concussion, with a pump knot the size of Texas with a seam of stitches over it. She traces over it with the tips of her fingers; her skin burns from superficial cuts, already scabbing over.
Javi tells her that her mom is on the way. She feels a tight, familiar ache in her chest. She’s not ready to see her mother’s face.
“Is everyone okay?” she asks.
Javi is direct, telling her about the losses that the town suffered. “But you saved so many lives, Kate.” He reaches for her hand and holds it between the two of his. “You saved everyone in that theater, myself included. And all the Wranglers.”
Kate twists her wrist and intertwines her fingers with his. They’ve been here before, the two of them riding out the aftermath of a storm. Clinging to each other. Before she ran, before she pushed him away. It didn’t matter how far she went; they were tethered together by tragedy.
Back then, Javi said that when he was told that only one of his friends survived, he knew it had to be Kate. Just like she knew that she wasn’t the one he would have chosen.
“Where are they—the Wranglers?”
“Most of them stayed back to help. Tyler is here, getting his leg fixed up. He’s okay. Should be discharged soon.”
The tight feeling in her chest inches up her throat. She hates that she wants to see him as badly as she does. Hates that she needs some proof that he’s actually okay.
Javi speaks again, tentative: “We have…we have a lot of work to do.”
“Storm Par?”
“You and me.” Then he adds, with a slight smile, “And whoever else is joining the team.”
She hadn’t had time to think about it, that it worked, and that she had done something that could change the world. That they had done something that could change the world. After all, Javi’s research was mixed in just as much as her own. He hadn’t begun as a storm researcher, but he’d been integrated into the team just like everyone else.
Javi watches her, and when she only offers a smile and a deep exhale in response, he says, “We can talk about it later. But you know this is big, right?”
“Yeah,” she says. As she thinks about all the research that’s yet to be done, she feels unbalanced – half elation, the feeling she feels when she knows the next storm is about to be a big one, and half trepidation, the clenching of her stomach at the thought of driving into another tornado. The thought of this new team, again trusting her with their lives.
Perhaps Javi takes her non-answer as anger, and he squeezes her hand lightly. “I’m sorry,” he says, blinking, “for what I said. I know I can’t go back in time and make things right, but I want you to know I’m sorry.”
She closes her eyes and lets her neck and shoulders relax back on the pillow behind her. Javi’s brow creases in concern, but before he can say something, she hears, “How ya feeling, Sapulpa?”
Tyler’s leaned against the doorjamb, looking very casual, though it occurs to her that he’s just keeping his weight off his leg. She’s relieved to see him. Alive. Whole. She sees her own relief reflected in his expression.
“How’s your leg?” she says.
“Asked you first.” He grins. Takes a couple of limping steps into the room. Then stops, cutting his eyes to Javi. “Sorry for interrupting.”
Javi stands. “It’s fine. We were just talking about saving the world.” He smiles at Kate. She smiles back, hoping it’s convincing enough. “I’m going to grab a coffee,” Javi says. He gives Tyler a light clap on the back as he passes by.
Tyler drops into the now-unoccupied seat.
“I’m fine,” Kate says. She fills him in on what Javi told her about her condition, though she gets the idea that he already knows all this. That he’s already been asking about her. When she finishes, she says, “Now. You turn.”
“I’m fine,” he says, echoing her first answer with a smirk. He gives her the cliff notes: nothing broken, some bone contusions. He has to wear a compression wrap for at least the next three weeks, and then he’d have to get it rechecked.
When he finishes, she says, “I’m sorry about your truck.”
“She sure took a beating, but she’s still running. Never knew how she’d fare in a tornado of that size, but…took someone more reckless than me to find out.”
She doesn’t respond to that. There’s nothing to say. He’s right; she was reckless. Is reckless. Has always been. Five years ago, she was reckless because she was young and felt invincible. Now she’s reckless because she has nothing to lose.
“You wanna tell me why the hell you took off by yourself into that storm?” He tries to keep his tone light, but it’s clear that there’s a tinge of hurt behind the question. Maybe he’s more upset about his truck than he wants to let on.
“What else could I do?”
“I thought we were doing this together, Sapulpa.”
For the two days leading up to the El Reno tornado, they had been. They’d barely left each other’s sides, running numbers, creating new models, gathering data. He made her believe this could work. He made her believe in herself. Maybe she did it alone so she wouldn’t break that illusion.
“I wasn’t thinking.” Lie. “I just acted.” Another lie. “If you feel it, I guess.”
“That’s not what that means.”
“I’m sorry.”
He takes a deep inhale and smiles at her. “Just don’t do it again, okay?”
She can’t make that promise. “But it worked.”
He beams. “It worked.” He doesn’t say anything about what he was doing while she was driving into the storm, and she doesn’t ask. Maybe they’ll talk about it someday, if they keep in touch when she heads back to New York. “You—your work, it’s incredible. And I want in. I wanna help. I think we all do.”
Kate thinks about what they could accomplish together. With support of the Wrangler team, as well. The data they can collect while she figures out how to put some kind of grant application together. But her mind is so jumbled that she has a hard time thinking forward to that point without just thinking about them driving off into a storm for her.
“I—I need some time.”
“Of course.” He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket. “Listen, how about you give me your number, and I’ll text you mine, and then you have it. And when you’re ready, I’m with you.”
She’s not sure he’s just talking about the research, but she recites her number. The phone on her nightstand vibrates as he sends the text.
Javi pokes his head in from the hallway and in a low voice says, “Kate, Cathy incoming.”
Tyler stands. “That’s my cue. I don’t think I’m ready to face the wrath of Cathy Carter when she finds out that I let her daughter drive my truck into a tornado.” She suspects he’d already spoken to her mother anyway, at least by way of Javi.
“She knows better than to think you let me do anything,” she jokes, trying to recreate some semblance of their banter.
Tyler tilts his head to the phone on the nightstand and says, “You let me know if you need anything, Sapulpa.”
She nods and says she will. But she’s not sure. At that moment, she’s not sure she’ll ever see him again.
She swallows back a sob as she watches Tyler leave. A younger, stupider Kate might call it love, twin flames, or something equally embarrassing. But they’ve known each other for seven days now, and she’s been in therapy long enough to know that this thing she feels is just some sort of survivor bond.
A few minutes later, her mom breezes into the room, her face a mask of calm. She’s speaking in that no-nonsense way of hers, something about Kate being discharged, going back to the farm, staying for at least another week. When finally, their eyes meet, Kate feels the world tilt upside down again, the sobs tearing from her throat as her mother holds her against her chest. Things should be different this time, but the overwhelming feeling of loss strangles her just the same.