“What are you doing?”
He spun around.
Melanie stood at the foot of the stairs, her face red.
“I knocked on the door, I—”
“Did you hear me say come in?”
“No.”
“Get out.”
“Melanie—”
“Get out of my house!” Tears ran down the sides of her face and she breathed so hard he could see her chest billowing under her button-down shirt.
“All right,” he said.
He started down the hallway between the walls of cardboard boxes, Melanie backing toward the stairs as he approached the foyer. She collapsed on a lower step and buried her head between her knees, her shoulders bobbing as she wept.
At the door, Peter glanced back. Melanie hadn’t lifted her head, and that cat was slinking between her ankles in figure-eights and purring like it meant to sooth her.
He said, “For the record, I think you’re beautiful.”
She wouldn’t lift her head, and her words came spliced with tears. “Please, Peter. I just need you to leave. I can’t stand this. I can’t stand you seeing this.”
“It’s okay, Mel. You don’t have anything—”
“What?” She looked up. “To be ashamed of? Is that what you were going to—”
“No, I—”
Her eyes bugged, her face darkened into scarlet, and she sprang up off the stairs and grabbed his shirt, balling the fabric in her hands and shoving him into the doorframe.
“Do not fuck with me,” she whispered.
“I’m not. I swear.”
“No one. No one has come in here…” It felt like two concurrent slaps, both hands slamming into his cheeks, open-palmed, squeezing his face, drawing it down, her lips barely chapped, her tongue warm. She didn’t kiss him as hard as he feared, though since he hadn’t touched his lips to those of another human being’s in twenty years, three months, and eight days, a point of reference was lacking.
They broke apart, breathless.
Melanie leaned her forehead against his sternum, and Peter stared over the top of her head at the cat who watched him from midway up the stairs.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked.
“Yes. No.”
He touched the point of her chin. Lifted her head. She stared up at him through a sheet of tears that evacuated from her eyes when she blinked. “I haven’t always lived like this.”
“Me either.”
“When you walked into the restaurant…I don’t know how to put it in—”
“You don’t have to put it any way. I know.”
“Are you lonely, Peter?”
“All the time.”
“Do you want to come upstairs with me?”
“Melanie, I haven’t…in a long time.”
“Makes two of us.”
“I’m not even sure if—”
She put her finger to his lips.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not about that.”
He came almost instantly and he told her he was sorry, that he knew this would happen and that he had tried to warn her. He lay between her legs in the dark in an upstairs bedroom, his hamstrings trembling, their chests heaving against each other.
“Peter, shut up. It’s okay.”
He pulled away but she clasped her legs around his back.
“Please,” she whispered. “Not yet.”
He rested his head on her shoulder as the bedroom flashed with electric blue. Out on the prairie it sounded like someone was moving furniture around—distant thunder.
“Do you want to leave?” she asked.
“No.”
“Is that the truth?”
“It is actually.”
He turned his head so he could see the lightning flicker across the stacks of boxes that diminished the bedroom into something the size of a walk-in closet.
“Peter?”
“Yes?”
“Why’d you leave Providence?”
“I was the head meteorologist at WPRI. Two months after...”
When he didn’t finish the sentence, she ran her fingers through his hair and said, “After what?”
“Can I just leave it at that?”
“Of course.”
“Two months after, I had a nervous breakdown on-air. You can find the footage on YouTube. Over a half-million views last time I checked. I left town, never looked back. How long have you lived here?”
“Nine years. You want to know what happened?”
“Do you want to tell me? Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I can feel your heart beating against my chest. It feels good.”
Later, they lay in bed listening to the rain on the tin roof, Peter sliding his fingers down the side of her arm as he had touched his wife in a previous life, and telling her about the time he almost died when Hurricane Bertha hit Kure Beach on the North Carolina coast. He’d ventured out to the end of a seven hundred-foot pier in the eyewall, clinging to the rail as twenty-foot waves crashed into the framework and hundred mile-per-hour rain and seaspray lacerated his face. He’d heard the outer pilings begin to crack and started the long crawl back to shore, just reaching the beach as the wind and waves tore the pier off the pilings.
He told her about the night he spent on the summit of Mount Mitchell in the ’93 Superstorm, about the time he almost killed himself when a southern blizzard didn’t pan out, about the calm and silent eye of Andrew and its perfect black circle of starry sky, about a December night in Fairbanks, Alaska, when the thermometer hit -58° F, and in the freezing fog his spit would crackle midair, striking the pavement as a blob of sleet. She laughed at that one, thought he was pulling her leg.
They didn’t belabor, as Peter had feared, the circumstances that had brought them to this moment. As she’d said, it wasn’t about that.
Exhaustion and contentment brought increasingly expansive lulls. Then they lay in silence, both facing the tall window beside Melanie’s bed. When the lightning came and the prairie flashed into existence through the heat-warped glass, Peter would catch the fleeting sense that this house and the two of them lying naked upstairs in bed was all that was left of the world.
Glass rattling in the sill wrenched Peter out of sleep and he returned to consciousness as the peal of thunder faded out.
He sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
The darkness through the window tinged with gray.
A jag of lightning split it down the middle.
Melanie moaned, half-asleep, “What are you doing?”
Peter swung his legs over the side of the bed and stepped into his briefs and jeans, still conjoined on the floor.
“I need to go read the Goodland advisories.”
“It’s…five-twenty in the morning.”
“Those sound like major storms out there.”
They hurried down the front porch steps, the grasses thrashing and the air making their eyes water, filled with dust and slivers of chaff.
In the RV, Peter opened the laptop and pulled up the National Weather Service page he’d bookmarked upon his arrival in Hoxie.
“Oh, man,” he said.
“What?”
“Come look.”
BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED
TORNADO WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GOODLAND KS
517 AM MDT MON JUL 17 2006
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GOODLAND HAS ISSUED A
* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
NORTH CENTRAL SHERIDAN COUNTY IN NORTHWEST KANSAS...
* UNTIL 630 AM MDT
* AT 510 AM MDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING A TORNADO 15 MILES NORTHWEST OF HOXIE...OR ABOUT 8 MILES WEST OF SELDEN...MOVING EAST AT 15 MPH.
* THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR...
SELDEN AROUND 610 AM MDT...
IF YOU ARE AT HOME...SEEK SHELTER IN A BASEMENT IF POSSIBLE. OTHERWISE...GO TO A SMALL INTERIOR ROOM ON THE LOWEST FLOOR. AVOID WINDOWS AND PROTECT YOURSELF FROM FLYING DEBRIS.