Recurring

The Father, Deceased

He appears in a hospital hallway. On the front porch of her home in Phoenix, with a clipboard in his hands, polite and distant, like he might ask her to switch internet service providers. Passing by on the sidewalk in Riley, the town where she grew up. Leaning out of his yellow combine. He wears jeans, red flannel rolled to his forearms, work boots coated in soil, as if he’s just come in the back door at the end of an autumn day. He is the color of golden wheat. He flickers like sunlight across their Kansas field. His crow’s-feet, deeper now, cut into his skin like far-off river valleys.

No matter where he appears, his joy looms so large that he’s nearly unrecognizable. His thick body vibrates as he grips her shoulders. She cannot recall ever seeing him so manic, not when her younger sister was born, not when they climbed out of the cellar to see their house untouched by the F4 tornado that flattened much of the township.

Gail, he says. He touches his thumb to her wrinkled cheek, a gesture so familiar and lost that she chokes back a whimper—a guttural, animal sound of recognition.

The Ex-Beau from College, Just Married

He holds his new wife’s hand no matter where they are. Awake, Gail still feels flashes of indignation and scorn in her chest, even some forty years later, but when his apparition arrives in her law office or at the Topeka State Fair, she experiences longing for camaraderie so shocking and thorough it’s as though she’s been baptized in freezing water. Never mind that he kept his real girl—the one who became his wife—in Abilene for the three years he spent with Gail at Wichita State. After his graduation he called her once from a pay phone, and then she never heard from him again. A friend’s cousin later reported back his engagement, his marriage, his prior six-year relationship with the girl from Abilene.

But in dreams all is forgotten. Gail greets his wife warmly, doesn’t say who she is, that she existed. If they’re in the law office, Gail leads his wife down the hall for tea or coffee, for kindness she can pour into a Styrofoam cup. If they’re together at the state fair, all three of them ride the Ferris wheel. The happy couple flanks her. At its zenith the ride stops. Their car swings as they gaze out over the swarm of sweating fairgoers. The parking lot catches light in the distance like clean jewelry, and everything else is the color of earth. His body radiates familiar heat. She leans to him with the urge to say, I understand now, you picked her, you made the right decision.

Instead she starts to sing their school song, and he sings too, and his wife, somehow she knows the words, so her harmony lifts them into the sky, where the white light of sun obliterates the day.

The Former Boss, 1979

First the old building, rented out by an insurance company, situated in a two-story business park just outside Derby, Kansas, the walls a dusty beige like the dead cornstalks outside. He’s not in his office. Against her chest she clutches a manila folder like a shield. Does he need to sign these documents? She flips open the folder. Oh, the unfortunate horror. He does. Where has he gone? She creeps past the conference room, where Abe and Martha sit in gray-backed chairs. They look at her with pity—she’s a twenty-two-year-old idiot and deserving of all ire and abuse directed her way. Martha’s bangs float up to the ceiling. Abe draws his finger across his throat and mouths “Dead meat.” She creeps down the worn-carpet hallway. She looks out the window and realizes it’s snowing. Now snow covers everything. These documents have gone unsigned for three months. She’s in big trouble. She notices a Life Savers wrapper on the floor under the fake fern and catches a whiff of mint and cheap cigars. He’s nearby, but where? She gazes out the dirty window, afraid to turn around. She should do it, she should turn. Quickly, get it over with. The scent of cigars—which brand were they? All she can recall is the burnt-red packaging, habitually placed on the corner of his desk, almost as an offering. She feels his labored breath on the back of her neck. Outside, the half-empty parking lot is buried under a foot of snow, and she watches a lone figure brave the wind toward a distant car. Why can’t she turn around? She hears faint crinkling as he unwraps another Life Saver, followed by the wet sound as his lips take the candy. She tries again to turn—why won’t her body move?—but before she can, she feels his hand on her waist. The manila folder is gone, the dust-covered fern recedes from her periphery, but the pressure on her hip remains.

Sophie, Age Two

Blonde curly hair spilling out under a winter cap. Fat legs made fatter by a bright turquoise snowsuit. Sophie’s father places her in a swing. Frozen mulch crunches under their boots. Gail holds the small Nikon camera gifted to her on her thirty-first birthday, long lost now, and snaps photos.

The Tornado

Silence moves across the field like a wall. Gail stands in a row of knee high corn. A two-lane highway separates the field from a yellow house. A swing, hanging from the bough of a nearby tree, moves gently in the breeze; the lawn is as empty as the road in front of it. The sky overhead darkens into a familiar gray-blue. In the stillness of day, tension knits into Gail’s shoulders, a discomfort she recognizes from hours spent hunched over her desk. She straightens her spine and thinks of her father, that perpetual-motion machine, the ache in his shoulders born from excess movement, the opposite of hers.

The Father, Alive

In the cellar they stand next to a train set suspended from the ceiling by four chains. It’s only the two of them, huddled together in the smell of musk and damp. Her younger sister is with her mother in the house, another world, which is sealed off and nonexistent down here. Canning supplies and canned goods, Christmas decorations, and the old mint-colored tricycle—outgrown by both her and her sister—are stored at the far end of the cellar. Closer yet is the nook behind the stairs, their safe zone during storms. A jug of water, flashlight, and rough blanket rest in a pile near the dirt wall. Nothing can tip over or fall into that small space where she has crouched with him, her mother, and her sister on more than one tedious afternoon. Those afternoons where she prayed for disturbance, even if it meant destruction too. Anything to renounce the endless procession of days, seasons long as serialized novels, hours of chores like a Möbius strip.

She holds a caboose steady on the table as her father takes the paintbrush and covers the last corner in mustard yellow. Standing next to him, she inhales his scent, a combination of the powdered detergent her mother stores next to her stacks of Sears catalogs in the laundry annex, engine oil, and, most distinctly, the saccharine sweet of Wrigley’s chewing gum, which he carries in his jeans and coveralls. Very good, he says, admiring their work. Then he leans in. He loves imagining himself as her coconspirator. You shoulda been a boy, he says, referencing their joke—when she was even younger, he’d made the same comment after she, his oldest child, assisted him with some task typically delegated to male children. He’d told her as if he were giving away a secret meant only for adult ears, and she, hotheaded and loudmouthed, immediately protested. So now he says it in jest, in situations free of prescribed gender roles, a joke at his own expense that she’s too young to understand.

He places his arm around her shoulder and gives her a light shake. She buries her head in his side and loves him. Despite everything, she’s made it her business to be the best son a girl can be. And here she stands: helpful, calm, rewarded.

The Rash Haircut

It varies in length and style of badness, but like many ugly things, it’s self-inflicted. Gail doesn’t care about the outcome, only the act. If her hair, grown halfway down her back, becomes bothersome, she shears it from her scalp with no regard. If she is young, she hides from her mother, a woman of violent wind and chapped skin. Propriety straightens her mother’s spine; obedient children do not cut their own hair. Sensible women do not self-destruct.

If she is older, her hair is already shorter, but still, her dream-self is not immune to the lure of shears. She’ll become aware of what she looks like only when Maureen, her fellow L2 student, says outside of Advanced Environmental Law II, Jesus, Gail, you have a rattail. Maureen pulls a compact from her purse, and sure enough, there it is, sprouting from the base of Gail’s skull like a coarse weed.

If she is older still, Sophie’s father will see her and, with a sigh that seems to deflate him, ask why. Why? Oh, she’ll tell him why. You know why, how can you even ask, it’s my hair. You’re always here, always policing, always describing my behavior back to me, always trying to make a fucking diagnosis, but there is nothing to diagnose, Mark. My heart is broken. How many times can I say it? So I cut my hair. Stop asking.

She wants to say more, but her hair has grown with every word. It’s long again. Like vines in a horror movie, it wraps around her neck and pulls her further into herself. She looks for the scissors, but they’re gone, vanished from her hands. Grief still curls in her stomach like a sleeping cat. There is nothing else to do. As she does in waking life, she turns to Mark and says, I don’t think I want to be married anymore.

The Best Friend, 1981 to Present Day

Maureen’s physical appearance varies little. She is dirt-colored hair, a stocky frame, bluntness embodied. She’s a fortune-teller, one who doesn’t predict the future so much as she designs it. She saunters into dreams of chaos and creates order. If cars are capable of flight, when Maureen arrives they become earthbound again. If Gail wanders through foreign rooms, lost in the dark, pursued by an unseen predator, Maureen’s arrival lights a path to safety. When she dreams of law school, which she still does, frequently, Maureen materializes too, her fellow student and smoker of Virginia Slims. In these dreams, if Gail has not studied for an exam, she’ll become endowed with dates and details of precedent-setting court cases and nuances of Kansas agricultural law only when Maureen walks up with a greasy bag of fries and what she calls a “decorative flask” of bourbon.

Untangler of knots, self-possession raised to the nth degree, Maureen is exactly like every woman Gail has ever known—plain, trained to be pleasant—except she’s charged. Electricity inhabits her body. Other people are afraid of her, but not Gail. Gail nests, has always nested, behind the protective shield of Maureen’s friendship. What can be said of their relationship?

For Gail, it’s the flawless engineering of a skyscraper, the invisible but ever-present equation that allows her to stand upright.

Sophie, Age Seven

Raw energy, barely restrained. She perches on the edge of the overstuffed armchair wearing secondhand Cabbage Patch Kids pajamas. Always in need of a job, she crumples newspaper and drops it on the floor next to her father as he kneels in front of the fireplace arranging maple logs on the grate. That’s enough, Soph, Mark says. The refrain of her early life. That’s enough, Soph, no more, restrain yourself, calm down. Words that could be spoken to any child but are repeated to her so often as to be her epithets. He lights a piece of balled-up newsprint and tucks it under the wood. She inches toward the flame, transfixed. Their hair will smell of smoke later. Gail will press her face against each of them, two distinct bodies, known to her heart by the oily scent of their skin and by what remains in their absence—the acerbic smell of smoke lingering on their pillowcases in the morning, hours after they’ve risen.

Sophie, Age Thirteen

Her presence is cruel. She appears curled in the armchair in Gail’s house in Phoenix. She calls Gail’s office, begging Gail to pick up Filibertos for dinner, but hangs up before Gail can reply. She materializes in the passenger seat of Gail’s car, not wearing a seat belt. She sits in the kitchen of their old house in Overland Park, explaining the history of pop punk to Mark before skillfully redirecting the conversation into an argument for purple hair dye—It’ll wash out, just the ends, I mean, I could be doing drugs, this is so benign, Dad, please?

But Gail cuts in and tells her no—so Sophie disappears again, this time stomping out of the room and up the stairs, the slam of her door a vibration under Gail’s feet. Mark, still seated, exhales in his way. She’s never known a man who could pack so much criticism into one sigh, but Mark can and he does. He rubs his eyes.

Why did you do that? You always do that. And—he stops himself, almost thinking better of it, but no, he means what he’s about to say too much. He stands up and moves toward the door—now it’s your fault we’re gone.

The Childhood Dog

Not a farm dog. Always penned in the side yard. Always crying. A tiny wiry ball of white hair, pacing circles around his damp corduroy bed. His paws red and raw where his teeth have torn at the skin over and over again.

The Tornado

Half a mile away, the rotten-colored sky begins, ever so faintly, to rotate. Its smooth surface curdles like sour milk. Something solid exists in the clouds, both revealed and concealed at once, the way her mother’s body used to be outlined and obscured as she hung sheets to dry on a windy day. There are two kinds of people, Gail thinks: those in awe of inclement weather, who welcome disturbance at any price, and those who see the dark sky and feel, intimately, the world coming apart in their hands. She is the former—always the former. What is dread in the face of such powerful, yearning beauty?

A funnel emerges from the turning. The nascent tendril wavers with doubt and for a moment vanishes. Uncertainty hangs in the air, and Gail feels childlike in her exclusion. She’s as small and earthbound as the house, as the power lines running along the road, as the barn behind her, which fills her with a rage rarely acknowledged. Head back, arms open, she screams for confrontation in the held-breath stillness of afternoon.

The white funnel comes into sharp relief against the sky, nosing its way toward the ground like an animal in search of sustenance.

The Bridge, in the Distance

A journey. Any journey. Never mind the destination or course. She could be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or walking down a hallway. On the horizon or another point in the distance, suspension cables grow like wheat stalks in a time-lapse. If she describes the dream later, she’ll say, It’s just like that video, what’s the one, on my niece’s Facebook page? The cables rise, pulling the bridge’s deck into a plane separate from the earth or water or tile floor. The towers form next. In the years before social media she puts it this way: It comes together like an image in an Etch A Sketch, all those lines connected, one leading to the next.

That’s how the bridge appears. Not even Maureen can stop it.

Sophie, Age Fifteen

A Dillard’s dressing room in Oak Park Mall. Mom, she says, can you zip this up? Gail opens the door and shuffles over to Sophie, who holds a strapless black dress against her chest. Her back, dotted with blemishes, curves under the dress as Gail tugs up the zipper. The beaded fabric hugs Sophie from chest to thigh. She hooks her thumb into the severe neckline and tugs. Gail watches Sophie’s expression reflected in the floor-length mirror while she follows the dress with her eyes. Gail wonders—did she look like this when she was fifteen?

It’s a little—Gail begins.
Hot.
Mature.
You mean really hot.
It might be too old for you.
Sophie turns to face her and lets out a groan. Mom, she says, dragging out the vowel. Mom, come on. Come on.
Let’s go see Grandma after this.
Does that mean yes? Sophie places her hands on Gail’s shoulders and gives her a shake. Say yes.
Let’s get the blue one for now. We’ll come back for this one in a few days. Maybe you can wear it next year.
Sophie groans again. Seriously? She looks down at the dress and then back at Gail, as if it might argue on her behalf.
Sophie—
You’re being really unreasonable.
We’ll talk about it later.
You’re being fucking ridiculous.

Gail throws open the door of the dressing room and turns around to face her daughter. Sophie’s eyes are angry and tired, and wisps of her fuzzy light-brown hair frame her face with such gracelessness that Gail’s heart aches. Gail will cave eventually, maybe even on their car ride north, just not right this second. She needs a moment.

But Sophie registers the softening in Gail’s attitude, and her expression hardens in response. What? Sophie snaps. What is your problem? Why are you always like this?

Gail drops her hands. Bring the blue dress to the register. If you don’t want it, fine. This is the end of the discussion.

Gail turns and walks away, down the line of dressing rooms. As she does, the dream shifts—she’s no longer in a mall, but somewhere doors stretch on in endless succession, one after another, each blocking entrance to a space where arguments with Sophie wait in perpetuity.

The Affair

It’s never set before. The first deceit has already taken place. She feels no panic, only the satisfaction and calm created in the wake of fulfilled anticipation. In some dreams she still has trouble with her right shoulder and hip, as she did in the months following the accident. In others she’s mobile and unencumbered. Cheating is self-sabotage, but she doesn’t feel guilty. Relief courses through her veins, pumped through her body by her mangled heart. She deserves to feel good. And she does, again and again: in the bed of a Motel 6, in the bathroom of a dive bar, on a secluded bench in the park several blocks from their shared office.

She feels good in places they never fucked too: the couch in his living room; the bed she shares with her husband, which is down the hall from her dead daughter’s room; the back seat of his car. She’ll feel unfettered lust for him until she’s dead, although over time the sharp angles of his face fade and he becomes a flash of torso, a set of lips, a hand buried in her hair. A merciful forgetting.

The Tornado

Gail’s hair whips forward. Strands sting her face and snap in the violent wind. She brushes them back, but it’s futile. If only she could cut her hair off altogether so she could stand uninterrupted, a dutiful observer.

The funnel, an hourglass, begins to move, not toward the field as Gail expected, but laterally, in the direction of the house. It collects power lines like a worker gathering extension cord. The tree and swing are next, ripped from the soil with the same disgust Gail has used to pull weeds from her garden. Shingles fly from the roof. The house is only a dark shape now, hunched and feral, its soft yellow imperceptible through the swarming dust. Gail waits for the funnel to change directions. It’s supposed to pivot at the last moment and come for her instead. This scene is in her body like muscle memory or faith.

The Bridge, beneath Them

She’s behind the wheel of her car when the bridge materializes under their vehicle. Sophie sits in the passenger seat, her Walkman turned off in her lap, her forehead pressed against the window. She’s a bundle of nerves and raw adolescent anger. Top 40 blares on the radio: The Verve Pipe, Smash Mouth, and now Christina Aguilera.

They’re traveling to the Victory Hills Senior Living Community to visit Gail’s aging mother. She hears Sophie in her head: Isn’t the name of this place kinda perverse? Like, what is the victory? Not being dead yet?

Come on over, come on over, baby.

Turn it down, Gail says. Their car travels in the fast lane of the highway. A concrete barrier tracks to their left. She looks back to check her blind spot—they need to get off this bridge—and she sees the department-store box containing Sophie’s unwanted homecoming dress in the back seat. What was wrong with that dress anyway? Why was she so insistent?

Far in front of them, where the bridge transitions to highway, tentative brake lights flicker on, their red glow spreading through traffic like a virus. Dread settles in Gail’s limbs. She cannot change lanes now, but she needs to, doesn’t she?

In the center lane, immediately to the right of Gail’s car, a space opens between vehicles. She signals to merge, but the gap is already shrinking; behind them at their five o’clock, a semi accelerates. Gail’s eyes flicker to the rearview mirror, searching for an indication that the semi might slow, but it speeds on, keeping pace just enough so that it will neither pass nor allow her quite enough room.

Suspension cables whip past their car as they approach the center of the bridge. Gail glances forward again. The red is gone. Cars ahead are gaining speed. All I want is you, now baby, don’t be shy, you better cross the line. The semi maintains its distance in the rearview mirror. Or does it? How is it that she can’t tell? Why can’t she make this call? I’m gonna love you right. All I want is you. Come on over, come on over,

baby.

Sophie, Gail practically shouts. Turn it down now.

The Kansas River flows beneath them, so still and distant it’s an oil painting. How many times has she driven over this bridge on the way to her mother’s? Every day of her life? She can make this merge. She takes her right hand off the wheel and turns around, twisting her body so she can watch the truck. There’s space. She can make it.

Mom, Sophie says.
Gail signals again.
Mom.

When Gail turns forward, she sees the infected brake lights on the sedan twenty feet in front of them. There’s no time for surprise, but it’s present in her gut along with something else. Didn’t she know? How could she have gotten on this bridge again? She’s a bad mother, a wretched mother, a selfish mother. She asked for this to happen. She swerves, toward the gap that is no longer there.

You would have died, Mark tells her later in the emergency room, and again on Gail’s first night back in their bed when she wakes from a nightmare, and yet again, a year later, as she stands at their front door, her bags packed, ready to exit their house for the last time. If you hadn’t swerved. You’d be dead too.

But it’s the same. In reality and in dreams. Collision is a burst of bright sound and light, beautiful and unreal. The tinkling of breaking glass. Screeching of metal warping away. The abrupt absence of music, replaced by pain she hasn’t felt since Sophie’s birth. Pain, ushering Sophie into the world. Ushering Sophie out again.

The Tornado Siren

The sound of her childhood. The first Wednesday of every month at noon as a test, and other days in true warning. The wailing tonal dip as it begins, then a crescendo to discord. Everything else—the dark skies, the autumn trees, the yellow-green lawn—all so still. She listens for a moment, but the volume increases, a maddening amplification penetrating her skull. She feels illness vibrating in her throat.

But is it illness? She touches her hand there. Not illness. Noise. She’s the siren. She’s screaming.

The Second Husband

He didn’t appear until after they’d been married for two years. Now that they’ve been married for seven, he arrives every night. Dreams of him are nothing like the dreams of Mark, who talks for hours on end, who in turn listens to every thought in her head spilled out in one breathless monologue, who continues to listen and speak in conversations she cannot remember when she wakes up.

Her second husband is so much a fixture of daily life that at times he appears as reliable as a household appliance. But occasionally he’ll take her someplace fantastic.

She’s sitting in the passenger seat of his car as he drives through the desert toward the Tonto National Forest. The soft rush of wind against the exterior affects her like a tranquilizer, and she exhales as he turns onto the narrow road that will take them toward the Superstition Mountains. Enormous saguaro cacti dot the landscape. She has wondered why anyone settled in this part of the world, but the saguaros, looming tall and stoic, have always served as her answer—they look on like gentle guardians, proof that life can flourish in even the most inhospitable conditions.

An uneven switchback guides them up a mountain. Why is she perpetually vehicle-bound? A thin guardrail shields the road from open air. In the distance, the landscape twists like a sheet of melting plastic, dipped pockets appearing between raised inclines. Maureen once said of a mountain range: I bet the ocean floor looks just like this. And Gail, landlocked as she’d always been, who had never once considered the topography of the ocean floor, felt the picture of the world she carried in her mind become enhanced.

So, as they drive on, the warm tones of the desert cool into blues of water. The Arizona sun softens as it’s filtered through saline. The saguaro, golden-barrel, and prickly-pear cacti remain, but now fish dart around their spines. There’s no urgency, no danger. Gail cranes her neck to gaze upward. The wavering water expands for miles above them. She spots a large shape drifting across a mountain peak—a sperm whale, the movements of its flukes so graceful it appears to be in slow motion.

Wonderful, isn’t it? her second husband says. He smiles at her coyly, pleased with himself for keeping a secret. I’ve wanted to take you here for a long time.

Oh, David, she says, half laughing, half tearing up. She loves him fiercely for finding her here, buried under tons of water, beneath thick layers of consciousness. He rests one hand on her knee as they travel through the incomprehensible world.

The Tornado, Recurring

Unlike in life, every iteration is the same. The sky overhead darkens. A familiar blue-gray. Silence like a wall across a field. One funnel cloud, following her through the years.

Sophie’s Father

I’m sorry we haven’t spoken in so long. The last time, you called from your mom’s old house. I could picture you standing with that ridiculous eight-foot phone cord curled around your wrist. You became very serious. I was surprised because you were never serious with me anymore. Grief made you grave, but healing sealed away your solemnity, both your interest in it and your ability. Everything was trivial or material for a joke.

You said you wished that she’d died in another year—in 1999 or 2001 or 2002—just not in 2000, so that writing the last two digits of the date wasn’t a constant count of how many years she’d been dead. A year will never be anything else, you said.

You’d never told me that before. Somehow, in the decade until that phone call, I had never once thought of it like that. But afterward that’s all it was for me too. Why the fuck did you tell me? Why couldn’t you have left me alone in my grief instead of giving me yours? I know my grief, I know what it looks like and feels like, and I know how to get it away, but I couldn’t get yours away, so when you called again a few months later, I didn’t call you back. You sent an email, and I ignored it too. You sent a Christmas card, and I threw it in the garbage before David could see it and respond. You sent another email, so I filtered your messages to the trash. You called again after the new year. I changed my phone number. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did that to you. But the loss of you undid me for a long time.

I always imagine you in a new suburban living room, somewhere with shitty carpet and no memory, standing in front of a fireplace controlled by a switch on a wall. I bet your hair smells of soap instead of smoke. I want to know if you still take your trip to Colorado every year or if you still write op-eds for the Kansas City Star, and I guess I could look that up but I don’t want to. I want to hear it from you. We became individuals again in her, isn’t that insane? It’s like all the things we never got to do came together and made a human being: the job you didn’t take in San Diego, the marriage I never had to my college boyfriend, the unread books on our study shelves, the unplanted vegetable garden in your mother’s backyard the spring they discovered her ovarian cancer. All those unlived lives became her. She had your long legs and your handwriting. I still have every card she gave to me. I can’t throw them away.

Sophie

I just wanted to show you again before Nathaniel picks me up, she says. What do you think? It’s great. Can you get the little thing—yeah, whatever is tickling my back. Thank you. That’s better.

The Tornado, Yet Again, Finally, at Last

She who welcomes disturbance at any price. She who swore when she was a girl, neck craned skyward, that she would welcome disturbance, always and ever. The decaying sky rotates above her head. The funnel, an hourglass, moving toward her. She was glass once, bright and transparent. She’ll fall like sand soon, like sediment into the next reservoir. The funnel reaches her like an arm. Her hair is gone. This is her storm.

Read more from Issue 17.1.