Page 44

“Mother? Dad?” I croaked, fumbling toward the bed. I could hear the rattling of Mother’s breathing even from the door, even over the sound of the fading wind. But it was only when I came closer that I realized how bad she was. Dad had her in his arms, and he was touching the skin of her face gently, whispering in her ear. He was wearing a strange, panicked smile on his face, as if he were trying to stay calm. One side of his face was bruised, the skin around his eye black and purple and swollen.

I sat gently beside Mother and took her hand. It was icy cold, so I rubbed it to warm it between my fingers.

“What happened?” Henry asked, coming to the side of the bed beside me.

“Tried to beat the duster but it came on so fast,” Dad said hoarsely. “Never seen anything like it. I completely lost my bearings once it got dark—kept getting in and out of the car trying to figure out where we were. Couldn’t find any landmarks I recognized, and the barn wasn’t where I expected it to be, so I thought we’d come in the wrong gate. Jesse was flailing, knocking the cart around as she reared up, so I got out to let her off her harness, but she knocked me to the ground. That’s the last thing I remember for a while.”

“Why is Mother in such bad shape?” I asked Dad, and he looked stricken.

“She must have unhitched Jesse and then she somehow hauled me back into the car, because by the time I came to, I was in the back seat and she was curled over my face, trying to keep the dust off me. I don’t know how long she was exposed like that. Too long. The dirt was filling up around us in the car. I thought we’d drown in it.”

We all looked to Mother then. Her lips were tinged with blue, and the skin on her face had a gray hue.

“We need a doctor,” Henry said.

“How?” Dad said brokenly, looking toward the window. It was light out again, but the sun would set soon, and all I could see was dust. The barn was completely buried—I could tell from the height of the mound that it had collapsed under the weight of dust. Poor Joker was gone, and whether she ran out into the storm or suffocated, Jesse was as good as gone too.

Our nearest neighbor was three miles away, and just like us, the Hutchinson family had neither a phone nor a car. There was a chance if one or more of us tried to walk there, even through the dark and the tail end of the storm, we’d find they were not in any position to help us. And then we’d have a three-mile walk home in the dark to contend with.

“I’ll go,” Henry said.

“You can’t,” Dad said flatly, shaking his head. Henry opened his mouth to protest and Dad exclaimed, “Goddammit, Henry! Would you think something throughfor once in your goddamned life? What if the storm rears up again? The only reason Mother and I didn’t suffocate right away was that we had the car to shelter in. It’s not worth the risk.”

“But—she looks—” Henry started to say. Then he broke off.

“Dad,” I whispered, a different kind of tear filling my eyes now. “I don’t know if Mother can wait until tomorrow.”

“Well, she has to,” Dad snapped, but then his expression crumbled, and he looked between me and Henry, remorse in his gaze. “She’d kill me if I let you go out there again. We just have to wait.” He turned his attention back to Mother, and he kissed her forehead and whispered gently, “You have to hold on, Ida, you hear me? Just until the sun comes up. Then we’ll get you help.”

Henry went outside to bring us fresh water and to survey the damage, but he refused to give us details of what he’d seen. Dad stayed in the bedroom with Mother, but I got a broom and started to clean. I swept so much dirt out of that house that there were piles of it, two and three feet high, all along the edge of the porch.

Within an hour, it was dark again—this time as it was supposed to be, because the sun had finally set.

I don’t know when I realized Mother wasn’t going to make it. Maybe I should have known from when I first saw how bad she was, or maybe it was better that I didn’t realize, since there was nothing I could do anyway. Slowly, though, over the hours of that long night, I started to wonder and then I started to suspect and then a heavy dread settled over me.

Dad was crying on and off, sometimes silent tears rolling from his eyes that might have been from the dust anyway. Other times his whole body shook with sobs. Henry sat on the floor in the corner of the room, arms wrapped around himself as he stared off into space. I took a clean damp cloth and wiped the dust from Mother’s face and hands. I wet her lips and tried to trickle water into her mouth. Her breaths grew shallower as the night wore on, and the hint of gray and blue in her skin became more obvious, even in the dim light of the kerosene lamp.

“I’ll go anyway. I’ll walk all the way to Oakden if I have to—” Henry blurted, stumbling to his feet, but Dad shut that right down.

“It’s still windy outside and we have no idea if the whole storm has passed. I am notlosing two of you in one night!”

Henry slumped again, and the next time I tried to get Mother to drink some water, it ran from her lips onto the pillow. She was limp and heavy against the bedding.

“Please wake up, Mother,” I choked out. There was still grit in my eyes and in my hair and even between my damned teeth. We were all still covered in the very thing that was taking her from us, and there was no way to fix that. We just had to sit in it. “Mother, I love you. Please wake up.”

Not long after that, she exhaled one last gentle breath and she never took another. By then, we were all too exhausted to cry. We sat around her body on the bed, me and Dad holding her hand, Henry slumped by her thighs. The horrible events of those past twelve hours started to feel warped, like I was caught in a surreal dream. Henry eventually climbed up onto the bed beside Mother’s body, as if he were too tired to hold himself up. I stretched out too, still holding her hand.

I didn’t mean to doze, but the highs and the lows of that day drained every bit of strength from my body and sleep simply overtook me. Sometime later I was startled awake by a loud sound. I sat up, confused and bleary-eyed, then cast my gaze around the room.

Mother’s body was on the bed beside me. Henry bolted upright too, his eyes as red-raw as the skin on his face.

But Dad was nowhere to be seen. I went to slip off the bed to look for him and to investigate the sound, but Henry put his hand out to stop me.

“No,” he whispered. “No.”

“But where is—”

“Stayhere,” he hissed, and something about his tone scared me so badly, I did. I watched him run from the room, my heart starting to race with a fresh wave of confused dread. Then I finally looked at Mother.

The sun was rising outside and she was bathed in the delicate light of a new day—casting a pinkish glow over her skin. I touched her cheek, telling myself we got it wrong and she was still there—but her skin was cold and she was really gone. How on earth would we go on without her?

Not all of us would.

Some of us wouldn’t even try.

And then I knew what the sound had been. I scrambled from the bed after Henry, running through the house and over the dusty porch, stumbling through the mounds of soft earth that had been dumped all over our home and yard.

I came to a screaming halt when I rounded the corner of the house closest to the bench seat and that Texas live oak. The sun was rising behind the tree, casting vibrant shades of pink and red and gold over the new morning.

In silhouette, I saw the outline of that battered tree and I saw the bench beneath it, and then I saw my brother on his knees in the dirt, cradling my father’s body in his arms.