Lucky, again

Steve Barnes

She could not help it, could not stop sending text messages, making phone calls. Thank Heaven for cell phones, she thought; their conventional, old-fashioned, wireline phone had minutes ago stopped offering a dial tone. Please, let the cell towers keep functioning. The cable television signal was as yet uninterrupted. They are at their best, the TV weather people, when the weather is its worst.

The wife, pulse elevated, was doing what so many other Arkansans, hearts racing, were doing: reaching out. First, the grands. Of course. The eldest, she remembered, was on business in the northwest corner — Fayetteville or Springdale — and well outside danger’s reach, as was her husband. But the younger of the two girls — they weren’t girls any longer, but they would forever and always be the grandmother’s girls, you understand — was farther south, perhaps still in class, the semester nearing its end. Was something less welcome approaching?

The grandmother’s index finger danced across the screen. Kids, they could do this so much faster, they use their thumbs, kids… Are you okay????

One minute. No response. Two. Silence. In the dorm? The lab? Surely not downtown, please… The phone chirped, its little screen brightened.

It all gud everything we safe. We have power do u?

The strict grammarian grandmother was too relieved to offer still another lecture on the imperatives of proper English, even in smartphone messages.

Stay inside she typed. And: Luv u no near windows!

The littlest one now, the not-so-little fourth-grader, the one who picks tiny blossoms of anything and brings them to her in a little paper cup: No matter that his school had a big safe room and, from the TV reports, did not appear to be in imminent danger. The lad’s father, anticipating the grandmother’s call, dialed her: He’s okay, the school’s okay, but they’re letting out early and I’m on the way to pick him up now…Yes, the traffic is starting to get bad…no, stay where you are, I can get to his school before you could….Yes, I’ll stay in touch…Yes, I’ll tell you when I get to the school… Yes, we’ll go straight home…Yes, we’ll call you…Yes, we have plenty of batteries… No, stay there.

Gratitude: Her daughter-in-law, the youngster’s mom, was far removed from the hot zone. But her own daughter, alone in the home where she and her husband, not yet returned from a faraway convention, alone in the home where those “girls” were reared — the Doppler sweep put it frighteningly close to the path of the storm. And then not.

And then a crackling noise, and the room fell dark and the screen went blank and there were no TV meteorologists, no radar images, no real-time pictures of that angry black monster. But the cell kept working.

I’m okay. I think it’s past us, the daughter said. The skies were still gray but not as dark, and the air was calm enough that she felt safe in stepping outside to survey her street, her neighbor’s houses. Some branches, but small ones and only a few. Electricity? Yeah, so far, and the TV, the cable. I’m watching now. Are those sirens I hear?

Yes, they were. The hall closet, get there, now. With a flashlight. And the cell. Typing, to her husband: Where you now? You, not “u.” Didn’t take that much longer, those two extra letters. Leaving out the verb, those three letters, that’s where the savings were. A lot of noise outside now. A lot. Again, the phone, this time: U freeway?

Yes, but miles away. Traffic. Then, two hours later, home. The skies were clearing, not to sunshine but to that metallic gray, more than enough light to permit a husband and wife to inspect their property. The roof, fine; no shingles missing. There was barely a leaf on the lawn, mowed only the day before. The street, not even the smallest limb.

“We dodged it again,” the husband sighed. Thirty-one years in the same house in Arkansas weather: innumerable severe thunderstorms, more than a couple tornados, bushels of hail, tons of ice, feet of snow. Never more than a few scattered branches, a couple days without electricity. And now they had dodged it again.

They drove as far from their home as the uprooted trees and the twisted metal and the police would permit — about three blocks, about three minutes. They could see beyond the barricades to a few, very few, of the houses and shops that had not dodged it. Why them and not us? they wondered. They turned back, toward home.