Page 110 of Devil

If the pantry’s opening were rotated ninety degrees, if it had faced the windows as the cabinets did…

It doesn’t bear thinking about. Even if the pantry had faced the windows, I would have been there, between Birdie and the gashing fury of the storm. She would have been safe.

Birdie allows herself to be led outside and up the driveway, holding tight to my hand as we get far enough up the hill to see that the farm is…gone. There’s no other word for it, no other word that captures the full reality. The yellow farmhouse is not just flattened but unrecognizable, a clutter and drift of wood and detritus, its shingles caught in the stripped trees, and only the cellar still where it should be. The barn as well is no longer standing in any meaningful sense, but it does look like it put up a better fight. The oak beams were well joined and are mostly still together, even though they’ve been torn free and knocked over. Lincoln Logs under the fist of a petulant child.

Birdie’s truck has a piece of metal rammed through the windshield and embedded in the passenger seat. I think it’s part of an antenna, and it juts out of the crackled windshield like Saint Longinus’s spear—confirmation, punctuation. A sign.

My own truck has been rolled past the hill house but it landed back on its wheels and, despite the slightly crumpled roof, looks drivable.

Birdie turns away from the ruin of the farmhouse, and I turn with her, still holding her hand tight. I keep seeing her standing in front of the storm, waiting for it. A suicide but passive enough to still be welcomed at the gates.

Fuck.

“Come on, Birdie,” I tell her. “It’s time to go home.”

44

BELL

She wantsto check on someone named Paxico not far up the road, and we find a cantankerous old man who’s just climbed out of his basement to find his house completely intact but one of his outbuildings ripped open like a can of sardines. The building oozes metal—tools, auto parts, bits of what look like very specialized machines—and I see an entire engine block deposited in the culvert running alongside the road.

After a while, Paxico chases us off, reminding Birdie that he has a generator and grousing about the time it will take him to catalog everything for the insurance claim, and I take it from Birdie’s demeanor that his complaining is a good sign and the reason she feels comfortable leaving him.

We continue home.

The tornado apparently fell apart at the edge of the city, tumbling into nothing while the storm itself went on to harass the towns flecked eastward along the Missouri. Only twenty miles of tornado path, all told, but twenty miles of scarring, flinging damage.

We skirt around power lines and edge around tossed cars. It looks like everyone’s dressers and garages were tipped upside down and shaken out. Broken wood is everywhere; wet leaves and dirt are stuck to the road signs that haven’t been ripped out and flung sideways.

Kansas City itself is only wet and littered with debris, mostly sticks and leaves, with some loose branches and trash cans and bicycles dotting the road. The warehouse is completely untouched, save for an upside-down charcoal grill on the sidewalk outside. Birdie and I barely look at it.

I lead Birdie straight into the shower, and she lets me, not even protesting when I turn it on while we’re still fully dressed. I strip off our wet clothes and begin washing her from head to toe. When I finish with her hair, she holds out her hand, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s asking for the sponge. I hand it to her, and she starts washing me in return.

Silently, this all happens, and it’s the only way it could have because our ears still whine from the tornado, because we just lived through something meant to kill us and that she wanted to kill her, because she left me and left me for some good reasons. And now we’re naked together, and there’s no way words alone can hold all that in one place, especially right now.

She washes my hair too, working at my scalp with her strong sculptor’s fingers, rinsing, conditioning, and rinsing again. When she finishes, she steps forward and presses a soft, wet kiss to my collarbone.

“Birdie,” I murmur, barely hearing myself with my fucked-up ears and the hiss of the shower.

She lifts her eyes, and for the millionth time in my life, I am humbled and worshipful at the sight. At how big and soft her eyes are, with so many shades of blue, with so much light pouring out of them. A little haunted, a little saintly, eyes that see things the rest of us can’t.

And then…then I am grateful. Because I see loneliness and I see shock, but I also see anger and longing and just plainsadness. Whatever emptiness came over her isn’t lashing her to itself; it isn’t rooted inside.

I’m looking at a very sad girl who hasn’t been happy in so long that happiness itself petrifies her. A girl whose ability to hope is so thoroughly driven from her life that she can only think of it as a lie and love as a mirage.

A girl so cold that it hurts her to warm up. And I warmed her up too fast maybe, shocked her system and gave her something like thermal burns. Tissue damage. Chilblains of the soul.

We dry off, brush our teeth, and feed Lilith. And then the three of us climb into bed.

It isn’t yet six in the evening, but there’s no question. It’s bedtime.

I drag her against my chest, where she tucks her head, and stroke her back until she falls asleep. And it isn’t until her breathing goes steady and even and deep that I let myself—for the first time since my mother died—cry.

I wakein the middle of the night. We’re in mostly the same position, except Lilith is curled up by my head on the pillow, purring louder than the tornado, but I know immediately that Birdie is awake.

“If this isn’t okay, you can tell me,” I say.

Thisbeing together in bed, naked, like a couple would be, like we were before she left.