Chapter Text
Ethel spent the days after the storm in bed. Mama watched from the bedroom doorway, wringing her hands, unsure what to do.
The tornado had been the worst Shady Grove had seen in years. Buildings destroyed, trees ripped out of the ground, three deaths.
Two beloved community members and one unclaimed, unidentified drifter.
Janie visits her on the third day, it’s the last day of winter break. Her skin is darker, carrying an air of coolness from being out in the world, a rolled-up newspaper clutched in her hands.
“They found his truck, Eth.” She bites her lip, placing a soft hand over her blanketed back.
Ethel doesn’t need to ask whose truck they found. The way Janie calls her “Eth” makes her heart ache, it sounds too much like someone else.
“And?” Voice raw from screaming her lungs out.
Janie steps away, as if grief is contagious. “He wasn’t in it, but it was smashed up good.”
It makes her stomach turn. That truck he had bought with his first few paychecks from the factory. He had poured blood, sweat, and tears into getting that car. She pictures the seats ripped out, metal grotesquely twisted, cab roof peeled off. The truck— their truck— where they spent so many moments together, rotting in a junkyard, destined for China to make patio furniture and soda cans.
Will those things still hold his scent? Hold the echoes of their voices?
“Where’s Roger?” She asks, half listening to the reply, wanting the focus on something else.
“Waitin’ outside.” Janie stares at her for a beat, brown eyes wide. “Are you comin’ to school tomorrow?”
Ethel doesn’t answer, just picks at the skin around her nail bed until it bleeds.
Janie sighs, as if realizing there’s nothing more to be done. “I’ll see you at school, Eth.”
She wants to say stop fucking calling me that, instead she nods once, not meeting Janie’s eyes.
The next morning, she dragged herself to school, Will’s flannel clutched around her like armor. Mama wrinkled her nose at the torn, filthy shirt but made no comment.
Will’s seat was empty in English class, the one class they shared together. It wasn’t unusual— he regularly skipped school. Still, it twisted her up inside to see it— pushed in, empty, like never belonged to anyone at all.
A few pairs of curious eyes glanced at her in the hallways and during class. Nobody said anything. They avoided her just as they had when Daddy died.
Will’s absence was overshadowed by another soul taken during the tornado. Addy Dressure’s grandmother, Millicent, had perished in the storm. Being hard of hearing, they guessed she slept through the whole thing. Addy Dressure showed up to school in a black dress, blonde hair pinned back, blubbering in the hallway. A small crowd surrounded her in laying their hands in prayer, hugging and crying with her.
Millicent Dressure was a godly woman, always in the front pew at church dressed in her Sunday best. After Ethel’s daddy died, Millicent nearly cried harder than her mama. Ethel felt a sense of genuine sadness at her death. The darker, angrier part of her seethed— Will wasn’t receiving the same sentiments.
There would be no prayers for Willoughby Tucker. He was damned anyways.
Ethel went down to the grocery store after school, pockets empty, planning to swipe a bottle of whiskey when Mr. Moore wasn’t looking.
The bells over the door chimed as she entered the store.
Despite the winter chill she was sweating, Will’s flannel clung to her skin. She perused the isles, trying to seem busy as she waited for her opportunity. Mr. Moore was chatting to a few trade boys who were buying smokes and beer after work. The cheap whiskey was kept behind the counter, rows of amber colored bottles beckoning her to swipe them.
As she was stalking the aisles, keeping an eye on the register, she almost bumped into Mrs. Callahan. Mrs. Florence Callahan was an elderly widow who was always in everybody’s business. Her cart was full of canned goods and cases of soda. Ethel wondered who all the food was for, Mrs. Callahan lived alone. Mrs. Callahan’s eyes lit up when she saw Ethel, then softened with pity.
“Ethel, how are you dear? How’s your mama?”
“Good.” She answered, trying to channel as much cheer as she could muster into her voice. It came out weak and raw.
Mrs. Callahan frowned, wrinkles deepening. “I been thinkin’ about you. Heard you and that Tucker boy were close.”
Ethel’s heart twisted at the mention of his name, she clutched the flannel tighter around herself. “He ain’t around anymore.” She said lowly, eyes focusing on a dust bunny on the linoleum.
“Storm took so much. Doesn’t seem right, someone so young just vanishin’.” Mrs. Callahan sympathized, shaking her head.
Ethel kept her eyes on the floor. The words slipped out before she could stop them. “Wasn’t the storm.”
“What’s that dear?” Mrs. Callahan squinted, leaning her head towards Ethel, gaudy gold earrings catching the light.
“Nothin’. I gotta go.” She rushed past Mrs. Callahan, forgoing all courtesies. The trade boys turned their heads as she exited, pausing their loud conversation.
Abandoning her whiskey mission, she delved into the parking lot, eyes burning with the effort to hold back tears. Her hand found the bracelet on her wrist and began twisting it until her skin bled.
If everyone wanted to believe the storm took him, let them. It was kinder than reality. The truth was worse. The truth was her.
Ethel’s mama watched Unsolved Mysteries in the evening, which did nothing to aid her neurotic mind.
“They’re posin’ as cops, pullin’ folks from cars.” She’d mutter, face creased with dread.
It took everything in Ethel not to roll her eyes. She’d welcome being dragged off into the night if it meant she’d be free from Shady Grove’s rot.
The faces of the missing glowed across the screen at the end of the episodes. Not been seen or heard from in X years. She began keeping her own tally.
Willoughby Tucker. Not seen or heard from in X months. Each day another mark, a slow bleed in her mind.
Weeks later, the weight broke her. The storm’s memorial— dead flowers and weathered crosses— lay empty. She gunned it to Nebraska, needing to see it for herself.
It couldn’t be gone. It was.
A pile of splintered wood and rubble sat where the looming, ancient house once stood. She turned over every piece of destruction until her hands bled. Looking for any scrap of him— a piece of clothing, hair, anything. Nothing. He had disappeared. Hands full of splinters and knees raw, she buckled on the rubble, heart hammering in agony.
She lay down on the rubble, dark hair fanning out underneath her, arms spread out. The sky was blurry through her tears, bright blue, not a cloud in sight. Nothing to hide her tears.
Closing her eyes, she pictured one of the last good days they had together at Nebraska. Will had swiped a cassette tape from the bookstore, titled Golden Hits of the 60s. Soulful ballads, rock n roll, and folk music scratched out of a shitty boombox he found at the dump. They danced together on the dusty floorboards, bodies pressed close, windows open allowing the spring air to caress their skin. It could’ve been like that forever. She could’ve died in that moment and not needed to live a minute more.
The sharp stinging of her hands and rubble digging into her spine pulled her from the memory.
“You’re gonna regret this forever.” The words echoed through her mind over and over until she nearly vomited.
Sometimes he returns. A dark force pressing down on her, filling her with dread and hopelessness.
He was in the cobwebbed corner of rooms. In the fluorescent lit grocery aisles. On the couch in her dreary living room.
“Where have you been, Willoughby?” She whispers into the empty air. The smell of truck stop soap and gambling halls overwhelms her. “Is this your heaven?” She thinks. “Why ain’t I in it?”
Forever in search of Nirvana, a place that doesn’t exist. He wouldn’t sit up in the clouds, playing harps with the angels.
A wanderer in life, a wanderer in death. She clung onto that hope like the last piece of meat in the pot, savored it, chewed slowly, grinding it up till it was down to nothing.
He is everywhere and nowhere.
He comes to her in a dream, deathly pale and despondent. Her dream self runs to tackle him to the ground, beg him to never leave again. He steps back, an invisible wall keeping her out.
“You can wait if you want,” he says, voice hollow. “But it’ll never be good the way you want to believe it is.”
She wakes up to the word ‘why’ searing into her skull. It digs into her from the moment she pries her bloodshot eyes open to when the sun sinks low. She can’t find an answer. The silent oath to protect him was broken. Everything she loved, she loved straight to death.
Granting herself forgiveness was impossible. Every time she looked out the window at work to see a vacant parking lot, spent a Saturday night in an empty bed, looked at the cheap silver bracelet that hangs off her wrist, the guilt returned.
She thinks about that last night. His whiskey slurred shouts, the howl of the storm, the way she ran and hardly looked back.
She pictured what could have been. If she dragged him out by the arm to safety. If she had stayed and disappeared with him. Maybe he’d be beside her now, buried in the dirt or lying with her in bed.
Either way, she wouldn’t be alone.
Instead, she ran. The silence that followed her louder than his shouting ever was.
It wasn’t the storm that took him. It was her leaving.
She did it to herself. And she deserved to suffer.