Hurricane Season, page 4
“What are you doing?” Fig called.
Mark startled and turned to look at her. “That your dad?” he asked.
“Yeah, with one of his students. He’s a musician.”
Mark nodded. “He’s good.”
“He’s great,” Fig fired back. “Sometimes you can’t tell that now, but he is.”
“I can tell,” Mark said, and Fig didn’t know what to make of that.
They listened to her dad play the same line again and again—and then his student repeated it slower as the sun started to fall behind the trees, leaving them both covered in shadows.
Still, Mark kept listening.
Fig thought about asking him if he knew anything about brilliant musicians, about royalties, about income. If he knew anything about Van Gogh, or anything about being crazy, or being sad—or just plain worried that all those things might come together and swallow them all up someday.
But eventually, Mark would hear from their other neighbors, and he would see her dad walking and talking to himself on his way to stand at the ocean. He would realize that sometimes her dad went weeks without leaving the house, sometimes went longer without changing his clothes or shaving his face. He would hear the stretches of days that her dad went without students, when the piano fell out of tune—and still he played, the music not quite right and slightly alarming. He would realize what everyone on her block already knew, and he would write off her dad like everyone else did.
Fig did not want Mark to ever learn all these things and then look at her, to make the connection that Miss Williams had.
Her dad’s music came to a stop, and the art books started to feel heavy in her arms. Fig checked her cell phone for the time and figured his lesson must be ending. She turned back to Mark and gave him a shoulder shrug and half smile. “I’ll see you around,” she said, and quickly turned to head up the walkway to the front door.
A car turned onto the street and into Fig’s driveway. And before Fig could reach the knob, the door swung open, revealing a girl who looked about her age with thick curly hair and bright blue glasses. She was carrying sheet music in her hands. “Oh!” the girl said. She had freckles on her nose. “Hello.”
“Hi,” Fig replied. Her dad’s students usually didn’t speak much to her, and they were more often than not a lot older.
The girl waved at the car in the driveway, and Fig turned to watch the woman inside it—the girl’s mother, probably—wave back. “I’m Molly. Mr. Arnold’s your dad, right? I saw your picture on the walls inside.”
“Yeah,” Fig said carefully. “He’s my dad.”
“This was my first lesson,” Molly continued. “I’m trying to get a head start so I can get into MCPA in a couple years. You know, the performing arts high school?” Fig was about to respond, but Molly’s mom honked a quick little honk, and Molly nodded in her direction. “I gotta go, but seriously—your dad’s incredible. You’re so lucky.” She ran down the front steps and the walkway toward her mom’s car, and Fig watched her go, holding the art books in her arms a little tighter.
Molly’s words made Fig smile, but she couldn’t understand why they also made her want to cry.
When Fig got home from school the next day, there was a different car in the driveway. She didn’t think her dad had a lesson, and they never had visitors. She dropped her backpack on the front lawn and ran to the door.
She quickly swung it open, keeping her shoes on as she hurried into the house, where she found her dad and a man she didn’t know standing in the living room. The man wore a nice, crisp shirt and a tie, and he held a folder and plastic container in his hands. Her dad wore one of his wrinkled white undershirts and jeans, his feet bare and his hands buried deep in his pockets. They both turned and looked at her.
“Why don’t you go get your homework started, love?” her dad said, his eyes pleading.
“What’s going on?” Fig asked, not moving. The TV was on, and a radar map of Tropical Storm Diane took up the full screen.
“Hello,” the man said. “No need to worry. I’m John, with Child Protection and Permanency. They explained to you about these visits?”
Fig’s dad stood straighter as he looked from Fig to John and back again. “She knows,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Dad,” Fig said, unable to take her eyes away from John and the package in his hand. She wasn’t ready for this. She hadn’t been at home all day. She didn’t get to check in on her dad to make sure he was all there, and the TV was on and they were talking about the approaching storm and what if her dad said something about that? Did this man, John, already know about what happened last year? The last CP&P lady who came to the door said they had a file from last time—had John read that file? Did he have it with him? Would he think it could happen again? Could it happen again?
She looked over at the calendar on the wall, at all the crossed-out dates, at the September header that meant there was still so much time left in which things could go wrong.
“It’s all right, Fig,” her dad said, getting her attention. “Go inside and start your homework, and I’ll come get you when we’re done here, okay?”
He was rarely cross with her, but there was a bitter edge in his voice that stopped her short. He gave her a smile, but it didn’t look right, and his face was flushed, and a drop of sweat was dripping down one side of his forehead. Fig didn’t want to leave him. She wanted to stay right there and make sure that he didn’t say anything damaging, make sure John didn’t hurt him, make sure nothing went wrong.
“Dad,” she said again.
“Go, Fig.”
He left no room for argument, so she did as she was told.
That didn’t stop her from keeping a close watch anyway. She kept her door open just enough so she could sit on her bed and tilt her head to see down the hall, where John opened up a small plastic container and handed her dad what looked like a small toothbrush. “Place this between your lower cheek and gum,” John said. Fig watched as her dad did as he was told. “And keep that there for a moment while it collects your saliva.”
Fig remembered the first CP&P lady telling them that someone would show up to administer drug tests. She knew her dad didn’t do drugs—he didn’t even drink—but she didn’t like watching him do this. She wondered if that was what Miss Williams thought the day he turned up looking for her in art class. If Miss Williams called CP&P because she thought her dad wasn’t sober.
John told her dad he could take the toothbrush drug test out of his mouth and then took it from him. They stood there in silence for a moment—her dad’s hands fidgeting against his thighs as John’s eyes remained on the test in his hand. Fig knew her dad didn’t do drugs, but she found herself holding her breath anyway.
“Okay, Mr. Arnold, you’re all set,” John finally said. Fig breathed easier, and her dad exhaled loudly enough for her to hear it. John reached into the folder he had tucked under his armpit (Is that the file ?) and pulled out some papers. “Here are some brochures and referrals for doctors that come highly recommended. A lot of them have wait lists, so it could take a while to get an appointment, and you’ll have to sort through to see which accept your insurance. You want to get this taken care of quickly so that we can see that there’s progress when we pop in.”
Her dad took the papers, staring down at them in his hands. “Right.”
“If you need any assistance, here’s a number you can call. We can help guide you through this, Mr. Arnold. It’s important.”
“Right,” her dad said again.
Fig moved away from the door to sit on her bed, listening as her dad walked John to the door, listening as the door opened and closed. She even listened for John’s car as it drove away.
Her dad came and knocked softly on her door. “Fig? You okay?” he asked as he entered. He had her backpack in his hands. “I found this outside.”
“Thanks.” Fig offered him her best attempt at a smile. She couldn’t hold it very long. “Is this going to happen a lot? Are they going to come by a lot?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. I hope not.”
She fiddled with the zipper on her backpack. The random visits were what scared her the most. She didn’t know how her dad would be feeling at any given moment. She didn’t know exactly when any future hurricane would make landfall. “Me too.”
Her dad hovered at the threshold, playing with the doorknob that was loose and wiggled when he touched it. “I don’t want you to worry about any of this, all right? It’ll get sorted. I . . .” He drifted off with a shrug. “Please try not to worry.”
Fig glanced at her now-open backpack on the floor, the library book of Van Gogh’s letters poking out behind her folder.
“Okay?” he asked, still toying with her doorknob.
Fig looked up at him and nodded. “Okay.”
5
Landscape Under a Stormy Sky
“What am I in the eyes of most people?” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother. “A nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person—somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.”
Fig’s eyes were blurry as she struggled to read the words, written by Van Gogh but echoing in her mind in her dad’s voice: “Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.”
The reading wasn’t easy—Van Gogh’s letters were lengthy and confusing and difficult for Fig—but these words she understood. They expressed something she was familiar with. Van Gogh was an outcast to most people, just like her dad. And, just like her dad, he was comforted by art and the music inside of him.
Fig closed the book that sat on her lap as she rode the school bus, blinking back tears. She leaned her forehead against the window to stare outside at the trees and traffic lights that knocked about in the harsh winds.
The storm was finally coming.
As Fig’s bus drove across the highway that separated her town from the town where her school stood, she looked at the parking lots of the shopping centers that they rode by. Those lots were full, and people walked from the stores to their cars, carrying water bottles and canned goods and everything else needed in case Tropical Storm Diane moved, as predicted, up along their shores. Lines at the gas stations would grow longer and longer. Fig and her dad planned to board up their windows when she got home.
Fig’s fingers toyed with her earlobe as she reopened the book of Van Gogh’s letters. “My mind,” Van Gogh wrote, “is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”
Just like her dad was always pulled toward a storm.
However, except for the growing winds, the clichéd “calm before the storm” was holding true. Fig walked down the hallway of her school, past the windows where sunlight continued to break through the darkening clouds. She tried to focus on that, on the bits of blue sky she could see from inside the school building, and not the anxiety that rolled in her stomach like the storm she knew would also roll in soon.
“Did you decide on what to paint yet?” Danny said, taking Fig by surprise as he jogged from the other end of the hallway to fall in step beside her.
“What?”
“For Miss Williams,” he said. “Are you going to paint something like Van Gogh?”
“Oh. I don’t know what I’m painting yet,” Fig said. She was reading a lot but still at a loss what to do with the research. “I just wanted to learn more about him, for now.”
“Did you? Learn about him, I mean.”
She sighed. “Well, you were right. He did cut off his ear.”
“I thought so.”
“He was sick, though, I think,” Fig said, and slowed to a stop. They reached the school auditorium, where Fig had gym class. “That’s not the same as being crazy.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“I don’t . . . The books are hard to read, and I’m still trying to figure it out. But he was just sick.” Fig frowned. She didn’t know the words to explain. “He couldn’t help it.”
Danny bit the inside of his cheek. “What about your dad?” he asked.
It shouldn’t have shocked her that her classmates were figuring out her dad was sick, but still, Danny’s question took Fig’s breath away. “He’s fine,” she said, and pushed open the auditorium door with more force than necessary. It swung open hard and clanked against the wall.
Danny hurried after her as she headed inside. “I didn’t mean . . . Wait, Fig, slow down.”
The late bell rang, but Fig stopped anyway. She turned to look expectantly at Danny.
“Are you going to Ava Washington’s Halloween party?” he said. “It’s obviously not until next month, but everyone’s already talking about going.”
Fig blinked. She wasn’t expecting that. Nor had she known everyone was talking about the party. Across the auditorium, Ava and the other girls were already sitting on the gym floor, dressed in their gym clothes and carelessly rolling a basketball back and forth. No one had talked with Fig about the party, at least.
A few of the other girls in their class pushed past Fig to go get changed. She was blocking the door to the locker room. “I don’t know,” Fig said carefully. “I’m not sure I’m invited.”
“Well, I’m inviting you,” Danny said. “My mom and I can pick you up if you want. We can go together.”
Fig hesitated. The wind from outside suddenly blew hard against the windows, and the sound echoed throughout the auditorium. Fig jumped; worry vibrated through her arms and legs like pins and needles as she looked up, sunlight now hidden by dark clouds, shadows covering the gymnasium.
“Are you afraid of storms?” Danny asked.
Fig took a deep breath, and confided in someone for the very first time. “It’s my dad. Storms make him . . .” She winced, not knowing what to say that would keep Danny from laughing at her. That would keep him from thinking about that day in art class.
But Danny didn’t laugh. “I hope he’s okay.”
Fig felt like she might cry. “Thanks.”
Danny smiled wide, the gap between his teeth front and center.
The dark gray clouds eventually completely covered the sky, leaving the town shrouded in gloom. The winds hit against the windows of her school bus, whistling loudly. The rain started, the sound of it against the metal of the bus bringing back the pins and needles in Fig’s arms and legs, making her wonder what her dad loved about those sounds. The rain wasn’t heavy, not yet, but it was steady enough that as she watched it fall, Fig’s stomach started to hurt. She wanted to be home, with her dad, boarding up their windows together, making sure everything was safe.
The rain and wind picked up even more as she exited the bus, and she held the hood of her jacket in place as she ran toward her house. No extra cars, no CP&P visit. She saw Mark across the street—boarding up his own windows and preparing his home for what may come—and she returned the wave he gave her. “You guys need help boarding up?” he called.
“We’ve got it!” Fig yelled.
“Stay safe,” he returned as Fig ran into her house for shelter.
The wind blew the door closed behind her with a loud slam. “Dad? I’m home! Did you get the boards ready for the windows?”
No response. Fig tossed her backpack to the side, kicking off her shoes and unzipping her jacket as she began to search the rooms for her dad. “Dad?” she called again, checking the couch and his bed and the other places where he sought solace. Her dad being asleep wouldn’t be ideal—she was too small to get the house ready by herself—but she would deal with that once she found him.
But she couldn’t find him.
And then she noticed that his shoes were gone.
Her stomach sank and hurt, and she knew—she knew—that he loved a storm, he loved to watch a storm, he loved to stand at the beach with his toes in the waves, staring out at the sea as the storm rolled in, and she couldn’t call the police like she did last time, not with CP&P breathing down their necks, not with the file of what happened during last year’s hurricane and this year’s art class. He was out there alone, and she would have to find him and drag him home, or he would be stuck out there, and Fig hated storms, and and and . . .
She quickly grabbed her shoes and pulled them on, nearly forgetting her jacket but grabbing it at the last second as she ran back out the door, which slammed again behind her. The rain was coming down harder now, and the wind whipped her hair in front of her face.
“Hey!” Mark called from across the street. “What are you doing? Get back inside!”
He was at his front door but moved quickly across his yard, then stopping short, as if he were about to run across the street to scoop her up before realizing that he had no right to. Fig wasn’t about to let him stop her. “I have to go find my dad!”
“What?” he called, moving closer.
“My dad!” she shouted through the wind. “He’s not home . . . He sometimes . . . I don’t have time for this!”
“You have to get inside,” he said, coming closer, and Fig balled her hands into fists, wanting to cry. Ms. Minkle would have ignored her.
“He won’t come back if I don’t get him!” She was grateful for the raindrops for a moment because they fell down her cheeks, so it didn’t matter that her tears fell with them. Two houses down, a branch on one of the Ramirezes’ trees—one that was already splintered from the last big storm—cracked and fell and blew against their house with a rattle that caused her to jump, caused her stomach to hurt even more, caused her to tug hard on her earlobe.
Mark was suddenly standing in front of her, his hands clamping tight on her shoulders as he bent over to her level, the rain falling off his short hair as he blinked the drops out of his eyes. “Get inside. Now. I’ll go get him.”
