Storm Warning

LYRIC ESSAY

by Amy Ash

          In the tri-fold mirror of the bridal boutique, she hates the large, hooped skirts of the wedding gowns, the excess of fabric. When she tries them on, she becomes a strange, sad cloud. Holding back tears, she thinks of rain.
         It is all too much. She thinks it would be better just to elope, like her mother suggested. No family, no fuss. The day would be theirs alone.
         They are in Omaha visiting her brother, planning the upcoming wedding. That evening, she and her fiancé join her brother Dan and his wife Adrienne for drinks, ending up at a small, local bar with a tropical theme. The pale, crinkly grass skirts stapled to the tables resemble a Nebraska harvesting disaster. They drink and drink. This goes on all night. This went on every night for Dan.
         In Nebraska, warning signs of a tornado no one heeds:

Ground-level flashes of bright aqua to white near a thunderstorm, suggestive of power lines snapped by strong wind. The cloud base illuminated by lightning.

         She feels the evening pressing in on her. Strong, persistent rotation of cloud formations, whirling dust or debris. The air is still. It is she who is spinning. And her brother—his life just beginning to spiral.
         It would be the last time she saw Adrienne, the idea of sisterhood swept away in the wind. She filed for divorce soon after, saying enough, enough. It would be months before the whirlwind of her wedding, months before everyone she loved was swept up in the danger and debris.

         Even after eighteen years of marriage, she and her husband rarely speak of it. The weather changes. Clouds roll in, loom, and leave. But only glance upward and you will find darkness somewhere in the sky, lurking.
         Another tornado warning sign: Loud, continuous roar or rumble which doesn’t fade in a few seconds like thunder. A sound that mounts and mounts.
         Like a pounding headache. Like someone banging urgently at the door.

          She and her husband are awakened at 6:30 a.m. the morning after their wedding in the honeymoon suite of the boutique hotel rented for their ceremony and reception. Their friend Bill had been pounding on the door. Finally, the police tell the desk clerk that if she does not open the door, they will. Get up, Bill says. It’s bad.

          The bride doesn’t have her contacts in. She feels around for her glasses, but is led outside before she can locate them. For this, she will always be grateful.
          The scene that morning is filtered through a blurred haze. Her movements slow, unsure. She is drifting through a heavy fog. Clouds cataract the sky.
          Eventually, she locates someone at the edge of the pool in a tan uniform with a badge. The corner of his sunglasses reflects the sharp sunlight in her direction. She makes her way over to him. I’m the bride, she says. What has happened here.
          She turns her head to the thick, chopping noise in the field next to the hotel, able to make out the imprecise outline of a medical helicopter. Everything spins.
          Hail or heavy rain followed by either dead calm or a fast, intense wind shift. Many tornadoes are wrapped in heavy precipitation and can’t be seen.
          The sky overhead, fragile, flushes into rash. The sunrise, a raw, open wound. The clouds, threatening.
          She turns to look up the stairs to the balcony. She will remember only the shape, only the color. Blood bright against a crisp, white sheet. The stretcher pushing past her.
          She doesn’t know who it is. All she knows is that someone was badly hurt. And that her brother and their friend Steve are missing. Her husband is ushered upstairs to look at the crime scene, broken glass like diamonds scattered on the carpet, the larger splotch of blood on the patio.

         Cyclone of sadness, she cannot control this violently rotating column of air working its way out of her throat in harsh, awful sobs.

         The record button of the police tape recorder makes a sound like a dry tongue clicking against the roof of a mouth. She doesn’t know why the sheriff’s department would want a statement from her. She tells them how she slept through everything. She tells them that when she went back to the room with her husband, the air outside felt calm.
         Everything she knows is secondhand, except that David showed up with his sisters, Ginger and Nina. She didn’t even know that he had tried to start a fight earlier at the reception. Her husband didn’t tell her until afterwards, not wanting to worry her.
         Your brother was flirting with Nina by the pool, her husband later explained. Nina’s brother was not happy. The bride’s brother, fairly drunk and newly divorced, was flirting with a lot of people that night.

         At the wedding earlier, everything had felt perfect. Even with the flowers that didn’t arrive, even with the preacher dropping the rings in the grass. Clouds like a layered cake. Clouds blooming like flowers.
         Her bridal gown fanning wide on the ground. On the dance floor, spinning, she was an inverted funnel.
         Ground swirl pattern has such a lovely sound.
         No one anticipated the turn the night would take. No hook echo, no warning before the sudden turn, volatile conditions escalating.

         Atmospheric instability fueled by anger and alcohol, long after the reception had ended. They say tornadoes that strike at night are more deadly, as many people are sleeping, unaware of the danger headed in their direction. Spotters cannot see through the dark.

         She did not see David in her brother’s room, drunken conversation and coke quickly turning to a rumble and roar of anger. She did not see how David slammed her brother’s face into the floor, breaking his nose on impact. How the blood seeped down his shirt and into the carpet, blossoming. How the blade first separated the skin of Steve’s arm, the sharp metal held against his throat. She did not see her brother knock the knife away, throw it over his shoulder like a bridal bouquet. The violent swirl of them, tearing through the room.
         She did not see her brother and Steve heave David unto the patio. She did not see them kick him until he stopped moving.
         She did not see her friend Bill in the aftermath, holding David’s tongue to keep him from choking on the blood, pressing the towel against his head to slow the bleeding.
         She hears of all of this secondhand.

         She will remember being dragged out of bed, wedding guests emerging from their rooms. The crowd gathering. She will remember holding David’s mother, collapsing, drawn into the debris cloud together. She will remember telling David’s mother that she was sorry and hearing an apology in return, how horrible this must be, neither of them knowing for sure what happened. Only knowing that David was not conscious. That Dan and Steve were missing.
         There will be no apologies to each other offered after that day.
         She will remember how the hotel employees did not know how to speak to her and her new husband, awkwardly ushering them away from the commotion to pay the bill. Her brother had rented his room under their name. Blood; debris. They will have no way to pay for the damages.

         She believes Steve when he later tells her that it was self-defense, that her brother saved his life. For a whole day, though, they hid out, leaving everyone to search through the rubble of this wedding, stunned survivors.
         It will be nearly a month before David regains consciousness after remaining in a medically induced coma. Everyone is afraid he may die.

         Weeks later, her brother comes to visit, needing to appear in court to officially legalize his return to Nebraska. It will be the last she and her husband will see or hear from her brother for quite some time after his arrest. For months, nothing.
         Her mother will call weekly, crying. You don’t know what this is doing to me. Her mother wants to erase it all—the wedding, the aftermath, the wreckage and ruin wind-swept into dust. The weight of guilt and shame piles onto her chest. The weight of worry.
         It will be almost a year before the allegations against her brother are dropped. Years more before any acknowledgement of addiction, any talk of recovery.

         Even now, years later, the air is charged when their anniversary rolls around. In her mother’s home there are no pictures of her wedding. The living room wall, a blank, cloudless sky.