The Year of the Storm

The Brewing Tempest

I was fourteen the first time I came in contact with a real storm. It cut a line right down the center of my life, pulling my sister and mother away from me and cleanly dividing that year into a before and after so radically different that I've come to think of fourteen as not only the longest year of my life, but also the most important because it was the last year of childhood and the first year of the rest of my life, a life that would be forever marked as different in subtle and insidious ways from the people around me.

Fourteen was the year my mother and sister disappeared, the year I lost my mind. The year I learned secrets that will stay with me until I am no longer able to think of them.

And fourteen, most of all, was the year of the storm.

—

“Mantooth's voice is masculine and powerful, flavoring the pages with the Alabama wilderness, the turmoil of family and how all these elements work to shape and nurture teenage boys into men.”

—Frank Bill

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Copyright © 2013 by John Mantooth.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61313-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mantooth, John, 1971–

The year of the storm / John Mantooth. —Berkley trade paperback edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-425-26574-1

1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. Storms—Fiction. 3. Strangers—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9199.4.M337Y43 2013

813'.6—dc23

2013003379

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley trade paperback edition / June 2013

Cover photo: Shutterstock. Cover design: George Long.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Becky, with gratitude.

Many people helped this book make it into print. Without agent Beth Fleisher's keen insight and unwavering patience, this book would still be just a manuscript languishing on my hard drive. Amanda Ng, my editor, also deserves a huge thanks for nudging the book in the right direction and being an indispensable source of knowledge and good advice. My writing group read this book first and then again after each revision (sorry guys). Sam W. Anderson, Kim Despins, Kurt Dinan, Petra Miller, and Erik Williams are the best writing group any writer could hope to have. Thanks, guys, I'll probably never repay what you have given to me so freely. Thanks also to all my friends, supporters, and kind first readers. I won't try to list them all, but there are a few that I would be remiss not to mention: John Rector, Frank Bill, Benjamin Percy, Dan Chaon, Joey Kennedy, Holly Goddard Jones, Usman Taneer Malik, Bracken MacLeod, Kevin Wallis, Beverly Bambury, Ian Rogers, John Langan, Paul Tremblay, Laird Barron, Jamie Nelson, Mary Rees, John Hornor Jacobs, Erik Smetana, Frank J. Mueller III, and Lawrence Wharton.

Finally, deepest thanks and love for my wife, Becky. This book is as much yours as it is mine because you gave me the freedom to write it.

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

 

Chapter One: DANNY

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four: WALTER

Chapter Five

Chapter Six: DANNY

Chapter Seven: Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten: WALTER

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve: DANNY

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen: WALTER

Chapter Fifteen: DANNY

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen: WALTER

Chapter Eighteen: DANNY

Chapter Nineteen: WALTER

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three: DANNY

Chapter Twenty-four: WALTER

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight: DANNY

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed.

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

One person's craziness is another person's reality.

—T
IM
B
URTON

DANNY

A
storm is a kind of magic.

I've lived through a lot of them, but none of them were like the ones I experienced when I was fourteen.

Watch the news in the spring. You'll see footage of flooding and devastation and broken homes scattered like wood chips from an almighty Skilsaw, any previous illusion of constancy the houses held shattered in short seconds of earsplitting fury. As I grow older, I watch these scenes on the nightly news a little differently. Of course I still grieve for the people whose homes and lives have been uprooted by the weather, but I also study the pictures and video a little more closely. I look for the way things have been altered, the way one world is gone and another moves in to take its place, and if this isn't a kind of terrible magic, then I don't know what is. After the news, when the lights are off and I lie atop the covers, not even pretending that sleep might eventually transport me away from these nagging thoughts, I marvel at the way scientists can deconstruct a thing, pulling it apart fiber by fiber until the whole of it is unwound and every piece labeled and comprehended. I tell myself that if the right scientist could get hold of my life, if that scientist could put the events of my fourteenth year under a microscope, he'd be able to explain them away. But then the magic would be gone, and
that
would keep me up at night too.

Now, I'm almost thirty, and I make weekly visits to a therapist who insists I call him Dwight instead of Dr. Reynolds. He slaps me on the back at the beginning of every session and hugs me at the end, just before letting his hand linger until I stuff a check in it. Oh, he's not a bad guy, and he seems genuinely fascinated by my story. He likes to explain everything in psychological terms and ask a lot of leading questions. Sometimes I think he's even on to something when he talks about “subconscious mythmaking” and “the profundity of illusion.” But other times—and these are the nights I sleep best—I dismiss his words as easily as the straight-line winds dismiss trees, snapping them like brittle sticks. When I think like this, I remember it all, and if there are pieces of the puzzle that I can't work into place, I ignore them and focus on the pieces that do fit. And these pieces are the people—Pike and Seth and Cliff and even my little sister, Anna. Most of all, I focus on the great things that the brain is capable of and how like a storm it can be, wild and ravaging, erasing landscapes and building new ones in the wink of a eye.

I was fourteen the first time I came in contact with a real storm. It cut a line right down the center of my life, pulling my sister and mother away from me and cleanly dividing that year into a before and after so radically different that I've come to think of fourteen as not only the longest year of my life, but also the most important because it was the last year of childhood and the first year of the rest of my life, a life that would be forever marked as different in subtle and insidious ways from the people around me.

Fourteen was the year my mother and sister disappeared, the year I lost my mind. The year I learned secrets that will stay with me until I am no longer able to think of them.

And fourteen, most of all, was the year of the storm.

—

D
espite dealing with the presumed deaths of my mother and sister, at fourteen I still believed that magic and God were the same thing, or if they weren't, that they were wound so tightly together and threaded through the spaces of our lives as to become a length of double-braided rope whose ends had not yet begun to fray.

My father was forty-one when I was fourteen, and like me, he was knocked back by the storm. But unlike me, his world then was a rigid place. Neither magic nor God existed for him except in books and memories. Storms were storms, and any transformation that came from them was incidental, swept away in a flood of adult problems.

Before my mother and sister vanished, we weren't a perfect family, but we were complete, a strong knot of individual strings, each wrapped over the other. If one string pulled too tight while another string fought to breathe more, how was that different from any other family? The point was that we were a knot, and then we came unwound. At fourteen, I was foolish enough to think I could tie the knot back, and we'd go on like always.

After it happened, Dad felt every kind of emotion—rage, hate, resentment, despair. But mostly, I think he was jealous. Jealous of a world that took his happiness, that swallowed it without leaving a scrap, and then went back to the same quiet, sleeping place it had always been.

But ten months into my fourteenth year, the world shifted in its slumber.

—

M
idnight, and a man I had never seen before stood outside our front door, a cigarette nub burning between his knuckles, his long white hair wild in the wind. Beside him on our front stoop was an oxygen tank he'd lugged up the steps. I watched from my bed, leaning over to peer out my upstairs window as he flicked his cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, extinguishing it against the concrete. He faced our front door, lifted a hand to knock, but faltered. Instead, he turned back to his oxygen tank, taking up the clear tubing and placing it inside his nostrils. He was still. I looked out over the yard and saw the immense oak trees swaying in the wind, saw the highway—empty and lonesome—and beyond that the great silver fields of cotton, rippling in the moonlight. On the horizon, a massive thunderhead gathered and advanced steadily toward the house.

I should have been asleep. Sleep came in fits those days, a dream of my mother's face always a few breaths away. Across the hall, Dad was snoring, and I wondered if he still dreamed about them too.

Shrugging off the covers, I stood and made my way down the steps, the same ones my sister, Anna, used to count each time she went up or down. There were twelve. Dad and I both knew that the same way we knew Anna's closet was her sanctuary from the world, the same way we knew that when a bad storm came, bad like the one that was rolling in now, Anna had no sanctuary except within herself. She was autistic and only four years old when she disappeared. She'd be five now, and though her doctors said it wasn't possible, I still wondered if she had gotten any better. It was a foolish hope, but I was fourteen and believed things that no rational person should. Things like my mother and sister were still alive.

Downstairs, I waited on the other side of the door. Would he knock? Or did he mean to simply stand outside our home, a strange presence that touched our lives without invading them? Maybe he stood outside every night while we slept. Maybe he was one of the moonshiners Dad had told me about, who lived beyond the margins of society, setting up stills in the deepest parts of the woods and living hand to mouth on what they could catch with a fishing pole or shoot with a rifle. Or he might have come from some faraway place, riding the rails like a lost hobo arriving at our house by pure chance or by some more sinister motivation. Or maybe he was the man responsible for taking those two girls back in the sixties, whose sad spirits seemed to linger and haunt these woods like fireflies in the darkest hollows of the night. Maybe he was the man who took Mom and Anna too, and now he'd come back for the rest of us. And maybe, just maybe, I'd go with him willingly.

Dropping to my knees, I moved across the den until I was under the front windows. Carefully, I lifted my head, pushing aside the curtains so that I could see out one of the lower panes. He was still standing there, illuminated by the moon, his hair glowing vivid white. Somewhere behind him, across the highway, lightning struck the cotton fields, followed by a sharp crack of thunder. The man did not jump or start or even seem to notice. He only stood at our door, filling his lungs with oxygen.

I let the curtain fall back in place, and I lay down on the floor. I'd been hearing the stories about these woods since I was a kid. Most of them were the generic campfire variety, the same urban legends reshuffled and personalized for different times, different settings, but one story was more than that. One story had the ring of authenticity. It was unique to these woods, and unlike the tales of hook hands and insane asylum escapees, it never seemed to fade away. Two girls, Tina and Rachel, lost in the woods behind our house. I grew up knowing their names just like I knew anything else. They were a part of the landscape, a part of the place where I lived. It didn't matter if I'd never seen them or heard them speak or even gotten the whole story straight about their disappearances. I felt their presences intimately, and their loss settled on the woods like a heavy fog. When I walked through the darkest parts behind my house near dusk, sometimes I thought I saw them in the gloom, floating, transparent, made from spiders' webs and dying streaks of light mingled with shadow. Their sad visages slithering round tree trunks and drifting past blooming moonvines. I shuddered, thinking that the man responsible for these disappearances might be standing in my front yard.

I'm not sure how long I lay there before I decided to check again, but when I looked up the second time, rain was hitting the roof in torrents, and the man was gone.

—

T
he next morning, I woke, back in my bed. I'd fallen asleep beside the window, but I vaguely remembered Dad picking me up in the dark hours of the morning and carrying me upstairs. It was still raining and when I fell into my own bed, in the throes of half sleep, I felt a simple, forgetful peace. It was the kind I used to feel each time my head hit the pillow and Mom leaned over me, saying the prayers I could not yet articulate, the same prayers I later repeated to myself, trying to work them out like jigsaw puzzles.

Summer meant I could sleep all day if I wanted, but I got up anyway, determined not to give in to the stifling depression that hung around our house as heavy and dank as the Alabama heat.

My best friend then was a kid named Cliff, who had a lazy eye and the biggest collection of Marvel comics I had ever seen. Together, we spent our summers chasing phantoms through the woods, imagining ourselves as Iron Man and Captain America, and lately, fantasizing about girls, specifically Rhonda Donovan and Betty Dozier. The double Ds. That was what we called them, and sometimes, in our more nerdy moments, D and D.

Usually, getting up on a summer morning meant going to Cliff's house. There were a million things to do—a trip into town to the comic book store, a day watching movies in his home theater, a jaunt into the deep woods as imaginary superheroes, a clandestine journey out to the honky-tonk on County Road Seven where we'd heard the women got drunk and danced topless.

But that morning was different. Dad came into my room as I was pulling myself from the bed.

“I found you in the den last night,” he said.

“I know.”

“Wonder why.”

Dad did this sort of thing, this almost talking to himself that only served to make me feel like he really didn't want to talk to me at all. Which was true. He didn't want to talk to me. He hadn't wanted to talk to me since Mom and Anna disappeared. He wasn't mean about it. In fact, Dad was about as gentle with me as he'd ever been, but the hardness grew inside him, in his eyes that sometimes slipped out of focus, and in his lips that were always too stiff to smile.

“The storm got to me. That's all.”

He sat down on my bed.

“The sheriff called today,” he said to the floor.

“And?”

He shook his head. “It's been nine months. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. How could I not know that? “What did he say?”

Dad shook his head and studied the floor.

“What did he say?” I asked again.

“Same old bullshit. The woods are a dead end. The dogs have canvassed every part of it.” He shook his head again, this time with more determination. “Dead ends. That's all we have. Damn dead ends. I told the sheriff—”

He stopped suddenly and looked at me, as if remembering who he was talking to.
Yeah, Dad, it's me. Remember not to tell Danny anything relevant because he's too young to understand.
It was infuriating.

“What?” I said. “What did you tell the sheriff?”

“Nothing important. He's going to do some more interviews with people at her work, extended family, that sort of thing. We've heard it all before.”

“That's good news, though. Right?”

Dad looked up, his eyes skimming past my face, but not focusing until they settled on my closet where the clothes I was quickly outgrowing hung like ghosts, pieces of the past that Mom and Anna had once touched.

“Good news?” he said, almost to himself.

“Yeah, I mean, well, at least we still have some hope.”

He looked at me then, and I saw that he hadn't been taking his pills. Looking back, I can't say I blame him much. The ones Dwight prescribed for me didn't work. Sure, they made sleep easier to come by, but my real issues were too deep for any medicine to touch.

The proof Dad had given up was in his face, his eyes, the way he hadn't shaved today or yesterday. Was he even going to work today? I wondered.

He shook his head. “Hope. That's funny.” He looked at me for a second, expectant, as if daring me to argue with him. When I said nothing, he stood up, swinging his arms together, letting his fist connect with his palm, a gesture he used to do all the time, a gesture that seemed strangely devoid of the happy-go-lucky spirit it was meant to suggest.

“Danny,” he said, speaking my name earnestly like saying it mattered somehow. “Why don't you and me do something fun today? Just the two of us?”

“What about work?” I said.

He shook his head, dismissing it. “I'll call in. I haven't missed a day in the last five months. They won't blink. Are you with me?”

“Sure. Yeah. Sounds good.” I tried to sound bright, happy, but it came out shrill, needlessly high-pitched and awkward. Dad pretended not to notice. It was the one thing we had gotten good at over the last nine months: pretending.