The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,1
to the left and right of ours, flipped one of our horse trailers upside down, tore off our roof, and kicked my canopy bed all the way to the grocery store parking lot a mile and a half away. That tornado ripped through our town for thirty-two miles. It killed thirty-three people, and injured one thousand one hundred and fifty others.
But it didn’t injure me. All it did was take my outstretched hand and bowl me down the driveway. It never even lifted me from the ground, it only rolled me—the way I rolled myself down grassy hills—at high speed, over the lawn, through flower beds, across the blacktop road, until I smacked up against the Aperjeets’ picket fence. The wind held me against the fence, right in the middle, without any of my limbs touching the ground. I was pressed there until the splintering of wood filled my ears, the smell of fresh cut lumber stung my nose, and that invisible hand pushed me down into the Aperjeets’ muddy yard, on my back, where I watched the boards of their fence fly away into the whirling sky above me.
When the wind stopped screaming, running footsteps drowned out my breath. My mother dropped to her knees beside me and snatched me by the shoulders. “You, you,” she said. “You.” She ran her hands over my arms, my face, everywhere she could. She squeezed my shoulders again, hard, and shook me, my bloody nose showering bright red drops down both of our shirts. My mother was drenched, a small star-shaped gash on her forehead. I remember realizing with amazement that she had followed me into the storm. She grabbed my hair as if to yank out handfuls of it, then released the handfuls and smoothed the hair instead. “You,” she kept repeating. She stood and vomited right there in the Aperjeets’ yard.
My father ran down the driveway, carrying a wailing Davy and shouting, “Where were you?”
“You don’t know when to stop,” my mother said to me, quiet discovery in her tone. It was the first of countless times she would say this. “You just don’t know when to quit.”
She was right. I knew I would do anything imaginable to repeat those last fifteen minutes.
When I grew too old to be doing such unladylike things as running out into storms or slipping onto that stallion’s back and careening across pastures, I turned to more sophisticated means of re-creating that rush, some healthier than others. I asked for a hot-air balloon ride when I was ten. I convinced the family to go white-water rafting when I was twelve. By thirteen I fell in love, at first by accident, with the pure adrenaline that kicks in with starvation. The hyperfocus, the lovely sensation of floating, the reckless certainty that I’d become superhuman. Throughout my teens I’d flirt with starvation—as well as with rock climbing, flying lessons, hitchhiking and lots of solo travel, a variety of drugs, and boys with bad reputations.
Nothing could ever compare with that tornado, though—until I met Bobby Binardi, the man who affected me like an approaching storm. A man whose family was as volatile and loud as mine was reserved and decorous. A man with lashes longer than mine and tattoos I traced under my fingertips. A man who fed all the reasons I’d been starving myself. Fed me, quite literally, because he was a chef. So, the girl who said she’d never marry did.
In our wedding video, the thunder drowns out the vows. Eighteen years ago—eighteen years? That couldn’t be possible!—a storm snatched the veil from my blond hair, toppled tables, and ripped the lily heads from my maid of honor’s bouquet. Guests gasped, clutching one another as they turned their backs against the wind. It had always been a good story to tell, one that set our wedding apart. Our wedding day suited us.
At the reception, we found out that a tornado had actually touched down only ten miles away. My relatives laughed and told all the Binardis how fitting that was.
AS I LAY IN BED, MY LEGS STILL TOUCHING MY SAD, SLEEPING husband, I pulled one arm from under the flannel sheets to release some of his heat. The back of my neck was damp. Our dog, Max, paced the hallway, his toenails clicking on the hardwood floor. The bedroom door stood open since Gabriella was away on yet another overnight debate tournament—kicking butt, I had no doubt (I tried to be impartial and modest, but our