But cycling through my head were all the times I wasn’t there to call her back from the literal edge of disaster; the million ways she could get hurt. And I’d be in New York, safe, not even knowing what had happened to her.

As if she could read my mind, she sat down, her camera settled on her knee. “I wasn’t made to stay at home,” she said softly, looking into her lap. “Some women, they love being mothers. They make it look easy. But I needed to know that there was still space for me to go off and do my work. Because then when I was home, I wouldn’t spend all my time wishing I was somewhere else.”

I stared at her. I knew she was trying to tell me something about herself, something about us, but all I could hear was I wasn’t made to stay at home, and the reverberating truth that I wasn’t enough to change that about her.

It struck me that my mother, who was not unsettled by rhino stampedes or the crossfire of drug cartels or raging brush fires, was nervous. “Do you get what I’m trying to say, Diana?”

I blinked at her. That she loved me? That she didn’t? That she was sorry? That it was all my fault?

My mother sighed. She turned the camera so that I could see the little two-by-three-inch LCD viewfinder. The photo she had taken of the parched land was a honeycomb, a pattern, whose fissures seemed lit from the belly of the earth. “You see,” my mother said. “Even broken things can be beautiful.”

I turned my face up to hers. And a drop of rain landed square on my forehead.

•

The sky was an unholy yellow by the time we reached the Next of Inn. There were sirens blaring from the town. Vietnam Tim was in front of the house, pointing across the parched field to the rolling storm, which was growling closer, its tail a black funnel of fury. Mrs. Evans was trying to get him to come into the cellar for safety.

My father had been standing on the porch, but as soon as he saw us he ran for the Jeep, scooped me into his arms, and dragged my mother with him to the cellar hatch. My mother was already fiddling with her camera. “But I need to—”

“No,” my father yelled. “You do not.”

Mrs. Evans followed us down there, still muttering about that fool Vietnam Tim. She sat down and tuned a little battery-powered radio to a station that was repeating the tornado emergency signal. We tucked ourselves between boxes of storage. Suddenly Vietnam Tim threw open the hatch doors. His eyes were wild, his hair electric. “It’s gonna reverse direction,” he yelled down. “A one-two punch.”

“Come down here before you get killed,” my father said.