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Broken Things

When I was a kid, it seemed to me that everyone knew my mother better than I did.

That’s a Hannah O’Toole, people would say, pointing at one of her famous photographs, reprinted in a book or framed on a museum wall.

On television, in a Jeopardy! clue: This American is the only woman to win both an International Photography Award and a Pulitzer.

Who is Hannah O’Toole?, Alex.

My mother was an icon, a legend who used her visual arts skills to document catastrophes and suffering so that those who saw her pictures from their safe, first-world homes could find the empathy (and cash) to mend the other parts of the world. She was most often described as if her Leica was a natural extension of her body, an adaptation to a limb that somehow gave her the superpowers of insight and recording. What people didn’t see was what happened when she put that camera down. Without that prosthetic, she faltered.

My father was a conservator, an artist who colored within someone else’s lines. Unlike my mother, who created art, he claimed he didn’t have the eye to tell his own story. Instead, he meticulously painted over chipped plaster on the frescoed ceilings of Newport mansions; he used Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste to mend tears in watercolor paper; he repaired water damage and smoke damage and insect damage to the canvases of Old Masters. His jobs lasted from months to years, depending on who was hiring him and how deep the wounds he was repairing. He was also the one who patched together the ceramic pig I made at summer camp when it fell off my dresser; who could stitch an invisible seam when my favorite dress got caught on a fence and tore; who could rewire the old Tinker Bell lamp we found at a thrift store so that it worked again. He could fix anything that was broken.

Except, maybe, my mother.

•

In April 2000, just before I was about to turn ten years old, my mother was headed off on assignment, shooting pictures of a nine-month drought in Ochelata, Oklahoma, to accompany a Washington Post feature on climate change. She had been away for more of my birthdays than she had been present. In fact, I probably would have been surprised had she rearranged her work schedule to be home in New York City with us.

The truth was, I had grown accustomed to my mother missing huge chunks of my life—both the ordinary ones and the milestones. When I was in first grade and parents had to sign up to bring a snack for the whole class each Friday, my father was the only dad who came in. When everyone else had a mother at the Nutcracker recital last Christmas, I did not. Even Alistair’s mother, who was on a television show about detectives, managed to come in and talk about her work during Career Day. My mom was in Myanmar.

For this reason, or maybe because I was a masochist at heart, I clung to her like a shadow when she was home, counting down silently the moments before she went away again. This time, I sat cross-legged on her bed, doing a word search puzzle while she packed. She had a gift for filling every square inch of her carry-on suitcase efficiently; I suppose that’s what comes of practice. “It hasn’t rained in Oklahoma in eight months,” she told me.

“Oklahoma,” I repeated. “That’s the one that looks like a pot with a handle.” We had been doing timed quizzes in school, where we had to fill in the names of states on an empty map of the United States. The square ones all looked the same to me, but Oklahoma I could find easily.

“I guess it does,” she considered. “Anyway, that’s why I’m going there. To shoot a drought.”

“How do you take pictures of no rain?”

“You take pictures of what happens in its absence,” she said. “How the land is changed.”

She leaned across me to pick up her hairbrush and jam it into the spine of her suitcase. She smelled like lavender. Even now, years later, when I catch a whiff of that scent, I look for her. Her chin paused, notched over my shoulder, looking down at the word search. “I’m missing one,” I told her.

She knew that I would not be able to go to sleep until I finished it, crossing off each word on the list neatly and decisively. She pointed to a reverse diagonal, the last word in the puzzle. “SUNBATHE,” she traced, letter by letter. “People always forget to look in that direction.”

I circled the word with my red pen and crossed it off the list. My mother folded up the clamshell of her suitcase.

“Will the drought ever end? In Oklahoma?”

With a grunt, she zipped it shut. “Of course, Diana,” she told me. “Nothing lasts forever.”

•

My mother had been gone for two weeks when my father announced out of the blue that we would be flying to the Midwest to join her at her work site, so that we could celebrate my birthday together. I was shocked, for several reasons. First, my father and I were a tight little nugget of family, forged as a result of my mother’s dizzy swoops in and out of our lives. Second, my mother did not like to be bothered when she was working. Third, my dad didn’t believe in pulling me out of school for doctors’ appointments or routine dental visits, much less last-minute vacations.

I should point out that I did not like surprises. Above my bed was a color-coded calendar that reminded me I had piano lessons on Tuesdays and dance on Fridays and that every Thursday night I had to have my spelling test signed so I could return it to my teacher the next day. I was that rare child who never had to be told to pick up in her room. I liked things in their places, which was maybe why it bothered me so much that my mother never seemed to be in hers.

Almost as soon as we left the airport in Oklahoma City in our rental car, we saw evidence of the drought: fields scorched black from brush fires, soil as parched and cracked as the throat of a man in a desert. The deeper we drove into the country, the worse it got: farms with foreclosure signs, heifers with ribs that pushed against their hide.

According to the sign at the town limits of Ochelata, there were 424 residents, and not much else. There was a Walmart distribution center within driving distance, which provided employment, and a slightly bigger town—Bartlesville—which had a motel or two.

My father turned right at a sign that said NEXT OF INN, 2 MILES. “Well, Diana Banana,” he said, his pet name for me, “looks like we made it.” We chugged down a dirt road, dust flying up around the car. A small gazebo rose from a dusty lawn. At the end of the drive was a small farmhouse with a screen door and a few ceramic pots of geraniums lining the porch railing. As my father got out of the car, the door opened and a woman stepped out of the 1950s. Her hair was curled in twin rolls on either side of her head, her feet grounded in sensible shoes, her apron covering a worn blue dress. She had one of those faces that might have been thirty or three hundred. “You lost?” she asked, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Actually, no,” my father said, giving his most charming smile, the one with both dimples that I had inherited.

“Well, I don’t have any vacancy. There’s a motel if you head—”

“We’ll be joining one of your guests,” he said, holding out his hand. “I believe my wife has already checked in.”

As if he’d conjured her, a rusty blue Jeep zoomed into the yard, parking behind our rental car. The driver was a man in his late fifties, with an explosion of white hair and camouflage pants and a T-shirt that said MISTER TWISTER. My mother got out of the passenger seat, a camera looped around her neck.

“Mom!” I cried, and I raced across the desiccated lawn to throw my arms around her waist. She caught me the way you catch the flu—squarely, and with a flutter of resignation.

Over my head, a whole novel was being written without words. My father smiled at her. “Surprise,” he said.

•

The owner of the Next of Inn was Mrs. Evans. While my mother took my father up to our room to drop off our suitcases and to make up the cot that had grudgingly been pulled in for me, Mrs. Evans got me a glass of milk and a chocolate chip cookie that was still warm from the oven. “Shouldn’t you be in school?” she asked. As she handed me a napkin, she peered at me like I was a bug she found in her coffee.

I nodded. “It’s my birthday this week.”

“Don’t expect a discount,” she said. She was scrubbing viciously at a frying pan with a sponge that looked like it was made of chain mail. “What do you think of Oklahoma?”

I’d only been here a couple of hours. “It is shaped like a pan,” I said.

“You’re from New York,” she said, and I gasped, thinking she was psychic until I remembered my mother would have told her this at check-in. “New York looks like a sea lion.”

Well, she wasn’t wrong.

“My mom came here for the rain.”

“Hmph. That could take a while.”

Upstairs, we heard voices being raised. Mrs. Evans looked at me, and for the first time, her eyes softened. She took an apple from the counter and handed it to me. “Why don’t you take this outside to nitpick?” she said.

I wiped my mouth with the cloth napkin and wandered into the front yard. I didn’t know if this was a Midwest thing—if nitpicking was some local way of peeling an apple, maybe. Then I realized that I was not alone. On the porch was the man who’d been in the driver’s seat of the car that carried my mother. He squinted at me. “You looking for something?”

I frowned at the apple in my hand, turning Mrs. Evans’s words over in my head, and then brightening with a conclusion. “Are you Nitpick?”

He laughed. “I am not,” he said. “I’m Vietnam Tim.”

“Oh. Okay.” I hesitated. “I’m Diana. My mom probably told you about me.”

“No,” he said. “She didn’t.” He stood up, moving down the steps of the porch with a noticeable limp. “You coming?” he asked.

I scrambled after him. “Are you a photographer, too?”

He crossed the dusty expanse of lawn and slid open the peeling door of the barn, which groaned on its track. “Sure.” He shrugged. “Sometimes.”

I blinked into the darkness. Suddenly there was a shriek like someone was having their skin flayed from the bone. I flattened myself against the wall, and then the barn flooded with light.

Vietnam Tim stood with his hand on the chain he’d pulled to turn on the bare bulb. In front of him was a single stall, in which a mangy brown donkey stood, making that horrible sound. “That,” he announced, “is Nitpick.” When I didn’t move, he plucked the apple from my hand and held it over the edge of the stall door. “He’ll take your fingers off if you’re not careful. He’s also the closest thing to a Democrat you’ll see in this fucking hellhole.”

My eyes flew to his. “You’re not supposed to curse in front of me.”

“Why not? You heard that word before?”

I nodded.

“Then I ain’t telling you something you don’t already know, am I?”

I inched closer to him and the stall. As a city girl, the closest I ever got to animals was the Bronx Zoo. There was something so visceral about this donkey, with its velvet eyes and nicotine teeth. “It has eyelashes,” I marveled.

I looked up to find Vietnam Tim staring at me. “You don’t get out much, do you?” he said.

“I’m nine.”

He nodded. “Fair point.”

“Are you here because there isn’t any rain?”

“I’m here because I’m betting there’s gonna be rain, real soon. I’m a tornado chaser.” When I blinked at him, he narrowed his eyes. “I go all over the country, trying to stay one step ahead of the storms.”

“I didn’t know that was a job,” I admitted.

“I didn’t know that was a job,” I admitted. “Me neither, but I been doing it for a decade,” he said. “Came back from the war so messed up in the head that I needed to find something worse off than I was.” He glanced down at me. “You ever seen a tornado?”

I shook my head.

“It takes three things to make one: vertical air movement—like the kind in a thunderstorm, a change in wind speed and direction inside that thunderstorm, and lots of space so the twister can expand.”

I wondered what it was like inside the heart of a thunderstorm. All I knew about tornadoes came from The Wizard of Oz and the Twister movie, which I hadn’t been allowed to watch. I looked nervously over my shoulder at the rectangle of light and sky through the open door of the barn. I didn’t even like it when I went to school and Mrs. Hathorne was out sick and we had a substitute teacher; the thought of a catastrophe that might sneak up on me was utterly terrifying. “How can you tell if one’s coming?”

“Hail,” Vietnam Tim said. “Roaring. Thunder. A yellow sky.” He reached out and gently stroked the ears of Nitpick. “Wind can get past two hundred miles per hour for an EF5 tornado. I’ve seen five of ’em, firsthand.”

“Why would you want to be there for that?”

His eyes lit up. “Because everyone else is running away,” he said.

Nitpick chose that moment to bolt at some imaginary slight and gallop out of the open rear door of the stall into a fenced pen outside. I imagined Vietnam Tim standing like a superhero as a dark black funnel cloud raced toward him. It was the way I sometimes imagined my mother in war zones and tsunamis and all the other gateways to hell—fierce and fiery and invincible.

“Your mom might have come here for the drought,” Vietnam Tim said, “but she’s an adrenaline junkie, just like me.”

I did not know what an adrenaline junkie was, but I knew a stupid idea when I heard it. “Well, I think it’s pretty dumb to sit around and wait to get hurt.”

Even as I said it, I thought of all the nights I tried to stay up, straining to hear the sound of my mother opening the door of the apartment, of the whir of her roller bag wheels on the wooden floor.

Vietnam Tim raised a brow. “Everyone gets hurt sometimes,” he said.

•

There was one restaurant in Ochelata, and it was full. I listened to the clink of glasses and tableware and watched a teenage waitress carry a sizzling steak with onion rings across the room. My stomach growled loud enough for my parents to hear.

“At least an hour?” my father said, repeating what the hostess had told them. “Why does it take so long to turn a table?”

“Because going out is a big deal here,” my mother said. “No one’s in a rush to get back home.” She squinted, looking across the street. “New plan,” she said, pointing to a business with a Budweiser sign blinking in the window. “You can get wings and chips and stuff at Pete’s.”

My father put his hands on my shoulders, pulling me closer. “We are not taking a nine-year-old to a bar,” he said.

Almost ten, I corrected silently.

My mother’s cheeks flushed. “Right,” she said.

“What about takeout?” my father suggested. “We can bring it to the playground we passed at the school. Have a picnic.” He smiled a little. “I mean, it’s not like it’s gonna rain on us.”

My mother stepped back into the restaurant to place an order with the hostess. Burgers, a salad to share, those amazing onion rings I’d seen passing by. A side of macaroni salad.

“Diana doesn’t eat macaroni salad,” my father interrupted.

My mother glanced down at me. “Since when?”

“Since she got food poisoning two summers ago after eating it.”

“Of course,” she said. “I knew that.”

Then why did you order it? I thought.

In the entryway of the restaurant was one of those carnival machines, where you’d put in quarters and try to pick up a stuff ed animal with a claw. I had begged my father for money (and had been denied) enough to know that the odds of getting what I wanted were so slim, it wasn’t worth the expense. Instead, I jiggled the buttons, pretending that I could maneuver the claw. From the corner of my eye, I saw my father slide an arm around my mother’s waist, saw her settle against him like a ship coming to dock. He whispered some-hing to her, and when she laughed, I felt a smile rise in me, too, like the fizz in a soda.

When our food came out in little white Styrofoam containers, the hostess stacked them in a plastic bag, which my father carried in one hand. With his other, he held on to me. My mom took my other hand, just like the way they used to when I was really small, when they would swing me between them and I’d feel perfectly balanced, like an astronaut hitting zero gravity or a roller coaster at its apex. I didn’t know of many fourth graders who wanted to go around holding on to their parents’ hands, but I didn’t feel like a baby at that moment.

“Mom,” I asked, turning toward her. “What’s an adrenaline junkie?”

She thought for a second. “Someone who lives for the things that make their heart pound,” she said, “even when they’re scary.” Then she squeezed my hand, like she was passing me a secret.

Like she knew that on the back of the green blotter on my bedroom desk, I kept a tally of every day she was gone. And that when she came home, I tracked how many days I had with her before she left again.

Maybe I had more in common with her than I’d thought.

•

I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime. My father and Vietnam Tim were drinking beers on the porch, my mother was nearby editing images on her computer, and I was beside her doing another word search. “So you got a warm, humid, restless air mass,” Vietnam Tim explained, “and it meets an area of cold, and the atmosphere gets unstable. The cap of cold air eventually gives way, but by then, you got yourself a funnel cloud of storm winds. If that touches down, it becomes a tornado.”

“But enough about Hannah,” my father joked.

She flicked her gaze toward him. “Very funny.”

Vietnam Tim laughed. It sounded like the wheeze from a pool toy that was losing air. “Tornado Alley’s the red carpet for twisters. They cut a swath through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, northern Texas. Here in Ochelata, the chance of a tornado coming is 145 percent greater than other places in the United States. There’ve been two category 4s here, matter of fact. One in 1974 that killed fourteen people and injured a hundred and fifty others, and one in 1991 that killed one person and injured twenty-four.”

“And you’re here because you figure Ochelata’s due for another?”

“It’s a matter of odds,” Vietnam Tim said. “If all the other storm chasers are heading for thunderclouds, I’ll pick the drought.”

My mother shook her head, smiling. “That’s not a plan, that’s a superstition.”

“You’ll see, when the tornado hits.”

“There isn’t going to be a tornado, Tim,” my mom replied. “There isn’t as much as a passing shower.” But as she said it, her eyes lit up, like she was energized by the challenge.

In my puzzle, I found letters spelling out BEAR, even though it wasn’t on the list of words to find. I circled it anyway.

“Well,” said Vietnam Tim. “I reckon one of us is gonna be right.”

•

The next morning Mrs. Evans showed me how to feed Nitpick. His loose lips rubbered against my palm when he took the grain from it. She taught me how to peel a slice of hay from a bale and toss it into his rack. “I wish I had a donkey.”

“There’s already plenty of asses in New York,” she said. “You wouldn’t want him, anyway. He’s fat and stupid and lazy.”

“Why don’t you get rid of him, then?”

“He reminds me of my late husband.” She patted between Nitpick’s ears. “Why don’t you get him an apple?”

While she mucked out the stall and refilled Nitpick’s water, I ran inside to get the treat. I hadn’t made it into the kitchen yet, though, when I heard the voices of my parents in the adjacent dining room, where Mrs. Evans had served pancakes and bacon for breakfast.

You can’t keep doing this, my father said. You need to come home.

You have no idea what I need.

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