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However, I worried that she might have regrets if the store wasn’t in decent shape. Unfortunately, I had no reason to believe it would be. It sounded like the tornado had passed directly above us and hit the store pretty hard. I was going to be happily surprised if our cars were even still in the same zip code, much less the parking lot. If Melanie went up there and saw everything that she had ever worked for was destroyed, that the store her family built was obliterated, I wasn’t positive how she would respond.
She was sitting on the couch and smiling at me as I pulled my jeans back up. I smiled back and caught her eyes trailing from my zipper up my body to my face. I didn’t mind her looking. I’d done my share of that while she was getting dressed. But part of me worried that she would compartmentalize everything that happened in the bunker and that she would think it had been a mistake. That falling into each other’s arms was something we’d only done out of fear.
As soon as I finished dressing, I crossed the room over to her. I offered my hand, and she took it, standing up beside me. I could see her face drop a little as she did. We were going to leave the confines of our little cave. It was sad and scary, but it had to be done. I led her to the stairs, and we began making our ascent.
Once I unbolted the door and tried to open it, I realized something was blocking the way. I gave it a shove, but nothing budged, and I stepped down a step to give myself better leverage. Whatever it was, it was heavy but finally seemed to be moving. On the last shot, I shoved hard enough for the door to fling open, and we caught our first glimpse of the sky above us.
The roof was gone.
Or at least it was mostly gone. Bits of it, torn and jagged, still hovered up there, missing whole chunks. Other pieces were hanging lower, into the building itself and dripping wet. I glanced around for any downed live wires that might electrify the water on the floor, but I didn’t see any. Tentatively, I put my foot down, and when I stood, I could see most of the damage through the window of the backroom door.
A whole chunk of the east wall was missing. As I went through the door into the store proper, it took my breath away to see how thoroughly the tornado had ravaged the building. It looked like a bomb had gone off. Displays and racks were scattered throughout the store, almost none of them even close to where they had been. Doors were torn off freezers and lay on the floor, racks of clothes were strewn all over, and toys and knickknacks were scattered all along the aisles. I became fixated for a moment on a pair of jeans hanging from a beltloop along a steel beam in the ceiling, looking like someone had been raptured right out of their pants.
A cash register was near the door leading to the back, the monitor, till box, and everything. It inspired awe at the power of nature.
Melanie walked behind me, and when I turned to look at her, she was clearly distraught. Her face was locked in an expression of horror. She too had noticed the register and bent to pick it up before realizing that it was too heavy for her to move by herself. There was no point anyway; the entire front end of the store was a wreck.
Whole sections of checkout lines were missing, either tossed in the tornado or scattered in the store. Plastic and paper bagswere literally everywhere, and candy seemed to be lying under every step. We stepped over an entire checkout belt to get to the middle of the store, and Melanie’s voice wavered when she spoke.
“There’s only six of them,” she said, referring to the belt that had been mounted into the ground. “I need them put back so I can open the store again, but they’re so heavy I can’t do it by myself.”
“Melanie,” I said, trying to speak as patiently and calmly as I could, “the store is destroyed. We won’t be opening again for a long time. We can rebuild, but most of this stuff is unsalvageable.”
Her bottom lip quivered, and her eyes shut tight as teardrops fell from them. She was trying to hold it together, but the more she saw, the worse it got. Unlike in the back, the roof was still intact for much of the main portion of the store, but the glass windows were all shattered, and the frame of one of them was obliterated. A soda display case was lying in the parking lot, along with pieces of the window.
I reached over and touched her shoulder, but she shrugged me off and took a few steps to the middle of the store. I followed her, but she seemed to be trying to create distance between us. Finally, she stopped between two aisle shelves that were still standing, unlike most of the others.
“Leave me alone,” she said quietly.
“Melanie, please,” I said.
“No!” she said, shaking her head. “No, stop. What happened down there was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. I’ve lost everything now. Everything.”
“Melanie,” I tried again, but she collapsed on the ground into a seated position, her head in her hands. “It’s going to be okay. We have insurance. We can rebuild.”
I knelt and put an arm around her, but she shoved it off. When she looked back up at me, her eyes were filled with tears and her mouth was stretched in a half-moon frown. Still, though, she wouldn’t make complete eye contact, preferring to look at my chest or neck, it seemed.
“I can’t,” she said, and then the tears really came. “I can’t.”
She was sobbing now, and the sound of her cries mixed in the air with a faint noise I slowly recognized as emergency vehicles. I looked up, through the hole in the wall from where the storm had touched down and scattered the contents of the store everywhere. Down the street, I could see a cop car with an ambulance and fire truck behind it. They were heading to us.
“Look, the rescue team is going to be here in a minute. We should try to get outside so they can get to us.”
Standing, but otherwise not acknowledging me, she shuffled to the hole where the front door had been and walked through it. She took a sharp breath and clenched her arm as she did, and I could see a little trickle of red come from her shoulder. She must have cut herself on the jagged glass still there in the frame.
I followed her, walking through a larger hole that offered much less glass to be worried about and stood near her as ambulances parked nearby. EMTs rushed out and took each of us, pulling us aside and away from each other. The last I saw of her for a little while, she was being bandaged on her shoulder and staring vacantly at the store where the sign used to be.
An EMT brought me over to where his ambulance was near my car. Shockingly, both our cars were still in the lot, albeit several dozen yards away from where they had been parked. Both were upright, although they were facing different directions now, and the windows were busted in both.
“What’s your name, sir?” the EMT closest to me asked.
“Victor,” I said. “Victor McLaren. I am a partial owner of this store.”
“Oh,” he said, looking back at it and then to me. “Well, that’s very unfortunate. However, it looks like you’ve escaped major injury.”
“We hid in the storm cellar,” I said. “It was safe down there.”
“That’s very good,” he said. “It touched down on the street back here and wiped out a couple houses and businesses. It looks like your store was the last place it ran through before it dissipated. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
