This family brought their car in and I felt like I could peer into their thoughts and see what they were thinking. It was pouring rain and windy and it was predicted that the storm was going to come in with more force than the area had seen in decades. The car was shot. It wasn’t clear what was wrong with it. They needed it but I looked at Jaime and we exchanged nods of recognition. I knew what he was thinking and what the result would be. We both understood that we shouldn’t agree because we had to get home and prepare for the storm, but it was a BMW and these people were in a spot and we needed the money. The family was staying in a motel right on Route 6. They walked away from the shop huddled together beneath an umbrella, the father clutching onto his wife and two kids like they were all going to blow away. It made me wonder what I had in my life.

Let’s just get it running, said Jaime.

I called Lou Anne to tell her that I’d be back in a while. I could hear my young son Gabriel crying and the tortured situation in my wife’s voice. We knew that the storm was not just anticipated to be bad but that it was already coming down like lions. I could tell that Lou Anne was having flashbacks of hurricanes from when she was a kid, memories of seeing her parents in a new and particular way. Like seeing the people she loved more alive out of fear that if they didn’t protect everything it’d dissipate. My wife asked if I could come back because the basement was flooding. I told her that I’d be back once we got the car running.

That’s all we gotta do, I said.

I heard the storm on her end of the phone.

Can you leave now?

I said that I’d try to leave soon and hung up.

I put my phone into the front pocket of my jeans, exited the back office, and went into the main shop. Jaime had finished his beer and was getting into the hard stuff. The car was up on the rig, suspended up like when you see an object getting airlifted out of a digging site, some gigantic artifact. I started to help but Jaime moved. I was still learning under him. I started out in construction but pivoted to cars. I was support. It was clear the spot we were in. Jaime kept sighing after trying anything. I could tell, too, that it was bad by the way he was drinking.

We’re fucked, he said. He stopped working. The rain was coming down in sheets and buckets, like rivers had broken open the sky. I heard atavistic growls. I wondered about my wife and son.

Should we just leave?

And go where?

Home, Jaime, Jesus Christ. The storm. We gotta get back or everything will wash away.

I think I want them to wash away, he said.

Right, I spat back, laughing under my breath and moving closer to the car. I gestured my hands in a way to suggest that we needed to get to work but Jaime just kept standing there looking up at the car like he was completely out of control.

I’m serious, he said, swigging gin.

About what?

Letting them wash away. My wife and kids. I hope they wash away, Jaime said.

I didn’t know what he meant. He wasn’t joking and he wasn’t working on the car. I knew that I had to make a decision. I started sensing that I had to either leave and protect the people I loved or they were going to have an incident in the storm that could change the course of our lives.

I hope they all get swept away, he said.

The air was cold now outside as a result of the rain, torrential and angry in its explosive quality. The freezing air was bellowing in from under the garage door through the slit at the bottom and from the fact that the door did not have the strength or endurance to deal with all of that cold and rough exterior of the storm.

That sounds like hail, I said, reacting to the sounds on the roof. Let it hail, Jaime said.

I gotta go home.

We gotta get this running.

We aren’t doing anything, though.

I am, he said.

All right.

I’m trying to figure this out. What are you doing?

I adjusted my posture by putting more weight on my back left heel.

I am here, I said.

He just kept staring at me and then back at the car. I wondered what he was thinking, and whether it had anything to do with me, or what it was that he was going on about regarding his family. I tried to peer into his mind in search of thoughts that revealed the truth.

You don’t want them to die.

Yes, I do.

No, you don’t.

You should go, he said. I’m gonna get the car running.

I’ll help. You need help or it’ll take too long. This is real, I said.

You need to go.

What about you?

I just told you.

I don’t understand.

That’s what I want.

What?

I don’t want to protect them and I don’t want them to protect me. If this storm takes care of them I can start a whole new life, Jaime said, sipping gin. That’s what I need. It’d be the best way for us all to go.

Lightning struck what had to be a piece of land or a tree directly within earshot of the shop and its rumble and electricity excited my fears and wrapped me whole and triumphant in an exclamation of what it meant to be in total exhaustion and paralyzed uncertainty.

Jaime sipped the gin, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and said, I want my family to wash away in the storm so that I never have to see them again. I need a new start. We all do. I’m not going to go back there. You should. I’m gonna stay and fix the car.

All right, I said. He was resolute in his demands and it was clear that something inside him had changed. I didn’t feel the need to search for the truth in his thoughts because I understood that what he was saying was a reflection of his interior life. This was not just talk that we had in the shop. This was a man; life had bludgeoned him to death but the corpse would not stop breathing. He was a dead man walking with blood rushing through him with brilliant and lurid tachycardia. I took another sip of the gin out of some instinct to try to hold onto something that was being removed with volcanic propulsion. It was blinding and inescapable. The gin burned in my throat and I embraced it. I knew I should leave. I wondered whether Jaime was making the worst mistake of his life, and I then tried to read his mind to find his real thoughts but all I found was emptiness. I tried to find other thoughts but I knew that there wasn’t any use looking. Like I was a surgeon opening up his brain, I saw what was living exclusively inside him.

What’s the matter? he asked.

Nothing, I said.

I drove slow. The radio was saying that a tornado was imminent. It was going to touch down within miles of us and maybe directly on top of Ambler. I started driving a little bit faster. The windshield wipers were going back and forth fast, but the rain was coming down so hard that it didn’t matter. The wipers couldn’t get the water out of the way fast enough. I felt like I was driving without eyes, completely from memory. It was like I was staring through the windshield at an entanglement of the deepest reaches and marrow of the ocean. As I let the memory of every time I’d driven home guide me, I tried my best to actually see what was on the road, but in truth, all I could make out were memories, like the windshield and interior of my car highlighted neglect that I’d had for my family in snapshots of abandonment. I thought to myself that if I got home I’d never hurt my wife again and that Gabriel would be in my thoughts always.

When I pulled into the driveway and turned off the car, the car shook and rocked back and forth like the entire thing was about to start levitating, or that the car had already separated from the concrete and was being pulled up into the sky. Then I burst out of the door and again felt the balls of hail and sheets of rain. It was like my skin began to make uncompromising negotiations with some force. Lurid cackles of entangled exclamations materialized from the ground, sky, and air. When I got into the house Lou Anne was in the kitchen holding Gabriel. She was nodding him in her arms. There was a leak in the den and the kitchen but she’d put buckets down. They were filling up. The water going into them was making tink tink and plop plop plop noises. I went to my family and brought them close. They rested on my chest, nestled. Gabriel wasn’t crying anymore and neither was Lou Anne but I was.

Did you get the car running? she asked.

Not yet. Jaime is still there, I said. There’s a tornado coming.

That’s impossible. It’s a hurricane. We’ve never had a tornado.

We have to get into the basement.

We can’t, she said. There’s too much water.

I grabbed a flashlight from under the kitchen cabinet, went to the basement door, clanked down the stairs and saw. There was more water than we’d ever had. I went back into the kitchen. Lou Anne was holding Gabriel. The outline of her body was light, brilliant and blurred.

We should drive to my mother’s, I blurted out, unsure of even what I was saying.

No.

We can’t go into the basement, I snapped back. That’s where you go in a tornado.

We can’t.

I know that. Let’s get in the car.

We’re not driving during a tornado, Marshall. Are you crazy?

What do we do?

The bathroom. The plumbing, she said, and as she spoke I remembered that she was right.

I started to lose faith in the house but I found strength in Lou Anne’s strength. She moved to the bathroom. I followed. She got into the tub. I got in, too. We pulled the shower curtain closed as if it were a type of blanket that was going to have some impact on the storm. Gabriel was calm. Lou Anne kept rocking him. My back stung because of how I was sitting but it settled. The sounds outside were like some immense breathing. My fear was intercepted by Lou Anne’s composure. She was looking at Gabriel and holding him. We were there together. I wondered what Gabriel was thinking and what the nature of his thoughts were, and then I started to hear what I’d never heard but was the unmistakable roar of a tornado. I became concerned in new ways. I thought about Jaime and wondered if he was still at the shop.

This will pass, whispered Lou Anne. Gabriel cooed.

About four years after that—pretty recently—Lou Anne and I were out on the back porch of the house watching Gabriel run around the yard like a little machine without any sign that energy could ever escape him. It was like the more my body rebelled against me, the more fuel there was for Gabriel to take and use for his little endeavors. He was completely self-reliant, going from one part of our backyard to the other, chasing imaginary people and doing little skips and hops, calling for us to watch him and look at this and just wait for this and then he got too close to the thorn bush so we had to warn him. I reached out and held Lou Anne’s hand. We were both sitting on these reclinable beach chairs that we’d put on the porch. Gabriel called out for us to watch. My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I didn’t need to look to know. I knew it was Jaime texting me to see if I wanted to go out for a drink. I wasn’t working at his shop anymore. I was at a place in Broad Axe where I had more responsibility and better pay. We were still friendly, Jaime and me, but sometimes I wondered if he just needed a drinking buddy.

He was in a tough spot. His wife had recently left him and took his daughter. He was trying to continue, still running the shop, but the injury he sustained during the tornado changed him. I knew he lost a lot of business and was barely able to get by.

I grabbed my phone and saw his text, asking whether I wanted to go to Charlene’s for a few. I didn’t want to. I was holding Lou Anne’s hand. Gabriel was running in what looked like infinity symbols, kicking up dirt and grass as he cut across the lawn. The air was crisp and bright. I put my phone back into the pocket of my jeans without answering Jaime, but as I was doing so, knowing that I wasn’t going to text him back, I was reminded of the night of the tornado and the way Lou Anne, Gabriel, and I huddled together in the tub. The tornado touched down a few blocks from the shop. Jaime was still inside. It tore half of the shop’s roof off. The BMW got totaled and Jaime told me that he thought he was going to die. He said that the sound of the roof tearing off and the way it and the car and many other parts of the shop were being lifted up into the sky was like some type of ceremony, as if everything was rising up on its own. I told him about being in the bathtub and how afraid I was. He agreed with me but said that as it cut through the shop something happened that didn’t have anything to do with fear. He said there was a moment when he understood that death loves us the same way that birth does. I told him that I wasn’t sure what he meant. He said that he didn’t really know either.

Jaime lost the use of his left arm from the injury he sustained that night. He still wears a sling. I’ve asked him a few times about why he thought he wanted his family to wash away. Whenever I broach the subject he changes it, or doesn’t really answer, and while he’s transitioning away from providing any insight, that’s when I try to read his thoughts, because it seems to me that it’s in those moments when there are thoughts in his mind that contain the truth. I figure if I keep at it, one day I might know.

Last week I was driving through Ambler near Jaime’s shop and I was reminded of what it was like to walk through that area after the tornado came through. So many homes and trees and cars were mangled, damaged, and partially destroyed. I had flashbacks of what the houses looked like. I remember how some houses had tarps covering half of them, and some homes were covered entirely to hide the damage. It made me wonder about not just my house and my family, but it made me curious about all of these stories of people who endured through the storm. One woman died. It was the only fatality from the event. A tree fell on her house. I don’t think that I ever knew her name but, yes, last week, while I was driving through that area—ground zero, we called it—all of these memories came rushing back. I drove onto the highway and remembered seeing all of the trees that had been leveled and flattened, like they’d been pressed down into the earth. The sound of the tornado rang in my ears, the noises we heard in the bathtub. While I was driving on the highway, reminded of all of this, I was also especially in tune with the weather overhead, the light, calm clouds and their seemingly transparent underbellies. I kept driving and it was altogether wonderful, for some reason, observing the serene day while also remembering the damage from the storm, so long ago now, but in a way, too, somehow, within my contented understanding of the present, I began to imagine rectangular syncopated northern extensions of light ripping and crashing, elongated and non-negotiable in their destruction. I wondered about Jaime and his family and their failure. I thought about death. I thought of Lou Anne and Gabriel. Cars drove by me on that highway and I sped along, swerving. It was like my hands started to drift and for an instant I thought about what it’d be like not so much to lose control of the car, but to have so much dominion over the surroundings that I could tear everyone and everything to shreds.

I try to imagine what everyone else thought while they lived through the storm. I feel like if I knew what everyone’s thoughts were it’d help me. I wonder if they were afraid to die.

Jake Shore’s short stories have been published in Denver Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, and others. In 2017, Shore’s play The Devil Is on the Loose with an Axe in Marshalltown was selected as one of Playbill’s “13 Shows Not to Miss Off- Broadway.” Shore works at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn, where he also teaches.