I was halfway down the stairs, rain blowing in through the open door, trying not to fall as I ran. I heard a woman's voice, turned to see Jess and baby Evangeline and Sergio and Louis framed by the doorway, lit by a burst of lightning. I was deep in a well, sheltered, turned awkwardly to look at them, and they were up in the storm.
Outside was a growl of wind louder than anything I ever heard, reaching down to the echo chamber of the stairs. Behind the growl, a blow shook the building, a pressure change took my breath, a funnel cloud reared up, it was so huge that I could see it through the doorway behind Sergio and Louis and Jess and Evangeline. The hand of the cloud reached down and grabbed the doorway, the bricks and concrete where we slept, the stairwell above me, the people standing there, as if they were dust, and threw them all out into the sky.
5
WHO WE WERE
Bix was contradictory—bold and terrified, full of action and stuck. She liked to disappear in her own way, from the water after she got scared, into dark corners, into Mother's vinyl record of Bix Beiderbecke on Tenth Street. It was jazz, had a cover with a picture—the horn player in a bow tie. Bix loved the solos, the lilt, the ease. The music had something of the way things had been long before we were born, optimism. It matched her. "Before the crash," Bix said, when electric was new and Old City was smaller and brighter, like a fresh-cut jewel, and cars made their way into the music and everything. Bix made sure she kept a piece of that time in her mouth with her name. She wanted it in all our mouths, made sure no one called her Beatrice. Made sure no one called me Norah. Like Father, she was impulsive.
Father liked a lantern and a hand tool, things to build or fix or sort or organize, people to help, a project, a way forward. His skin a wall of freckles so dense they formed a new color on him, his hands knuckled, rough, his red-brown hair wavy, trailing past his ears, his beard thin and ready for the knife. Like him, Bix had accelerated curiosity. Bix looked into every dark corner and every single space and never even wanted a lantern. She followed Father around instead, and the flint knapper, Oliver, who had been trained to do it for his anthropology fieldwork and used it again at Amen and taught Sergio. She learned to make edges and fix knives and shoot arrows, to make a good fire and find deer in the Park. She would be all the music and the boldness and be called "Bix." I wouldn't be myself. She'd make me into the word "no," as if, calling me "NO-nie," she could say "No" every day. I wanted a girl name for her, even though she'd never wear girls' clothes. Not a dress. Not a chance. At Amen, she cut her hair with a pair of scissors she kept from rusting wrapped in an oiled washcloth in her pack. Her hair was red-brown, curled like Father's, blunt cuts twisted into wavelets when it was damp. She had Father's pale skin, wide mouth, freckles. Her eyes were Mother's blue, like mine, a golden ring around the irises.
I liked the only mystery Bix hated—the ocean. I wondered why she never took that mystery from Mother, like I did. I had Mother's straight brown hair, her nose like one on a Roman marble head, and half of Father's freckles dust-covered my nose, drawing attention to it. Everyone said I didn't smile Father's and Bix's big grins. They showed their teeth, almost to yell something they wanted to do. Like Mother, I was quiet. I started talking again a year after we came to Amen, but I didn't talk like everybody—I said full sentences mixed up with silence and science and the formal books Mother read us at night, Verne and Stevenson, little professor. There was a right way to say things and I didn't know how to do it wrong. Bix and Mother and Father all said my brain wasn't wired like other people's. I could sit with Mother in the lab for hours. I could organize all the plastic sea-creature toys in my room, so they lined the windowsills. I could remember all the animals in the museum, even without the Logbook. I didn't understand how Bix felt sometimes, or Father or Mother. I had to watch their faces and think about what they meant when they spoke. I had to do that with everyone. Keller and I could talk about animals. We made up a game about animals. It made me settled and calm when we played, asking my brain to shush and concentrate and remember. Mother knew to play the game when I was scared. Bix and Father never did. The museum was perfect for me, dark and quiet, organized and private, like the world inside my head that no one ever saw.
