Well, you know what the rest of that day was like, whether you were in Colorado or not. I’m sure you saw all the same stuff on TV as I saw on Ursula’s generic black laptop. Reporters went outside to kick through the needles and record the damage. The storm had cut a four-mile-wide swath down the mountain, through Boulder, and into Denver. There was a skyscraper with every window on its western face smashed in and people staring out from forty stories up. Abandoned cars littered the streets helter-skelter, all of them ready for the junkyard. Shell-shocked Coloradans wandered the lanes, carrying tablecloths and curtains and coats and whatever they could find to cover the corpses on the sidewalks. I remember one reporter yammering into the camera and a dazed man stuck full of pins walked through the shot behind him, carrying a dead Yorkie. It looked like a bloody mop with eyes. This guy’s face was a blood-smeared blank. He had to have over a hundred nails sticking out of him.
The operating theory—lacking any other credible explanation—was terrorism. The president had disappeared to a secure location but had responded with the full force of his Twitter account. He posted: “OUR ENEMIES DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY STARTED! PAYBACK IS A BITCH!!! #Denver #Colorado #America!!” The vice president had promised to pray as hard as he could for the survivors and the dead; he pledged to stay on his knees all day and all night long. It was reassuring to know our national leaders were using all the resources at their disposal to help the desperate: social media and Jesus.
Late in the afternoon, this one reporter found a guy sitting on a curb cross-legged with a square of black velvet spread out in front of him and delicate nails of all colors scattered across it. At first glance he almost looked like one of these dudes you see selling watches on the street. He was studying his collection of pins with a jeweler’s loupe, looking at one, then another. The reporter asked what he was doing, and he told her he was a geologist and he was analyzing the nails. He said he was pretty sure they were a form of fulgurite, and she asked what that was, and he said a kind of crystal. By that evening all the cable channels had experts saying much the same, talking about spectrographic analysis and crystal growth.
Fulgurite had formed in clouds before. It happened whenever volcanoes blew. Lightning would flash-cook flakes of ash into fangs of crystal. But there hadn’t been any eruptions in the Rockies in more than four thousand years, and fulgurite had never formed into such perfect little needles before. The chemists and the geologists couldn’t come up with any natural process that would account for what had happened—which meant it had to be the result of an unnatural process. Someone had figured out how to poison the sky.
So they knew what had hit us but not how it could’ve happened. Wolf Blitzer asked one chemist if it might’ve been an industrial accident, and the guy said sure, but you could see from the nervous-scared look on his face that he had no idea.
Then there were the plane crashes. Two hundred seventy people died in one plane alone, after it passed directly through the cloud. There were roasted bodies buckled into airplane seats bobbing in Barr Lake like corks. The whole tail section sat a few hundred yards away, in the northbound lane of I-76, boiling with black smoke. Aircraft had come down all around Denver, crashes decorating an eighty-mile radius encircling the airport.
At some point I swam up out of my daze—the deep trance cast by scenes from the unfolding catastrophe, the same spell 9/11 cast upon us all—and it came to me that my parents might want to know I was alive. This was followed by another thought: that someone needed to tell Dr. Rusted what had happened to his wife and daughter, and that someone was going to have to be me. It was a Saturday morning, so he hadn’t come to Boulder with them but had remained behind to write the sermon for that evening’s services. It was inexplicable that he hadn’t called me already. I thought that over and decided I didn’t much like what it might imply.
I tried my mother first. It didn’t matter we didn’t get on. I don’t care who you are. It’s a human instinct to seek out your mother when you’ve skinned your knees, when your dog has been hit by a car, when the sky opens and rains nails. But I couldn’t get through to her, didn’t get anything but an annoying squawk. Of course it would’ve just been an annoying squawk if she answered, too!
I tried my father, who was in Utah with his third wife, and didn’t get him either—just a long, staticky hiss. I wasn’t surprised the cellular network was overloaded. Everyone was calling someone, and no doubt the relay towers had sustained a lot of damage. It was a surprise, really, that Ursula was able to keep us online.
By the time I tried Dr. Rusted, I wasn’t expecting the call to go through. None of the others had. But after eight seconds of dead air, it began to ring, and then I found myself hoping he wouldn’t answer. I still feel rotten about that. The idea, though, of telling him he’d lost his wife and daughter made my whole body throb with dread.
It rang and rang, and then there was his voice, sweet and happy and kind, saying to leave a message and he would be so glad to ’ear from me. “Hey, Dr. Rusted. You better call me, soon as you can. It’s Honeysuckle. I need to tell you— Just call me.” Because I couldn’t let him find out what had happened from a recording.
I put the phone down on the coffee table and waited for him to call back, but he never did.
We watched streaming video into the late evening, Ursula and I. Sometimes the video fragmented and froze—once for almost twenty minutes—but it always came back. I might’ve watched until the laptop battery died, but then the CNN stream went to video of a school bus turned over on its side, full of six-and seven-year-olds, and that was when Ursula got up and closed her browser, shut her computer down. We had sat together on the couch most of the day, drinking tea and sharing a blanket tossed across our knees.
At some point I took Ursula’s hand without knowing it, and for a while she let me, which couldn’t have been easy for her. Maybe she’d been different before the husband died, but in the time I had known her, she could hardly bear physical contact with anyone except her son. She liked plants better, had a degree in agricultural science, and probably could’ve grown tomatoes on the moon. She wasn’t much for conversation unless you wanted to shoot the shit about the best fertilizers or when to spray your fields, but in her own way she was comforting, even sweet.
She took the blanket that had been across our legs and flapped it over me, as if we had already agreed I was sleeping on her couch that night, and she tucked me in like a seed in a warm, fragrant bed of earth. I had not been tucked in by someone else in years. My father was a no-good drunk who stole the money I made on my paper route and spent it on women of negotiable affections; he was hardly ever home when I went to sleep. My mother was perpetually disgusted with me for dressing like a boy and said if I wanted to be a little man instead of a little girl, I could put myself to bed at night. But Ursula Blake enfolded me in that blanket just as if I were her own child, was so tender I half expected her to kiss me good night, though she didn’t.
She did say, “I am so sorry about Yolanda, Honeysuckle. I know she was dear to you. She was dear to us, too.” That was all. Nothing more. Not that night.