She’s worked her way through Patio (eastern phoebe) and Pond Box (chickadee) while keeping up on Lady Bearcats practice with Morgan, and Macy’s cat’s hairball with Macy, who’s at the vet’s, and checking Facebook every few minutes, and is just starting on Path Box (bluebird, her favorite) when the radio emits its blood-curdling screech once again. Jane is still in the garden. When the robot comes on again, Kaylee is the only one in the house to hear it say, The National Weather Service in Louisville has issued a tornado warning for the following counties in Kentucky: Anderson, Franklin, Grant, Marion, Owen, and Washington until 6:30 pm. The National Weather Service has identified rotation in a storm located fifteen miles southwest of Lebanon and heading north-northeast at 40 mph. Cities in the path of this storm include Lebanon; Springfield; Harrodsburg; Lawrenceburg; Alton … Kaylee shoves back her chair, grabbing her SmartBerry, and runs to the door. “Jane! Hey Jane!” she yells. “They just said it’s a tornado warning!” Behind her the robot says sternly This is a dangerous storm. If you are in the path of this storm, take shelter immediately. Go to the lowest level of a sturdy building … “They said take shelter immediately!” she shouts.
Jane drops her shovel and starts trotting toward the house, calling “Fleece and Roscoe! Come!” She doesn’t trot too fast, she’s got arthritis in her knees like Kaylee’s grandma, but Jane is much, much thinner than Mammaw; think of Mammaw trotting anywhere! The dogs race up the steps onto the deck, followed by Jane holding on to the handrail. “Are you sure they said warning?” she puffs. “I wouldn’t have thought it looked that threatening,” and just then they hear the heavy rumble of thunder. Fleece, the white poodle, trembles violently and slinks through the doggy door into the house; she hates thunderstorms. The sky is starting to churn. As the rest of them come in, the radio is repeating its announcement, including the part about taking shelter immediately. Jane says, “Well that blew up out of nowhere! Okay, I guess we get to go sit in the basement for a while. Did you turn off the computer?” Kaylee shakes her head. “Get your data submitted?”
She nods. “Almost all of it.”
“Good. Go on down, I’ll be there in a sec.”
Kaylee snatches up her backpack and runs down the basement stairs, then isn’t sure what to do. Jane’s house is set into a slope, so half the basement is underground and the other half isn’t; you can walk straight out the patio doors, climb a ladder kept out there for the purpose, and check on the phoebe’s nest perched like a pillbox hat on the light fixture. It’s pretty crowded down here; the basement is the size of the house, tiny, and piled with boxes containing mostly books. But now Jane’s hurrying down with Roscoe the beagle behind her, leading the way into what looks like a closet under the stairs, but turns out to be a kind of wedge-shaped storm shelter. Fleece is already in there, lying on a mat and panting. Roscoe flops down beside Fleece; they must be used to this drill. There’s a folding canvas chair in the shelter too. Jane says, “I guess you’ll have to squeeze in with the dogs. Or maybe just sit here on the mat next to them. I have to take the chair or in five minutes my back will be screaming worse than the radio.” Which, Kaylee sees, she’s brought down with her, and which she now switches back on.
But the robot voice is only repeating what it said already. Jane turns down the volume. Kaylee sits cross-legged on the edge of the mat and consults her SmartBerry.
When she first started working on the nesting project with Jane, she’d kept the SmartBerry in her jacket pocket or in her hand all the time; but when Jane noticed, she’d made her put it away. “You can’t do science like that, hon, texting seven of your friends while checking out a nest. Good observation requires all your attention, not just some of it.” Kaylee doesn’t see why; she’s always doing half a dozen things at once, everybody does. It’s actually hard to do only one thing. She tried to argue that she could record the data directly onto the NestWatch site from her SmartBerry, skipping the note-taking and data entry phases completely, and take pictures. But Jane doesn’t trust her not to spend the travel time between nest sites chatting, instead of listening and looking around, which is smart of Jane, Kaylee grudgingly admits. They’ve compromised: she can use her smartphone during data entry time, but not while actually monitoring nests. It makes Kaylee feel twitchy, all that time hiking between sites and trying to identify bird songs, not knowing what’s going on everywhere else.
Now she says, “I should probably call my mom so she doesn’t worry.”
“Good idea.”
Nobody answers at home. Kaylee’s brother Tyler always drops her off at Jane’s on his way to work his shift, so he’s at work, and her dad picks her up on his way home, but her mom must be out. When the answering machine comes on, Kaylee says, “Mom, did the siren go off? There’s a tornado warning, I hope you’re someplace safe. I’m down in Jane’s basement till it’s over, so don’t worry. See you later.” Then she rapidly texts safe in basement @ janes dont worry and sends that to her mom and dad, then sends im in janes basement where r u? to all her best friends at once, Hannah, Tabby, Andrew, Shannon, Jacob, Morgan, Macy, and waits for somebody to text back. It takes her mind off being scared, not that she’s all that scared really. There are tornado watches and a few warnings every spring—more and more of them in the last few years—her mom is always complaining, but they’ve never actually come to anything around Lawrenceburg, though she’s seen the TV shots of other places, even in Kentucky, where whole houses got turned into piles of rubble in a few seconds. The worst watches are the night ones, when you can’t see what the sky looks like.
While she waits—in the circumstances Jane can hardly object—she gets on Facebook and posts, “I’m in a tornado warning in Jane’s basement!”
She’s reading Tabby’s text—me + my mom + the twins r in the city hall shelter—when Jane puts her hand on Kaylee’s arm. “Listen. Do you hear that—like a freight train?” Something does sound like a freight train, getting louder and louder. She feels a thrill of serious fear, which spikes into panic when Jane says urgently, “Better get down low.”
At that instant three more buzzing beeps interrupt the droning radio robot. A tornado has been sighted on the ground near Glensboro, heading north-northeast at forty miles per hour. If you are in the path of this storm, move to the lowest level of a building or interior room and protect yourself from flying glass. Kaylee and Jane look at each other; Glensboro is only a couple of miles west of here. If it stays organized this tornado should pass near Lawrenceburg at 5:45 pm, near Birdie at 5:50 pm, near Alton at 6 o’clock pm, and near Frankfort at 6:15 pm, the flat voice states.
“Kaylee, get down. Get under the blanket and hold that pillow over your head.” Fleece and Roscoe are both whining now; Jane slides out of the low chair onto her knees and stretches herself out on top of Fleece, with her arm tight around Roscoe and terrified Kaylee; she pulls the blanket up over all of them.
The roar becomes deafening. There’s pressure in Kaylee’s ears, she can feel the floor vibrating. The house blows up.
After the shaking and roaring have stopped, and they’ve thrown off the blanket, Kaylee can’t see anything through the cracked but miraculously unbroken patio doors but a tangle of branches full of new green leaves. The basement has held together, though light is coming through some new cracks in the aboveground foundation block. “Kaylee, let me look at you. Are you okay?” Jane says worriedly.