Free The Year of the Storm by John Mantooth Page A

was as a stranger. He was sitting three seats down from me at a bar. By then, the clash between what happened to me when I was fourteen and the rational adult world I had known since was beginning to exercise a hold on my life. Some nights, I couldn’t sleep for worrying about how much of it really happened. See, you start growing up, moving faster, doing more things, occupying your mind with one thing or another of little or great consequence, and you begin to lose sight of the things you once held dear: the ideals and the truths that you had clung to in your interior life because the interior life is whittled away by scratches on a calendar, obligations, and all the damned little things that make you old.
    I saw him and at first, I didn’t recognize him. No, that’s wrong. I recognized him immediately, but I didn’t place him. Seeing his face spiked something in my subconscious and put me in mind of the past. I knew I knew him. I felt dizzy with it. Then I heard him speak, saw him gesture with his hand, and I had it. Cliff. I leaned forward intending to call out his name, but at that instant, someone tapped him on the shoulder. Greetings were exchanged, beers bought amid uproarious laughter. I was left with a sense of loss so profound I immediately got up and exited the bar. Even now, I struggle to explain it. Maybe I just didn’t want to make him revisit those events that obviously had caused him so much pain. More likely, I believed it would be easier to simply walk away than to confront a person from my past with whom I had shared the greatest enigma of my life.
    I think one of the reasons I decided to write all of this down is because of that encounter with Cliff. It’s too easy to forget. And it’s even easier to pretend that you are just an ordinary person instead of that young boy who not only witnessed magic, but embraced it, reshaping the very world around him so that it lined up right and true.

Chapter Nine
    C liff woke me at ten thirty. For a brief second, I felt disoriented. I thought I was at Gran’s and I’d fallen asleep in her big chair. In my reverie, Mom and Anna were still with us, and I almost called out Anna’s name, somehow mistaking Cliff for her, before realizing where and
when
I was.
    â€œI figured it was time,” Cliff said.
    My neck was stiff and I had a dull headache, the kind I got sometimes when I’d been overstimulated. I nodded at him. “Good call. We need to get moving.”
    We grabbed a box of snack cakes to eat as we walked, and I wolfed down three of them before the highway.
    The day was already hot, something you got used to in Alabama, but there were no clouds that morning and the sun seemed particularly bright on my skin. I angled for a stand of pear trees in order to get out of its harsh glare.
    As we slid into the dim light of the woods, I saw the remnants from the tornado. Whole segments of the forest had been decimated, making it tough going because of all the deadfall. I remembered seeing Anna, the way she had seemed to beckon to me, as if she understood something about my fate that I couldn’t even begin to fathom. I was about to tell Cliff, when I thought better of it and decided to keep it to myself.
    I did want to find the shelter again, to show Cliff, but for some reason I couldn’t locate it. The woods looked so different now, devastated by the storm. I would be doing good just to find the old cabin again, much less the storm shelter where I’d seen Anna. Besides, I still wasn’t sure what to make of that whole day anyway. Like the night I’d seen Anna near the quicksand, the time in the storm shelter seemed more like a dream than reality.
    A few minutes later, we stood on top of a steep embankment, looking down at the little shack. It looked almost the same as the last time I was here, when I’d watched the police coming in and out behind yellow tape. A rutted, dirt road served as a driveway to