The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [18]
Oh, the possibilities! Thanks to the Internet, you could now watch a storm during its inception and incubation through all stages of development, which in turn allowed you more time to obsess, if you were so inclined. Conditions had to be just right for a hurricane to develop. First of all, he’d discovered, for a trouble spot to form, ocean waters had to be warm, warmer than usual, and along with that you needed a cool upper atmosphere. There also had to be a disturbance near the surface of the water, an inverted trough of low air pressure moving through, such as a West African Disturbance Line—a line of convection that formed over Africa and moved into the Atlantic Ocean. Many factors could dilute storm activity—the infamous El Niño causing vertical wind sheer, a dry dusty Saharan Air Layer cooking the upper atmosphere, an area of high pressure hulking like a big bully, deflecting all storms. The 2005 hurricane season notwithstanding, the more Vic knew about hurricanes, the more it seemed a sort of miracle that one ever formed at all.
Vic would never have admitted it to anyone, but part of him was hoping for a hurricane to hit Tallahassee. Growing up in the Midwest, he’d always run outside, instead of into the basement, when the tornado sirens started wailing, but he never actually got to see a funnel cloud. Now he wanted more than just to see a storm coming. He wanted to be in a storm. Period.
Almost every summer, tropical storms flooded Tallahassee, but a tropical storm, nasty as it might be, wouldn’t do. It had to be a big mother. Cat. 3 or better. Chances this year were good. According to the weather experts, the 2006 hurricane season was supposed to be as bad or worse than the previous season, which was the most active hurricane season in recorded history, the season of Dennis, Emily, Rita, Wilma, and Katrina. He’d watched news coverage of those hurricanes and found himself, in a sick sort of way, envious of the survivors he heard telling their stories. They’d lived through a natural disaster of legendary proportions, they told awe-inspiring stories, and their lives would never be the same. Of course there were tragic losses, and he felt bad about the losses, when he thought about them, which he didn’t spend much time doing. Instead, he kept imagining what it would be like to be right in the middle of all that fury, and hoped he’d get the chance.
Tallahassee was twenty-five miles inland, but that didn’t make it safe from hurricanes. People still talked about Hurricane Kate, which wreaked havoc in 1985—ten years before Vic and his family moved from Iowa to Tallahassee. People said there were trees down everywhere, especially the big pines, power and water out for six weeks. There hadn’t been any direct hurricane hits since then, but Vic was hoping for the worst, which, he supposed, made him a selfish and callous person, but as long as he never actually voiced this desire, who would know? It’s not like he could cause a hurricane to come there. Get bigger, he told the little orange circle that wasn’t quite a storm. It didn’t budge.
* * *
Mrs. Archer showed up right at seven thirty p.m., and Vic was annoyed to be summoned out of his hidey-hole, but he tried to cover up his annoyance by offering the old lady some chocolate cake, and of course Caroline and Suzi wanted some, too, so he divvied up the remains and gave himself the smallest piece. Carrying their slices of cake on Caroline’s precious Jadeite dessert plates, they paraded into the living room—Vic, Suzi, and Caroline and Nance, as she insisted on being called. The rest of the family was nowhere to be seen. Otis was out in his shed, Ava was in her bedroom, supposedly doing homework, and Wilson was downstairs “resting.” None of them wanted to be subjected to an awkward evening with