Stories from the Back of His Motorcycle

A storm was brewing. The inevitable kind which always follows a heat wave; forcing you to hurry outside and pack away your deck chairs, cover your pool, close the doors on hinges suddenly un-oiled. The kind which always hits the hardest because the sky has forgotten how to carry clouds.

I stared up; tracing patterns in the dark swirls, feeling increasingly anxious. It was as if I knew something big was coming, something bigger than this storm. Warnings had been sent out through every broadcast possible so even Ross, the guy who hated radio and refused to watch television, had doubtlessly heard them. Stay inside. Close all possible windows. Wait to be notified if it takes a turn for the worse.

I was sat on my doorstep with my head resting on my palm just watching it all come rolling in. There was the distant smell of rain getting closer and I could already see it break up the atmosphere around me. Not five seconds later it was coming down, and I was instantly drenched. I didn’t move an inch because I had done this since before I could remember – sit in the summer rain and watch lightning collide with the earth. It was a good place to think, or forget, whichever was the less painful at the time.

Right there I was forgetting all about my mother, her unwelcome visit days before, and how she hadn’t tried to ring once because she knew Nick would record the conversations if we ever had to face her in court. I was forgetting all about the wedding just two weeks away, how there was a bridesmaids dress up in my closet haunting me like a ghost. I was forgetting that my boyfriend had to still hear about a donation, and that his expiry date we never could quite pinpoint was fast approaching.

Turning my face upwards I allowed the rain to carve out my cheekbones, trace along my jaw, spill down my already sopping shirt. I held my breath like I was underwater, like I was waiting for that something horrible to happen already. I had to exhale eventually though because that something wasn’t going to strike me when I was expecting it. That was how the world worked – bad things only made sense if you weren’t expecting them.

That was possibly why Vaughn’s illness was so much worse. I could walk outside my front door and get hit by a car. I could stride across my yard and get struck by lightning. I could choke on my food; hit my head on the sidewalk; have a heart attack. Those were unexpected; they were unplanned ways I could die. Vaughn had it all planned out and had had so for most of his short life. I didn’t know how I’d cope with death staring me right in the face; I’d rather never know which turn I took might lead to that last closed door.

I sighed to myself; I was doing a pathetic job of forgetting.

“Hey, what are you doing out in the rain?”

Nick stood idly in the doorway behind me, watching his crazy sister getting soaked amid a typhoon. He wasn’t surprised because he could remember this too. He’d asked me that same question so many times before it was almost a ritual, and I would always answer the same way.

“Sitting.”

He chuckled, knowing my words even before I’d said them.

“El called, she wants to make sure we don’t forget the rehearsal dinner this weekend.”

“As if I could forget that,” I scoffed, rolling my eyes once again up to the dark sky. It was only mid afternoon but it could have been night for all the natural light cast, waves of black clouds curling up into each other so it was impossible to remember what it looked like blue and clear.

“Oh and Vaughn called too, saying something about visiting Keisha and telling you exciting news later,” Nick continued.

“What?”

As soon as I sprung up there was a sharp flash of lightning, its fork crashing nearby. I stood frozen in the rain, waiting for the inevitable thunder and for my heartbeat to stop spiking. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.

“He’ll drop by later to tell you. He sounded really happy on the phone. It’s not something I should know about is it? Not something like you’re pregnant or he’s picked out your engagement ring…” Nick trailed off uncomfortably.

I turned to face my brother slowly before finally hearing the thunder. Deep and growling, it applauded the sky, telling me that time hadn’t stopped for even a second. I breathed in deeply through my nose, smelling the rain, knowing the world was still turning, knowing that after the next fork of lightning there’d be that thunder again.

For a child with not a lot to hold onto this was always a comfort. I’d sit at my backdoor and count down the interlude between the natural giants, and the thunder never let me down.

“No Nick, it’s nothing for you to worry about.”

He nodded, eyeing the incoming storm behind me dubiously. “It was lucky he called when he did because it looks like this one might cut off the power for a while. I wouldn’t count on him dropping by if the weather doesn’t let up, nobody in their right mind would set a foot out of their house.”

For some reason I found myself glancing down at my bare feet both firmly planted outside, soaked and pruning and dirty.

If I knew Vaughn at all I knew a little bad weather wasn’t going to stop him from coming over, he still had a nasty habit of doing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. The rest of the world be damned. I could almost see him shrugging, waving a careless hand around at the sky as if to incorporate the entire world into his next words “it’s nothing important. It’s nothing that can stop me.”

Sometimes it felt like Vaughn was invincible; it felt like he was at the very top of the world, looking down at us all. But then at the worst points, at the lowest ebbs, he was anything but invincible. He was mortal. I could almost reach right through him, his skin translucent. When he was holding me and crying, when he was explaining exactly why he might leave me at any moment, when I’d catch him faltering just a step and he’d swear he was fine.

Just fine.

“Please Alice, come inside?”

I smiled at him, wondering if deep down in those musician hands, that lazy brain, that locked-up heart he missed Mom and Dad. If he was missing someone he’d left behind. He was my brother and a stranger and I loved him all the same. I realised under blankets and blankets of rain that even if he hated motorcycles, hated thunderstorms, hated everything that I held most dear, it wouldn’t change that.

I wanted to know anyway, though. There could be a girl back wherever he’d come from. Her name might be Lizzie or Caroline, she might be blonde or brunette, she might have been in his old band or worked at the local library, she could be the love of his life.

My mouth opened to ask before my brain caught up, as if my body had hurtled itself forwards so quickly that for a split second common sense had been left behind. Everything had been left behind. This was it – this was what I came outside in storms for. I’d forgotten about what most terrified me, I was about to plunge into something I knew I wasn’t ready for.

My healing family unit breathed in fragile breaths and I couldn’t risk that. For the first time in four years I could look at someone, smile at them and see it right there within them that they would never hurt me. They’d look back at me with a smile much like mine, tell me that they loved me, and I would believe them.

“Just a few more minutes.”

He nodded, retreating back behind the door to stand in our kitchen, his back facing me as he stared at something invisible. I watched for only a moment, grasping onto empty air and feeling the water run through my fingers. We were all so weak before the angry clouds, so insignificant, just standing there with nothing but our eyes and ears, hearing and seeing what could so easily destroy us in seconds.

I had never been afraid though. It was too beautiful, like a rough sea fallen upside-down.

I remained standing, swaying, winds picking up, getting ready to knock me over. I already knew what Vaughn was going to tell me but I didn’t know how I felt about it. Happy. Ecstatic. Scared. Terrified. Sad. Distraught. It was time whether I liked it or not, whether I was ready or not. He’d be here soon to look at me straight and tell me they were ready for him. They had one planned, lined up, papers signed and permissions granted, the donor card still warm lying in that poor dying person’s hand.

And he was excited about it – that’s what Nick had said – so he would agree to it. His silly notions about declining it long gone, whittled away by an overbearing mother and a nagging girlfriend no doubt. There would be hospitals and flashing lights and sirens. There would be my Vaughn being wheeled off into surgery while I would sit in the waiting room with carbon copies of myself.

Hit and miss, that’s what the doctors would tell me. It’s all hit and miss. Sometimes it’s fine, other times it’s not. I’d looked up the statistics for myself, I didn’t need anyone in a white coat with too many years in a fancy college to tell me my boyfriend could well die in the surgery. I knew that. God, I’d hammered it so far home it was probably engraved somewhere like a love heart on a tree, only so different as well.

I was becoming overwhelmed; the storm wasn’t helping me forget anything anymore. The hissing winds were too loud and the pounding rain was too cold. I didn’t want to look up in case I fell right up there in that tumultuous mass, head first.

The door was so easy to open. I was in the kitchen before I could understand that there was another presence in my kitchen other than Nick’s familiar one. My stomach lurched then curled, never settling once. Nick glanced up at me with a face so foreign to him I found it impossible to properly decipher.

“I was just about to come get you,” he murmured softly. I placed it then, the face and the voice. Pity. It was personified in my brother as he sat perched on a kitchen chair, looking like he didn’t know if he was coming or going.

I was heavy with the knowledge that something was wrong, wet hair dripping down my neck and bare feet slipping on the tiles. It didn’t hit me until then that possibly the storm raging outside wasn’t as beautiful and wonderful as I had always thought. It was an omen too.