Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir Read Online Free

pounding, pounding, and the inescapable feeling I was going to die.
    This wasn’t a quiet feeling; it was a loud and jagged scream; it was the terror of drowning; it was all the terrible things I had ever known and ever feared, uncoiling into a thousand savage arms ruggedly pulling me under until I could not see or think or feel beyond my most basic hardwired need to claw through and take another breath.
    I called 911, but when I heard the voice on the other end, I remembered the men who’d been here just the day before, how they’d smiled at me, and I couldn’t bear the thought of facing them again. With my fingertips pressed against the side of my neck, I told the 911 operator that I’d misdialed, then hung up and hunched over on the front step, my head in my lap.
    When I called Larry, I spoke into my knees. “It’s happening again.”
    “What’s happening again? I’m in the middle of seeing patients.”
    “My heart,” I said. “Can you come home?”
    “You’re okay,” he said. Then he repeated himself, as if there were no other thing to say.
    But those words didn’t help, no matter how many times he repeated them. They were both a dismissal and a directive, and I wanted neither. I wanted him to make some gesture that would magically gather me up, like a basket of fallen fruit. The phone shook in my hand, rattled against my ear. “You can’t come home, can you?”
    Larry sighed. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.” We both knew what that meant: not soon at all.
    Outside, it was obnoxiously summer, things blooming all over the place. And my fear seemed to be part of the pollen, stuck in the air, collecting in my lungs. I thought of friends I could call, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to say some version of Hi, I thought I’d give you a call between panic attacks or heart arrhythmias or whatever the hell is happening to me, just to let you know that I’m afraid—of everything. Also, I may be going crazy.
    I couldn’t understand how I would be so afraid now, here. As a child in my parents’ custody and as a teenage runaway, I’d had countless reasons to be afraid, but when I was nineteen, I’d walked away from that world and given myself a fresh start. For the sixteen years that followed, I’d found what seemed to me a stable and happy life. I’d once come across a saying attributed to the Buddha—“How sweetly the lotus grows in the litter of the wayside”—and I liked imagining myself as that lotus, having emerged from the filth of my past still clean. It was nice to think that the chaos I’d lived through not only hadn’t damaged me but had provided me with a hard-won wisdom I could offer my friends. I was happy to be the one they came to with their love spats, their sadness, their uncertainty. That was my role with most people in my life—a calm presence who could show others how to move toward light—and I took it on gratefully. I wanted to believe that I had already learned the hard lessons of life, that the majority of my struggles—real struggles—were behind me now. And I liked the idea that by taking charge of my life at such a young age, by having pulled myself up out of the abyss by the force of my own will, I’d discovered a power I probably would never have otherwise known I had, a power that made it possible for me to be relentless about going after what I wanted—love, safety, a happy life—and to build it. But now, as I sat in terror, for the second time in as many days, on the front step of the beautiful home I shared with the beautiful man I loved, I felt utterly powerless.
    When Larry came home that night, I greeted him with his old stethoscope from medical school, which I’d found in the basement in the equally old black doctor’s bag that he’d purchased earnestly for his first day as a doctor-to-be and never carried again after he realized that the only doctors who had them were in 1950s movies. He looked crumpled—not only his scrubs but also his