Jean Thompson - Wide Blue Yonder

Praise for National Book Award Finalist Jean Thompson and Wide Blue Yonder

Now and again, a novel comes along that is so authentic, so comprehensive in its vision that you forget, temporarily, everything youve read before. Jean Thompsons Wide Blue Yonder is such a book.

Lisa Shea, Elle

Meticulously engineered, Wide Blue Yonder boasts a wholly cinematic ending. Weather of every kind rains in; tenderness tints the horizon.

Beth Kephart, Baltimore Sun

Thompson is a writer of extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity.

Vince Passaro, The Oprah Magazine

Thompson displays a keen eye for everyday details. [She] creates a warm, wry sense of familiarity and a rooting interest in her characters progress. A blithe, good-humored book.

Janet Maslin, The New York Times

Thompsons ability to create a swirl of the strange and the familiar is why the novel works on both heart and head.

Erica Sanders, People

Jean Thompson is a writer worthy of [our] trust. An ultimately rich read.

Robin Vidimos, The Denver Post

Jean Thompson is one of the rare contemporary writers who have earned their credentials as card-carrying members of the literati while addressing the delicate, ineffable business of ordinary family happiness. Thompsons prose is crisp, slangy, staunchly unpretentious. This elegant and entertaining novel manages to deliver the good news without a shred of sentimentality.

Lisa Zeidner, The New York Times Book Review

A wry tragicomedy about barometric pressure in our skies and in our psyches.

Jennifer Krauss, The Washington Post

An authentic, affecting tale of flooded hearts, roiling spleens and souls hunkered down in the storm cellar of their private fears.

Kristin Tillotson, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

A Novel

Jean Thompson

Simon & Schuster
new york london toronto sydney Singapore

My sincere gratitude to Henry Dunow and Denise Roy for their expertise, enthusiasm, and unfailing support. Many thanks to others who helped: Stephen OByrne, Adrienne Kitchen, Carolyn Alessio, and my friends at El Centro por los Trabajadores.

SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2002 by Jean Thompson

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition 2003

Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales: 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

Designed by Jeanette Olender

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Simon & Schuster edition as follows:

Thompson, Jean, date.

Wide blue yonder : a novel / Jean Thompson.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3570.H625 W5 2002

813.54dc21 2001034157

ISBN 0-7432-0512-X
eISBN: 978-1-439-12998-2

0-7432-2958-4 (Pbk)

Beige Woman was saying Strong Storms. She brushed her hand over the map and drew bands of color in her wake. All of Illinois was angry red. A cold front currently draped across Oklahoma, a raggedy spiderweb thing, was going to scuttle eastward and slam up against your basic Warm Moist Air From the Gulf. The whole witchs brew had been bubbling up for the last few days and now it was right on the doorstep. Beige Woman dropped her voice half an octave to indicate the serious nature of the situation, and Local Forecast nodded to show he understood.

Then he got up to see if the coffee was ready. It wasnt quite; he stood watching it drip drip drip. When he poured milk in his cup it swirled like clouds. The sky outside was milk as well, milk over thin blue. Local Forecast stood on the back porch steps and turned his nose to the southwest, where all the trouble would come from later. He sniffed and squinted and tried to tease the front out of the unhelpful sky, but it stayed as shut as any door.

Back inside it was Man In A Suits turn. He stood, palm up, balancing Texas by its tip. Texas was green today. Florida was full of orange suns. Man In A Suit tickled the Atlantic coastline and whorls of ridged white sprang up, high pressure. Then jet stream arrows came leaping out of the northwest, blue and swift, full of icy glittering.

There was always Weather. And every minute there was a new miracle.

Coffee and cereal, then fifteen toe touches. Fat Cat rubbed at his ankles and got in the way. He couldnt reach his toes anymore. He got all purply and out of breath. He was old. Plus it was humid this morning, 93 percent, as you might expect on a Strong Storms day. He let his head hang and peered at the screen from between his legs. He had a glimpse of upside-down palm trees, which puzzled him for a moment before he straightened and collided with the couch, anxious to get turned around and watch properly.

Tropical Update. Hed almost forgotten, with all the storm news. It was June the First, official start of Hurricane Season. Now hed missed it and would have to wait through twenty minutes of insurance commercials and such before the next Update. He settled back in the couch. Fat Cat poured into his lap and solidified there, thrumming away. The big map was on and he fixed his eyes on the exact center of Illinois, You Are Here, the place the Weather lived.

Of course, you didnt get hurricanes in Illinois. You couldnt have everything. For hurricanes there were special people to show you how bad it was. The ocean going lumpy and gray as the storm moved in. Then came the galloping wires and sideways rain and the riven treetops. The announcer all tied up in a parka hood and staggering to keep upright. Water droplets blurring the camera lens. Local Forecast felt his heart grow large, thinking of their bravery. Sometimes if it was really bad, they were only voices on the phone, a lonely scratched-up sound that left you to imagine the shriek and slam of those water-soaked winds, the darkness closing in.

The blue screen came on. The Local Forecast. Blue blue blue, deep glowing indigo, like an astronaut would see from outer space. As long as there was the blue, there would be Weather.

He had to pee. He always had to pee nowadays, nothing down there worked the way it should. He got up, spilling his lapful of insulted cat. And wouldnt you know, when he got back from flushing, the Update had started and any second now theyd show the names. Names for the new hurricane season, storms that hadnt been born yet. Ocean currents not yet warmed, wind: not yet beginning to eddy. Come on come on come on.

Arlene, Bert, Cindy, Dennis, Emily, Floyd, Gert, Harvey

His eyes stopped right there. Harvey was his other name.

And since there were, as Man In A Suit said, an average of nine named storms every season and six hurricanes, the odds were on his side. He pitied people with names like Rita or Stan, who were pretty much out of the running. Hurricane Harvey! The mere possibility sent him bounding around the room, making hurricane noises. Hurricane Harvey, a spinning white spiral tilting now toward Florida, now toward the Bahamas, considering a jaunt up the East Coast. People boarding up windows and laying in batteries and bottled water. Waves eating beach houses bite by bite. Of course you wouldnt want anyone to die. Hed feel terrible. He hoped at least hed be an American hurricane, where they could handle these things a little better.