Fearless (12 page)

That’s just what Kelley did right after school let out, renting an apartment, finding a waitressing job, and diving into a carefree lifestyle that almost always called for a miniskirt or a bikini. She would wait tables in the evening, dance and party the rest of the night away, sleep until afternoon if she slept at all, hang out at the beach, and repeat the process seven days a week. It was so much fun she didn’t want the summer to end. Occasionally she felt a twinge of guilt for not returning to college, but for the most part she was content in the now, with nothing on the horizon but good times.

The thought of home was particularly dreary. Though Kelley’s childhood had been wonderful, everything had changed at age thirteen when her parents began fighting. Kelley’s mother would leave for days and even weeks at a time, and her father would shoulder the responsibility of raising Kelley and her younger brother. Arguments were nearly constant whenever Kelley’s mother returned, and Kelley was
no longer relaxed in her own home. Family had become a source of anxiety, not comfort.

Kelley Tippy in Little Rock shortly after returning from Florida.

One Sunday well into September, Kelley woke up in the middle of the day, looked around the dirty apartment her father was helping her rent in Panama City Beach—piles of laundry on the floor and party fliers taped to a fridge holding more alcohol than food—and thought,
This isn’t normal. This isn’t right. I’m going nowhere
. “I felt pathetic,” she says.

The next week she was out with friends when a fight broke out and a male friend was badly beaten. That jolted her.
I don’t hang around people like this
, she thought.
Where am I? What am I doing here?
Only days later another friend, a “very GQ, Mr. Muscle, flashy, super cocky” type, was shot during a drug deal gone bad. Kelley visited him in the hospital, and he was “so scared and humbled,” she says. “I could almost see the innocent boy he used to be before he got all wrapped up in this seedy world.”

Late for work, Kelley hurried home to her apartment to change. As she fumbled through her closet for a pair of matching shoes amidst the disarray, she happened
upon her Bible—the one book she’d brought with her from home. She picked it up, brushed off the sand and dust, sat on the bed with it on her lap, and said out loud, “Lord, it’s time for me to get out of here, isn’t it?”

Hurricane Opal slammed into the Florida coast on October 4, 1995, with hundred-mile-an-hour wind gusts and a massive storm surge. That morning Kelley packed up her belongings and joined the evacuating throngs heading west through torrential rain and howling wind on gridlocked highways. She didn’t stop driving until she’d reached Little Rock fifteen hours later.

After moving back in with her father, Kelley mended her relationship with her mother over long talks and reconnected with her spirituality. She began attending Otter Creek Assembly of God. She read her Bible. She searched for direction. “God,” she prayed, “what is my path?”

Kelley took a job as a travel agent in early 1996 and enrolled in college courses at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, but she didn’t finish her classes. Her heart just wasn’t in it. Occasionally, she’d go out clubbing with friends but drank little, always volunteered to be the designated driver, and never again watched the sun come up after partying all night.

On October 17, 1997, two years after Kelley returned home, she and her friend Stephanie headed to the hippest nightspot in Little Rock to meet up with Heath Vance, whom Stephanie had gone to college with. Inside the smoky building, where an act reminiscent of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
was being performed on the stage, Kelley and Stephanie located Heath Vance standing with several buddies.

Kelley was instantly enamored with one of Heath’s friends, a young man he introduced as Adam. Leaning toward Kelley, Stephanie quietly said, “You can have any of them you want, but stay away from that one. He’s
crazy
. Stay away from him.”

“Ooh,” said Kelley, “but he’s the one I like.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Stephanie said. “He’s trouble.”

Adam chose that moment to take his shirt off and begin whirling it over his head, hooting at the transvestite act onstage.
Who
is
this guy?
wondered Kelley.
He’s hilarious
. She kept staring at his crooked smile and deep blue eyes, smitten. What she didn’t know was that Adam had been home from Teen Challenge for only three weeks. He had been clean and sober for just over a year. “I still question the wisdom,” says Heath.
“What in the world compelled me to bring Adam to a bar in Little Rock a couple of weeks out of drug rehab?”

Likewise, Adam couldn’t take his eyes off Kelley, a tall brunette with a girl-next-door face. Eventually, he walked over and stood near her. “Y’all havin’ a good time?” she asked him.

“Sure am,” said Adam. “I don’t get out much.”

Kelley laughed.
Yeah, right
, she thought.

They talked for a while, then out of the blue Adam said, “You smell so good, Kelley. What kind of perfume are you wearing?”

Overhearing the question, Stephanie rolled her eyes at what sounded like an obvious pickup line, but Kelley replied, “That’s funny. I have on three types of perfume tonight.”

“Yeah? What are they?”

“Heaven, Pleasures, and Forever.”

Without missing a beat Adam said, “Hmm. That
is
funny. That’s exactly how I picture us: heaven, pleasures, and forever.”

Adam went home that night with Kelley’s number.

The phone rang the following afternoon at Kelley’s home.

“Hello,” said Adam. “May I speak with Kelley, please?”

“This is Kelley.”

“I thought so! Hey, this is Adam. Adam Brown—we met last night? What are ya doin’?”

“Oh, I just got home.”

“Ah. Where you been?”

Kelley wanted to be honest and say that she’d just returned from teaching Sunday school, but she was nervous. She’d met this guy at a place that was, well, not where you’d expect a God-fearing Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher to be hanging out—and giving out her phone number, no less.

“Well, Adam, I just got home from church.”

There was quiet, then a gigantic sigh of relief. “I am
so
glad to hear you say that,” Adam said. “I’m a Christian and I go to church too. And that’s super important to my life. Figured I’d get that out in the open right off the bat.”

Kelley had been on a handful of dates with Adam and never experienced an awkward moment of silence or boredom. He was quirky, funny, and silly, but at the same time a perfect gentleman who saw to her every need—from opening the car door to making sure her popcorn had enough salt at the movies. She went to church with him too, and met Janice and Larry.

Then one night they were to meet for dinner at the Waffle House in Benton and Adam didn’t appear. He finally showed up forty minutes late, apologized as he grabbed a menu, and wouldn’t meet her eye. It took Kelley only a minute to clue in.

“Are you on something?” she asked.

“Funny story about that,” he said, looking up at her with disappointed eyes. “I actually am.”

While Kelley made him eat waffles and drink coffee, Adam explained how he had finished a drug treatment program only two months earlier. “This is the first time I’ve done it in over a year. I drove through this part of town on the way here, and I parked in front of this house I used to go to. I got tempted and couldn’t fight it. I went in, smoked some, and now I feel horrible. It will not happen again.”

He was talking so fast and so oddly that Kelley became worried—not for her safety but for his. He was acting “weird, crazy weird,” she remembers. Just what
Stephanie had warned her about. When his behavior hadn’t changed after two hours, she made a decision.

From the start, Adam was smitten and comfortably goofy with Kelley.

“You aren’t going home like this,” she said, then drove them to a nearby hotel.

“I’m so sorry,” he said at least a dozen times. In the room he wrote a check to cover its cost but she wouldn’t accept it, so he shoved it in her purse.

Kelley kept Adam talking into early morning, telling him about her parents’ fighting and their recent divorce, and Panama City Beach and how she’d come home and made amends with her mother and thanked her dad for being there for her. Adam choked up when he told her about his own mother and father, how much they loved each other and everything they had done for him, how awesome his older brother was, and what a great friend and supporter his twin sister had always been. He broke down and cried as he admitted he’d already let his family down and now he was doing it again.

“This isn’t you,” Kelley said. “It’s the drug. You have so much more to offer than this, Adam Brown. You know what? I’m going to pray for you.”

“That sounds like I won’t be seeing you again,” he said.

After hugging him for a long time, she wiped his tears and said, “You just have to fight this.”

At four in the morning, she drove them back to the Waffle House, fed Adam breakfast, and dropped him off at home. As she backed out of the driveway, he ran up beside the car and she rolled down the window. “I love you,” he said.

“You know, it’s funny, but I love you too,” she said, all the while thinking,
What in the world are you doing, Kelley Tippy?

She prayed for guidance as well as for Adam, but she knew her heart belonged to him and nothing told her to run from the situation. The moment she’d laid eyes on him, she had fallen in love. It simply didn’t matter that he came with baggage. Major baggage.

When Kelley got home, she retrieved Adam’s check from her purse and laughed because it was made out in pencil. Then she sighed heavily as she read the memo line where Adam had written, “I’m very sorry I disappointed you.”

For the next few weeks, Adam was on time for every date, which included taking Kelley’s dog, a chocolate Lab named Sidney, to swim at the lake, attending church, and
holding hands on long walks. Says Kelley, “He’d just do sweet little things,” like adjusting her car’s air vents so the heat would blow on her when it was cold. “But the sweetest was how he’d make me feel important. He’d stare at me and I’d catch him, and he’d smile and tell me I was beautiful. He’d tell me over and over again how lucky he was.”

One day she arrived at work to find a rose on her desk, with a note:
I love you—and am always thanking God for placing an angel in my heart. Adam
. On another day a gigantic box of a dozen Jungle Roses arrived, overnighted from the Amazon. When Kelley chastised Adam for spending that kind of money, he told her, “You deserve the best.”

Then, in early December, Adam stood Kelley up. “It was the second time he’d relapsed,” she says. “And I was thinking,
But wait! You’re so sweet and perfect! Why? It’s like two personalities
.”

Adam resurfaced two days later, as remorseful and apologetic as before: “a moment of weakness,” he explained. Like he’d done with Ryan Whited nearly two years earlier, he drove Kelley by the crackhouses where she could look for him if he disappeared again.