What Stands in a Storm (22 page)

James Spann continued the warnings as the news desk patched in a call from Tuscaloosa.

“Let's bring in Mayor Walt Maddox,” Spann said. “Mayor, everybody wants to know what has happened in your city. So tell us, what happened?”

“Well, right now we're in the incident command center and it appears that the damage is substantial.”

“Can you tell us some of the hardest-hit areas?”

“Well, I caution, because these are the first reports and some of this may change, but it appears that the Rosedale community seems to be the hardest hit. We all know that our EMA in the Curry facility has been damaged . . . the East police precinct in Alberta has been damaged.”

“How did the Tuscaloosa police headquarters fare? Because it looked like they were awfully close to this thing.”

“It was awfully close. They seemed to fare pretty well. The PD is up and operational. The city is operational. We're at full go right now. Hopefully later tonight we'll have a better idea of what has transpired over the last few minutes.”

“I've got countless mommies and daddies wondering how their kids are doing. Is there any damage on the campus there?”

“We've heard reports but they haven't been confirmed. One thing I've learned is that in any emergency what you hear in the first thirty minutes you have to caution taking as fact.”

“There are no tornadic storms approaching Tuscaloosa from the west. I take that back, let's take a look at this one here. No signs of organization or rotation, so once we get through this last batch, you're going to be okay for about an hour.”

“Thank you, James. You saved a lot of lives today.”

5:45 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

Across the river from Tuscaloosa, in Northport, Kelli Rumanek's mother, Dianne, emerged from her safe place, surprised she still had power and cable, and wondered if the storm had passed. Her landline began ringing. She had nearly gotten rid of it last month but was grateful today she had not. It was Loryn's father, Shannon Brown. He had been dodging other storms at his home in Madison, Alabama, and without power had not known about the Tuscaloosa tornado until friends began calling, worried about Loryn.

“Dianne, I can't get in touch with Loryn,” Brown said. “Have you heard from the girls?”

“No, but I know Kelli's okay and she's on her way,” Rumanek said. “Don't panic—there's been damage. But the phone lines are down, and no one's able to communicate. I'll just run over there.”

“I hate for you to do that.”

“No, I don't mind.”

The weather in Northport had seemed so uneventful that Rumanek was not too concerned. Communication often fell apart after storms, and this was no exception. She kicked on a pair of flip-flops and got in the car, skirting downtown and campus by taking River Road. Everything at that end of town looked all right. She turned right on Helen Keller Boulevard, passing Baumhower's Restaurant, the labyrinthine sports bar where Loryn waited tables. But as she approached
University Boulevard, the roads were blocked. Not far from where Kelli and Eric had parked, she pulled over and left her car to continue on foot.

The first inkling of dread hit Dianne Rumanek at the corner of Beverly Heights. Was that the Lutheran church? She could hardly recognize it, splayed open as if by a giant ax. She flagged down a student with a backpack walking out of the neighborhood.

“Is everything okay down there?” she asked the kid.

“Everything but the house where the girls lived,” he said.

“What?”

“Not the house where the girls lived.”

“That's my house!”

Silhouetted by the wreckage of a fallen house, Kelli Rumanek blinked in confusion.

Where's my house?

Not a single wall rose from the ruins that filled the bowl where the house once stood. An ancient oak, so big it would have taken two people to hug it, had sliced the house in two. The second story had splintered and collapsed, crushing the first floor beneath it. The low point in the neighborhood was now level with the elbow of road.

“Oh, my God!” Kelli screamed. “They're in there!
They're in there!
”

She just stood there, shaking, crying, barely breathing, until her boyfriend ran up, breathless, and folded her into his arms. Kelli's legs gave out, and as she sank to the ground, Eric Arthur sank with her, guiding her fall, never letting go. He could feel her heart beating within her ribs like the wings of a wounded bird.

“Just breathe,” he whispered. “Just breathe. Just breathe.”

Eric held her, wishing he could crush out the sadness. As the magnitude of the moment washed over him, small details came into focus. The smoke and the splinters and toppled trees. The scent of pine and sulfur. The dying of the light. Kelli's tears hot on his neck.

On the ground beside him a playing card, ripped at one corner, lay facedown in the dirt. It was just one card, plucked from its deck by the storm and placed there like a message. Keeping one arm around Kelli, he reached down and flipped it over.

Queen of hearts.

He slipped the card in his pocket.

Dianne Rumanek ran up to find her daughter in Eric's arms, kneeling by a mountain of hopelessness.

There's no way
, Rumanek thought.
No one in there could have survived.

Loryn's mother, Ashley, kept calling her, but Loryn did not answer. At her knee, her youngest children were scared and crying. “Where's Sissy?” they demanded again and again. “Mama! Where's Sissy?” She pulled herself together, thought,
Who can I call to check on her?
Leah! Loryn's friend who worked with her at nearby Baumhower's.

“Baby, I was talking to Loryn and the phone cut off. I can't get her to answer. Where are you?” Ashley asked. “Are you okay? Are you with her?”

“No ma'am, she's at home. I just talked to her a little while ago. She was at her house.”

“There was a boy with her. I think it's Dustin.”

“I don't think it's Dustin. I just called him seeing if he'd heard from her. Miss Ashley, it went right over there. I can't get through. It went right over her house!”

“I know, baby,” she said softly. “I saw it on TV.”

Loryn's friends had been at work at Wings, a few blocks away on Helen Keller Boulevard.

Ashley Mims next tried Dustin, her daughter's good friend.

“Dustin, are you with Loryn? I can't get her to answer.”

“No ma'am, but we're fixing to walk over there and we can't get
through,” he said, beginning to cry. “Miss Ashley, I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry!”

“Dustin, there's somebody with her. There was a guy with her. Who could it be?”

“I don't know, Miss Ashley. Steven's with me, and I've talked to Tribble and Sean, and it's not them.”

They ran toward the house, climbing over trees and branches. When they got there, Dustin called her back.

“Miss Ashley, her car's not there,” he said. “She must have left.”

“No, she didn't leave. She's there.”

“But her car's not here. It's not where she parked. I promise you she must have left.”

“Dustin, she didn't leave. I'm telling you, she didn't leave.”

It had been an hour, but it felt like minutes. Ashley paced the front yard, her kids trailing her, crying, “Mama, what's going on? What's going on?”

In Beverly Heights, Dustin realized he was standing in the wrong driveway. This used to be a vacant lot, and now it had a house on it. They ran around the ruins, yelling Loryn's name. No one answered. When he finally found Loryn's car, he didn't have the strength to call her mother. He called Ashley's husband, DeWayne Mims, instead.

It never dawned on Ashley to call her ex-husband, Loryn's dad, until his name lit up on her phone. Shannon Brown and his wife had been taking shelter from tornadoes passing near his home in Madison, a small town on the outskirts of Huntsville. The power was still out, and he had been unaware that a tornado had struck Tuscaloosa until his phone started ringing relentlessly. Everyone was worried about Loryn.

“I can't get Loryn to answer,” Brown told his ex-wife. “Have you heard anything from her?”

“I was on the phone with her, Shannon, and the phone cut off,” Ashley said. “I can't get her to answer!”

“She's fine,” Shannon said. “She'll be fine. It's just that there's no phone service.”

“I'm telling you the phones are fine. I was on the phone with Dustin earlier in her front yard. If that child was alive, I'd be the first person she would call. She would not let me worry for a second.”

Shannon knew at that moment Ashley was right.

His father was already loading heavy equipment in Greensboro, about thirty minutes south of Tuscaloosa. A retired air force lieutenant colonel, Jerry Brown owned a tree-trimming service that helped clear the roads after storms. He had talked to Ashley and knew from the reports by Loryn's friends that trees had crushed the house.

As Loryn's Pop-Pop steeled himself for the saddest job of his life, his wife turned to him with tears in her eyes.

“Go get my grandbaby,” she said. “Go get her.”

5:55 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—CHARLESTON SQUARE, TUSCALOOSA

Rescue 21, have a subject at Charleston Square. Are you at Rosedale?

We're en route to the Curry building. Where do you need us to respond to?

Charleston Square. Eight hundred Twenty-Seventh Street.

A young woman woke up somewhere outside her apartment, sprawled on her back, blinking up at the sky. The clouds were painted gray and green and blue and black, the colors swirling and bleeding into one another like a living watercolor painting.

Did that really just happen?
she thought.
Am I in a dream?

Chelsea Thrash did not know how long she had been lying there. As she surfaced into consciousness, the moments leading up to this stuttered through her mind. Sirens sounding and the trees outside the second-story apartment swaying. Stopping by the kitchen to grab a snack. Carrying notes into the bathroom and settling in to study on the linoleum floor. The cool porcelain of bathtub against her arm. A roar that shook the walls. Peeking out of the bathroom and seeing the front door flying off the hinges.

And then: blackness.

Now, lying flat on her back under the curdling clouds, she heard the world go oddly quiet. No cars. No hum of outdoor AC units. No voices. No wind. She wondered whether she had landed somewhere all alone, whether anyone else in the world had survived. She made a move to get up and look around.

Nothing happened.

She tried again.

Nothing.

Her legs would not move. She felt no pain. She felt . . . nothing. Something was terribly, horribly wrong.

Chelsea craned her head around, and it took a second to recognize the trashed inner courtyard of Charleston Square. Minutes ago it had been a lovely place, a giant grassy quad framed by a large two-story square of modest apartments. The centerpiece was a large blue swimming pool set in a lawn crisscrossed by concrete footpaths and shaded by clusters of trees.

Now it resembled those scenes on CNN of some distant, godforsaken corner of the earth where tanks roamed and suicide bombers blew themselves up. A section of the building was gutted, exposing bedrooms and living rooms in varying states of disarray. What was not shelled was utterly obliterated, the shredded remains smeared in an ugly white streak across the green lawn. Boards and drywall bobbed in the pool not far from where she lay. Chelsea could not feel it, and yet underneath her back lay a rock that had shattered her vertebra. Above her, a ragged tree raised its naked branches toward the sky like hands, as if to ask, “Why?”

She looked down to see what was wrong with her legs. Her shoes had vanished and her legs lay passively in the black yoga pants she had pulled on with a T-shirt that morning. Her legs appeared intact, but they felt strangely disconnected. Her brain kept willing them into motion, but they just lay there, aloof and inert, as if they belonged to someone else, someone who could make them move.