What Stands in a Storm (27 page)

Loryn's father, Shannon Brown, arrived just in time to see his daughter pulled out of the house. She was the last one out. That was just like Loryn, he thought. He could almost hear her voice:

Daddy, I'm not coming out till you get here.

The investigator held out his camera.

“Yeah,” Shannon said. “That's my child.”

The pixels of the tiny screen shaped the awful, inescapable truth.

There she was, the girl who had changed his world as soon as she had entered it, squirming and squalling in his giant arms, twenty-one years and thirty-nine days ago. There was the toddler who cheered him on from the sidelines of Alabama football games, her pigtails in bows, crimson skirt flouncing. There was the little girl who walked on his back in bare feet after practice, her tiny toes easing the knots in his shoulders. He saw the growing girl who helped him press his hands into the cement in front of Denny Chimes, the Alabama football walk of fame. The girl who returned to that spot as a young woman in a houndstooth coat, kneeling for a photo beside her daddy's name. He saw the young lady who posed for a picture at Disney World with Jessie, the redheaded cowgirl from
Toy Story
, after whom she named the sprightly mare she loved to race around barrels in the yard. He saw the twenty-one-year-old college student who slept in his number 75 football jersey and wore it with a skirt to football games. He saw the young woman who should be walking across the Quad to class at the University of Alabama this fall.

The defining moments of Loryn's past, present, and future all swirled together and slipped through his hands like water. Shannon Brown could not hold back a grief so vast that it seemed to fill the sky. The men working in Beverly Heights paused as they heard it echoing through the black night, the sound of a father's loss.

A block away, just outside the neighborhood, Darrell Stevens got out of the car. His wife, Jean, her eyes red and raw, stayed in the car and stared through the glass at her husband's lips moving silently at the officer. She watched Darrell return, walking through the headlights with a hopeless curve in his spine, an awful emptiness in his eyes.

“It's not good” was all he could manage to say.

Will's best friend, Rand, watched from the shadows, wondering what he should do. He saw his best friend's father sag, as if someone had opened a valve and all the hope holding him up had leaked out. Rand had been waiting for his best friend's family, leaning against his truck on the roadside, watching for their Tahoe. Chase had gone home, but Rand's sister had come to give him company and support. When she drove up, he had hugged her tighter than he ever had. Now he watched from a distance a family whose world, like his, would never be the same.

What do I do? What do I say? What would Will do if it were me, and that was my dad?
Rand thought.
He'd go over there and be the best friend that he was.

Rand walked over and embraced Darrell like a man. No words were necessary. The two men cried and held each other up.

Jean and Darrell wanted to see their son. Rand led them through the lonely dark, down a road flanked by stacks of trees piled and shoved to the side. The air smelled dank and earthy, and the road felt textured underfoot, crusted with mud, broken twigs, and tender leaves crushed into the pavement.

Rand introduced Darrell to the investigator, who held out his digital camera, the little screen glowing like a flashlight. Darrell bent his tall frame over the two-inch display and looked with stabbing pain on the face of his only boy.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “That's my son.”

“I'm sorry for your loss,” the officer said.

Jean looked at the photo and saw through the stubble, the manly jaw, to the boy who once fit in her arms. The boy who wore a path in the lawn between home and his grandparents' house, running there every day. He always had to carry a little something back home—a stool, a pan, a bag of potatoes. The stool he had carried home as a toddler was still in a corner of her living room. All the memories came at her at once.

“Why! Why did this happen?!” she screamed so loud she thought her voice might shatter. “Why did this happen?”

But even drowning in grief, she thought she saw on Will's face a tiny smirk.

He has seen his Nana. He's with her now.

They had lost Nana eighteen months ago. Will had taken it hard. Those last few days, as Nana slipped away, Will sat all night in a chair by her bedside, watching over her until dawn. One morning when he went home to shower, she passed quietly. They buried her in the church cemetery, where each of them had a plot waiting. Just three days ago, after Easter services, they had stopped by as a family to visit and remember. Leaving her grave, Will had turned to Darrell with a sad smile.

“Daddy,” he said. “What I wouldn't give to see Nana again.”

Jean believed his wish had come true. That brought her comfort.

Will's younger sister, Taylor, moved to look at the camera, but Rand caught her shoulder and gently pulled her back.

“Sweetheart, you don't need to see him,” Rand said. He didn't want that picture to steal from her the image of Will living.

Taylor heard in that moment her brother's voice. Her last memory of Will was Easter Sunday. They had gone to church, visited Nana's grave, then joined the extended family over at Paw Paw's house for a big lunch. Before he had left for Tuscaloosa, they had said good-bye in the living room. He had picked her up in a hug so big her feet flutter-kicked the air.

“I love you!” He would not let her down until she said it back.

“Well, I guess I love you, too,” she said with a huff that made him smile.

That had only been three days ago, but now it felt like forever. As her parents talked quietly with the investigator, an ambulance slammed its doors and drove off. They watched it go in silence, taillights vanishing into the night. The world as they knew it continued to unravel at every seam.

Jean felt her head go light and her legs grow weak, and she melted onto the ground. She sat there in the street, too stunned to cry. She just wanted to go home. Looking around at this new and awful world, a world without Will, she noticed his beige Ford F150 peeking out from beneath a bouquet of green. A heavy limb had crushed the rails of the bed, but the cab looked survivable, one window blown out. She walked slowly to Will's truck, knowing she would find the doors unlocked and his wallet on the seat. That was Will. So trusting. Even when he knew he was not on the farm. She held the wallet, fingering the smooth black leather embossed with the University of Alabama seal.

The weight of reality crushed her. What were the chances he would be here, at this house, at this fateful moment? At the only house in the neighborhood that looked this bad? What were the chances?

Chance. It was Will's middle name. Born two days before Christmas in 1988, William Chance Stevens was their miracle baby after eight years of trying. “We're gonna name him Chance,” Darrell had said, “because I may not have another chance to have a child.”

They did in fact have another child, a sister for Will named Taylor. A quick-tempered brunette, Taylor Stevens knew exactly what she thought and let it be known. Will teased her that she was born without a filter. Will almost never got mad. Even-keeled and easygoing, he had the soul of another generation.

Rand finished knocking the broken glass out of the driver's-side window, and Taylor crawled into her brother's truck and sat behind the wheel, wishing she could drive it back in time to the days when
Bubba was alive. That's what she called him, even though he didn't look much like a Bubba.

The investigator wrote down the Stevens' name and phone number, said he would call them when they were ready to release Will's body. It was well after midnight when they started the drive home. Taylor lay down in the backseat, curled up around Will's pillow, his wallet in her hand.

As Will's family drove home on I-20/59, among the first lights they saw from the interstate were those of the Wingate, Danielle's hotel, where Ashley Mims had taken a room on the second floor. She could not sleep.

She had been told that she could not see Loryn's body until morning and had been tempted to spend the night in her car in the parking lot of the VA hospital, where she would be allowed, at 8:00 a.m., to enter the morgue and see her child. But her friends and family had talked her into getting a hotel room where she could shower and go through the motions of getting some rest. By coincidence, she had chosen the Wingate, not knowing Danielle had worked there.

In her room, Ashley sat quietly in a stuffed chair by the window, staring out into the night, seeing only her daughter's face. In her mind's eye she could see Loryn as clearly as if she were painted on the clouds, white on white—the vision she saw in the sky outside her home right after the phone cut off. She had begged her daughter not to go. But she knew at that moment it was over. And now the only thing she could do was sit in the dark and beg the dawn to hurry.

She passed the time by reliving their last, perfect weekend, replaying each moment over and over, as if the act would record every detail indelibly in her memory. Loryn singing into the steering wheel as she drove home to Wetumpka that Thursday before Easter, bursting in the front door like a happy tempest, going to pieces when she found the house empty.

Loryn had cooked them all tacos that night, adding too much water to the taco mix so the meat came out a little bit soupy. Anna and Holly fought over whose turn it was to sleep with her, and little Anna won out. It was a tight squeeze in Anna's skinny twin bed, but Loryn loved snuggling with her sisters so much that it did not really matter.

On Saturday they went to see about a horse. Loryn's older horse, Prissy, needed company, and they had looked at a sprightly chestnut mare. The girls took turns galloping in pairs through the fields and woods, around the small pond in back of the house. Ashley filmed Loryn racing barrels in the field beside the house. She rode Western, in jeans, boots, and a T-shirt, her long, brown hair sailing behind her.

On Sunday, after church, Loryn made them take family pictures until everyone's cheeks ached from smiling. She herded them around the yard, the girls in their gleaming white dresses and worn cowboy boots. She had them pose with the horses, by the pond, together and apart, orchestrating the perfect family portrait.

“Holly, fix your hair!”

“Anna, you're not smiling!”

“Parker, you've got to smile. Everyone look—Parker's not smiling!”

The pictures!

Ashley thought with a jolt that they might be lost to the storm. Loryn had taken the memory card back to school and posted a few on Facebook. But that memory card with all the rest—it had to be somewhere under that house, mixed up in all that rubble. They would never be able to find it. But they just had to. Those photographs were all they had left of their last precious day together.

The photographs and the note. Every time she left to go back to school, Loryn loved to sneak into the hallway and leave a little note on the chalkboard that hung on the wall. That Sunday, she wrote:

I love you!

To the moon and back
, Ashley thought, completing the sentence her daughter had said ever since she was little. When it came time to
head back to Tuscaloosa, Loryn pulled out of the driveway and drove slowly down the road along the front yard, as Anna ran barefoot beside the car, waving. Loryn rolled down the window, pointed to the sky and delivered her parting line:

“To the moon!”