What Stands in a Storm (30 page)

Ashley Mims had heard that Danielle's parents were here, and she waited for them to finish the awful duty she had also just done. She watched the Downs family walk back into the lobby, sharing the pain they now felt. She rushed to Terri and hugged her. In the hallway of the VA hospital, two mothers who had never met before embraced each other's agony, forever sharing an intimate, terrible bond that no one else could ever understand. There are no right words for times like this, and few were said. Instead, there was the feel of warm arms, hot tears mixing cheek to cheek.

As they prepared to leave, another anguished mother arrived at the morgue. Ashley recognized her as the woman she saw that morning on the news, the desperate mother waving the photograph of her beautiful missing daughter. It was the mother of twenty-one-year-old Ashley Harrison, who had been ripped from the arms of her boyfriend, Carson Tinker, and thrown hundreds of feet to her death in a field.

Oh, I feel so sorry for you
, Ashley Mims thought.
I'm sorry you have to feel like me.

The woman and her husband disappeared into the little room.

Through the walls they heard her scream.

Danielle's family was still at the VA as Ashley Mims sifted through the ruins of 31 Beverly Heights, searching for artifacts of Loryn's life. It was high noon, and to Ashley, the world around her seemed unnaturally bright and crisp, every color more vivid, every smell more intense—natural gas commingled with pine and azaleas. Even the trees that had fallen on the house seemed fresher and greener than before.

Members of the UA baseball team had gathered in front of the house across the street, where one of their teammates lived. He had watched through the window as 31 Beverly Heights exploded under the giant tree. His team came over to help him clean up, and they noticed the family weeping as they searched through the ruins across the street. The team walked over and asked how they could help.

“There's a white dress,” Ashley told them. “We'd like to bury her in it. Can you help us find it?”

It was the dress she had worn to church on Easter. Loryn had been going to that church since she was five years old, and dreamed of being married there. Loryn would make one final trip down that aisle. Ashley wanted her in that white dress.

The players joined the families like a team of archaeologists, digging and sifting through the sedimentary layers of rubble. They lined up like a fire-bucket brigade, passing Loryn's wardrobe, piece by piece, to the street. Dresses paraded over the rubble in a colorful stream of patterns and colors and shapes. One of the baseball players paused and looked up between dresses.

“This girl liked clothes,” he said.

Ashley smiled. “Yes, she did.”

Loryn's paintings landed in the neighbor's yard. Her necklaces were found splayed in the street.

A member of the baseball team, the pitcher, lifted a white sundress at last and held it up for Ashley Mims. It was streaked with red Alabama clay, but that did not matter. It was the dress. She would never, ever forget how beautiful Loryn looked on that day in that dress.

“Thank you so much,” Ashley said through the tears. “Thank you.”

The white dress lay silently in the backseat as Ashley rode home through the yellow afternoon light to a house filled with friends who had been cleaning, cooking, and doting on the kids. They had kept Holly, Anna, and Parker at bay, preserving what few hours remained of life as they had always known it. Church ladies met visitors in the driveway, whispering over the casseroles:
They haven't told the kids.

Ashley could not let them hear it from anyone else. She had to be the one to tell them, even if she did not yet know how. She could not imagine anything harder than what she had just done.

Except facing the future.

In less than a month, Loryn was supposed to be getting on a plane for her first big trip. She was going to tour Beverly Hills with her aunt, then embark on a two-week wandering road trip across the great wide country, to all the places she had never seen, and the places in between. They had booked her flight on April 26, the night before the storm. In July, the whole family would drive to Florida for a beach vacation. Oh, how she loved the sugar-white sands and bath-warm waters of the Gulf.

Ashley realized the beach would never look the same. She would always see the empty place in the waves where Loryn should be playing. It was where Loryn became a child again, digging for sand dollars and gathering shells, her little sisters trailing her like ducklings, copying everything she did. On their last trip to the beach, Ashley snapped a photograph of her three girls doing handstands on the hard, wet sand. The waves swept into three sizes of handprints, washing them all away.

Danielle's friends and colleagues had begun to worry. It was not like her to go MIA. She was the cool head in the crisis, the starter of the phone tree, the one counting heads. She was exactly the person you wanted to be around at a time like this. She would know what to do and say.

At TES, Danielle was the only one who had not come into work. Even though her field placement had ended on Tuesday, she would have been among the first to show up to help, no phone call required. Her absence was a palpable void; today was all-hands-on-deck and they needed her desperately. Every time the front door opened, her colleagues glanced up, hoping to see her walk in.

At the Wingate, the front-desk staff had begun to suspect that something was terribly wrong. On the night of the storm, a lady had called and asked for her parents' phone number. Giving it out was against hotel policy, but the measured desperation in this woman's voice had been reason enough to break the rules. Her friends and colleagues had been calling her all day, but no one had been able to reach her. They had been in touch with her parents, who had not heard from her either. Now, as the hotel throbbed with guests in varied stages of crisis, the phone call came. Danielle's good friend Chanel Chapman was working her third shift in two days when she picked up the phone.

“Wingate, how may I help you?”

At first there was silence on the other end of the line.

“Is this Chanel?” the man said.

“Yes sir,” she said. “Is this Danielle's father?”

At first, she got excited. They must have found her. But his long pause turned that feeling inside out. She was crying before he spoke again.

“She's gone,” said Ed Downs.

“She's gone? What do you mean?”

“They found her and her friends under the house. As soon as we know anything else, we'll let y'all know.”

Chanel opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She turned to
her colleague, another friend of Danielle's. The friend read her face and began to cry as Chanel mouthed the words.

“That was her father.”

Loryn's family had gone home by the time the Downs family arrived at the house late that afternoon. Many of the roads were still blocked, and they parked nearby and hiked their way in, crossing the railroad tracks that bordered the back of Beverly Heights. The tracks, no longer cloaked by trees, now lay naked and exposed in the sun.

It was a beautiful day, and the sunshine seemed incongruous with the death trap that lay beneath. The giant tree that guillotined the house had sliced right through Danielle's room. On one side of the tree her grandmother's bed lay smashed, part of the bedpost slung into the street. On the other they found her Disney movies, scattered like playing cards. Danielle's stuffed pink hippo was stuck in a tree, ripped and bleeding stuffing.

Michelle scrambled onto the second floor, which was now the first floor, and began filling the drawers with the things she found—clothes, jewelry, movies, a throw pillow with a purple flower.

Acts of kindness condensed from the air, like rain. Strangers dropped off cases of water. A group of men had driven three hours with hunting ATVs. Four men they had never seen before cut up trunks with saws and formed a chain, passing armfuls of Danielle's things over and out of the house. People walking by gently offered whatever they could.

“Do you need anything?”

“We don't have any gloves.”

“Here, take these.”

A young woman from the Highlands, the adjacent neighborhood, gave Terri the ponytail holder from her hair and brought a tray of water. A student who went to college in another state offered to let them store Danielle's furniture at her parents' house, one street over, to keep
it out of the rain. They were grateful for all the kindness. Several men, whose names they would never learn, carried the big things to the storage room. They would come back down with a trailer. By the time they were done, dusk had draped itself over the house. They were too exhausted to drive home.

The Wingate was booked, but Danielle's friends had held two rooms for the family as soon as they had heard the news. As night settled over the scrambled city, they made their way to the little franchise by the interstate, where the wall-mounted AC units hummed white noise.

As they walked into the lobby, Terri looked drained and on the verge of breaking down. Danielle's friends rushed over and embraced her. Family, friends, and colleagues stood in a giant huddle, exchanging more tears than words near the front desk where Danielle should be standing. Michelle had once surprised her with a visit, hiding behind the customers until Danielle looked up and said, “May I help you?” Danielle had squealed and fanned her cheeks with her hands in shocked delight, her mouth forming a little
O
.

Exhausted in every way imaginable, they surrendered to the numbness of sleep.

Ashley and DeWayne Mims took the kids into their room and sat them down on the bed. Ashley held Anna, the littlest, on her lap. Holly, the middle child, sat beside her. Parker, the oldest, stood.

They knew. Ashley could see it in their faces. They knew.

Her husband was the one to say it.

“We found Sissy.”

Holly's face brightened with relief. “Oh, good!”

“When is Sissy coming home?” Anna said.

DeWayne sighed. This hurt as much as anything.