What Stands in a Storm (31 page)

“Baby, Sissy's not coming home,” he said. “Sissy's in heaven. She's gone before us. She's waiting on us.”

They screamed and cried and clawed at their faces, doubled over with pain. Ashley hugged the girls to her chest, feeling Holly shaking with sobs. Anna moaned pitifully. Parker walked to his room, sat on his bed, and stared out his window.

It was close to midnight when Brian Williams, the anchor of
NBC Nightly News
, checked into the Wingate.

A little more than twenty-four hours before, Williams had been on a plane to London Heathrow Airport to cover the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. After landing, as the airplane taxied to the gate, he checked his BlackBerry and saw that the death toll from the outbreak was eighty-three. By the time he reached the baggage claim, it had risen to 172. On the drive into London, he asked the driver to pull off the highway while he joined a conference call with NBC News in New York. Which story was more important?

“Go home,” said NBC president Steve Capus.

The car turned around and drove Williams back to the airport. He landed in Birmingham after ten o'clock and drove to Tuscaloosa along a dark interstate. He noticed the air smelled wet, and of pine. He came upon a tangle of cars twisted near an underpass, guarded by a lone Alabama trooper.

When Williams checked into the Wingate, one of the only hotels that had power, the hotel manager approached him and his crew and said that the hotel “has been touched by this tragedy.” The manager told them about his front-desk clerk, working her way through college at this interstate hotel.

When Williams learned that the girl's parents were at the hotel, he thought of his own twenty-three-year-old daughter in New York, and what he would say when he e-mailed her tonight from his room. The feeling moved him to write about it on a blog post that caused other fathers around the country to pause and tear up as they imagined their own daughters. Among them was the meteorologist Jim Stefkovich,
who closed the door to his office at the National Weather Service in Birmingham, put his head on his desk, and wept. Ed Downs, who was at this moment sleeping almost exactly one floor beneath Williams, would not see the post until three years later. He, too, would cry.

“Just a nice kid, not from a fancy family, but wanting a degree from Alabama and doing the work it requires,” Williams wrote. “She's someone's pretty, lovely angel, and one man just a few floors below me is coming to grips with the fact that his life will never, ever be the same.”

FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

Danielle's family checked out of the Wingate and thanked the staff for the room, and for the tears they had shared. Today was Michelle's college graduation from Mississippi State. Clay and his mother would be taking photos and cheering from the bleachers. Ed and Terri drove home to plan a funeral.

Before they left, Michelle wanted one more walk through Beverly Heights. She gingerly stepped through the splintered two-by-fours, shredded drywall, and soggy insulation, hunting for more relics from her sister's life. She searched for photographs, clothes, jewelry. Lifting a blanket of insulation, like the batting of a quilt laid bare, she found the ceramic picture frame, painted with pink daisies, that had rested on Danielle's nightstand. It held a photo of two sisters in front of a waterfall, smiling into the sun.

The clothes hamper was still in the closet, filled with shirts that still smelled like her sister. On a shoe rack hanging on the back of the closet door, Michelle noticed a pair of kitten heels. A birthday gift from a friend, they were the color of morning sunshine, with pale blue stripes and a flourish on the toe. Danielle called them her “happy shoes.” Michelle longed to keep them—they were cute, they fit her perfectly, and they were Danielle's—but she had other, bigger plans for them. She found a pair of earrings and tucked them in her pocket.
These things were just things, but they were more than things, because they felt like a part of Danielle.

Among the last and most precious things she found was a whiteboard. On it was a Bible verse in Danielle's hand, written in purple dry-erase marker. Every letter remained intact, and when she found it, Michelle believed Danielle had left it for her to find:

We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed,

perplexed, but not in despair;

persecuted, but not abandoned;

struck down but not destroyed.

—2 Corinthians 4:8

In the skies above 31 Beverly Heights, a little before noon, the President of the United States gazed out the window of Air Force One. From high above, the tornado's path looked like a brown smudge through a pointillist painting, an eighty-mile scar across the verdant land. People scattered through the interrupted streets of a broken city like ants rebuilding a hill.

Air Force One landed at Tuscaloosa Regional Airport, a two-runway operation with no commercial flights. Wearing slacks and a light button-down shirt with no tie, President Barack Obama climbed down the steps of his plane hand-in-hand with First Lady Michelle Obama. At the bottom, they shook hands with the governor, the mayor, and their wives.

The roads had been cleared for the motorcade, and people paused from their digging and hauling to rise up and catch a glimpse of the President. The limo passed slowly down Fifteenth Street. To the left, Forest Lake sparkled like a diamond in the dirt. Once hidden by ancient Druid oaks that shaded its homes like lacy parasols, the small lake was one of the few recognizable landmarks left in a featureless mess. Those giant oaks were snapped at the trunk, as if cut by a giant
Weedwacker. Across the street, the tiny cottages of Cedar Crest were mowed down, one yard indistinguishable from the next.

The limo stopped in Alberta City, where the President and First Lady emerged to walk a raggedy stretch of Seventh Street. It was seventy-five degrees and muggy, and the politicians had all rolled up their shirtsleeves. They paused to speak with a group of residents standing atop a crushed house and met the principal of Holt Elementary School, which was now functioning as a shelter and aid station. Principal Debbie Crawford had been at the school with her school nurse for the past forty-eight hours. The First Lady hugged survivors, and the President held a two-year-old girl who no longer had a home.

The President had declared Alabama a major disaster area on Thursday night. The total death toll had reached 333, including those who died when the outbreak began to the west on April 25. Alabama's death toll had now reached 247. Fifteen hundred people were staying in sixty-five Red Cross shelters, 654 families had been displaced from government housing projects—and that was only a fraction of the number of people who were suddenly homeless. The missing-persons list had grown to 454.

“I have never seen devastation like this,” the President said before he left Tuscaloosa.

But in the devastation he noticed something else, a universal truth that echoed across tragedies.

“When something like this happens, people forget all their petty differences . . . and we're reminded that all we have is each other.”

Clay and Michelle Downs loaded the shoes, the earrings, the photograph, and the whiteboard in the car and drove back to Starkville in time for her graduation from Mississippi State. She had long been looking forward to this day of celebrating milestones and accomplishments. She and Clay were graduating on the dean's list. Her parents would have beamed with pride, but they were picking out a casket.

Michelle slipped on her black cap and gown, put on Danielle's earrings, and slid her feet into the happy shoes she had found in her sister's closet. She would wear them for the most important walk in her life—until the one next week that would take her down the aisle of a church.

After the storm, the University of Alabama canceled commencement ceremonies and postponed them indefinitely. Michelle hoped to be able to walk on her sister's behalf, to receive the diploma that Danielle had struggled so hard to earn. But just in case that did not come to pass, Michelle decided to cross her own stage in Starkville holding the framed photograph that she had dug from the rubble, the one that showed the two of them smiling in the summer sun.

Now, as she sat in the rows of robed graduates, she held the photograph in her lap, studying their faces until they grew blurry. Her blue eyes were red and puffy, and she ached with the greatest hurt she had ever known. Yet somewhere deep inside her sprang the inner well that Danielle had divined, the strength she did not know she possessed until her sister showed her it was there. From this source she summoned a genuine smile as the officiant called Michelle Kathleen Downs to walk across the stage.

It was a short walk, but in each step was a thousand journeys, a thousand acts of courage and faith. One more step into a future without Danielle, one step further from this awful past. One breath, one step, one day at a time. For some things in life, there is no way around—you have to go through them.

Michelle raised her chin and smiled through the tears as she walked in her sister's shoes.

SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2011—PLEASANT GROVE, ALABAMA

The crack of a bat and the arc of a ball into the bright green of the outfield made the storm seem like a horrible dream. James Spann watched his thirteen-year-old son, Ryan, sprint across the field in his baseball whites. Here was a little pocket of normal, a rare moment of escape from the aftermath that would haunt the state for months. These were Spann's happiest times, with his wife by his side and his son on the field doing what he never got to do with the father he never had.

Fatherhood nearly filled the void that Spann's father left behind. Nearly. Three decades after the man walked out, Spann found his house in Huntsville and went knocking on his door. Now thirty-seven, and a father himself, Spann still had questions. He still had anger. He still had a tiny shred of hope that he might find a father.