What Stands in a Storm (34 page)

Phillips stood, turned toward Sargent, and gave a thumbs-up.

A collective surge of relief filled the air, the mission finally accomplished. It gave her chills. This father's five-day nightmare of waiting had come to an end. The rescuers removed the last branches and boards and lifted the young man from the rubble. Four men carried him, each supporting a limb, and laid him on a clear spot of ground.

Two CSI guys in dress pants walked around the mountain.

“You have found him,” the father said.

“Yes, we found him.”

The father asked to see him. Usually, this is discouraged. It can be gruesome, haunting. This is why rescuers often make families wait until the emotionally antiseptic setting of the morgue, after the bodies have been cleaned up. And sometimes, that is why they push the photograph.

But the father needed to see his boy. He told them so, and sent his wife and oldest son away. Given his composure and what he had endured, giving him a moment with his son on the scene was the only right thing to do.

The father knelt by his boy, took him in his arms, and wept with grace and dignity. He told him that he loved him, and that he would miss him. He held his son with such tenderness, with such unconditional, absolute love, that it made some of the grown men turn away and scrub imaginary dirt from their eyes.

Marcus Smith was a twenty-one-year-old student, a bright young man from Richmond, Virginia, with a broad smile and his father's kind eyes. A junior at the University of Alabama, he had been on track to graduate next spring with a business degree. His Sigma Pi fraternity brothers knew him as a genuinely happy, humble guy who was as passionate about church as he was about sports. After Wednesday night services at Northwood Church of Christ, where he sat with his girlfriend in the third or fourth pew, he would join his church buddies for a game of basketball. Every Friday afternoon found them playing football at Snow Hinton Park. The last Sunday before the storm, he
taught a Bible study at a member's home and spoke about putting God first.

Marcus Smith had been in his apartment talking on the phone with his girlfriend when the phone went dead on Wednesday afternoon. She drove there to check on him and had helped the firefighters search.

Today every rescuer who had been to Charleston Square felt a great burden lifted, knowing the son who was lost for so long had been found. He was the needle in this citywide haystack.

His father, Robert Smith, thanked the men, who were startled by his graciousness; they were doing their job, but in his eyes they saw an arresting reminder of exactly why they did that job.

The rescuers would speak of this moment for years.

He had been waiting there for four days.

2:00 P.M., SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2011—HARTSELLE, ALABAMA

On the drive to Danielle's visitation, Kelli Rumanek wore a new black dress, one of the few items of clothing she now owned. Her mother was at the wheel and her boyfriend in the back, and their presence was the only thing keeping her on the solid side of a precipitous ledge.

Kelli was not okay. She had come home to find her roommates dead under her devastated house. She had no doubt that the horror of this would haunt her for the rest of her life.

At first she had shut down, her eyes absent of tears, her body frozen by a numbness that made her catatonic. Underneath that deceptive stillness, fear and anxiety pounded within her. When something tripped the fuse, her heart would flutter, her eyes would dilate, and her breathing would grow shallow and rapid. Her mind would race with a million fears, founded and unfounded, until she shut down again.

Her mother and boyfriend had whisked her away to Atlanta for a couple of days to get her out of Tuscaloosa, a beloved hometown transformed overnight into a minefield of sights, smells, and sounds that triggered flashes of terror. Arresting and visceral, the flashbacks would accost her like muggers leaping from the shadows of her mind in unexpected moments. A conversation, an object, a memory was all it took to unleash them.

She had not wanted to go back to the house, ever. Not until it was an empty slab.

“Kelli, you have happy memories there,” Dianne said. “Your life is there. We need to go.”

“No.”

Dianne knew she could not force her daughter, but she felt it was important for her to go. She knew that Kelli would find at least a few mementos that conjured happy memories. If she could salvage a few pieces of her past from under that house, maybe the house, and the past, would not become haunted.

Kelli finally relented. When they got to the house, the hallway was visible, and the girls' clothes fluttered silently in their closets. Kelli's brother crawled into the voids and called out, asking what he should be looking for.

“Can you get my necklaces?” Kelli said. Handmade in Uganda, they were not worth much, but they were a hundred happy moments of her first big trip abroad, strung together on a bit of string.

“I can see them, but I can't get there,” he said. “They're under something.”

“What can you see?”

“I'm just gonna grab stuff.”

Her brother crawled out clutching a shirt. It was a man's Hawaiian shirt, patterned with brown palm fronds on a black background. It was her boyfriend's shirt, and Kelli hated it, thought it was as ugly as homemade sin. But Eric loved it. She didn't have the heart to throw it away, so she had hidden it deep in her closet.

“Hey!” Eric said. “I thought I lost that shirt!”

For the first time in days, Kelli found herself laughing.

They salvaged a bedside lamp that had belonged to her grandmother, with a Tiffany-style stained-glass shade that somehow escaped a single crack. Her brother found a little tie-dyed scarf tied in a heavy bundle.

“It's my rocks!” she cried, weeping as if they were diamonds. “My Uganda rocks!”

As they left, Kelli turned to her mother and admitted that she had been right.

“I hope I never have to come back here again,” she said. “But I'm glad we came.”

Now, as they drove to Danielle's visitation, she wondered whether she would feel that way again. Kelli was not sure she could bring herself to go in. She did not know how to face her friends' parents. She felt a great, heavy guilt about being at the library instead of at the house. She feared being identified as the one who did not die beside her friends. Every time she watched the news she feared seeing her home on CNN. This unrelenting, ominous feeling of dread pervaded her days and consumed her thoughts. When she walked down the street, she felt certain people could see her guilt, branding her indelibly as if with a scarlet tattoo.

They arrived in Hartselle around two o'clock and were among the first in line at Danielle's visitation. Kelli began to unravel in the parking lot. Her pupils shrank and her breath grew quick and shallow. She fought the terror of being recognized, of being known as The One Who Lived.

“Honey, you don't need to do this,” Dianne said.

“I've got to do this!” she said. “You have to go first.”

As they stood in the receiving line, Kelli fought the urge to run. And when they finally stood face-to-face with Terri, Ed, and Michelle, she felt the terror squeezing her throat. She thought they would hate her for living.

Terri turned to Kelli with a flash of recognition.

Kelli braced herself.

“Oh, sweetheart!” Terri said, hugging her hard. “Thank God you're okay!”

Kelli broke open then, and all the sadness spilled out onto Terri's shoulder in a glorious rush of sobs and release. Her dead friend's mother held her up, held her with love and no need for forgiveness.

“There's a reason you survived,” Terri said. “You've got to live your life for the three of them.”

Dianne Rumanek stood speechless beside them, in awe of this
woman showing such grace and dignity as she prepared to bury her child. There had been moments when Rumanek felt so grateful Kelli's life had been spared, but that gratitude came laced with guilt knowing others had not been so lucky. Later, Dianne pulled Terri aside and thanked her.

“I watched you give my child her life back,” she said. “I'll never forget that as long as I live.”

“Dianne, the pain in that child's eyes,” Terri said, “I did what any mother would do.”

“You did what any mother would like to
think
that they would do.”

The funeral home scheduled an early viewing, because the director did not know whether or when the power would be restored, or the air-conditioning. Terri worried that there were not enough flowers. Without power, the florists had watched their inventory wilt in the heat. Clay's family made up for it with photographs. As mourners waited in an hour-long line that led to the closed pastel casket, they walked through twenty-four years of memories curated with great care. A slide show flashed through Danielle's life in snapshots, and Clay's sister had included messages written by friends and family on her Facebook page. On a table, notebooks, journals, newspaper clippings, and photographs formed a mosaic of her childhood and youth. Danielle as a baby, then as a toddler holding her baby sister. In her soccer jersey, on bended knee. Standing in the yellow prom dress she helped buy with McDonald's wages. High school graduation. Making goofy faces with Michelle.

A middle-aged man who only knew her from the Wingate looked sadly through the portrait of a life cut short. Flipping through her high school yearbook, he began weeping for the umpteenth time since he had heard about her death. On the page, she shared where she thought she would be ten years after graduation. Danielle wrote,
Married with at least one child. Graduated from college and helping people for a living.

That sounds about right
, thought Joe Kryzkowski.

Joe was a customer and a casual friend who knew Danielle from the Wingate. He stayed there during his business trips to the Michelin tire plant. Joe remembered the first time he met Danielle, during one of his first stays at the Wingate. She was in training under a manager, but she projected a natural friendliness with everyone who walked in the room. As she typed his information during check-in, she noticed his address was in Decatur, not far from her hometown.

“What part of Decatur?” she said brightly.

Joe immediately grew suspicious.

Why is this cute girl striking up a conversation out of the blue?

She looked about the same age as his daughter. Joe was the kind of man who did not open up to strangers, and he responded aloofly to her friendly overtures. But Danielle had a gift for breaking down walls with her unrelenting friendliness. When Joe realized this girl was not flirting, he lightened up. They soon learned that they belonged to the same parish and had several friends in common.

Joe became one of her favorite regular guests at the Wingate. She always gave him the best room, and he liked to pick on her by ringing the front desk bell obnoxiously. Whenever she saw him coming, she would run and snatch it away, laughing. Even when she claimed to be in a very bad mood, she was kind. And blunt in ways that he came to appreciate. Danielle called him out whenever he said something cynical, and she taught him the value of laughing at the absurdities of life.

When he heard through the grapevine about her death, Joe found himself bewildered by the unexpected emotions that accosted him. He did not think he knew her well enough to grieve this much. Needing someone to talk to, he called his ex-wife, who was as puzzled as he was by the magnitude of his feelings.

“Joe,” she said, “I've never heard you cry before. Just what did this girl mean to you?”

That question haunted his thoughts for days. He had known her for only a year and a half. They were casual friends, and nothing more.
He saw her, at most, once a week. And yet, he felt the crushing sadness of the void she had left in the world. He puzzled over it for some time.

What did Danielle mean to me? Why have I been so torn up?

After considerably more self-examination than he was accustomed to, he came to several answers. Danielle surfaced in his life at a very tough time, when he did not even realize how much he needed a friend. When she asked “How are you?” she was one of the very few people in his life who cared to hear the
real
answer. Most people hear, but they do not listen. She did. And beyond that, she cared. They had shared many thoughtful conversations about life, and she always gave surprisingly salient advice for someone half his age. Just as her yearbook suggested, she was born to help others. She was special. More than that, she made everyone around her feel special, too. As Maya Angelou wrote, “I have learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The fact that Danielle had so much to give the world, and died so young, in such a horrible way, shook him to the core. It made him think of his own mortality and the value of true friends, so few and so fragile. Danielle had cracked his cynical shell and freed a long-dormant part of his heart that had been afraid to love. He reflected on this and wrote a long essay about it, and shared it with her family. In it, he shared a great and vulnerable conclusion that helped her family comprehend the subtle ways in which she helped others: