What Stands in a Storm (40 page)

The family would never stop wondering why things happen the way they do. Why someone who had so much to give the world would have died before having the chance. His sister pictured him with Nana.

Taylor had gone to visit each of the families. She spent a night on the farm with Loryn's sisters and brother. She and Michelle became close, leaning on each other as orphaned siblings who had to find their way through the new and unfamiliar life of an only child. Taylor spent the night before the memorial with Kelli and Eric and got to know them as well. She was still hotheaded, and her grief usually manifested as anger. But she had found in the tragedy a new direction for her life.
After the tornado, she enrolled in nursing school, with an interest in emergency medicine.

Will's cousin had started a memorial scholarship fund in Will's name. It was just what Jean and Darrell needed to begin their healing process. It was a way to channel their energy and emotions toward something that could make a difference. Nothing would ever take away the void and the pain, but the one thing that made them feel better was helping others. They organized an annual memorial car show, where avid restorers of antique cars paid ten dollars to park on the baseball field and look under one another's hoods. They auctioned off engine blocks and donated parts, and sold raffle tickets for door prizes. That first year, they raised ten thousand dollars. They had a town-wide yard sale, which raised a few thousand more. They raised enough to grant two college scholarships each year, to a male and a female athlete from Priceville. This year, the male recipient's name was Chance, and he wore the number 11.

Will's football number was 11, as was his daddy's. Chance Ellsworth chose the number because Will had been a mentor to him. After Chance, the Priceville football coach promised to retire that number as long as he was coach. Will had also played under number 7, because he admired University of Alabama quarterback Jay Barker. That year, when the cows began to calve, Darrell came back to the house one morning looking especially pale and red-eyed.

“I got two cows that just calved,” he told Jean.

“Okay.”

“The first cow was number seven.”

“Okay.”

You know what the next one was?”

“Number eleven.”

It felt like Will was sending them a message:

It's gonna be okay.

Loryn's mother visited her grave every week and made sure she never lacked decorations. On game days she ordered a red and white spray of carnations shaped into a big Alabama
A
. When Beyoncé had a baby girl, they bought an
IT'S A GIRL!
wreath and placed it on Loryn's grave. On Halloween, the girls painted polka dot pumpkins. On Christmas, Ashley put up lights and a tree.

She had found little things as she sorted through the objects they had gathered from the house. There was a sketch pad that was mildewed from its time in the rain. It was blank, but she could not bring herself to throw it out. She flipped through one last time and found a page that she had missed. It was one of the only pages free of mud or mold, and on it Loryn had drawn an angel, with curly hair, standing on a cloud. In a copy of
Chicken Soup for the Soul
, a twig and a white azalea had blown into the pages. She opened it up to the page they marked, and it contained a poem called “Angels Among Us.”

She felt that she would never be the same mother that she was when Loryn was alive, but she treasures every moment with her living kids. The smiles seem brighter. The hugs seem tighter. And she believes that the three simple words “I love you” can never be overused.

The kids are magnificently resilient, and they still cry and miss Sissy, but they're okay, too. Anna, though, went through a very hard time and began to withdraw. Born in a family of ardent huggers, she lost her will to hug. Before, she would climb into Loryn's arms and attach herself to her sister all weekend like a monkey. Loryn would always make her mother give two-arm hugs, not the one-arm side hugs that did not count. “Mama, put down that laundry basket and give me a two-arm hug!” she would say. Ashley had to teach Anna how to hug again. She made her give a two-arm hug every single night for thirty-one days. Even if she was staying over at a friend's house, she had to hug her friend's mom with two arms before going to sleep that night.

Whenever the weather turned, the kids would all pull on helmets and huddle in the hallway, remembering. Anna worried the hardest.
When a rash of tornadoes pummeled the South on Christmas Day in 2012, Anna was inconsolable.

“It's going to be okay,” Ashley told her kids. That's what a mother says.

“Mama, it's not going to be okay,” Anna said. “It wasn't okay when Sissy didn't come home.”

Christmas was the hardest time of year, especially for Ashley. How does a mom learn to shop for one less kid? She didn't have the heart anymore to decorate like she used to, or put up a tree in every room. Everything meant to bring her cheer only made her think of Loryn.

One day that first December, Ashley came down with an awful flu and crawled into bed with Loryn's quilt, which she had never slept with before. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she saw a white mist floating across the room. Not much of a drinker, she thought at first it was the NyQuil talking. She reasoned it was moonlight bouncing off the pond and streaming through the blinds. But when she closed them, it was still there. She thought it was steam rising from the iron. The iron was cold.

“What is that?” she heard herself say aloud. It started to move to the door. “Wait, don't go.”

It moved to the corner of the bed, the corner where Loryn used to sit. She just lay there, looking at it, unafraid. Then she took out her camera, snapped a photo, and fell back asleep. Days later, the memory of it came back like a dream. She told her husband about it, and he looked at her as if she was crazy.
Was it a dream?
Then she remembered the picture on her phone.

There it was, just as she remembered it. A white, shapeless mist hovering over her bed. To this day she cannot explain it. She does not believe in ghosts, because she knows her daughter is in heaven. Whatever it was, she felt that it was given to her to get her through the heartache of that first Christmas.

Loryn's family started a memorial scholarship fund, too. Shannon's
fame as a coach and a UA football player helped them raise enough money to reach endowment. Then they started another one and endowed that, too. Ashley reads all the applications and chooses the recipients. The first one reminded her of Loryn.

One Friday night in autumn, two north Alabama high school football teams lined up to play for a memory. Each team was led by a coach who had lost a daughter to a storm: Shannon Brown, the coach of Ardmore High, reeling from the loss of Loryn, and Dirk Strunk, coach of Priceville High School.

Four years had passed since Strunk's own sixteen-year-old beauty, Katie, was killed when a twister struck Enterprise High on March 1, 2007. Katie had been hunkered in the hallway with friends, near the classroom where her mother, Kathy, was teaching. Eight students died that day.

Weeks after that storm, Ashley drove Loryn and some friends to the beach for spring break on March 17, 2007, Loryn's seventeenth birthday. They often passed through Enterprise, and that day they made a detour by the school. The girls were struck by what they saw.

“Those kids were our age,” said Loryn's friend.

The girls let that sink in.

“You know,” said Loryn, “none of us know we will make it through today.”

After April 27, 2011, Kathy wrote a letter to Loryn's mom, sharing the sorrow that other mothers could only try to imagine. Ashley Mims took some comfort in knowing that she did not mourn alone. Coach Strunk had reached out to Shannon Brown and Darrell Stevens, telling them the same.

“We're in a club nobody wants to be in.”

The Ardmore players wore on their helmets a special gold sticker with Loryn Brown's initials. Odd-numbered Priceville players wore Will's, while the evens honored Danielle.

Three families sat hip to hip in the stands, seesawing between pride and sorrow, leaning on one another through every play. Ashley Mims had spent the night at Will's house, where she stood in Will's room and got to know the boy who had held her daughter's hand until death pried them apart.

Jean and Darrell Stevens blinked away tears in the stadium lights as they watched Chance Ellsworth retire the number 11 in the last home game of Priceville's season.

On January 9, 2012, Tuscaloosa's biggest healing moment came when the University of Alabama Crimson Tide swept over LSU to win their fourteenth national championship. Watching the march to victory on TV, Shannon Brown paused from the gripping game to send a quick message from his phone. It popped up on Loryn's Facebook Page, where friends continued to send her greetings.

The next day, after the victory celebration, Alabama long-snapper Carson Tinker left the New Orleans Super Dome with his team to fly back to Tuscaloosa. It would have been Ashley's twenty-third birthday. In Tuscaloosa, three homemade crosses were planted in a
quiet field across the street from where the girl he loved was ripped from his arms by the wind. The crosses marked the spot where Ashley Harrison was found lying near their dogs, who also died. Friends had decorated her memorial with lay crimson-and-white shakers and other tokens from the game and left golf balls for her dogs. In his wallet Carson carried a note she'd written that said, “Just remember I love you.
Ash.” The signature from that note was stamped on the pink memorial bracelets sold to raise money for her scholarship, along with the phrase she often said to her family: