What Stands in a Storm (41 page)

I love you as big as the sky!

Michelle still had good days and bad days. On the bad ones, she knew she could go home to cry on Clay's shoulder. He did not even need to say anything.

She did not want sympathy. She hated the looks she got from people who gave her sad smiles of pity. She hated just as much the judgment she felt when she did not show her grief. She experienced the whole spectrum of emotions every day, from sadness to anger to injustice to peace. She felt selfish for wanting her sister back on earth when she believed that she was in a place free of pain or sorrow. She told herself that nobody wanted to hear about her pain, but she did not want to be here if Danielle was not.

She did not want to hurt Clay when she told him that. She just wanted to be with her sister. Danielle's hugs could fix any hurt. Her laugh brightened any day. Without her, the world just did not hold the same beauty as it did before.

She wished that she could dial Danielle's number and hear her voice. Or send her a text about nothing. She even missed the things she hated the most, how anytime she vented, Danielle would force her to see the situation from another point of view. Danielle saw the good in everyone. It was something Michelle struggled to emulate.

Recently, she overheard her dad and uncle joking about something
in the car. It struck her then, the realization that she would never again have that. The thought of facing sixty sisterless years terrified her. She still wept a lot, but counseling sessions with her priest had taught her how to control her crying spells. And she had a dream that would help her face a world without Danielle.

In the dream, she is standing in billowing clouds. In front of her towers a golden gate. It slowly opens. On the other side, she sees Danielle, smiling, so pretty in her favorite little black dress. The sisters run to each other and embrace. The dream hug feels so strong, so real. Michelle can smell her sister's hair.

Then Michelle feels herself being pulled away. Danielle is still smiling, but now it is a sad smile. She uses no words, but her kind brown eyes say everything.

It is not your time
.
But I will see you again.

Michelle is now outside the gate, looking in at her smiling sister.

And then she wakes up.

JANUARY 28, 2013—BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

Johnny Parker stood in a crisp black suit before the green screen at ABC 33/40, beaming into the studio lights. On the TV monitor, a radar splashed behind him. He posed for pictures, gesturing in front of the weather map he could not see, and shaking hands with James Spann as they stood behind the weather desk. Spann had invited him to the filming of WeatherBrains, the online video talk show that he hosted every week. Guests typically joined the show remotely, using Google Connect and a webcam. But Johnny had driven two and a half hours with his family to be on the show in person.

Johnny had filled out, and with a beard and glasses, looked more than the year and a half older than he did when the superstorm hit, but he still had a scramble of dishwater curls and a boyish, effervescent smile. He sat down at the news desk with Spann and Bill Murray, a meteorologist who regularly appeared on the show. Murray had taken an interest in the aspiring weatherman and made efforts to support him. Johnny's mother, Patti, sat by his side, gently filling in the gaps in the moments when words would not come.

As the cameras rolled, Johnny told his story. Even though he still struggled to speak, he was comfortable in his element, confident among his people. Together they described the experience few meteorologists in the world would ever live to tell about: surviving an EF5.

The house where the Parkers had lived for twenty years had taken
a direct hit. But the interior walls had stood up to the two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds that spiraled within the funnel. They had survived, amazingly, without so much as a bruise. But the front and the back of their home had been shorn off, and the hallway had become a wind tunnel that sprayed debris through the house like buckshot. The windowless bathroom at the core of the house was the island of safety, and their last-second escape from the hall had saved their lives. They had preserved the strip of drywall stamped with childhood handprints, but the rest of the house was torn down.

Johnny described his defining moment of meteorological instinct. Just before school was dismissed a little early on April 27, a teacher had asked him what he thought the weather would do. The words stumbled out of his mouth before he even realized they were coming.

“I told him, ‘Even if our town does not get hit by one today, in the near future, we will be hit,' ” Johnny said. “After I told him that, that's when I realized what would happen.”

Smithville High was still using portable trailers as classrooms—with underground shelters nearby—when Johnny graduated the following May. He had his class ring engraved with waves and a tornado. Now he was a college student, enrolled in online meteorology courses at Itawamba Community College near home. He would later transfer to Spann's alma mater, Mississippi State.

A few months after the tornado, Jason Simpson conspired with a colleague from Mississippi to get Johnny and his family to Birmingham to introduce him to a special guest. Johnny did not know at first who it was, only that he was making the two-hour drive from Atlanta specifically to meet him. When a familiar face from the Weather Channel walked in the door, Johnny felt ten feet tall.

“Jim Cantore,” Johnny announced proudly on WeatherBrains, “gave me his own Weather Channel jacket.”

That blue rain shell, embroidered with Cantore's name, had weathered at least one whole season of storms, and Johnny wore it rain or shine. Cantore had a special appreciation for Johnny's intelligence
and determination to overcome impediments. His own two children were born with Fragile X Syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality that placed them on the autism spectrum. Cantore signed up for Johnny's forecasts, and the two became friends who e-mailed each other whenever the weather got interesting.

Patti Parker recounted the day after the storm, Johnny's seventeenth birthday. She had dug through the house to salvage his gift: a NOAA T-shirt. He loved it. The family shared a cake and a brief birthday celebration, a nice respite from what would grow into long months of cleanup and recovery.

They lived in a temporary house for much of that time, as Patti worked around the clock for United Way, overseeing storm relief. They wore donated clothes and ate donated food and occasionally their restaurant tab was picked up anonymously. Once, while she was standing in the checkout line at Walmart, Patti unloaded at least one hundred dollars' worth of groceries from her cart. When she reached into her purse for her wallet, the checkout lady smiled and said the stranger in line ahead of her had quietly offered to pay.

The tornado devastated the heart of Smithville, but not its soul. It gutted four churches and more than 150 homes. It ravaged Town Hall, the post office, the police station, and almost every business, including Mel's Diner and the Piggy Wiggly. It killed sixteen people. Some of the dead were found naked in fields, stripped of their clothes by the winds.

The people who got through it best were able to look at the mess and see meaning.

Johnny's pastor had carefully salvaged the fragile stained-glass window of Christ from the ruins of Smithville Baptist. That it would survive, with just two small cracks, may or may not have been a sign. But to the people who had seen their town scoured by the sky, it was not a matter to question. All they wanted was someone to make sense of it. Pastor Wes White, a man who described himself as a better hugger than a prophet, did the best he could. Sixteen neighbors and friends were gone forever. He held five funerals in four days. “We do
not grieve as those who have no hope,” he preached through the days of mourning. “For the believer, there is no period at the end of our life, only a comma.”

Even in rubble, even in pieces, the church was there for people to lean on. On the Sunday after the storm, his congregation built a giant scrap-wood cross, stuck it into the soil in front of the ruins, and held church in the parking lot. “Our beautiful church building is no longer here, but our church has never been more lovely,” the pastor told them that day. “I believe our God is going to take our devastation and turn it into something beautiful.”

Pastor Wes now presided over a church that had grown not only in size but in members, despite the town's population decline. Smithville Baptist was rebuilt bigger and better, with a modern sanctuary, a cozy nursery, and a new youth wing for teens. The stained-glass window watched over the pews and the altar, a sign of what stands in a storm.

The storm blew some people to a place from which they will never quite return. But others were blown to a better place. The Parkers lost their home, but the tornado scoured a clean slate for the dream house Patti had been sketching in her mind for years. Now those rooms were a daily reality.

Just as the Super Outbreak of 1974 had forged James Spann, the Smithville EF5 was the catalyst that transformed Johnny's weather hobby into a viable career. He still rose before first light to write his forecasts, and now he used complex meteorological software and other tools of the pros. His parents helped him create a private weather company, Parker Weather Service, and he had chosen a unique title for his business cards, inspired by his love of Jedi: Master Meteorologist. He had typed so many forecasts he wore the letters off his keyboard. He now had more than a thousand subscribers, including Jim Cantore and James Spann.

On the show, Spann acknowledged the impossibility of understanding all this family had endured. Of the thousands of tornadoes he had forecast, he had never stared into the teeth of one.

“I have been doing this for thirty-four years, and I have never been in a tornado,” Spann said. “I don't know what you feel like, but I'm sorry you had to go through that. That pain never goes away. It fades away, but it never goes away.”

Spann looked at Johnny and saw a boy who reminded him of his eighteen-year-old self. He also saw the future. Spann was not ready to retire just yet; he wanted to fix the warning system and develop a new weather model to pass on to the next generation. Johnny was coming of age in just the right era, with tools that helped him transcend limitations to do just what he loved.

“God spared your family for a reason,” James told Johnny. “You're taking something bad and turning it into something good.”

Somewhere in the world, right now, the atmosphere is stirring. Great invisible paisleys are swirling in a perpetual dance of infinite complexity. Winds are coursing above the land in waves and streams and eddies, heating and cooling and flowing, yielding to pressure in the immutable ways that water surrenders to gravity.

Somewhere, thunderstorms are purpling the sky, gathering and spreading with whistling speed and bruising rain. Below them waits a road, a town, a church. And somewhere, a future meteorologist, scanning the coiling sky.

Nature holds mysteries and power we barely fathom. It can, and will, inflict unimaginable suffering. But the same forces that destroy the walls that protect us also bring down the walls that divide us. And when everything else is stripped away, what stands is a truth as old as time: The things that tear our world apart reveal what holds us together.

April 2011 became the most active tornado month on record, with 757 tornadoes confirmed throughout the United States. Two hundred of them occurred on April 27, the most ever recorded in a single day. It is tricky to compare outbreaks, which have some similarities but inevitable differences, but many experts consider the April 25–27 outbreak the worst on modern record, narrowly exceeding the April 3, 1974, Super Outbreak. “In the period from 1960-2011, there have been about 100 tornado outbreaks that would qualify as ‘major' events and these two (April 3, 1974 and April 27, 2011) are, by far, the highest rated,” wrote Chuck Doswell, the respected research meteorologist who studies tornadoes. “The 2011 outbreak is the highest ranked outbreak (by a very tiny margin over April 3, 1974) since 1960.”