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“Jenna, this is Margot Tuttle.” Nancy then advised Margot about her initial assessment. “Be right back,” Nancy said. “I’m going to see someone to help with your son.”
Margot, a soft-spoken woman in her mid-thirties, checked Cassie and Jenna’s vital signs, shone a light in their eyes for any indication of brain or nerve injury, then treated Cassie’s face, gently dabbing it with cotton swabs.
“I’m just cleaning your cuts, sweetheart.”
Jenna continued scanning the area and other aid tables where medical people were helping the injured before asking Margot, “Has anyone seen a baby, a five-month-old boy?”
“No, not that young. Not yet. I’m sorry.” Margot glanced to a clipboard. “So far at our station, our youngest patients have been a two-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy. But we’re finding survivors, so we’re hopeful.”
Her heart racing, Jenna continued scanning the area surrounding the station while battling a rising tide of guilt and worry over Caleb.
How could I lose him? Why didn’t I hold him?
When Margot finished with Cassie, she reached under her table into a bag, took out a stuffed teddy bear and gave it to her.
“This guy’s for you. He needs someone to take care of him. Can you do that for me?”
Cassie hugged the bear and nodded. Margot then changed Jenna’s dressing. “Looks like you took a nasty bang to your head,” she said as she cleaned her wound and put on a new bandage.
Afterward, Nancy returned and took Jenna and Cassie to another smaller post nearby where a woman and a younger man were at a table working on laptops. The woman took Jenna’s hands in hers.
“Hi, Jenna. Nancy told us about you. I’m Belle Walker. This is Denton Reeves, my partner. We’re here to help.”
Belle offered Jenna a folding plastic chair next to her so she could see her laptop’s screen. Cassie was given a chair nearby but could not see the screen. She hugged her bear in silence while staring at the ongoing rescue efforts around them.
“We’re working with the Dallas PD, county and state on a preliminary list of missing and people unaccounted for.”
“What does that mean exactly?” Jenna’s voice quivered.
“In these kinds of situations there’s a lot of confusion and chaos. People are hurt, they’re taken to a hospital without loved ones knowing, or they go to a first aid station or an aid post—we’ve got several here. Or they just go home, or to their hotel, or somewhere.”
“Or they’re still trapped?”
“Yes. Or—” Belle lowered her voice “—the storm—”
Jenna revisited images of the tornado tearing the center to pieces, seeing some people sucked up into the winds.
Belle didn’t finish her sentence, but Jenna understood.
“So we’re working on the list,” Belle said. “It will feed into a bigger database that will be shared with fire, police, paramedics, hospital, aid agencies, to help reunite people, okay?”
Jenna nodded, then said, “I’d like to call my husband...I can’t find my cell phone. Can you help me call him?”
“We can. After we’re done here we have buses taking people to the community hall near here—that’s our closest emergency shelter.” Again, Belle took Jenna’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “They’ll have working phones there for you to use, and there will be counselors there if you feel like talking to someone, okay?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Let’s get started,” Belle said.
They took down vital information, names, dates of birth, addresses.
“It’s usually a good idea to give us contact information for relatives in case we can’t reach you. We’ll put it into the system—it’s all confidential,” Belle said.
Jenna gave her the cell number for Blake and her sister, Holly, in Atlanta. Then Belle asked for more details on Caleb, everything she could think of that would identify him.
“He was, is, sorry—” Jenna wiped her tears. “He is wearing a blue-and-white-striped romper with a little elephant crest on it that’s lifting a bit on the right. The bottom snap is loose. He’s got a rocket-shaped birthmark on the back of his left calf. He’s in a folding umbrella stroller, navy with green, red-and-blue polka dots on a white seat. The left front wheel had some white paint on it that I’d spilled when I put a paint can away.”
As Belle entered the information quickly into her laptop the concern on her face deepened.
“You live in Lancaster.”
“Yes.”
“From our information it looks like it was hit hard. I’m sorry.”
Jenna closed her eyes tight.
“I’ll deal with that after I find my son.”
Denton Reeves then gave Jenna a photocopy of a floor plan of the Saddle Up Center.
“Please mark the area you were in when the storm hit.” He gave her a pencil. “As best as you can.”
Jenna marked the spot, recounting how the red-haired woman and her friend helped her, leading up to the time the tornado hit.
“The woman is in her mid-twenties, with short, spiky red hair. I know she had nice teeth, a nice smile,” Jenna said. “I don’t remember much about the man. Same age, wearing a T-shirt with a dog on it, I think. My bag with the clothes I’d bought for the kids was in the stroller’s basket.”
After Belle submitted the details, Denton said to Jenna: “Would you recognize the woman who helped you if you saw her again?”
Belle threw Denton a look of concern.
“I think so, why?” Jenna said.
Belle drew up close to Jenna and dropped her voice so Cassie wouldn’t hear. “We can show you video of the deceased recovered so far from the Saddle Up Center and the area nearby.”
Jenna stared at Belle, who continued in a near whisper.
“You’ve already been through so much and this won’t be easy. Would you be willing to look?”
“What is this? Is this your way of telling me my son’s among the dead?”
“No.”
“You tell me right now if he is because I want to see him. I have a right to see him!”
“No, we’re sorry...we don’t know,” Denton said. “Police made the video. They’re updating it as they recover more fatalities, and they’re requesting we show it to people who’re reporting missing persons. It’s a first step before allowing people into the area where the deceased are before they’re moved. It’s nearby.”
Belle placed her hand on Jenna’s.
Jenna took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I’ll look at it.”
Jenna glanced protectively at Cassie. She couldn’t see Denton’s screen. He made a few keystrokes and a video played. The camera showed bodies arranged on the ground in a neat line, maybe twenty corpses. They were not covered and had varying degrees of damage.
Jenna held her breath and covered her mouth with her hand as her focus went to the smallest victims, seven little children. None looked any younger than two or three. No babies.
Oh God, it’s real! Those dead children! Their poor parents! Please, please don’t take Caleb from me! Please!
As the camera tightened and panned over each one, Jenna looked for any women with red hair, gasping when the camera found one. Instantly she thought of the spiky-haired stranger who’d complimented her on Caleb and Cassie at the clothing table; her smile and how she’d led them to safety in the center, holding Caleb’s stroller.
A kind woman who tried to help me.
But the dead red-haired woman, whose bruised face filled the screen, appeared larger and older. She couldn’t be the woman who’d helped her.
The camera continued its grisly display, evocative of documentary and news footage Jenna had seen of concentration camp and earthquake victims. In this one, many of the bodies looked as if they’d been broken and awkwardly reassembled. Her eyes blurred with tears. Not long ago, these people were living their lives, shopping, just shopping like me, but now—now...
“Oh, no!”
Jenna saw one dead older woman, her neck and face bloodied, still wearing a Dallas Cowboys ball cap and a T-shirt with the words: Verna’s Clothes for Kids.
“That’s the woman I bought my children’s clothes from just before the storm hit.”
“She’s been identified by a relative,” Belle said. “She’s a vendor.”
Jenna was overcome.
As the video played out to the end, the image flowed into Denton’s screen saver: a mountain vista with snowcapped peaks. Jenna stared at it then at the devastation around them, aching for her baby.
I should’ve been holding him. I’m his mother.
Jenna needed Blake, needed his arms around her, to hold her together because she was coming apart. It started with a small cry in a far corner of her mind and grew to a keening as the blood rush hammered in her ears—“Jenna, are you all right?” Bella asked—creating a deafening roar, and the beginning of a colossal scream rose from deep in her stomach when—
Cassie suddenly got up from her chair and stepped away from the table. Her eyes sharpened on heaps of debris in the distance. Clutching her teddy bear with one hand, she raised the other, extending a little finger to point.
“Mommy, I can see Caleb’s stroller!”
8
Wildhorse Heights, Texas
Kate painstakingly picked her way through the debris to the Saddle Up Center.
It had been more than fifteen minutes since she’d left the news truck and the curt email from Dorothea.
Her criticism still burned.
You should’ve tried to reach us sooner.
How? Cell phones aren’t working here and no one at the bureau was handing out satellite phones.
Can you find anything stronger?
What the hell does that mean? Chuck wanted the facts, the heartbreak and the heroes, and that’s what Kate got. She could only interpret Dorothea’s comments to mean the people in her story were “not suffering enough.”
In her years as a reporter, Kate had encountered hard-case editors and unbalanced fools for editors, but Dorothea was in a class of her own. What is it with that woman, making those brainless comments on her work from her downtown office on the twenty-second floor of Bryan Tower? No doubt she was watching TV-news footage and convinced she was tuned in to reality while Kate was here, on the ground, stepping through it.
Feeling the crunch of debris under her boots, Kate looked at the wasteland around her; the air was filled with cries for help, the chaos of rescues, radios and helicopters; the smells of upturned earth, broken timbers and small fires.
As she got closer to the Saddle Up Center it became clear to Kate that for some unknown reason Dorothea did not like her. But Kate would be damned if she’d let that slow her down. If anything, she thought, tapping her notebook to her leg, taking in the destruction, it made her stronger.
“CALEB!!!”
A child’s voice cut through the clamor, yanking Kate’s attention to the scene ahead: a little girl, no older than five or six, with a woman in her twenties, presumably her mother. An empty, twisted stroller stood near them, the mother savagely tearing away debris, tossing pieces as she and the child repeatedly called out: “CALEB!!!”
Even the little girl was lifting smaller pieces and peering under them. Two aid workers in orange fluorescent vests appeared to be helping on the opposite side of the debris pile. The woman was contending with a large section of plywood by herself when she saw Kate at the end of it.
“Please help me move this!”
The panic in the woman’s eyes telegraphed her agony—she was in the fight of her life.
“Please!”
Once more, Kate was being asked to cross a journalistic line. She was well aware that her job was to observe the news, not take part in it, but her conscience would not allow her to ignore another plea for help. She gripped her side of the wood, heaved and helped toss it aside.
“CALEB!”
The woman got on her knees, her hands and fingers were laced with blood as she tugged at scraps and hunks of metal, glass and wood while combing every opening in the ruins.
“Is Caleb your child?” Kate asked.
“He’s my baby boy.”
The woman pulled at a large chunk of wood causing the entire heap to shift precariously toward her daughter. Kate reached to steady it.
“Stop, miss!” A relief worker shouted at Jenna. “Get back! It’s not safe!”
“My baby could be in there!”
“Yes, we’ve got help coming!”
“Hurry, please hurry!”
As Jenna continued searching the debris without touching it, Kate acted.
“I’m Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead. Would you tell me what happened to you when the storm hit?”
Without taking her eyes from the debris to look at Kate, the woman quickly related her story. She held nothing back. “It’s my fault. I should’ve held him to me. I had him, but I let him go. Oh God, it’s my fault!”
I had him, but I let him go.
