Rick Mofina: Whirlwind

She knew deep in her heart that she needed to become a journalist, someone who helped people find the answers to the most important questions in their lives.

At age nineteen she was living on her own in Chicago, where she took night classes to finish high school.

She wrote an essay about how in her heart her sister would always be alive and that she would never stop yearning to know what really happened the night Vanessa’s little hand slipped from hers.

Did she die that night in the mountains? Or did she survive and wander off miraculously into another life?

Kate’s teacher showed it to David Yardley, an editor at the Tribune, telling him of Kate’s desire to be a reporter. A meeting was arranged. Astounded by Kate’s natural writing talent, and her life, David helped her with a part-time news job. She remembered him saying, “You’re like something out of a Dickens novel.”

She was forever grateful for his help.

Kate graduated from high school and worked her way through community college, which led to news reporter jobs in Syracuse, New York, for a short time before she went to California. She was still pretty green working on the crime desk at the San Francisco Star when she fell for a cop. It was after she got pregnant that she learned he was married.

Kate was crushed.

How could he lie to her? How could she be so stupid?

She’d confided to a reporter friend that she wanted to keep her baby but needed to leave the city. She got a job with the Repository in Canton, where she had Grace at age twenty-three.

Kate thrived on the paper’s crime beat where she was honored for tracking down a fugitive killer. While her work was shut out for a Pulitzer and other national prizes, she did win a regional award for journalistic investigative excellence. But the glory didn’t last.

One day after several years, Kate was called into the office of Ed Brant, her managing editor. He removed his glasses and said her job, along with a dozen others, was gone. It was a dark time for her but Kate did the best she could. She searched everywhere but news jobs were drying up.

Weeks then months passed. She waitressed while applying for public relations positions with corporations. She got one in Canton that lasted three weeks. Kate just did not fit in.

She was a reporter. Period.

Things got dire. Kate was juggling bills when she learned that Newslead, the worldwide wire service, had an opening in its Dallas bureau.

Kate’s application got her a teleconference phone interview with Chuck Laneer and Dorothea Pick in Dallas, and a human resources woman in New York. A week later, Chuck called Kate back. She’d made the short list. He invited her to a three-week internship at the bureau with two other candidates. The strongest candidate would get the full-time job at the bureau. It paid nearly double what she’d earned at the Repository, and came with great benefits.

Kate arranged for Grace to stay with her friend Heather Baines, whose daughter, Aubrey, went to school with Grace. It tore at Kate to leave Grace for three weeks, but she had to do it for both of them. She’d promised they’d talk on Skype every day. Kate loaded up her Chevy then made the twelve-hundred-mile drive to Dallas in just over two days. She stayed in cheap motels and ate fast food to save money.

The trip was a lonely one, and at this moment, in the shower, Kate longed to be in Ohio. She ached to be home watching a movie on the sofa with Grace, something funny, something happy, because the day’s tragedies were overwhelming.

Kate stepped from the shower, toweled off then brushed her teeth and her hair. She put on her pajamas, killed the lights then got into bed, exhausted. She reached for her phone. The screen glowed in the dark as she studied her favorite picture of Grace.

I’d die if I lost you.

Then she cued up her photo of Jenna Cooper amid the horror, searching for her baby, her words replaying, “I had him but I let him go. Oh God, it’s my fault!”

Kate knew this anguish, this guilt. She’d felt it throughout her whole life, after she’d let Vanessa slip away in the river.

As she looked out her hotel window at the buildings and the highways twinkling in the night, she was overwhelmed with self-reproach, for Vanessa, for leaving Grace, for being in this room while people out there were enduring so much loss and pain.

Kate stared hard at her photo of Jenna Cooper.

Like you, I can only imagine what’s going through your mind.

Was her baby dead? Was he hurt, buried under debris? Did someone find him and take him to a hospital?

Kate continued looking at Jenna’s picture.

I’ll help you find the truth .

Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas

The next morning, across the city, in Room 16 of the Dreamaway Motor Inn, the TV glowed in the predawn darkness.

The window shades were drawn, blocking the neon sign flashing Vacancy out front. The room’s air reeked of cigarettes and stale beer as Remy Toxton sat at the edge of the bed teasing her spiky red hair while watching coverage of the disaster.

Dallas stations showed the storm’s aftermath and interviews with shell-shocked survivors in neighborhoods that had been hit hard. When the report went to the flea market, Remy, still a little shaky, concentrated on it until she was satisfied that no threat had surfaced from what she’d done.

“This is going to work out for us, babe,” she said.

Mason Varno, Remy’s boyfriend, was standing shirtless in his sweatpants at the window. He’d gently moved the shade to watch the parking lot while rubbing his lips and constantly checking his cell phone for messages. They had service here. Remy threw him a look over her shoulder, loving how his muscles rippled under his prison tattoos, loving that he was her man, flaws and all.

No one was perfect. Mason didn’t talk much. He had a lot on his mind.

So did Remy.

They’d been through hell lately, but now their dreams were within their grasp. They were going to get enough money to get a place along the Oregon coast and start their new life, the real life they both deserved. It was going to happen. They were beating the odds, and now Remy believed that they could overcome anything.

Even a dead baby?

Yes. No. I don’t know.

An alarm bell went off in her skull, her brain convulsed. She held her head to keep it from splitting open and took deep breaths.

Stop thinking about that! It’s in the past! Leave it there!

Her jaw tensed as she counted backward from one hundred until she recovered.

Okay, okay.

She was all right.

Just one of her little spells.

She turned back to the TV.

We were so lucky to get out with nothing but a few scrapes.

It’s all meant to be .

The newswoman was talking about the number of dead, missing, injured, homeless, and where tornado victims could get help. The screen showed a graphic with information and websites on locations across the Metroplex for emergency shelters providing medical services, food, water, clothing, trauma support and other aid.

This was important. Remy took notes, got her laptop and resumed checking the locations for shelters and medical help. Then she searched online news sites focusing on reports about the flea market, scanning them for one thing.

Nothing surfaced in the stream of stories until a certain picture blurred past. Remy went back to a photograph of a woman holding an empty, beat-up stroller and a child standing with her before the devastation. The cutline read: “Jenna Cooper holds her daughter, Cassie, and the empty stroller of her five-month-old son, Caleb, who is missing after a tornado destroyed the Saddle Up Center where scores of people were killed.”