It's amazing how wind can clear your perspective on life.

Walking out on my wife had been hard, but only because I couldn't take my daughter with me.  I remember that I had to live in my truck until I got my next paycheck, and even then all I had was enough money to get a rented room. I still had to provide for my wife and child, and I had pay the mortgage on their house.  I couldn't afford a place big enough for myself and Kelsey.  And I'd lose a custody battle anyway.  

I had sworn to myself that I wouldn't let the separation between me and Diane create a separation between me and Kelsey.  But with two sets of living expenses to pay, I had to take every ounce of overtime I could get.  Three months ago the foreman's position opened up. I took it because it meant a steady salary that kept me in the black, but the hours were long.

This week marked one year that I'd been out of the house, and I have been working like crazy on a construction job for the new VA hospital.  I never have a day off, and the deadlines to get the job completed have kept me away from Kelsey.

The storm warnings for today had been bad: tornadoes highly likely. At the job site we spent most of the day battening down the hatches. The rains moved in early, and the sky got darker.  In Oklahoma City we're used to this.  You know it might happen, and you prepare.

At first, I wasn't worried about Kelsey and Diane. Our house had taken a direct hit in the tornadoes of '03, and we'd rebuilt the house with a good storm shelter built inside.  We lost my mother in that storm.  Kelsey had been just a baby, and she and my mother had literally been pulled out of the house and into a tree.  Mom's body sheltered baby Kelsey as the winds tore up the neighborhood.  It was bittersweet for Diane and I to come home that day to no house, Mom dead, but Kelsey still alive. We rebuilt the house, put in a storm shelter and tried to move on.

I wasn’t worried about them until I was standing on the top floor girders of the new VA hospital.  I was looking out towards the southwest suburbs when I saw the funnel cloud.  I hadn’t moved so fast in my life.  I was down the steel stairs and in my truck in three minutes. By that time, I could hear the tornado sirens in the distance.  It was 3:30 pm.  Kelsey would be home from school, but Diane wouldn’t be home from work yet. The crosstown expressway kept me north of the storm, and the traffic was light.  I made the Ray Boulevard exit in ten minutes and headed south.  The radio in my truck was off, but I didn’t need the news to tell me what was going on.  The further south I drove, the darker the sky.  The ground was wet, and there were leaves everywhere.  Police cars started passing me, as did a few ambulances.  

The further I drove, the more debris I saw. The power was out everywhere, and the traffic got thicker with emergency vehicles and people running on foot. The winds were still blowing, and the rain picked up.

When I got to 129th and Ray, I knew I had to abandon the truck.  There were no more passable roads: trees were down, and there was a house in the street.

From that point, I ran.  There were no landmarks anymore, but I knew where our street was.  I ran past pile after pile of wood, shingles, sheet metal, insulation and twisted vehicles.  I could still make out some recognizable items: Jim Harley’s classic Corvette upside down and two streets from where it should be; the walk-in refrigerator from the corner delicatessen sitting in one piece on top of a trashed motor home; and the cross from Holy Nativity Church was resting on top of a heap that was once a house.

Propane, gas fumes, smoke and dust were all that I noticed as they burned in my lungs.  I knew people were trapped all around me, but I only had one place I needed to be.  I kept thinking about the last storm and how we found Kelsey alive.  I kept thinking that she was sitting inside the shelter.  I kept thinking that maybe Diane had gotten home early and gotten them both to safety.

Then I got home, and I stopped thinking.  The house was gone.  The concrete block shelter and kitchen table were the only two things standing on the foundation.  The door to the shelter was open, and no one was inside.  I felt my knees ready to go out from underneath me, until I saw the pink pants.  There were pink pants in the tree in the back yard.  There was someone in those pink pants.  Kelsey was in the tree.

Suddenly, Nick Adams, our neighbor, was there beside me.  I don’t know where he came from, but he helped me get her down.  She’d been impaled on a broken branch.  She was breathing, but her eyes were closed.  She didn’t talk.  She just moved her mouth and made little groaning sounds. Nick had his shirt balled up and pushed into her wound to stop the blood flow.

We carried her six blocks together, heading for my truck.  There was just a light wind at that point, and it cleared my head of the bad air.  I realized then that I didn’t know where Diane was.  I realized that ten years of fighting between us didn’t mean a damn thing if we lost Kelsey.  We’d suffered through it only because Kelsey deserved a family.  Holding Kelsey, watching her bleed out in front of me, I realized that ten years of fighting wasn’t the kind of family a child deserved.

An ambulance with three EMT’s stopped us a block from my truck.  They put Kelsey in the back and started to evaluate her. One of them pulled me aside and started to treat me outside.  I had a cut on my hand I didn’t realize I’d gotten.  As he bandaged my hand, one of the other EMT’s came out of the ambulance.  

“I’m sorry, sir.  She opened her eyes, said one thing.”

I did not quite comprehend why he was saying he was sorry.

“What did she say?”