Whirlwind

Kate let go.

She sobbed as steam clouds rose around her, letting them pull her back through her life, back to that night when she and Vanessa, her little sister, were together with her babysitter, Mrs. Kawolski, when she’d answered the door of their creaky old house.

Mrs. Kawolski’s hand covering her mouth. The police officers filling the small kitchen, their utility belts making leathery squeaks as they cleared their throats. The policewoman giving Kate and Vanessa little stuffed bears to hold, a teddy for her, a polar bear for Vanessa. I’m so sorry, she said. There was a terrible fire, I’m so very sorry, your mommy and daddy won’t be coming home. They’re with the angels now. Mrs. Kawolski taking them both in her arms, rocking them, whispering a prayer over and over.

In the aftermath, Kate and Vanessa pinballed through a succession of homes belonging to increasingly distant relatives. Ultimately, they lived with strangers. Pretty much all Kate remembered from that part of her childhood was how she and Vanessa were forever moving.

Until the accident.

Kate and Vanessa were in the backseat of a car, driving in the mountains. Suddenly their car was flying, rolling upside down before it crashed in a river. The water rushed in. It was so cold, so dark, except for the dome light in the car as it banged against the rocky riverbed.

Everything moved in slow motion.

The windows had broken open. Kate had Vanessa’s hand; she got them both out of the car and tried to pull Vanessa to the surface with her but felt the cold numbing her fingers, felt them loosening. She was unable to hang on.

Vanessa slipped away.

Why couldn’t I hold her?

Kate was the only one who survived. She was nine years old; Vanessa was six. They never found Vanessa’s body. It may have gotten wedged in rocks, they said. Vanessa’s little white polar bear was still in the car. When they found it they gave it to Kate.

After the accident, Kate was sent to live in a never-ending chain of foster homes. Some were good, some weren’t.

As soon as she was old enough, she ran away.

She did what she could to survive. She panhandled, lied about her age and took any job she could get. She cleaned toilets, washed cars, washed dishes, landscaped, waitressed, did night shifts in an office sending out spam, she even worked as a phone sex operator. She learned about life the hard way, but she never stole, never used drugs or got drunk. She never prostituted herself.

Somehow Kate managed to follow an internal moral compass, which she believed—no, hoped—she’d inherited from her parents. Relatives had told her that they were honest, hardworking people. Her mom was a supermarket cashier who loved to read and kept a journal; her dad worked in a factory that made military truck parts. They were living near Washington, D.C., at the time they died in the hotel fire.

Kate never really knew them.

She had vague memories of her mother’s voice and how she smelled like roses. How the month before she died she gave Kate and Vanessa each a tiny guardian angel necklace with their names engraved. How Vanessa wanted to trade them so she wore the one with her big sister’s name on it and Kate had the angel bearing Vanessa’s name.

She still had it.

Whenever she looked at it, she’d remember how happy they all were, and how she felt so safe in her father’s big, strong hands whenever he lifted her up, and she could not forget how Vanessa’s eyes shone like stars when she laughed.

They were all ghosts to her now.

But at times, Kate would stare at the few photos she had of her with Vanessa, hugging her little polar bear she had named “Chilly,” dreaming that Vanessa might be alive somewhere. She knew it was impossible but she couldn’t help it. She kept reading news stories about people finding long-lost relatives after enduring years of pain. Those stories and the reporters who wrote them gave Kate hope and direction.

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.

11