The answer, in a real sense, is absolutely nothing, and that’s exactly why I’m telling you about it.
When tragedy strikes—real tragedy, horrific tragedy—all the little things that you cared about prior to that moment are swept away as if by a blast from a neutron bomb, leaving only crumbling structures in its wake. Maybe you’ve got tickets to an upcoming concert you’ve been excited about, or you just bought a new designer handbag you had been scrimping and saving to afford, or you just got a promotion at work; whatever it is, when the black tidal wave of tragedy hits, everything else becomes meaningless, inert. You wonder why you cared at all.
August 25, 2015, was a day of celebration and personal victory. Less than twenty-four hours later, I would have barely been able to spell the words “weekend generation,” let alone explain why anyone should care. And a little more than twenty-four hours later, I would find myself back at the dam, my former site of triumph, attempting to shout God Himself down from the Kingdom of Heaven.
•
I’m going to tell you about the worst day of my life.
The list of disagreeable things I’d rather do would make for a book at least twice the length of this one. I realize, however, that it’s important for you to know what it was like. It’s important for you to have a taste of what I went through on the day my daughter was killed.
Make no mistake, it will be just a taste. I don’t know that a team of the finest living writers could record that day so that you would feel exactly what I felt. I can tell you about it; I can show you what happened; but I cannot truly put you in my shoes, and frankly, I wouldn’t wish that on you if I could. If I can make you feel at least a fraction of what I felt that day, even 1/100th, I’ll feel I’ve done my job.
Recalling the entire sequence of events precisely is as impossible as filling a jar with mist, but I will tell you what I remember, and I will tell you the most horrible parts I will never forget.
My wife, Barbara, woke me up a little before 7 a.m. on August 26, 2015, shortly after she received a phone call from Alison’s live-in boyfriend, WDBJ anchor Chris Hurst. Chris says he didn’t call until at least 7:15, but who can know? It was early, especially for me.
I was working from home in those days as a corporate headhunter, and I was accustomed to waking up about 8:00. I didn’t usually watch Alison’s early morning segments live; I would watch them on the internet over breakfast. I am eternally grateful that I’m not an early riser.
“There were shots fired at Alison’s location,” Barbara said, stirring me from sleep. “We don’t know what’s going on.”
I stared at the gently whirring fan blades overhead, the fog of sleep still clinging to my brain. The words made little sense, but the uncharacteristic tremor in my wife’s voice prodded me.
Shots fired? Alison was a morning news reporter an hour up the road. She wasn’t a war journalist. Why would shots be fired?
“Huh?” I said.
“Just get up,” Barbara said, leaving the room and padding down the hall toward the kitchen.
I watched the fan rotate against the backdrop of the white popcorn ceiling, watched as the blades stirred dust motes to life in the rays of sunlight streaming through the bedroom’s wooden blinds. I crawled out of bed, grabbed the T-shirt and shorts I’d left on the floor the night before, and tried to sort out this new information.
A couple of months earlier, Alison had been covering a story on a meth lab bust in Jacksonville and someone had fired a warning shot to scare off the news crew. This was probably something similar, I thought; some story the locals didn’t want covered.
But where was Alison, anyway? I rubbed the sleep from my eyes as I struggled to remember. The marina at Smith Mountain Lake? That seemed right. We’d spent a lot of summers at that marina when Alison was little, tubing and waterskiing behind the boat before retiring to the little Chinese restaurant nearby for some fried pork dumplings. The restaurant was gone, and I’d sold the boat, and since then, the marina had become a major tourist attraction replete with shopping and dining and minigolf for the kids. Why would someone at the marina fire off a warning shot? It didn’t make any sense. It was an unlikely site for a meth lab, to say the least.
I figured the easiest way to get to the bottom of this mystery was to just text Alison. Hell, she’d probably already texted me. She was good about that. Ten minutes before her first live CNN report, she’d texted me to tell me to tune in. If she flubbed a word in the middle of a live broadcast, I’d hear about it by the first commercial break. There was little question that by the time I’d slipped on my flip-flops and shuffled into the kitchen to retrieve my phone, I’d have a text message waiting for me—probably two or three.
I walked into the kitchen to find Barbara sitting in her usual roost at the terra-cotta–topped island in our kitchen. The whole house has a Southwestern-style, uncommon for our little town in Henry County. It was one of the reasons we’d picked the place when we’d moved in two decades earlier. The turquoise walls and bleached-pine ceilings reminded us of Texas, which we called home until the late 1970s.
Barbara’s coffee mug was in the sink; this was a bit of comforting normalcy. She usually woke up about 6:30 to make coffee, take a stroll in the nearby park, work through a Sudoku puzzle, and watch the videos from Alison’s morning segments.
The Sudoku book lay ignored on the kitchen island; Barbara was hunched over her iPhone, her chin-length blonde hair pulled back, working the phone’s digital keyboard with the speed and focus of a court stenographer. Her face was creased with concern behind her red-framed glasses.
She momentarily broke away from the phone’s screen to glance at me over the glasses.
“Alison’s last two hits never went up,” she said, then returned her focus to the phone.
“Huh,” I said.
When you spend half your life with someone, you learn all of their tells and cues, the subtle gestures that betray the workings of their mind. It might not surprise you to learn that of the two of us, my wife is the one more predisposed to holding her emotions close to the chest. Her eyes, however, never fail to tell the true story.
I’ve always called Barbara my “doe-eyed goddess.” Her hazel eyes are large and expressive, easy to read, a window into her heart. They were one of the first things I loved about her. They’ve been my saving grace more than once, letting me know when I crossed a line without her saying a word. Alison had those same eyes, deep and rich as chocolate, far darker than you would usually find in someone so fair and blonde. They had that same power to draw you in, and I loved them every bit as much as Barbara’s. Alison was my other doe-eyed goddess.
Barbara’s eyes revealed her true feelings that morning, and for the first time that day, I felt my heart rate kick into a higher gear.
Alison was normally on the air each weekday morning for three segments ranging from three to five minutes each. The first of those segments ran at 5:45 a.m. After her first week at WDBJ, the sleep deprivation began to get to Barbara and me, and we told Alison that, proud as we were, we’d be watching her segments on the internet when we woke up instead of catching them live. She understood completely. Of course she did.
The fact that the last two segments hadn’t dropped meant something was wrong. How wrong remained to be determined. It could be something minor, after all. The feed from the live truck had gone down a handful of times in the year and a half she’d been at WDBJ, which could delay videos for an hour or more. It was rare, but it happened.
I unplugged my phone from the wall charger and checked my messages. Alison hadn’t texted me. That was rare, too. Alison always had her phone on her because the station needed to be able to reach her at the drop of a hat. She must be busy, unable to reach her phone. In the middle of an interview, perhaps, or maybe she left her phone in the car, or maybe she dropped it in a puddle and it gave up the ghost. There were a million reasons that she might not answer. There