Barbara and I knew that Alison loved Chris, and that was enough for us. We had all just celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday the previous weekend by kayaking through the Great Smoky Mountains, same as we did every year, staying in a rented cabin along the Nantahala River. He struck me as a good guy, but I didn’t think I’d ever spoken to him without Alison present. I didn’t even have his phone number, and I didn’t know he had ours. If the situation was bad enough for Chris to call . . .
I pushed the thought from my mind. A man can drive himself crazy gathering up what-ifs. I’d just give Alison a call. As I tapped the icon to open up my recently dialed numbers (knowing hers would be at or near the top of my list), I imagined exactly how the call would go. I figured I’d probably be interrupting some important meeting, probably about how the live truck had lost its connection.
“Oops,” I’d say. “Sorry, Scooter. Just your nervous dad. Heard someone was shooting, and I wanted to make sure it was just a camera.”
“Oh, Dad,” she’d reply with an exaggerated sigh, the smile and the comically rolled eyes somehow audible through the phone’s speaker.
“Just wanted to hear your voice,” I’d say.
“Don’t worry,” she’d say. “I’m busy on location. You won’t believe what happened, but I’ve gotta go, so I’ll tell you later. Loveyoubye.”
Immersed in that reverie, I pressed the “call” button. The phone rang once; twice; three, four, and five times, each unanswered ring adding to the uneasy, tingling sensation working its way across my scalp.
“Hi, you’ve reached Alison Parker with WDBJ News,” her familiar, cheery voice-mail greeting said in my ear. I ended the call.
Outside, I watched our nearly empty red plastic hummingbird feeder sway softly from the eave of the house. Beyond it, a bottle tree, an art project Barbara had assembled from some kit a while back, decorated with brightly colored wine bottles. When she bought the kit, she told me that the bottles were supposed to catch evil spirits and hold them at bay. Neither Barbara nor I are superstitious, but I sometimes wondered if those bottles ever needed to be emptied.
What the hell was going on? Alison always picked up the phone, always, even if just to tell me that she couldn’t talk.
I read once that before a tsunami hits, the tide rolls out, farther and farther, exposing sand and rocks and scuttling creatures that never see the light of day except just prior to cataclysm. The tsunami needs to gather strength, you see, to marshal every ounce of its resources before flinging itself back at the shore in a towering wave of destruction.
Right then, I could feel the tide rolling away, exposing the dark, squirming creatures to the light of day.
Barbara gripped my hand. We said nothing, attempting to hide our worst fears, neither of us able to muster any bland pleasantries about how all was well and there was probably just some unusual incident, perhaps an exploded transformer or a solar flare or some other such nonsense that had brought down both the live truck and the cell towers around Smith Mountain Lake.
I sat down at the kitchen island and opened my laptop. Barbara moved behind me and placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. The laptop spun to life slowly (why do these damn things start slowing down the second you take them out of the box?) before creaking to life. I googled “Alison Parker.” Plenty of old news clips popped up, but nothing new. Nothing that told me anything. I opened a tab and went to WDBJ’s website. Nothing. Back to Google. Nothing. I opened another tab and typed in “Smith Mountain Lake.” There were sketchy reports of shots fired, but nothing concrete, nothing useful, nothing that answered any questions. I navigated between the three tabs, compulsively clicking the reload button, the minutes ticking away.
My ringtone for Alison was Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” Surely the phone would ring any minute now, Van the Man’s tinny voice echoing off the turquoise walls. I conjured an image in my mind of Alison picking up the phone, her eyes widening in mild surprise at the missed calls she had received, tapping the numbers to reply in order of importance. I knew I’d be the first one she called. I willed the phone to ring.
“I’m calling Lane,” I said.
Lane Perry is Henry County’s sheriff. I’d known him for years, back since I was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2003. He’s a good guy, a tall, plainspoken man with a crew cut so perpetually close-cropped that it probably requires daily maintenance. If Lane knew anything, I knew he would tell me.
Lane answered his cell immediately. He said he was sorry to report that he didn’t know much more than I did. He had also heard that something happened up at the marina, and he was reaching out to his colleagues in Franklin County to see what he could learn. He promised to call me back as soon as he heard anything.
As I got off the phone with Lane, I heard the tail end of Barbara’s phone conversation. She had been calling area hospitals, but no one named Alison Parker had been admitted, and they hadn’t heard anything about a shooting.
Within minutes, my phone rang; not “Brown-Eyed Girl,” but a generic ringtone. Lane Perry.
“They said there has been a shooting at the marina,” Lane said, “but they think the news crew is OK. I’ll let you know just as soon as I hear anything else.”
“That’s encouraging,” I said weakly, and ended the call.
I thought about grabbing my keys and driving to the marina, but Smith Mountain Lake was at least an hour’s drive away, better than half of it down a long, twisting two-lane road with intermittent cell service. What if Lane called back with news, or Alison called to tell me all was well, that she had just misplaced her phone about the same time a car had coincidentally backfired nearby? I was terrified to miss a phone call, so I stayed at the kitchen island with Barbara.
We sat there in silence for the most part, looking out the window at the hummingbird feeder, the bottle tree, the middle distance beyond. I’d occasionally refresh my tabs on the browser; there were no updates.
I couldn’t tell you the exact minute that we began to lose hope, but it happened sometime after that second phone call with Lane.
Years ago I read a story—I can’t remember where—about twin brothers in Kansas, or maybe Nebraska, one of those perfectly flat Midwestern states. They were both power company linemen, and one day one of the brothers touched the wrong wire and got zapped, dying instantly. Fifty miles away, his brother was in a work truck with a coworker. He pulled over and stopped the truck.
“Oh God,” he said, sobbing, “my brother is dead.”
As the story goes, they checked the times, and sure enough, he called it to the minute. He just knew.
Maybe that story is bullshit. It sure sounds like it. Or maybe there’s something to it. Maybe close family—twin brothers, or parents and their children—have some sort of deeper connection, some quantum physics thing that science doesn’t yet understand, an invisible umbilicus that connects us no matter how far apart we travel.
I don’t know. But I do know that as Barbara and I sat at our kitchen island, the morning sun pouring through the windows, filtering different hues by those wildly ineffective evil-capturing glass bottles outside, we began to realize that our daughter was dead. It wasn’t something we ever would have voiced. I don’t know that we even realized it on a rational level. But on some subconscious wavelength, we knew it to be true.
We waited for the call.
•
I always had a premonition that Alison would die young.
Some would probably chalk that statement up to confirmation bias; the death of a child is every parent’s greatest fear, after all.
Some