Part 4

When I picked her up, she grabbed my collar so hard her little fingernails left marks in my neck. They're still there. The helicopter flew her to the children's hospital in Little Rock that night. Matt went with her. In my father's dining room, my phone kept ringing. Rachel looked down at the screen in my hand. Her eyes went wide. "Erin," she whispered. "Look who's calling." It said MATT. My father saw it too. "Don't you dare answer that in my house." I answered it. "Did you tell him?" my brother said. His voice was raw, like he'd been crying. "I'm telling him right now." "She's awake, Erin. She found the picture of Dad I keep in my wallet. She wants to know if her grandpa is coming." He stopped. "What do I tell her?" Before I could answer, someone shouted from the den. "Vaughn! Come look at this!" It was Rex. A bunch of guests had wandered in there with their drinks to watch the news about the tornado. Now they were all standing in front of the big television, staring. I walked to the doorway of the den, with the phone still against my ear. My father followed me. On the screen was a man in a four-star general's uniform, standing at a podium at the Pentagon. The words at the bottom said he was the Chief of the National Guard Bureau. I knew him. Most people don't know that the Guard's top general sits on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, right next to the heads of the Army and the Navy. "In Cotter Springs, Arkansas," he was saying, "a search team led by Lieutenant Colonel Erin Lennox pulled thirty-one people out of that school alive. Nineteen of them were children." Every head in that den turned and looked at me. Then a photograph filled the whole screen. Somebody from the newspaper had taken it late Saturday night, under the floodlights. It was me, covered in mud, walking out of the wreckage. In my arms was a little girl with a broken leg and one pink shoe, her face pressed into my neck. My father stopped walking. He stared at that screen. Rachel stepped up beside him. She put her hand on his arm, very gently. "Dad," she said quietly. "That little girl. That's Lily. That's Matt's daughter."