Time was on one woman's side, luck on the other's

SUFFOLK

The TV in the J&K Nail Salon was on but muted Monday afternoon, the stereo playing music, and no one noticed the tornado warnings.

Vickie Eason didn’t know Karen Weatherspoon, but she watched and smiled at her holding and playing with the salon owner’s 2-month-old baby, Sophia. Weatherspoon even phoned her significant other, William, and told him, “I’m holding a baby.”

Eason got up, paid and left a moment later. Weatherspoon didn’t.

Wednesday morning, the two women stood behind police tape and looked at where the salon had been in the strip mall, a building that has become an icon of a tornado that was incredibly destructive but killed no one. They saw insulation flapping in a breeze and sunshine glimmering off the shiny silver duct work dangling everywhere.

It had to be said, as both women did repeatedly, that if it weren’t for luck or fate or timing or being blessed, along with some human help, the two of them might never have met again.

Weatherspoon wore a blue hat and a sweat shirt zipped up to her neck, where medical bandaging and stitches poked out of the top. She ended most sentences with, “But I’m alive.” Eason displayed a set of fingernails freshly manicured and painted Really Red .

“I remember you,” Weatherspoon said. “She wanted you to stay longer.”

“I’d have been right there with you,” Eason said. She had been in a hurry to run an errand on her way home and ignored the shop owner’s urging to keep her nails under the dryer longer. As a compromise, she walked out wearing the nail-salon flip-flops so her Really Red toenails could dry.

She turned out of Burnetts Way, went up over U.S. 58 on Godwin Boulevard and peered over to the right.

“When I got down the road a little way, I saw it,” Eason said, “the cloud that was down.”

Weatherspoon handed Sophia to the salon owner’s husband, then went to sit at the front of the shop, by the windows, for her manicure. The lights went out. Then they saw the cloud.

Weatherspoon reached for her purse and started running. The roof caved in. Debris knocked her to the floor and covered her in darkness.

“I don’t want to die!” she called out.

She lived across the way from Burnetts Mill, but normally on a Monday afternoon she would have been in Chesapeake, teaching at Truitt Intermediate School. She’d taken the day off and decided to treat herself at the spa.

Under the pile, she kicked her legs because she could move nothing else. No one responded to her screams, so she kept yelling: “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”

Tareylyn Cripe, a nurse at Obici Ambulatory Surgery Center across the street, was looking out a window when she saw the twister touch down. She ran to an interior room. Then, five or six minutes later when the tornado’s noise stopped, she stepped outside.

Toward the strip mall, there was a young lady with a deep cut on her thigh, but others were helping, so Cripe checked her vital signs and kept moving. She came across a co-worker, who had had a baby shoved into her arms. Cripe checked the baby’s breathing. It was Sophia, and she seemed fine.

The salon owner wanted to get back into her business to help those who might be trapped, but Cripe persuaded her to take Sophia to the hospital to be checked. Cripe headed for the nail salon.

People were hastily pulling drywall and wires aside, and Cripe spotted a woman on top of a pile, collapsed onto herself like a folding chair. Cripe saw that furniture, metal and TVs sandwiched the crumpled woman, but at the bottom of that pile she saw something else.

She saw two legs moving. A second person’s legs.

And she heard a voice: “I don’t want to die.”

Cripe stuck her arm into the rubble as far as she could and finally grabbed a hand.

“As long as you’re holding my hand,” she told whoever it was, “you’re going to be OK. You are not going to die.”

Cripe felt the hand squeeze hers. Hard.

After about 20 minutes of gripping that hand, and hearing that voice, Weatherspoon was on her way to the hospital and being patched up. Wednesday morning, she stood looking at the nail salon and her Toyota RAV4, which the tornado had upended and dropped on top of the salon owner’s Mercedes.

She had cuts up and down her left side and two gashes in her back that took 28 stitches.

She had come back in hopes of retrieving some personal things from her car and to see the destruction with her own eyes. That’s when she ran into Eason.

“I was in that, can you believe it?” Weatherspoon said.

“No,” Eason said, “I can’t, and I was there five minutes before.”

“I wasn’t supposed to be here,” Weatherspoon said, “but I survived.”

Thanks to that hand, and the voice belonging to that hand. She didn’t know who the woman was, but she gets the shakes every time she thinks of hearing her .

A little after noon on Wednesday, Cripe walked over to the police tape near the strip mall with some friends and started telling them the story. She didn’t even know the name of the woman she had helped.

Weatherspoon, still waiting on her car, heard a familiar voice and turned her stiff neck around.

“My name is Karen,” Weatherspoon said.

She thanked Cripe, and they cried.

Lon Wagner, (757) 446-2341, Lon.Wagner@pilotonline.com