Surviving the Suffolk tornado: a home lost and found

Part 2 of 2

SUFFOLK

Lines rose over Monica Alvarado's right upper arm like little jagged mountains.

Everyone watched. Her mother and father. Her brother, Kenny. The hospital corpsman in scuffed boots and brown fatigues with his tray of instruments.

The doctor at Oceana Naval Air Station's Branch Health Clinic declared that Monica's stitches were ready to come out.

"There will be permanent scars," the doctor said. "Antibiotic ointment will help."

Monica wasn't worried about that at the moment. She's right-handed and the cuts made it hard to write. A teacher at school insisted she try with her left, but she couldn't make it work. She was worried about algebra, a subject that stumped her from the start but now seemed nearly impossible.

Monica lifted her shoulders and then dropped them and let out a sigh when the stitches were out. She smiled, and her mother stopped cringing.

Monica showed off her right arm. "Now I have a bigger scar than you," she said to Kenny.

The wind picked up outside. It was a warm, sticky day in early May. Most of eastern Virginia was under a tornado watch, but Kenny and Monica's parents didn't tell them.

Monica wondered where Twister would sleep.

It was move-in day at the rental house. She inflated a narrow air mattress that would be her bed in a mostly empty room for the next five months.

The old bed with the green blanket and the long pink pillow was big enough for Monica and the dog. But that was gone now. So was the white dresser and night stand she didn't like all that much; the pictures of her friends; the photo of her parents, Ken and Lesvia Alvarado, on their wedding day almost 20 years ago.

Even the debris was gone. They picked through it and volunteers picked through it and a big machine pushed what was left into a pile that rose as high as the house had stood. Then it was hauled away.

Ken told Monica to think of this as an extended camping trip. It looked like it, at least. There were two camping chairs downstairs. They would eat from these, cheap plates in laps, until Ken and Lesvia decided enough was enough and got TV trays and two more chairs so everyone had one. They would wash the donated and salvaged clothing at a laundromat, until Lesvia demanded her own washer and dryer and Ken rented a set for $21 a week. They were bottom of the line, white Whirlpool. Nothing like the big, front-loading energy-efficient ones lost in the storm.

It was, Monica said, an adventure. But everything was so different now. Just the night before, a friend sent a text message to her cell phone that said another tornado was on the way. Monica started crying and struggled to stop.

Ken reminded her how she had felt about bad weather before all of this. It didn't scare you, did it? You cannot look back. Only forward, he said.

Ken, despite the advice he doled out, struggled, too. In Puerto Rico, he had surfed the swells pushed in by hurricanes. The Caribbean Sea hit the walls of the house where Lesvia grew up. But Ken had wanted to take the family and run during the first storm after the tornado.

Monica reminded herself that she would get new stuff and that this would be a learning experience. That at least she had a warm, dry place to stay while their house was being rebuilt.

If there was a good time for a natural disaster, now was it. Lumber prices were down. Contractors - suffering from a slowing economy - were ready to go to work.

Ken had already met with the builder, Scott Turner. An architect had sketched plans for a 3,400-square-foot house in the old yard, maybe on the old foundation if it could be salvaged. Lesvia had picked out nickel hardware and mocha cabinets and Venetian gold granite for the countertops. The house would be brick instead of vinyl because Ken thought it would be sturdier.

Monica would have a big closet and her own bathroom and double windows that looked out over the pond where turtles gather.

Still, Monica did not like the rain coming down outside just now. Neither did Twister. He shivered and hid anytime a storm came. He refused to go out when the clouds covered the sun and was on anti-anxiety medication.

Monica did not like this neighborhood and this busy street with the constant swish of cars. She was used to the quietness of a cul-de-sac. She did not know what bus she would ride to school. She did not want to go back to school at all.

"I know it won't feel the same," Monica said. "I won't be going home."

A house on paper did not feel like progress.

This, Ken said, felt like progress. It was not quite 10 a.m. on June 9. Everybody was talking about the heat wave and the cost of gas, which had just gone up to more than $4 a gallon for regular unleaded.

Ken had taken the morning off to meet at the site of the old house with the builder, who made circles around the irrigation system with spray paint. Foundation work would begin tomorrow. Turner wanted to make sure the system wouldn't be disturbed when they dug into the yard.

Lesvia was there. So was Ken's father, Aladino Alvarado, a distinguished-looking man who had come to Suffolk from Puerto Rico to celebrate Kenny's high school graduation and to see how he might help his son's family.

"But there's nothing I can do," Aladino said.

He nearly cried when Ken called with the news of the tornado. "He worked too hard. I felt so bad."

Ruger Court had been transformed in just more than a month. The back deck that survived the tornado was gone now, cut down with a chain saw to make room for the reconstruction. The new house would be nearly a third larger. The homes that flanked the Alvarado house were gone now, too, bulldozed. A new roof was going in on the house across the street. Two more houses were partially covered with blue tarp.

The air reverberated with sawing and hammering.

Ken and Lesvia and Aladino spent an hour there. Ken's hair was wet, his forehead beaded with sweat and his clothes damp.

Framing could start next week, Turner told them.

Ken said nothing about the heat.

It looked like a giant popsicle stick house at first. But particle board transformed frame into wall and then a roof went up. Brick rose halfway up the house in July.

Ken and Lesvia picked out lighting and appliances and thumbed through Direct Buy catalogs. They bought new clothes for the kids - more than $1,000 worth - and ordered bedroom and dining room sets.

Two rooms of the rental house filled up with furniture boxes. The family room grew cluttered with items brought over from the storage unit - the Adonis bust and a hand-painted

plate from Lesvia's mother and the figurine of "The Last Supper" with the decapitated disciples.

Lesvia threw her head back and laughed when she saw it.

"I want it anyway," she said. "Jesus is fine. We are good."

Lesvia and Monica rubbed punctured and stained photographs with cloths. They rejoiced when they discovered an album filled with rare photos of family, immaculate in plastic sleeves.

Lesvia took Monica to Target to shop for a new bedroom that would be painted pink. She got bedding sets with stripes and polka dots. She got a white piggy bank with polka dots to match and striped footstools that could double as storage.

Monica got so much stuff that a woman in the check-out line asked if she was headed to college.

They said yes. It was easier than talking about the tornado.

Monica watched Brian Williams on NBC with her parents most evenings, and sometimes they shook their heads at the bad news. Then they would drive to the new house. Ken swept up sawdust that would accumulate again the next day. He cleaned windows that would get dirty again.

"I'm wasting my time in a valuable way," Ken said. "It brings a sense of ownership to me."

He talked to the workers and inspected their work and pointed out potential problems: This pipe is in a bad place in the kitchen. This lumber is the wrong grade. There is not enough space to store linens in the laundry room so perhaps a closet should go at the end of the upstairs hall. The bathroom tile work needs to be redone because it does not look professional.

You didn't ask for it to be done this way, a worker said.

Why should I have to ask for a professional job? Ken responded.

Turner had never worked with such a hands-on homeowner. Both were skeptical at first but would come to respect each other.

One evening in mid-July, Monica climbed in the car with Twister and her parents. She would not walk the dog in the new neighborhood. There was no sidewalk and the cars went too fast.

On Ruger Court, Monica led Twister out of the cul-de-sac. She had spent part of the summer in school trying to boost her grade in algebra, but now she had a distraction - her Sweet 16. She was thinking of colors - pink and black and silver - and a three-tiered cake and beaded necklaces for her guests. It would be kind of like a club theme, with music and dancing. She would get her hair done and wear a tiara and a new dress.

Monica did not have a big 15th birthday bash, and Lesvia thought she should not miss this milestone. They would invite the neighbors and forget about their old houses and their lives in limbo.

Monica still thought about the tornado. She remembered the house lifting up around her because the scars were everywhere - in chain saws buzzing somewhere over the golf course, in houses half-covered in blue tarp, in bits of debris imbedded in the grass.

In Monica's right arm.

The lines and squiggles and the upside-down check mark were a softening shade of pink. Her parents had talked about doing something to make them less noticeable, Monica said, but she wasn't sure she wanted that.

She wanted to point them out to her grandchildren one day and tell them that when she was 15 years old, she wrestled a tornado and won.

Ken stands in the back of the U-Haul with the dresser box marked "master bedroom." His cell phone rings. He stops to take the call, and Kenny carts more boxes into the moving truck, bouncing the dolly out the front door.

"I should have hired movers," Ken announces when he hangs up the phone. "Because they are better than you are, Kenny."

Lesvia sits on the staircase with Twister. That's why he doesn't help him, she says of Kenny. "And I don't blame him."

"If you pay me, I'll do a little bit better," Kenny tells his father.

"You can get your furniture and do what you want with it," Ken says.

It is a cool morning in late October. The strain of the past several months weighs on them all. But it will lift soon.

A stately brick house that smells of paint and echoes in its emptiness sits on Ruger Court a few miles away. Outside, a new wind chime dances on the front porch and tags cling to azalea bushes like hearty spring buds. Inside, glue sticks to hardwood floors in places and sawdust gathers in corners. Some rooms are bigger than they were in the old house and some are smaller. There is no more half-bath at the center of the house.

If a tornado ever comes to Ruger Court again, the family will hide in a bunker Ken had built beneath the house.

He wears a "Life is Good" T-shirt with a smiling golfer on the front.

Nothing has tested Ken's patience so much - not holidays or family milestones or special moments missed at sea.

Now Ken feels like the guy on the shirt.

He will be home by nightfall with Lesvia, Monica, Kenny and Twister, eating pizza around a kitchen counter that gleams. The new televisions will be mounted in the bedrooms, drawers tucked into new dressers, plastic peeled from new mattresses.

But these are just things, Ken says. Material things that don't matter as much as they used to.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5555, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com