Part 1: Lost and found in the Suffolk tornado

SUFFOLK

Ken Alvarado sizes up two rooms of boxes stacked precariously high in places. He is eager to get going. In the corner, his wife, Lesvia, takes her time, carefully wrapping a hand-painted Nativity from the old life.

The tornado that tore their neighborhood to bits in late April left these delicate figures intact, mostly.

"It's missing a camel," Lesvia says. "The donkey is missing an ear. We will turn him sideways and no one will notice."

Almost everything else stored in this room and the next is new. The dressers and the mattresses and the bed frames, the table and the chairs and the televisions.

Ken does U-Haul geometry - how to fit all these things into the 17-foot truck parked by the front porch.

Ken considers his bad knees and his only help for the heavy stuff, his son Kenny, 18. He won't hire movers even though the insurance company would have paid for them. This is a family project.

He and Kenny grab the ends of a box marked "master bedroom."

Time to go home.

That spring afternoon had been ordinary until about 4.

Ken, a Navy senior chief petty officer, was finishing up an entertainment system installation in a space beneath the staircase. Kenny programmed a new cell phone upstairs.

Monica, 15, sat at the kitchen table with homework, and Lesvia would be off from work soon.

The lights flickered.

Storm coming, Ken thought. Better unplug the electronics.

Kenny's cell phone call dropped.

Dad, Monica called, pointing toward the mottled gray sky beyond the kitchen window. Look at the clouds.

A dark swirl was dancing toward the house.

Get down! Ken shouted. Get in the bathroom!

Monica jumped from her chair, scooped up her dog and dashed into the bathroom. Kenny looked at his wallet and the cell phone on the desk before him. He thought of the urgency in his father's voice, grabbed the cell phone and hopped down the stairs, his feet touching only two or three.

Ken stood at the bathroom door and watched as the swirl moved closer to the house. The windows burst. He slammed the door.

It was dark as night, and then it wasn't.

A sliver of light shot through the floorboard. The house was coming apart at the seams.

Monica, crouching between the vanity and the toilet with Twister still in her arms, let go and covered her head. The walls disappeared, and the force of the wind flung the dog into a neighbor's yard.

Monica was pushed and dragged across the floor like a mop. She saw a tire in the air. She saw the tornado take out part of another house but couldn't hear anything.

Ken heard the roar of the tornado lifting the house, ripping it apart, scattering the pieces.

He was pushed and pulled along.

A piece of drywall worked its way beneath Kenny's feet, and for a moment he felt like a surfer on a wave. His ears popped. He saw wood and siding overhead, and then he crashed and everything went still.

Ken rose first, bleeding and bruised. He could not see his children. He scanned the rubble and screamed for them.

Kenny emerged from beneath a pile of debris. He had a cut on his side. A finger was punctured.

Monica stood up a dozen feet away. Her right arm was seeping blood.

They looked at each other - all accounted for except Twister.

He was Monica's dog. A gift for her 14th birthday and a friend who curled up in her bed each night. The path of destruction he had left as a puppy had earned him his name.

They would think of the irony later.

And then he appeared, bounding from the neighbor's yard.

Monica and Kenny took cover beneath the still-intact back deck, the only place left to hide. Kenny unfurled his fingers from the cell phone and dialed 911.

Ken ran from house to house, looking for anyone who might be trapped. He helped move one injured neighbor away from downed power lines. He rummaged. He was thinking of the hurricanes from his life in Puerto Rico, where he and Lesvia and their children were born. The storms had cut giant swaths of devastation and left neighborhoods without electricity for months.

Everywhere in Hampton Roads would look like this, Ken thought in a rush. He had to find identification for the family. He had to find clothes because there would be no place to buy them.

A neighbor drove by in a pickup searching for wounded. "Anybody need help?" the man shouted.

The cuts in Monica's arm were deep enough for stitches. Kenny needed his wounds sterilized and bandaged. The pair climbed into the truck, bound for Sentara Obici Hospital, where dozens of others were beginning to fill a frantic emergency room.

Ken reached Lesvia on her cell phone.

"I'm going to tell you something..." Ken began.

He was hoarse from screaming, but he smiled as he gave the news. "Everything is OK. Everybody is great. But we don't have our house."

Ken's parents had taught him to show strength even when he didn't feel strong. To hold his family close because nothing was as important - he and Lesvia took vacations and shopped and went out to dinner and saw movies with their children in tow. When Monica and Kenny grew old enough to do things on their own, they stuck together anyway.

Ken joined the Navy at 18 when a recruiter promised three things he wanted most: an education, a place of his own and money to buy a car.

The Navy taught him to deliver the good news first. To cheerfully tell sailors what a great job they were doing and how everyone depended on them before announcing their six-month stay at sea was extended.

Ken treated his family no differently. When Lesvia's brother, one of his closest friends, died years earlier, he took her shopping before telling her, even though it was the end of the month and they couldn't really afford it. He wouldn't let her see his own grief.

Three days after the storm, Ken stood on a concrete slab at the end of a cul-de-sac on Ruger Court.

The roof was missing from a neighbor's house. A garage had collapsed at another.

Forty-nine homes were destroyed. Ninety others were badly hit, and already the damage estimate was in the tens of millions.

The media had descended on the city of Mr. Peanut, and satellites beamed back images of a decimated shopping strip, a flattened cul-de-sac, a house lifted off its foundation and dropped intact in a neighbor's yard.

State and local police arrived like troops for battle. They blocked roads and refused re-entry to homeowners that first morning. Some snuck back in. Those who never left stood on streets lined with powerless houses. Later, the officers escorted in residents who needed their medicines. The restrictions grew more lax on day two, and by day three, the neighborhoods reopened with checkpoints.

On Ruger Court in Hillpoint Farms, people picked through homes reduced to sticks and scattered across a pock marked golf course. They covered gaping holes with tarps and cut away trees left broken and twisted.

There was nothing to fix on the concrete slab that once held the Alvarado house. Bits of it hung in trees. Most lay mangled in the pond beyond the backyard, a dormer perched on top like a hat.

Ken had tried to stay. Hours after his children were taken to the hospital, police officers showed up and told him to leave. He had demanded to know how a man could fight for his country but could not remain with his home.

It's an order, one officer told him.

We know what you're going through, another said, but you need to come with us.

Ken reunited with Lesvia, Kenny and Monica in a hotel lobby. They slept in the Navy barracks for a night and then moved to a cottage on the beach at Dam Neck Annex. His colleagues took up a collection that helped pay for some new clothes.

Ken drank coffee while watching the sun rise over the Atlantic and quietly accepted what his family had lost. He began to look ahead because it was not in his nature to look back.

Kenny and Monica strolled the beach in the afternoons. They listened to the calming rhythm of the waves and watched the surfers fall into the froth. Monica wished she could see them better. She wished the seashells and the sand crabs on the beach were clearer, but she had to wait for new glasses to replace the ones the tornado took.

Now they were back on this clear spring day when ladybugs flitted in the sweet-smelling grass and the sky was so blue the disaster before them seemed improbable.

"Hey, you don't want your dress whites, do you?" Kenny called from a heap of debris.

"No," Ken answered. "That's garbage. Pictures, pictures, pictures."

Kenny brought them anyway, and a blue uniform with gleaming gold buttons still wrapped in plastic with the dry cleaning tags attached.

Ken pointed to the place where he and his children huddled three days before. The tornado took the toilet, the vanity, everything but the tile floor. Bits of their belongings were recognizable in the mound of rubble behind him: a bed frame, a butcher block table, a stuffed dinosaur. The office chair where Kenny was sitting when the cell phone call dropped.

"I cannot complain," Ken said.

He and Lesvia and Monica and Kenny had laid the tile and the hardwood that still clung to the floor. They had tended a neat, green lawn with flowering azaleas and a white-blossomed weeping willow. They had owned a fancy china collection purchased in Puerto Rico a few pieces at a time during the early years of their marriage.

The tornado had ruined all that. Broken every dish. Devoured all but four volumes

of a prized set of World Book encyclopedias Ken's mother had given him when he was a child.

What was left would fit inside a small storage unit - a birth certificate, some DVDs, blankets made for Kenny and Monica when they were infants. Silverware passed from one family member to the next for more than a century; an Adonis bust from Ken's travels to Greece; "The Last Supper" figurine from Jerusalem, four disciples now decapitated.

Some photographs: Ken and Lesvia on their wedding day; Lesvia pregnant with Kenny; Monica in her baptism dress.

They had spent seven years in this house on Ruger Court. A tornado destroyed it in seconds. A contractor said it would take at least six months to rebuild.

They would have to find a place to live. They would have to compile a list of everything they had lost. Everything.

They would have to meet with builders in the middle of the day and buy furniture and pick out light fixtures and shop for new bedding.

Kenny would graduate from high school and Monica would turn 16, and Ken and Lesvia would celebrate their 20th anniversary.

They would do it together. Standing where his home once did, Ken smiled.

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

Part 2: Home again