* Hod onto your heart. Tough read. imo
“When the wind blows, I can still smell it,” Alwood says.
Alwood’s mother, Lori Alwood, glances toward the charred trailer.
“We all feel like this is a nightmare, and we’re gonna wake up from it,” she says.
...
At the trailer park, the two households mostly kept to themselves.
...
As a smoke detector went off, she quickly threw on clothes, grabbed Rose’s hand and headed out of the bathroom to investigate.
She met Jason at the trailer’s furnace, just outside her grandmother’s room. bbm
Holding Rose’s hand, Katie Alwood was about to head to the kids’ beds and grab them up.
BOOM.
Meanwhile, 9-year-old Kyle had fled the structure. He ran to his grandparents’ trailer next door.
It was Kyle, banging on the door and shrieking, “The house is on fire! Help!”
Soon they heard a horrible wail.
“God help me!” Lori’s mother screamed repeatedly from inside the trailer, her desperate shrieks piercing through the trailer park.
As her mother ordered her to stay put, they saw Jason Wall duck back into the trailer. They heard him calling to the children.
“Daemeon!”
“Ariel!”
“Rose!”
There was an agonizing pause, the only sound the crackling of voracious flames. Then they heard him yell “I’ve got a baby!” — an apparent reference to Rose.
After another pause, they heard a gasp, apparently from Jason Wall.
“We heard him suffocating,” Katie Alwood says. “They all were. And that was it.”
...
Meanwhile, Mike Alwood had pushed through a doorway and into the trailer. He had to withdraw, choking as he stumbled out.
***
Kathryn Murray was found in her bedroom. Jason Wall was on the floor, next to Rose. Daemeon and Ariel were in their beds, looking much as they did when they’d gone to sleep.
Meanwhile, Katie Alwood and her dad went to a Peoria hospital for treatment for smoke inhalation.
“There’s children in the park who can’t eat because they heard the screams from my grandmother that night,” Katie Alwood says.
As Lori Alwood says, “You feel you’re all cried out. Then the tears come again and again and again.”
Rose’s bed and belongings are still in Lori Alwood’s trailer.
“I’m not ready for that to be moved,” she says quietly.
...
Just before the fire, she had taken off her ring in preparation for her bath. Amid the charred rubble, there is no sign of the ring.
Katie Alwood plans to legally change her last name to Wall.
Plus, his kitchen-tool invention remains safely tucked inside the fireproof safe. She dreams of one day hitting the jackpot with the invention.
She’ll have to provide for her son, who has been staying with his paternal grandparents, in another town.
...
Her father perks up and adds, “Like the time Daemon bit my toes?”
His wife smiles, then chimes in, “You were the only one he ever bit.”
They all smile for a while. Then silences pushes in and the smiles slip away.
Luciano: Mom recalls Goodfield inferno that killed five loved ones
