In Springfield, storm heroine’s love buoys kin

“I just thought it was a rainy day,’’ she said in a lengthy interview last week near the leveled three-family home. Plaintively, she looked to her father for affirmation. Juan Guerrero nodded sadly, and stretched his hand to hers.

For many, Angelica Guerrero’s death stands as the most indelible image of the tornado that ripped a 39-mile swath through the western part of the state, an instinctive act of motherly love and sacrifice.

A month after the tornado, the region is beginning to rebuild, and displaced families are slowly mending torn lives. The Guerreros carry a heavy grief through days fraught with uncertainty. Their apartment, along with nearly all their possessions, is gone, buried in a jagged mass of brick and wood. They pass long hours in a hotel, waiting for word on an apartment. They try to push aside memories of the storm, of Angelica lying lifeless in the rubble. But again and again, the images come crashing back.

They speak to therapists about the sadness and anger, the swirl of questions about why she had to die and why they didn’t. But it only helps so much.

“For a little while, it feels good to talk about it,’’ said Juan Guerrero, 46, who fractured his hip in the storm and now walks with a cane. “But how are you going to forget?’’

This summer would have been their 20th wedding anniversary, Guerrero said.

Fabiola, a pretty, soft-spoken 18-year-old who rarely smiles and worries over her younger sister, now wears her mother’s gold wedding band. Ibone, who smiles constantly just like her mother did, now has her engagement ring.

The girls are deeply proud of their mother, who died at 39, and say they will do their best to make her proud of them. And they hope she will be remembered for what she did.

“She saved my life,’’ Ibone said, with a bittersweet smile.