The Dark Tide. Andrew Gross
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the top that Sam claimed was “absolutely missing, Mom” (in her daughter’s dresser drawer), and refereed two fights over who was driving whom that morning and whose cooties were in the bathroom sink the kids shared.
She’d also fed the dog, made sure Alex’s lacrosse uniform was pressed, and when the shoulder-slapping, finger-flicking spat over who touched whom last began to simmer into a name-calling brawl, pushed them out the door and into Sam’s Acura with a kiss and a wave, got a quote from Sav-a-Tree about one of their elms that needed to come down and dashed off two e-mails to board members on the school’s upcoming capital campaign.
A start … Karen sighed, nodding “Hey, all,” to a few familiar faces as she hurriedly joined in with their sun salutations at the Sportsplex studio in Stamford.
The afternoon was going to be a bitch.
Karen was forty-two, pretty; she knew she looked at least five years younger. With her sharp brown eyes, the trace of a few freckles still dotting her cheekbones, people often compared her to a fairer Sela Ward. Her thick, light brown hair was clipped up in back, and as she caught herself in the mirror, she wasn’t at all ashamed of how she still looked in her yoga tights for a mom who in a former life had been the leading fund-raiser for the City Ballet.
That’s where she and Charlie had first met. At a large-donors dinner. Of course, he was only there to fill out a table for the firm and couldn’t tell a plié from the twist. Still couldn’t, she always ribbed him. But he was shy and a bit self-deprecating—and with his horn-rim glasses and suspenders, his mop of sandy hair, he seemed more like some poli-sci professor than the new hotshot on the Morgan Stanley energy desk. Charlie seemed to like that she wasn’t from around here—the hint of a drawl she still carried in her voice. The velvet glove wrapped around her iron fist, he always called it admiringly, because he’d never met anyone, anyone, who could get things done like she could.
Well, the drawl was long gone, and so was the perfect slimness of her hips. Not to mention the feeling that she had any control over her life.
She’d lost that one a couple of kids ago.
Karen concentrated on her breathing as she leaned forward into stick pose, which was a difficult one for her, focusing on the extension of her arms, the straightness of her spine.
“Straight back,” Cheryl, the instructor, intoned. “Donna, arms by the ears. Karen, posture. Engage that thighbone.”
“It’s my thighbone that’s about to fall off.” Karen groaned, wobbling. A couple of people around her laughed. Then she righted herself and regained her form.
“Beautiful.” Cheryl clapped. “Well done.”
Karen had been raised in Atlanta. Her father owned a small chain of paint and remodeling stores there. She’d gone to Emory and studied art. At twenty-three she and a girlfriend went up to New York, she got her first job in the publicity department at Sotheby’s, and things just seemed to click from there. It wasn’t easy at first, after she and Charlie married. Giving up her career, moving up here to the country, starting a family. Charlie was always working back then—or away—and even when he was home, it seemed he had a phone perpetually stapled to his ear.
Things were a little dicey at the beginning. Charlie had made a few wrong plays when he opened his firm and almost “bought the farm.” But one of his mentors from Morgan Stanley had stepped in and bailed him out, and since then things had worked out pretty well. It wasn’t a big life—like some of the people they knew who lived in those giant Normandy castles in backcountry, with places in Palm Beach and whose kids had never flown commercial. But who even wanted that? They had the place in Vermont, a skiff at a yacht club in Greenwich. Karen still shopped for the groceries and picked up the poop out of the driveway. She solicited auction gifts for the Teen Center, did the household bills. The bloom on her cheeks said she was happy. She loved her family more than anything in the world.
Still, she sighed, shifting into chair pose; it was like heaven that at least for an hour the kids, the dog, the bills piling up on her desk were a million miles away.
Karen’s attention was caught by something through the glass partition. People were gathering around the front desk, staring up at the overhead TV.
“Think of a beautiful place….” Cheryl directed them. “Inhale. Use your breath to take you there….”
Karen drifted to the place she always fixed on. A remote cove just outside Tortola, in the Caribbean. She and Charlie and the kids had come upon it when they were sailing nearby. They had waded in and spent the day by themselves in the beautiful turquoise bay. A world without cell phones and Comedy Central. She had never seen her husband so relaxed. When the kids were gone, he always said, when he was able to get it all together, they could go there. Right. Karen always smiled inside. Charlie was a lifer. He loved the arbitrage, the risk. The cove could stay away, a lifetime if it had to. She was happy. She caught her face in the mirror. It made her smile.
Suddenly Karen became aware that the crowd at the front desk had grown. A few runners had stepped off their treadmills, focused on the overhead screen. Even the trainers had come over and were watching.
Something had happened!
Cheryl tried clapping them back to attention. “People, focus!” But to no avail.
One by one, they all broke their poses and stared.
A woman from the club ran over, throwing open their door. “Something’s happened!” she said, her face white with alarm. “There’s a fire in Grand Central Station! There’s been some kind of bombing there.”
Karen hurried through the glass door and squeezed in front of the screen to watch.
They all did.
There was a reporter broadcasting from the street in Manhattan across from the train station, confirming in a halting tone that some sort of explosion had gone off inside. “Possibly multiple explosions …”
The screen then cut to an aerial view from a helicopter. A billowing plume of black smoke rose into the sky from inside.
“Oh, Jesus, God,” Karen muttered, staring at the scene in horror. “What’s happened …?”
“It’s down on the tracks,” a woman in a leotard standing next to her said. “They think some kind of bomb went off, maybe on one of the trains.”
“My son went in by train this morning,” a woman gasped, pressing a hand to her lips.
Another, a towel draped around her neck, holding back tears: “My husband, too.”
Before Karen could even think, fresh reports came in. An explosion, several explosions, on the tracks, just as a Metro-North train was pulling into the station. There was a fire raging down there, the news reporter said. Smoke coming up on the street. Dozens of people still trapped. Maybe hundreds. This was bad!
“Who?” people were murmuring all around.
“Terrorists, they’re saying.” One of the trainers shook his head. “They don’t know.…”
They’d all been part of this kind of terrible moment before. Karen and Charlie had both known people who’d never made it out on 9/11. At first Karen watched with the empathetic worry of someone whose life was outside the tragedy that was taking place. Nameless, faceless people she might have seen a hundred times—across from her on the train, reading the sports page, hurrying on the street for a cab. Eyes fixed to the screen, now many of them locked fingers with one another’s hands.
Then, all of a sudden, it hit Karen.
Not with a flash—a numbing sensation at first, in her chest. Then intensifying, accompanied by a feeling of impending dread.
Charlie