by Andrew Gross
Dressed, Charles was usually in rush mode by now. The six-thirty wake-up shout to Karen, a knock on Alex’s and Samantha’s doors to get them rolling for school. Looking over the Wall Street Journal’s headlines at the front door.
This morning, thanks to the car, he had a moment to sip his coffee.
They lived in a warm, refurbished Colonial on an affluent tree-lined street in the town of Old Greenwich, a block off the sound. Fully paid for, the damned thing was probably worth more than Charles’s father, a tie salesman from Scranton, had earned in his entire life. Maybe he couldn’t show it like some of their big-time friends in their megahomes out on North Street, but he’d done well. He’d fought to get himself into Penn from a high-school class of seven hundred, distinguished himself at the energy desk at Morgan Stanley, steered a few private clients away when he’d opened his own firm, Harbor Capital. They had the ski house in Vermont, the kids’ college paid for, took fancy vacations.
So what the hell had he done wrong?
Outside, Tobey was scratching at the kitchen’s French doors, trying to get back in. All right, all right. Charles sighed.
Last week their other Westie, Sasha, had been run over. Right on their quiet street, directly in front of their house. It had been Charles who’d found her, bloodied, inert. Everyone was still upset. And then the note. The note that came to his office in a basket of flowers the very next day. That had left him in such a sweat. And brought on these dreams.
Sorry about the pooch, Charles. Could your kids be next?
How the hell had it gotten this far?
He stood up and checked the clock on the stove: 6:45. With any luck, he figured, he could be out of the dealership by 7:30, catch a ride to the 7:51, be at his desk at Forty-ninth Street and Third Avenue fifty minutes after that. Figure out what to do. He let in the dog, who immediately darted past him into the living room with a yelp and out the front door, which Charles had absentmindedly failed to shut. Now he was waking up the entire neighborhood.
The little bastard was more work than the kids!
“Karen, I’m leaving!” he yelled, grabbing his briefcase and tucking the Journal under his arm.
“Kiss, kiss,” she called back, wrapped in her robe, dashing out of the shower.
She still looked sexy to him, her caramel-colored hair wet and a little tangled from the shower. Karen was nothing if not beautiful. She had kept her figure toned and inviting from years of yoga, her skin was still smooth, and she had those dreamy, grab-you-and-never-let-go hazel eyes. For a moment Charles regretted not rolling over to her back in bed once Tobey had flown the coop and given them the unexpected opportunity.
But instead he just yelled up something about the car—that he’d be taking in the Metro-North. That maybe he’d call her later and have her meet him on the way home to pick it up.
“Love you!” Karen called over the hum of the hair dryer.
“You, too!”
“After Alex’s game we’ll go out….”
Damn, that was right, Alex’s lacrosse game, his first of the season. Charles went back and scratched out a note to him that he left on the kitchen counter.
To our #1 attacker! Knock ’em dead, champ! BEST OF LUCK!!!
He signed his initials, then crossed it out and wrote Dad. He stared at the note for a second. He had to stop this. Whatever was going on, he’d never let anything happen to them.
Then he headed for the garage, and over the sound of the automatic door opening and the dog’s barking in the yard, he heard his wife yell above the hair dryer, “Charlie, would you please let in the goddamn dog!”
CHAPTER TWO
By eight-thirty Karen was at yoga.
By that time she had already roused Alex and Samantha from their beds, put out boxes of cereal and toast for their breakfasts, found 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 hot-shot 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. “In-hale. 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 screens. 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.”
CHAPTER THREE
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 had yelled something up to her—about going in by train this morning. Above the drone of the hair dryer.
About having to take in the car and needing her to pick him up later on that afternoon.
Oh, my God…
She felt a constriction in her chest. Her eyes darted toward the clock. Frantically, she tried to reconstruct some sort of timeline. Charlie, what time he left, what time it was now…It started to scare her. Her heart began to speed up like a metronome set on high.
An updated report came in. Karen tensed. “It appears we are talking about a bomb,” the reporter announced. “Aboard a Metro-North train just as it pulled into Grand Central. This has just been confirmed,” he said. “It was on the Stamford branch.”
A collective gasp rose up from the studio.
Most of them were from around there. Everyone knew people—relatives, friends—who regularly took the train. Faces drained of blood—in shock. People turning to each other without even knowing whom they were next to, seeking the comfort of each other’s eyes.
“It’s horrible, isn’t it?” A woman next to Karen shook her head.
Karen could barely answer. A chill had suddenly taken control of her, knifing through her bones.
The Stamford train went through Greenwich.
All she could do was look up at the clock in terror—8:54. Her chest was coiled so tightly she could barely breathe.
The woman stared at her. “Honey, are you okay?”
“I don’t know….” Karen’s eyes had filled with terror. “I think my husband might be on that train.”
CHAPTER FOUR
8:45 A.M.
Ty Hauck was on his way to work.
He cut the engines to five miles per hour as he maneuvered his twenty-four-foot fishing skiff, the Merrily, into the mouth of Greenwich Harbor.
Hauck took the boat in from time to time when the weather turned nice. This morning, with its clear, crisp April breeze, he looked off his deck and sort of mentally declared it: Summer hours officially begin! The twenty-five minutes on the Long Island Sound from where he lived near Cove Island in Stamford were hardly longer than the slow slog this time of the morning down I-95. And the brisk wind whipping through his hair woke him a whole lot faster than any grande at Starbucks. He clicked the portable CD player on. Fleetwood Mac. An old favorite:
Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night / And wouldn’t you love to love her.
It was why he’d moved back up here, four years ago. After the accident, after his marriage had broken up. Some said that it was running away. Hiding out. And maybe it was, just a little. So the hell what?
He was head of the Violent Crimes Unit on the Greenwich police force. People relied on him. Was that running away? Sometimes he took the boat out for an hour or so before work in the rosy predawn calm and fished for blues and striped bass. Was that?
He had grown up here. In middle-class Byram, near Port Chester by the New York border, only a few miles but a lifetime away from the massive estates that now lined the way out to backcountry, gates he now drove through to follow up on some rich kid who had tipped over his sixty-thousand-dollar Hummer.
It was all different now. The countrified families who had grown up there in his youth had given way to thirty-something hedge-fund zillionaires who tore the old homes down and built enormous castles behind iron gates, with lake-size pools and movie theaters. Everyone with money was coming in. Now Russian moguls—who even knew where their wealth was from?—were buying up horse-country estates in Conyers Farm, putting in helicopter pads.
Billionaires ruining things for millionaires. Hauck shook his head.
Twenty years ago he’d been a running back at Greenwich High. Then he went on and played at Colby, Division III. Not exactly Big Ten, but the fancy degree got him fast-tracked into the NYPD detectives’ training program, which made his dad, who worked his whole life for the Town of Greenwich Water Authority, proud. He’d cracked a couple of high-profile cases and moved up. Later on he worked for the department’s Information Office when the Trade Towers were hit.
So now he was back.
As he chugged into the harbor, the manicured lawns of Belle Haven to his left, a couple of small boats cruised past him on their way out—doing the same thing he was doing, heading to work on Long Island across the sound, a half hour’s ride away.
Hauck waved.
And he liked it here now, though a lot of pain had left its mark in between.
It was lonely since he and Beth had split up. He dated a bit: a pretty secretary to the CEO at General Reinsurance, a marketing gal who worked at Altria for a while. Even
one or two gals on the force. But he’d found no one new to share his life with. Though Beth had.
Occasionally he hung out with a few of his old buddies from town, a couple who had made bundles building homes, some who just became plumbers or mortgage brokers or owned a landscaping company. “The Leg,” that’s what everyone still called him—with a soft g, as in “Legend.” Old-timers, who still recalled him busting two tackles into the end zone to beat Stamford West for the Lower Fairfield County crown, still toasted that as the best game they’d ever seen anyone play here since Steve Young and bought him beers.
But mostly he simply felt free. That the past hadn’t followed him up here. He just tried to do a little good during the day, cut people a break. Be fair. And he had Jessica, who was ten now, up on weekends, and they fished and kicked soccer balls around on Tod’s Point and had cookouts there. Sunday afternoons, in his eight-year-old Bronco, he’d drive her back to where she lived now, in Brooklyn. Friday nights in the winter, he played hockey in the local over-forty league.
Basically he tried to push it back a little each day—time, that is—trying to find himself back to that point before everything caved in on him. That moment before the accident. Before his marriage collapsed. Before he gave up.
Why go back there, Ty?
Hard as you tried, you could never quite push it back all the way. Life didn’t afford you that.
Hauck caught sight of the marina at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, where the dock manager, Hank Gordon, an old buddy, always let him put in for the day. He picked up the radio. “Heading in, Gordo…”
But the marina manager was waiting for him out on the pier.
“What the hell are you doing here, Ty?”
Hauck yelled to him, “Summer hours, guy!” He reversed and backed the Merrily in. Gordo tossed a bowline to him and reeled him in. Hauck cut the engine. He went out to the stern as the boat hit the buoy and hopped onto the pier. “Like a dream out there today.”
