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.”
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