Wave (10 page)

For nearly ten minutes after she got behind her desk this morning, Styrofoam cup in hand, she stared at the photos. She summoned all her strength and reminded herself again of The Plan. She and Mike had sat down one evening at the kitchen table after the boys had gone to bed and worked it out on paper. Provided neither of them lost their jobs and Mike continued getting a yearly salary increase of at least three percent, she could quit working altogether in another five years. Patrick and Michael would only be nine and eight then, which left plenty of time before they packed their bags and headed out into the world.

Five more years
, she thought bitterly as she tore her eyes away and forced her hands to pick up the pile of manilla folders that cried for her like a nest of starving sparrows.
It’s like a prison sentence
. It wasn’t the first time that thought had surfaced, either. If she didn’t think it would arouse suspicion among her coworkers and her boss, she’d hang a calendar on the wall to her right and start marking the days with big Xs.

She was reviewing a rental contract for a property in North Beach when she first heard about the downed airliner. Scott had come in, dressed in dark tweed slacks, a crisp white shirt, and a navy tie, with his favorite coffee mug in hand. It was simple white porcelain with THE BOSS printed in a plain font across the visible side; one of many gifts his staff had given him over the years. He was tall and thin with a slight but unmistakable forward lean that no doubt wreaked accumulative havoc on his spine. He was always clean-shaven and kept his dark hair conservatively cut and impeccably groomed. He smiled easily and had a soft, gentle voice that, as far as Karen knew, had never been raised in anger.

“Did you all hear about the latest terrorist attack?”

Three of the other five real estate agents were in the office, too. Everyone looked up.

Myra Gates put a hand to her chest and said, “Oh my God, no. What happened?” Forty-three, single, and still youthfully pretty, she was a veteran of the Jersey Shore social scene and spent the bulk of her weekends with a group of close friends in Atlantic City. She and Karen were galaxies apart in terms of lifestyle, but they got along well. Myra loved when the boys visited and always brought little gifts for them on their birthdays.

“They hijacked a flight to DC, but something happened on the way and it went down in the ocean.”

“Jesus…”

“About six-hundred miles offshore, they’re saying.”

“Off
our
shore? Right here?”

Tarrance nodded. “Yep.” He shook his head. “Incredible, isn’t it?”

Karen shook her head, too. She almost never used profanity in her speech, but her inner voice said at that moment,
What a fucked-up world this is
. Then, in a moment of irony that she couldn’t possibly be aware of, she thanked God they lived in such a quiet, relatively overlooked place. They’d have to get out the snowplows in Hell before any terrorist group decided to descend upon Long Beach Island—too low-profile a target with too small a potential body count.

A short time later Tarrance reappeared. “I have some bad news,” he said in a steady, quiet tone, eyeing his staff earnestly. His face was pale, the coffee mug was gone. “It appears there was a bomb on the hijacked plane and when it went down it somehow triggered a tsunami—a huge tidal wave. And it’s coming this way.”

Karen was aware of the gasps and the “Oh my Gods,” but mostly she felt the frost settle over her body; first on the surface, and then down to her very soul. In a flicker of an instant she somehow knew what was coming next.

“They’ve started evacuating LBI. If any of you have any friends or relatives there you better call them now.”

His gaze fell on Karen; she stared back, a hundred thoughts flowing between them. He was very in touch with what was happening in his employees’ lives and he knew her boys were on the island. His expression seemed to say,
It’s going to be chaos getting off the island. Two little boys and a retired couple won’t have much of a chance. I’m sorry, Karen. I’m so sorry
.

“If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. I’ll be right here. I’ve got three phones and a car.”

He started to say more, but Karen wasn’t hearing it. She up-shifted into a strange frame of mind that was somehow both alien and familiar. She’d heard about out-of-body experiences, where people were aware of themselves from a third-person perspective and able to function at the same time. It was kind of like that. She watched her hand yank the phone from its cradle and her fingers tap out Nancy’s number at blazing, almost comical speed. But she wasn’t
feeling
any of it. Utter and complete numbness, pure objectivity. An overload of emotions so massive that she was unable to connect with any of them.

As the call was going through, she had a wild idea about what she would do if the boys didn’t make it.

It was the ugliest thought she’d ever known.

Jennifer King didn’t like listening to the radio. She had a pretty extensive collection of cassettes and CDs, so she figured she’d have a better chance of hearing a song she liked with one of those.

When she bought the car two years ago (actually her parents had covered half, and she was paying them back in installments of two-hundred dollars a month), it already had a cassette player from the factory. The addition of a CD player was easy—she simply velcroed a Sony Discman to the dashboard; a dummy-cassette adapter connected the two units. The Discman had been a Christmas present from Mark. Unlike many males she’d known, he had a knack for picking the right gift.

The drawback to ignoring the radio, she knew, was that she was isolating herself from what was going on the world. Her father, for example, got his daily news fix during his hour-long commute. Sometimes she’d get to work and hear everyone discussing some current event that she hadn’t a clue about, and it made her feel ignorant. From time to time she’d promise herself she’d try to be more aware in the future, but somehow it never happened. She liked music too much and, at this stage in her life, cared about world events too little.

The first public announcement concerning the tsunami came over the radio only moments after she got into the car. Others followed, of course, but she never heard any of them. She was too busy singing along to Simply Red’s
Home
album.

She parked around the back of the Acme and used a steel door marked FOR EMPLOYEES ONLY. She was one of four employees who had their own key. Brian had given it to her when she was coming in at odd hours to familiarize herself with the inventory computer. She knew it was a sign of trust, and she felt privileged and flattered. Others had to ring the bell to be let in.

With her Acme apron still rolled up in her hand, she stepped out of the sunny morning and inside the dim and cluttered bowels of the old building. She took her timecard from a diagonal slot and set it into the punch-clock. The outdated machine stamped it with brute force.

She went into Brian’s office to say hello, but he wasn’t there. This struck her as odd. He was a highly organized and regimented individual, and at this time each day he took care of paperwork. He hated it, she knew, and always wanted to get it out of the way first thing. It was unthinkable that there wasn’t any. Maybe he was dealing with a customer complaint.

With a sigh she tied on her apron and went into the stockroom. Ancient sodium lights hung from the high ceiling in conical aluminum cages, accentuating the cold, warehouse feel of the place. The cement floor between the aisles had been worn to a dull shine. In the corner near the giant delivery bay was a small table, and on it was the dreaded computer. At least the chair was cushioned, she thought as she settled into it. She turned on the system and waited. It would take a few minutes to warm up. She always found this funny—the computer her family had at home (in the living room so everyone could use it) was ready to go in about thirty seconds. It had a 17″ flat-panel monitor, Windows XP, and an Athlon processor. Comparatively, this thing was a fossil. The mere fact that it still served someone’s purposes was amazing.

Brian had left the master list for her, and she started into it immediately. Time passed—ten minutes, twenty, thirty. She got into what she called “The Zone”—a near-hypnotic state induced by intense concentration combined with a lack of distraction. When someone came through the paired swinging doors that separated the back area from the sales floor, she was only vaguely aware of it. The keyboard continued chattering under her swiftly moving fingers.

“Who’s there?” said a voice. It sounded frantic, forceful.

Jennifer turned and saw Brian peeking around the end of the aisle. She was momentarily surprised—it hadn’t sounded like him at all.

“It’s
me
, Brian! Who do you th—?”

He came down the aisle fast, not jogging but almost. He had his hands out as if two people, one on either side, were about to slap him five.

“What are you doing here?” he cried. “You’ve got to get out!”

“What? Why?”

“Don’t you know?”

He emerged from between the towering, steel-girded shelves and came alongside her. His face was red—not from overwork like it usually was, but from fear. Jennifer realized in that instant that something was terribly wrong.

“Know what?”

“About the tidal wave. Come on!”

He took her by the arm—gently but firmly—and pulled her from the seat. She went willingly, carried along mostly by her trust of this man.

“What are you talking about? What wave?”

He shook his head. “You and your CDs. There’s a tsunami coming.”

“A tsunami?”

“Yeah, a
tidal
wave.”

Through the yellowish dimness she could see the satiny shine of perspiration on his forehead. Some had run down his face, leaving glossy tracks.

“
Wha
t
? No way!”

“Yes way. You’ve got to get out of here, and
fast
.”

“Oh my God, Brian. Tell me you’re kidding. Tell me this is a joke.”

They rounded the end of the aisle and came back to his tiny office. Through the glass windows Jennifer could see the mess of paperwork that had been left undone on the desk. Now she understood why.

“I wish I could, I really do.”

Brian opened one of his desk drawers and put a few things in a plastic shopping bag. They were personal items, Jennifer noticed—a penknife, a keychain, his lucky silver dollar. Then he began ripping down the pictures of his kids and his wife. There were no frames—they had been taped to the wall. While he did this, Jennifer fired a litany of questions at him—when would the wave strike, what had caused it, how were people getting off the island? Brian answered as many as he could, but the truth was nobody had all the answers at the moment.

His last act was one of pure nobility—he went to the store safe, worked the dial with remarkable calm, and removed all the cash. Jennifer had no idea how much was there, but she could see it was a lot—stack after stack of neatly wrapped bills; he left the coinage behind. The thought occurred to her that a person of weak morals could make a fortune at a time like this—take it all, hide it, and claim the store was looted or the money was lost in the destruction. But she knew Brian too well—he would return it later, every penny. He was smart like that—his integrity would get him farther than the cash would. The company bigwigs in the main office in Idaho would have a record of every penny. When they learned that he’d made the effort to protect it, they’d remember him for it. For all she knew, he also made a point of having her there so he’d have a witness.

“Okay, let’s go.”

He left the office door open, which he never did—always locked tighter than Fort Knox—and the lights on. For some reason this scared Jennifer. Systems were breaking down, rituals were being ignored. The glue that held her world together was melting.

They stepped outside, and the door shut behind them with a hydraulic thump.

“You have your car, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, get in it, and get out of here! What about your family?”

“I’m going to call them on my cell phone right—”

She stopped, turned white. Somewhere in the distance, a siren began wailing. The eerie synthetic scream somehow made the terror all the more palpable.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Oh my God!”

“What’s the matter?”

He had taken a few steps away from her, toward his own car. Now he took those steps back.

“Jen, what’s wrong?”

She looked up at him, her eyes reddening. “Mark.”

“Have you heard from him?”

“No, not since this morning.”

She took her cell phone from her bag and dialed quickly.

“He’s got a phone, too, right?”

“Yes, but he always—”

The number rang just once, and then a pleasant recorded voice said, “We’re sorry, the person you are trying to reach is not avail—”

Jennifer terminated the connection. “He turned it off. He always turns it off when he does a photo shoot.” Tears began streaming down her face. “Oh my God, he probably has no idea. He doesn’t even—”