by Mara, Wil
Little things like storm warnings made her think about him. As she munched her way toward an early heart attack, and the mid-morning breeze made the curtains over the sink dance and sway, she wondered if he was still “out west.” That’s where he had said he was headed. She knew he’d been ambiguous on purpose. She saw him only once after that, when they signed the divorce papers in his lawyer’s office. She thought about getting a lawyer of her own, just to give him a hard time. But they didn’t have any children or savings, and he’d already decided to give her the trailer and all its contents. What would she fight for? All he wanted was his freedom, and she knew why.
She finished the sandwich, wiped her hands on her T-shirt, and went into the bathroom, leaving the door open. The fart she ripped as she slid her sweatpants down sounded like a dry towel being slowly torn in half.
As she sat reading a rippled copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, the TV sang again, this time followed by a garbled announcement. Somewhere in the back of her mind she noted that an actual voice message was unusual, even for the shore—
This is an emergency broadcast from the National Weather Service. All residents along the New Jersey coastline from Belmar to Cape May are required to leave their homes at once and move at least two miles inland. Again, all residents along the New Jersey coastline from Belmar to Cape May are required to leave their homes and move at least two miles inland. A tidal wave has been detected roughly six hundred miles offshore and will strike the coastline in approximately two hours.
At first she thought she’d misheard it, similar to the way a song on a radio sounds slightly different if you’re far away from it. She jumped up and hurried out, still clutching the digest-sized magazine with her thumb acting as a bookmark. There was another long beep, followed by a repeat of the recorded message, which would obviously replay hundreds of times this day. The scrawl at the bottom of the screen, an amateurish superimposition but no less effective, was almost identical—
…>> URGENT <<…ALL RESIDENTS OF THE BEACH AREA FROM BELMAR TO CAPE MAY ARE REQUIRED TO LEAVE THEIR HOMES IMMEDIATELY AND MOVE AT LEAST TWO MILES INLAND. A TIDAL WAVE WILL STRIKE THE COASTLINE IN APPROXIMATELY TWO HOURS…>> URGENT <<…
“Holy shit!”
She grabbed the remote and switched around for more information. The same message was running on every channel, originating from the local cable company. It occurred to Mosley that there was a small chance this was some kind of error or maybe even a practical joke; perhaps a recently released employee (“disgruntled” was the word that entered her mind) had set it up to run automatically, long after he or she had hightailed it out of there.
Then she landed on CNN, where two reporters—one male and one female—were sitting at the news desk, looking grave and earnest. The BREAKING NEWS banner under them alternated between “Commercial Airliner Goes Down in Atlantic Ocean. Onboard Bomb Detonates.” and “Tsunami Approaching Southern New Jersey Coast. Tidal Wave Expected to Strike in Less Than Two Hours.” As they spoke, the screen switched to a generic map of the state, and in the light blue area that represented the water was a series of concentric circles in pulsing red, representing the radiating movement of the tsunami.
At that moment it became real to her. The fact that the best known news channel in the world had picked up the story made it impossible to deny. It wasn’t April Fool’s Day.
This was really happening.
Tarrance-Smith wasn’t the largest real estate company on the Jersey Shore, but it was one of the oldest. Started in 1919 by Samuel Tarrance and his business partner, Neil Smith, the company grew slowly but steadily, amassing a loyal customer base through four generations, two world wars, and nearly a full century. There were eight offices, all within the Garden State. The one in Manahawkin on Route 72, where Karen Thompson worked, was the smallest.
She sat in a long, brightly lit room with five colleagues, each with their own desk but without walls or dividers. It was vaguely reminiscent of the secretarial pools from the 1950s. Only Scott Tarrance, great-grandson of Samuel, had an enclosed office with an actual door.
Karen made a point of keeping her workspace neat and tidy. On a practical level she found it easier to keep track of everything that way. From an emotional standpoint it made her feel more organized. And in terms of PR value it was priceless—a customer considering the purchase of a beachfront home that might cost anywhere from a half to five million dollars wouldn’t want to deal with a salesperson who couldn’t find a Post-It or a paper clip.
She kept all of her pens and pencils in a Tarrance-Smith coffee mug on the left side, which was within easy reach as she was left-handed. Next to it was a stapler and a tape dispenser. On the right was a tray containing the day’s files, which she always prepared at the end of the previous day. At the back was a little desk lamp, and flanking it on either side was an ever-growing population of framed family photos. It looked like a miniature city, with the lamp acting as some sort of peculiar centerpiece to the downtown area. There were numerous shots of Patrick and Michael—some with their father, some with their mother, some with both, some neither. One picture showed them playing their first round of miniature golf at Thundering Surf, in Beach Haven, another had them eating Italian ices at Bay Village. With the exception of Karen and Mike’s formal wedding shot (the happy couple standing alongside their silver Rolls-Royce limousine) all the photos were of the boys.
She looked at these pictures often and drew strength from them. Most importantly she drew motivation. Each time she saw their round, smiling faces, fresh pangs of guilt would alight in her stomach. She cursed herself for not being able to spend more time with them, all of her time with them. She worked because she had to work, because just about all mothers had to work now. It was part and parcel of the modern age—both parents worked, and someone who had absolutely nothing to do with the children’s organic existence raised them. She hated this, hated it so much that it sometimes made her mildly ill. She only worked part-time—four days a week, about seven hours a day—but she hated every moment. The fact that the Tarrance family treated her well and that Nancy was the greatest babysitter in the world didn’t make a difference in the final sum of things—nothing erased the pain of being apart from her kids.
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.
“What? No way!”
“Yes way. Y
ou’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.