Читать книгу The Dark Tide - Andrew Gross, Andrew Gross - Страница 13

I never heard from my husband again. I never knew what happened.

The fires raged underground in Grand Central for most of the day. There’d been a powerful accelerant used in the blast. Four blasts. One in each of the first two cars of the 7:51 out of Greenwich, exploding just as it came to a stop. The others in trash baskets along the platform packed with a hundred pounds of hexagen, enough to bring a good-sized building down. A splinter cell, they said. Over Iraq. Can you imagine? Charlie hated the war in Iraq. They found names, pictures of the station, traces of chemicals where the bombs were made. The fire that burned there for most of two days had reached close to twenty-three hundred degrees.

We waited. We waited all day that first day to hear something. Anything. Charlie’s voice. A message from one of the hospitals that he was there. It seemed like we called the whole world: the NYPD, the hotline that had been set up. Our local congressman, whom Charlie knew.

We never did.

One hundred and eleven people died. That included three of the bombers, who, they suspected, were in the first two cars. Where Charlie always sat. Many of them couldn’t even be identified. No distinguishable remains. They just went to work one morning and disappeared from the earth. That was Charlie. My husband of eighteen years. He just yelled good-bye over the hum of the hair dryer and went to take in the car.

And disappeared.

What they did find was the handle of the leather briefcase the kids had given him last year—the charred top piece still attached, blown clear from the blast site, the gold-embossed monogram, CMF, which made it final for the first time and brought our tears.

Charles Michael Friedman.

Those first days I was sure he was going to crawl out of that mess. Charlie could pull himself out of anything. He could fall off the damn roof trying to fix the satellite and he’d land on his feet. You could just count on him so much.

But he didn’t. There was never a call, or a piece of his clothing, even a handful of ashes.

And I’ll never know.

I’ll never know if he died from the initial explosion or in the flames. If he was conscious or if he felt pain. If he had a final thought of us. If he called out our names.

Part of me wanted one last chance to take him by the shoulders and scream, “How could you let yourself die in there, Charlie?” How?

Now I guess I have to accept that he’s gone. That he won’t be coming back. Though it’s so effing hard….

That he’ll never get to drive Samantha to college that first time. Or watch Alex score a goal. Or see the people they become. Things that would have made him so proud.

We were going to grow old together. Sail off to that Caribbean cove. Now he’s gone, in a flash.

Eighteen years of our lives.

Eighteen years …

And I don’t even get to kiss him good-bye.