The Dark Tide

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 di

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. “Do

“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 begi

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 ru

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!