The Ocean Dark

13

Her ears were still ringing as she walked north to Times Square, hugging close to buildings, averting her face from the street, while New Yorkers frantically responded to the explosion underground. She had intended to take the subway, but every train in the city had been halted the moment the news spread.

She trembled as she walked, terrified that Ted might have hung around. If he saw her, it would all be over. He would know she hadn’t gotten on the train.

The train.

Oh, my God.

Her face felt tight and she wondered if the heat from the explosion had been enough to burn her. Police and transit workers had been first down the stairs onto the platform after the blast had knocked her off her feet, but ordinary citizens had come down after them, wanting to help. If she’d been a man, the cops might have looked at her more closely, but when a stylishly coiffed black man in an expensive suit and a dreadlocked white guy who’d been playing guitar in the station near the ticket booth helped her up the stairs, nobody paid any attention. They were focused on the crisis.

When EMTs and firefighters started coming down into the station and the transit workers forced people to move back, it was a simple thing for her to slip away.

The dreadlocked guitarist had carried her suitcase up for her. It banged against her leg now as she walked hurriedly north. A giddy amazement ran through her like an electric charge.

Wherever Ted was, he didn’t know where she was.

For the moment, she was free. Now she had to stay that way.

When she reached Times Square, she realized that she had done it. Left Ted behind. She tried not to let her elation show. People were talking about some kind of bombing downtown, maybe a terrorist attack, and it felt like a somber time. She didn’t want anyone to think she was laughing about the train.

As she walked, the sky above Manhattan had started to clear. It all seemed too perfect, like she was in a movie and at any moment the music would begin to swell. It felt like a dream, but the blue breaks in the gray sky were real. The sidewalk under her feet was real. The weight of the suitcase in her hand.

But the weight of dread that had sat on her shoulders for years had vanished.

Sirens wailed as emergency vehicles sped southward. A city bus idled in the crux of the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, waiting while the fire trucks and police cars flew by. The blat of the fire trucks’ horns hurt her ears, just as it always had when she’d sat and watched the Christmas parade pass by as a little girl.

Between waves of emergency response, she crossed the street. The Millennium Broadway Hotel sat on the corner of Forty-fourth Street, a monolith of glass and steel and marble, and it was a thing of beauty. The doorman and a cab driver were talking grimly about what might be happening, wondering aloud if this was some follow-up to 9/11. They didn’t even look up as she walked by, and she opened the door for herself, went straight to the elevator and rode up to the seventh floor. Afraid to write anything down, she’d committed the room number to memory and for days had feared she would forget when the time came.

But she didn’t forget. 719.

She knocked so softly she couldn’t imagine anyone inside would hear it.

He answered in seconds, and when he opened the door she had a moment of disappointment. George had lied to her. The photograph he’d e-mailed must have been at least five years out of date. The man in room 719 had thinning hair and weighed a good twenty pounds more than the one in the photo.

But then he smiled, his eyes alight with such elation that she forgave him instantly. As lies went, it was a small one, and perhaps as much a lie to himself as to her.

“Is it really you?” he asked, for he’d never seen a photo of her. Everything he knew about her she had told him in the long, rambling conversations they had online when Ted had let her go to the library.

“It really is.”

George laughed and stepped out into the hall, crushing her into an embrace. She stiffened, unused to being touched by anyone but Ted. Unused to being touched out of love.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” he mumbled, stepping back, eyes full of horror at his own presumption and the idea that he might have upset her.

“No,” she said quickly, shaking her head, reaching for him. “Please.”

She stepped into the room, dropping her suitcase by the door, and pulled his arms around her, weeping with years of pent-up sorrow, newborn relief, and astonishment that anyone would want to hold her.

George reached out and swung the door closed without letting go of her. Then he just held her, speaking comfort to her in low, gentle tones. Three quarters of an hour passed and they had barely moved.

At last, he asked her a question that required an answer.

“Who are you going to be now? You get to choose. A new place. A new name. Everything. Have you decided on a name?”

She took a deep breath, smiling against his chest, and nodded.

“Victoria,” she said, stepping back and beaming up at him. “Tori.”

George’s eyes lit up. “Hello, Tori.”

“Hi, George.” She stood on her toes and kissed the big man’s cheek. “You saved me.”

He actually blushed and looked shyly away. “You saved you. You were brave enough to make the jump.”

They’d talked about this many times. Tori squeezed his hands in hers. “Only because you gave me the faith that you’d be here to catch me.”

For hours, they talked, but they never left the room. Tori knew it was irrational, but she feared that Ted would find her, out on the street. Less irrational was the thought that she might see someone she knew, someone who knew him. And then he would know.

They ordered room service, and afterward Tori wanted to take a shower. It had been so long since she had felt clean.

When she came out in the fluffy white cotton hotel bathrobe, George was perched on the end of one of the two beds, watching CNN. His mouth hung slightly agape and she wondered how long he had been sitting like that, staring.

“Did you see—” he started to say.

Then something clicked in his mind. Maybe earlier he hadn’t taken note of the scrape on her elbow or the ruddiness of her cheeks or the dirt on her clothes. Now it hit him. George had a heart as big as the world, full of love and faith in the basic decency of people, which sprang from his own basic decency and his need to believe that others were like him. But he was also an intelligent man. Only his joy at seeing her had blinded him.

“You were there when it happened. Oh, my God—”

He started to say her old name, the one she’d left behind in Penn Station, then corrected himself.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded quickly. “Don’t I look all right?”

“If you’d gotten on the train—”

“I’d be dead. If I believed in God, I’d say maybe you weren’t the only one looking out for me today.”

Her voice shook as she said this last, and her hands trembled as well. But she bit her lip and she smiled to show him it was only nerves. And then she told him every detail of her day. Afterward, he held her again for a while, the two of them sitting on the bed together, and Tori waited for George to kiss her or slide his hands up over her breasts. Not that she wanted this, but she expected it. The choices she’d made had put her in the role of damsel-in-distress, but she knew that Prince Charming existed only in the pages of fairy tales.

Yet George only held her. She knew he wanted her — he’d made that plain in the conversations they’d had online — but he didn’t try anything.

“If you’re just joining us, at least seventy-three people are dead and dozens more injured in a train explosion beneath Manhattan today,” the CNN anchorwoman was saying. “Authorities so far refuse to speculate publicly on whether the explosion was the result of a terrorist bombing, but other theories have also been put forward, with some suggesting a massive gas leak might be responsible. Meanwhile, rescue and recovery efforts are still under way. Many passengers were treated for minor injuries and have already been released, but other victims of this tragedy remain hospitalized, some in critical condition.

“We’re now hearing from several different sources that many of those who died in today’s explosion were so badly burned that identifying their remains may be impossible, creating a nightmare for their families that is only just beginning.”

The redheaded newscaster kept going, the tragedy in an endless loop of information and grim footage of rescue vehicles and people weeping. But Tori could only stare past George as laughter built softly in her chest and then came out in a giddy, hysterical babble. It lasted only a few seconds and then she realized how manic she must seem, and how morbid. People were dead, burned beyond recognition, and she was laughing.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling back and looking up at him. “I’m not … it’s just …”

George looked at her, face tinged with horror. Then realization crept over his features.

“You’re dead. I mean, as far as Ted knows …”

Tori took a shuddery, emotional breath and nodded. “He would’ve come after me once he figured out I wasn’t on the train. But now he’ll never know. No one will.”