Pickings winced as he remembered. It was the children who had suffered most of all. They could not understand how their mother could simply leave like that. Pickings had always made up excuses about her previous disappearances: She was visiting her sister in Paris; or friends in London; or her extensive family in Beirut. And they’d never doubted him. In the end, the mere uncertainty of it, the fact that they knew nothing, had worn the family down. They began to blame themselves. They wracked their brains trying to imagine what they’d done wrong, or what they’d said to drive her off. But, for the life of them, they could not remember anything. Even after all this time, he still couldn’t.
Pickings took a walk on the verandah, wondering how he had left all that behind: the inquisitive police; the nosy neighbors; his insufferably pitying relatives; even his children. They were old enough to take care of themselves now and, despite his love for them, he found it difficult to be around them. They reminded him too much of Layla.
He sighed. Now, at last, he was untouchable, alone and safe, with the solitude he required to tend his flower garden and finish his book on Pope Pius II. Nothing ever happened on La Palma. They were in the middle of nowhere. The entire island only had eighty thousand inhabitants, and the house was nestled high along the central ridge, within a stand of tall Canary pine and tree-heather, a good way from the nearest town, and a little too close to the still-active Cumbre Vieja to entice most visitors. It had been weeks since he’d seen anyone — months, really — other than his housekeeper, Rosa. Only the occasional hiker traversing the Ruta de Los Volcanes, or some scientist studying the proximate Cumbre Vieja broke up the monotony. Like that Dr. White who had stumbled by three months before with his Jordanian friend, Dr. Hamal, the one who had heard of his dead wife’s work with Palestinian relief organizations. But even they had quit the island. Dr. White’s wife had fallen ill; he’d been forced to return to America in a hurry. And Dr. Hamal had left soon after. Pickings remembered the wonderful dinner they’d had in Fuencaliente, how they had come back to the house, and Dr. Hamal had played the jukebox all night long and told him how he could find a buyer on the Internet.
Help wound down inside. Pickings looked down at the stormy sea below, the thrashing waves, the flash of moonlight on the water. For a moment he thought he saw something on the distant rocks, something moving. But it was only his imagination.
Chapter 4
Emily Swenson stood on the stage within the darkened auditorium, gilded by the halo of a lectern light. First-year students from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute packed the auditorium, kids who had yet to settle on a specialty. She could hear them coughing and fidgeting about in the dark. Swenson’s lectures were always well attended. She was famous in certain academic circles for her presentations, their drama, her state-of-the-art graphics and California good looks. Someone had once posted a snapshot of her on the Internet — sunbathing topless on a sun-drenched beach, with a backdrop of palm trees and the glittering sea — and she would never live it down. She still got fan mail from deranged admirers whom she had never met. They forgot she came from South Dakota.
It was strange to be back in Massachusetts, to see such scenes of normalcy after all that grizzly devastation in Sri Lanka. Swenson ran through her presentation with precision, describing the events leading up to, during, and after the tsunami. It all seemed so unreal now. The slides helped to bracket the memories, to frame each experience in light and — perhaps more importantly — to block out the unwanted. She no longer smelled the distinctive stench of rotting human flesh when she awoke each morning.
“It was the morning of December Twenty-sixth,” she began. “A month ago, almost to the day. The ‘Queen of the Sea’ train had left Colombo — Sri Lanka’s capital — two minutes late, and had just pulled up at the tiny station of Telwatte just shy of 9:30 AM. The platform and cars were jammed with passengers, over a thousand, since December Twenty-sixth was a ‘full moon day’ — a local Buddhist holiday. Telwatte is generally a momentary stop. The conductor was waiting for the signal to turn green but — due to reports of water on the tracks down the coast — the signal never changed. This was the only harbinger of what was soon to come. Everything seemed ordinary. But deep beneath the earth,” she added, “two and a half hours earlier and over a thousand miles away off the coast of Sumatra, enormous forces had strained the underlying rock. In the space of minutes, this pent-up energy was released as a 9.0 magnitude earthquake along a subduction zone in which the India plate is being thrust beneath the Burma plate. A section of the seafloor lurched upwards — as much as fifteen feet, in some places — lifting the normally flat sea surface in response.
“One of the passengers — a man named Vidu, who lost his leg in the ensuing tsunami — later described what happened on that fateful day.”
She displayed a slide of Vidu. He lay in a hospital bed. His stump was wrapped with bandages. His right arm in a sling. His face was bruised and battered, lined with cuts.
“As the train idled at the station,” she said, “Vidu heard a rumble, like that of a low-flying jet. A few minutes later, he saw a wall of water rushing toward the train, like a huge river. After the first wave hit, instead of climbing off the train, the water drew more people to the cars, including those who had been waiting on the platform. The water was waist high and the train seemed solid. People scrambled aboard, some handing their children up to the passengers hanging out the windows. Others climbed up onto the roofs of the various cars. For some reason, Vidu decided to leave the train; to this day, he can’t say why. He picked up his two young daughters and carried them to a slab of concrete over a nearby latrine. Ten minutes or so after the first wave struck, he watched in horror as a second wave — more like a swell — rushed in from the sea and inundated the station and the train. The train, including the eighty-ton engine, was hit with such force that it was bulldozed off the tracks. The cars twisted and turned, filling with water. And Vidu and his two daughters were swept away into a nearby swamp. There, he hung in the trees, unconscious. When he awoke, he had already been attacked by saltwater crocodiles. His right leg had been ripped off just below the knee. His two daughters — six and nine years old — were nowhere to be seen. Indeed, no trace of them was ever found.”
She displayed a photograph of Vidu trapped in the branches, flesh hanging in strips from his pulverized knee, crabs nibbling, the bloodstained crocodiles beneath. The audience gasped.
“He was bleeding profusely,” she continued, “but he was too exhausted to move. He could barely look around. Other bodies were crucified all about him. Body parts dangled from the trees, like overripe fruit. Crabs and ravens and crocodiles crept through the underbrush, feasting on human flesh. Then he fainted once again. Were it not for the arrival of a rescue party, he would have died on the spot.