Act of God (5 page)

“I’d get you some soup, but I don’t know who’s going to feed us tonight, and I don’t have any money.”

“I don’t want any soup.”

With some effort, Big Dug got down on his knees and peered inside the box. Joshua was curled up in his blanket like a baby.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” the man asked. “You’re shivering.”

“Go away,” Joshua repeated. “I don’t want to talk to you now. I have nothing to say. I want to go to sleep.”

“Okay,” Big Dug said with a sigh, hefting himself back up. “I’ll come by later and see how you’re doing.”

As soon as Joshua heard the heavy footsteps moving away, he let out a deep sigh of relief. It was all his fault, and he couldn’t
tell Big Dug. He couldn’t tell anyone. They would all blame him, and Big Dug wouldn’t want to be his friend anymore.

He hadn’t meant to do it. It was just that he had the appointment, and the doctor had told him it was important, and he was
afraid he would forget. But he knew he wasn’t supposed to sleep at Hill House.

“I’m certainly not saying that we should condone what took place in Seattle today,” the Reverend Jonathan Heal was quick to
tell his televangelical flock on his nightly cable Prayer Hour. “I say only that it’s not hard to understand why it happened.
I myself know the frustration, the outrage, of having to stand by helplessly while more than a million blessed babies are
murdered in this country every year, each one of them given no more significance than an unwanted piece of garbage. So the
grief that we as true Christians feel by the loss of so many innocent lives at Hill House must be taken in context with the
fundamental wrong of taking any life—born or unborn.”

In homes all across the country, people murmured, “Amen.”

“I have no idea what tortured soul was driven to commit such a deed as this, but I will pray for him,” the Reverend continued,
warming to his subject, and beginning to sweat through his customary white suit and ruffled shirt. “Because I believe, in
his heart of hearts, he decided that he was not only justified in
doing what he did, but that he had no choice. Surely, he must have felt that, at the highest level, he was committing nothing
less than an act of God.”

Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, from local newscasts to
Nightline
, the bombing of Hill House—and the fact that every international terrorist group in the world was denying any responsibility
for it—was the major topic of conversation. It eclipsed everything else of interest.

This was not, however, just any first Tuesday in February. As happened every four years, it was the day of the New Hampshire
primary, and the voters from that state had gone to the polls to declare their preference for both Democratic and Republican
presidential candidates. On any other evening, the event, which unofficially signaled the start of the election campaign,
would have been on everyone’s tongue, even the late-night gagsters. This evening, however, the story was almost an afterthought
on the news, and Leno and Letterman were not making jokes.

T
he authorities were as good as their word. While regular medical bulletins on the various victims were issued during the days
that followed the bombing, there was no information forthcoming about the investigation itself.

The media, its ranks already swollen to national proportions, scrounged around for anything that would fill air or print space.
The overwhelmed medical examiner’s office confirmed that there were so far one hundred and sixty-three dead, the majority
having perished at the scene. Some forty of the most seriously injured were still in various hospitals around the city. Another
thirty had been treated and then released. Perhaps half a dozen were still unaccounted for.

Reporters hovered outside the boundaries of the clinic, watching rescue workers dig through the wreckage, waiting for word
on the missing. They camped outside the homes of victims, begging for interviews. They stood shifts at the various hospitals,
anticipating a rise in the death toll.

By Saturday, funerals had begun to take place, and memorial services were being conducted. Among the most poignant
was one held by a group of homeless people who had depended on Hill House’s waterfront soup kitchen for one decent meal a
day. Over five hundred strong, they lined Alaskan Way, down near the ferry terminal, armed with candles donated by a shop
in Pioneer Square, and prayed throughout the night. Several local churches, hearing about the vigil, quickly organized their
congregations to bring a hot dinner for the participants.

The governor and the mayor attended as many of the ceremonies as they could, with the media close behind. Politics had taken
second place to Hill House. The results of the New Hampshire primary and speculation about the upcoming South Carolina primary
had been sandwiched between round-the-clock bulletins from Seattle.

Sensing a national photo opportunity, the two front-running presidential candidates, seeking to go into South Carolina on
a high note, both announced they would fly to Washington to meet with the survivors and the families of the victims. Upon
hearing this, the mayor’s office promptly planned a huge public memorial service, and designated Memorial Stadium at Seattle
Center as the site.

Condolences poured in from all across the state and many parts of the country. And money, tucked inside cards and letters,
found its way to the families of the victims. Outside the iron fence along Boren and Madison, flowers and small remembrances
began to appear, a trickle at first, that soon became a deluge.

Joseph Heradia was one of the lucky ones; he had not been killed or even injured in the explosion. More important, as far
as the investigation was concerned, he was an eyewitness.

“I was just crossing Boren,” he said, repeating to Dana McAuliffe exactly what he had told the police. “The laurel bushes
were between me and the clinic, but I heard what sounded like, well, sort of a sonic boom—very loud. And then
the ground was shaking under me so hard I could barely stand. I grabbed hold of the gate, and stuff started flying in all
directions. The next thing I knew, I was inside the fence, on the lawn, and let me tell you, it was total chaos.”

“I can only imagine,” Dana responded, thinking how a meeting run long had more than likely saved his life.

“The police asked me if I’d seen anybody who looked suspicious, someone who didn’t belong at the clinic, or who was heading
away from the scene rather than toward it, but I really couldn’t help them. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time.”

“Maybe in a few days,” she suggested, “something you may not even realize you noticed will come back to you.”

He looked at her with hollow eyes. “What kind of crazy people would blow up a bunch of innocent children like that, not to
mention mothers with their newborn babies? What kind of world are we living in, anyway? And if this is what it is, why would
anyone want to bring new life into it?”

“Sometimes, I wonder,” Dana murmured.

“The police also asked if I knew of anybody who had a grudge against me or against Hill House. I really can’t bring myself
to believe that the Jensens would’ve had anything to do with this, but I had to tell them.”

“Of course you did,” she assured him. “Don’t worry. If they’re not involved, there’s no harm done.”

“They’re good people,” he said. “I don’t want them to get hurt by this.”

“I’ll talk to their attorney,” Dana promised. “Give him a heads-up. He’ll explain to the Jensens that you didn’t have a choice.
It’ll be all right.”

Marilyn Korba huddled in the tiny waiting room just inside the second-floor Intensive Care Unit at the Harborview Medical
Center. The cramped space held a shabby sofa, three cracked vinyl chairs, and a television set that worked on only one
channel. It had been her home for the past eighty-four hours, ever since the call had come, telling her that her husband had
been critically injured in the Hill House bombing.

Family, close friends, doctors, and nurses had passed in and out with food, blankets and pillows, small talk, and medical
updates, but most of it was just a jumble in her head. Other than her sister, who had been with her from the start, and the
daily telephone call to her mother, who was taking care of the children, all she could focus on was that the last words she
had exchanged with Jeff had been in anger over a stupid washing machine. Now there was a very real possibility that she would
never hear his voice again.

For just a few minutes at a time, she was allowed in to see him. He lay in a small, sterile, curtained-off room, blessedly
unconscious, what remained of his once vigorous body attached by a dozen different wires to machines that blinked and flashed
and bleeped, and connected by tubes to life-sustaining drips of blood and glucose and saline. Marilyn had never seen anything
so frightening in her life.

“I don’t want him to wake up in pain,” she told the doctors anxiously. “You can give him something for that, can’t you?”

“Of course,” the doctors said, nodding solicitously, not wanting to suggest to her that it was unlikely he was going to wake
up at all.

Marilyn and Jeffrey Korba had both been born and raised in the Seattle area, meeting at the University of Washington, and
marrying right after graduation. They lived with Marilyn’s parents while Jeff went through medical school. In his last year
of residency, they bought a modest home of their own in Issaquah and started their family, two boys and a girl coming in rapid
succession. In all their years together, except of course for those nights when Jeff was on duty at the hospital, they had
never been apart for more than a day at a time, and they had never once gone to sleep on an argument.

“I wish they’d let me stay in there with him,” Marilyn told her sister. “I don’t want him to be alone.”

“He’s not alone,” her sister assured her in a soothing voice. “God is with him.”

After surgery to remove the metal fragments that had lacerated her eyes beyond repair, Ruth Zelkin was moved to a private
room on the third floor at Virginia Mason Hospital. Although the Zelkins could hardly afford the expense, her husband, Harry,
had insisted, knowing that the family would want to be in constant attendance, and not wishing to disturb another patient.

He was right. Four of their five children lived in or near Seattle, as did Ruth’s two sisters, her brother, Harry’s brother,
and all their families. At least a dozen people surrounded his wife’s bed at any given time.

“The children,” Ruth moaned as soon as the anesthesia had begun to clear from her brain. “What about the children? What about
the staff?”

“Don’t think about that now,” Harry told her gently. “There’ll be time later on. Right now, you need to concentrate on getting
well.”

She turned toward the sound of his voice, fear creeping into her tone, as she whispered, “How many?”

Harry looked acutely uncomfortable, and for an unguarded instant, he was glad she couldn’t see his face. It was too soon,
he thought; she wasn’t strong enough to hear. Their oldest daughter took her mother’s hand.

“You need your rest, mom,” she said. “Talk later.”

But Ruth set her jaw in that not-to-be-denied expression her family knew so well and managed to half lift herself from the
bed. “How many?” she demanded.

Her daughter placed both of her hands on her mother’s shoulders and pushed her gently back against the pillow.

Her husband sighed. “Ten members of the staff were lost,” he said.

“And the children?”

Her daughter shook her head vehemently, but Harry shrugged. “Fifty-six,” he told his wife.

Ruth Zelkin’s world, which was already gray, suddenly went black.

The nursery where Jason Holman had spent most of his brief life was dark, heavy curtains blotting out the sun so that his
afternoon naps would not be disturbed. Janet Holman sat in the big maple rocking chair where she had nursed her son through
infancy, and held and soothed him whenever he was hurt or frightened. She had been in that chair, in that room, since Tuesday
night.

She hardly needed light to see the crinkly smile that brightened his face when she lifted him from his crib, or the little
arms that reached up for her, trusting her implicitly to defend and protect him from whatever evil might lurk in the big bad
world. In truth, she couldn’t have said whether it was day or night, nor did she care.

Outside the room, people came and went from the spacious Bellevue condominium, walking softly, speaking in whispers. They
needn’t have bothered; Janet never heard them. She just sat there, gently rocking back and forth, as she always did when Jason
was fretful, and stared into the lightless space, in a world of pain so excruciating, so overwhelming, that all she wanted
was to go wherever it was that Jason had gone.

“She hasn’t eaten or slept since it happened,” her husband, Rick, told everyone. “I try to talk to her, but I don’t think
she even hears me. She just sits there, staring at something I don’t see.” He was red-eyed with sleeplessness himself. “We
have to make… arrangements, you know, for the funeral and everything. But she won’t even discuss it. It’s almost like, if
she
doesn’t have to talk about it, then it didn’t really happen. I don’t know what to do…” His voice trailed off.