Amazing Grace (7 page)

Sarah gave the doctor their address, and was quiet on the way home, praying for her children. There was still no way to communicate with the house or the babysitter for reassurance. All telephone lines were down, and cell phones weren't working. The badly shaken city seemed completely cut off from the outside world. All she wanted to know now was that Oliver and Molly were okay. Seth was staring out the window in a daze, and kept trying to use his cell phone, as the doctor drove them the rest of the way. They finally arrived at their large brick house perched on top of the hill on Divisadero and Broadway, overlooking the bay. It appeared to be intact. They thanked the doctor, wished him well, and got out. Sarah ran to the front door as Seth followed behind her, looking exhausted.

Sarah already had the door open when he reached her. She had kicked her impossible shoes off, and was running down the hall. There was no electricity, so the lights were off, and it was unusually dark, with not even streetlights outside. She ran past the living room to go upstairs, and then she saw them, the babysitter asleep on the couch, with the baby dozing in her arms, and Molly snoring softly beside her, and candles lit on the table. The sitter was out cold, but stirred as Sarah approached.

“Hi…oh… such a big earthquake!” she said, waking up, but whispering so as not to disturb the children. But as Seth walked into the room and the three adults talked, the children began to stir too. Looking around, Sarah could see that all their paintings were wildly askew, two statues had fallen down, and a small antique card table and several chairs had tipped over. The room had a severely disordered look to it, with books spilling all over the floor, and smaller objects strewn around the room. But her babies were fine, which was all that mattered. They were uninjured and alive, and then as her eyes got accustomed to the dim room, she could see that Parmani had a bump on her forehead. She explained that Oliver's bookcase had fallen on her as she ran to get him out of his crib when the quake began. Sarah was grateful it hadn't knocked her unconscious or killed the baby, as books and objects had fallen off the shelves. A baby in the Marina had been killed in the 1989 earthquake that way, when a heavy object had slipped off a shelf and killed the infant in its crib. Sarah was grateful that history hadn't repeated itself with her son.

Oliver stirred as he lay on top of the sitter, picked up his head, and saw his mother, and then Sarah picked him up and held him. Molly was still sound asleep curled up in a little ball beside the babysitter. She looked like a doll, as her parents smiled at her, grateful for their safety.

“Hi, sweetheart, were you having a big sleep?” his mother asked him. The baby looked startled to see them and puckered his face as his bottom lip quivered, and he started to cry. Sarah thought it was the sweetest sound she had ever heard, as sweet as the night he'd been born. She had been terrified for her children all night, ever since the earthquake had begun. All she had wanted to do was run home and take them in her arms. She leaned down and gently touched Molly's leg, as though to reassure herself that she was alive too. “It must have been so scary for you,” Sarah said sympathetically to Parmani, as Seth walked into the den and picked up the phone. It was still dead. There was no phone service in the entire city. Seth must have checked his cell phone a million times on the way home.

“This is ridiculous,” he snarled, as he walked back into the room. “You would think they could at least keep our cell phones going. What are we supposed to do? Be cut off from the world for the next week? They better get us going again tomorrow.” Sarah knew, as he did, there was little chance of that.

They had no electricity either, and Parmani had wisely shut off the gas, so the house was chilly, but fortunately the night was warm. On a typical blowy San Francisco night, they would have been cold.

“We'll just have to camp out for a while,” Sarah said serenely. She was happy now, with her baby in her arms, and her daughter within her sight on the couch.

“Maybe I'll drive down to Stanford or San Jose tomorrow,” Seth said vaguely. “I have to make some calls.”

“The doctor said he heard at the hospital that the roads are closed. I think we're pretty much cut off.”

“That can't be,” Seth said, looking panicked, and then glanced at the luminous dial on his watch. “Maybe I should head down there now. It's nearly seven
A.M.
in New York. By the time I get down there, people will be in their offices on the East Coast. I'm completing a transaction today.”

“Can't you take a day off?” Sarah suggested, and Seth ran upstairs without answering her. He was back downstairs in five minutes, wearing jeans and a sweater and running shoes, with a look of intense concentration on his face and his briefcase in his hand.

Both their cars were trapped and perhaps lost forever in the garage downtown. There was no hope of getting either of them out, if they could even be found, and not for a long time anyway, since most of the garage had collapsed. But he turned to Parmani with an expectant look and smiled at her in the soft darkness of the living room. Ollie had gone back to sleep in Sarah's arms, comforted by her familiar warmth and sound.

“Parmani, do you mind if I borrow your car for a couple of hours? I'm going to see if I can head south and make some calls. Maybe my cell phone will even work down there.”

“Of course you can,” the babysitter answered, looking startled. It seemed like a strange request to her, and even more so to Sarah. This was no time to be trying to get to San Jose. It seemed inappropriate to Sarah for him to be obsessed with business now, and leaving them in the city.

“Can't you just relax? Nobody is going to expect to hear from anyone in San Francisco today. This is silly, Seth. What if there's another quake or an aftershock? We'd be here alone, and maybe you couldn't get back.” Or worse, an overpass could collapse and crush him on the road. She didn't want him going anywhere, but he looked determined and intent as he headed for the front door. Parmani said her keys were in it, and the car was in their garage. It was a battered old Honda Accord, but it got her where she wanted to go. Sarah wouldn't let her drive the children in it, and she wasn't enthusiastic about Seth traveling with it either. The car had over a hundred thousand miles, had no current safety features, and was at least a dozen years old.

“Don't worry, ladies.” He smiled at them. “I'll be back.” He ran out the door. It worried Sarah to have him venturing out, with no streetlights to drive by, no stoplights to control traffic, and maybe fallen obstacles on the road. But she could tell that nothing would stop him. He had left before she could say another word. Parmani went to get another flashlight, and the candles flickered as Sarah sat in her living room, thinking about Seth. It was one thing to be a workaholic and another to dash off down the peninsula, hours after a major earthquake, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves. She wasn't happy about it at all. It seemed like irrational, obsessive behavior to her.

She and Parmani sat in the living room talking softly until almost sunrise. She thought about going upstairs to her bedroom, and putting the children in bed with her, but she felt safer downstairs, able to leave the house if there was another quake. Parmani told her a tree had fallen in the garden, and there were things all over the floor upstairs, a huge mirror had fallen and cracked, and several of the back windows had popped out and shattered on the cement outside. Most of their china and crystal lay smashed on the kitchen floor, along with groceries that had literally flown off the shelves. Parmani said several jars of juice and bottles of wine had broken, and Sarah wasn't looking forward to cleaning up the mess. Parmani had apologized for not doing it, but she'd been too worried about the children, and didn't want to leave them for the amount of time it would have taken her to deal with it. Sarah said she would do it herself. At one point she walked into the kitchen to look, after she set Oliver down on the couch, still sleeping soundly. She was horrified at the disaster area the kitchen had turned into in a matter of hours. Most of their cupboard doors had opened, and everything had fallen out. It looked like it would take days to clean up.

As the sun came up, Parmani went to make coffee, and then remembered they had neither electricity nor gas. Stepping gingerly over the debris and shards of glass, she poured some water from the hot tap into a cup, and dropped a teabag into it. It was barely lukewarm, but she brought it back to Sarah, and it was comforting to drink it. Parmani was peeling a banana for herself. Sarah had insisted she didn't want anything to eat, she was still too shaken and upset.

She had barely finished the tea when Seth came through the door, looking grim.

“That was quick,” Sarah commented.

“The roads are closed.” He looked stunned. “I mean
all
the roads. The entrance to 101, the whole on ramp is down.” He didn't tell her about the horrifying carnage below it. There had been ambulances and police everywhere. The highway patrol had turned him back and sternly told him to go home and stay there. This was no time to be going anywhere. He tried to tell them he lived in Palo Alto, and the officer had told him he would have to stay in the city until the roads were open again. And in answer to Seth's question, he said not for several days. Maybe even a week, given the enormity of the damage to the roads. “I tried Nineteenth Avenue to get on 280, same thing. The beach to get to Pacifica, they've got landslides there. They have it all blocked off. I didn't bother to try the bridges, because we heard on the radio they were closed. Fuck, Sarah,” he said angrily, “we're trapped!”

“For a little while. I don't know why you can't calm down. Besides, it looks like we have a lot to clean up. No one in New York is going to expect your call. They know more about what's happening here than we do. Believe me, Seth, no one is going to miss your call.”

“You don't understand,” he muttered darkly, and then ran up the stairs and slammed their bedroom door. Sarah left the children with Parmani, who had watched the scene with interest, and then followed her husband upstairs. He was pacing around their bedroom, looking like a lion in a cage. A very angry lion, who looked like he was about to eat someone, and for lack of any other victim, he seemed as though he was going to attack her.

“I'm sorry, baby,” she said gently. “I know you're in the middle of a deal. But you can't control natural disasters. There isn't anything we can do about it. The deal will hold for a few days.”

“No, it won't.” He spat the words angrily at her. “Some deals don't hold. This is one of them. All I need is a fucking phone.” She would have produced one for him if she could, but she couldn't. She was just grateful that their children were safe. His obsession with continuing to do business, under the circumstances, seemed more than extreme to her. She realized at the same time that it was why he was such a huge success. Seth never stopped. He was on his cell phone night and day, making deals. Without it now, he felt utterly and totally impotent, and trapped, as though someone had severed his vocal cords and tied his hands. He was nailed to the floor in a dead city, with no possible communication with the outside world. She could see that he viewed it as a major crisis, and she wished she could convince him to calm down.

“What can I do for you, Seth?” she asked, sitting down on the bed, and patting the spot next to her. She was thinking about a massage, a bath, a tranquilizer, a back or neck rub, or holding him in her arms, or lying beside him on the bed.

“What can you do for me? Are you kidding? Is that a joke?” He was almost shouting in their beautifully decorated bedroom. The sun was up now, and the soft yellows and sky blues she had done it in looked exquisite in the early morning light. Seth was oblivious to the room, as he stared angrily at her.

“I mean it,” she said calmly. “I'll do whatever I can.” He stared at her as though she were insane.

“Sarah, you have no idea what's going on. None. No concept.”

“Try me. We went to business school together. I'm not a moron, you know.”

“No, I am,” he said, sitting down on the bed and running a hand through his hair. He couldn't even look at her. “I have to transfer sixty million dollars out of our fund accounts by noon today.” His voice sounded dead as he said it, and Sarah looked impressed.

“You're making an investment that size? What are you buying? Commodities? Sounds like risky stuff in quantities like that.” Admittedly, buying commodities was not only high risk but equally high profit if you did it right. She knew Seth was a genius with the investments he made.

“I'm not buying, Sarah,” he said, glancing at her, and then away again. “I'm covering my ass. That's all I'm doing, and if I can't, I'm fucked … we're fucked … everything we own will be gone …I could even go to jail.” He was staring at the floor beneath his feet as he spoke.

“What are you talking about?” Sarah looked panicked. He was kidding obviously, but the look on his face said he wasn't.

“We had auditors in this week, to check on our new fund. It was an investors’ audit to make sure we have as much in the fund as we claimed. We will eventually, of course, there's no question of it. I've done it before. Sully Markham has covered me for audits like that before. And eventually we make our money and put it in the account. But sometimes in the beginning, when we don't have it, Sully helps me pad things a little when the investors do an audit.” Sarah stared at him, stunned.

“A little? You call sixty million dollars’ worth of padding a ‘little'? Jesus, Seth, what were you thinking of? You could have gotten caught, or not been able to make the money up.” And then, as she said it, she realized that that was what was happening. He was there now.

“I have to get the money, or Sully
will
get caught in New York. He has to have the money back in his accounts today. The banks are closed. I don't have a fucking cell phone to use, I can't even call Sully to tell him to cover it somehow.”

“He must be able to figure that much out. With the whole city down, he must know you can't do it.” Sarah looked pale as they talked. It had never even remotely occurred to her that Seth was dishonest. And sixty million was no small slip. It was major. It was criminal fraud on the grandest scale. She had never for a moment thought that Seth would be corrupted by greed into doing a thing like that. It put everything between them in question, in fact their whole life, and more importantly, who he was.