BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Reed Bishop was cold when he woke.
Cold and very hard of hearing.
His right cheek was on the cool cherrywood floor, his lips were dry, and his lungs were rasping. His body was… naked, it felt like. His arms, legs, and back felt exposed.
And there was stuffing in his left ear. He moved his hand left, thinking to pull whatever was in there out, saw a cloud drift over.
What the hell? he thought.
Where was he? More importantly, where was his daughter? They had just been looking at someone, an older woman and her husband, talking to them…
“Laura?” he said, though he wasn’t convinced he had spoken. It sounded more like a thought.
Still thinking of his daughter, he placed his palms against the floor, pushed, and was suddenly surrounded by a cloud.
Did I do that? How?
He raised his head, looked through the haze, didn’t see Laura to his left, didn’t see much of anything that looked familiar, only a jumble of debris. His neck went numb, and he let gravity pull his face down with a hard slap so he was staring across the floor again. With effort, he turned slowly to the right.
There was Laura, he thought with relief.
It looked as though she was sleeping. But she was white, covered with what looked like confectioners’ sugar. And…
What?
There was only half of her. The top half. He screamed. This time he was sure, because it punched through the thickness in his ears and caused his throat to shake and cleared his head so he could hear the sobs and wails of others. As the dust thinned, he saw them, and more debris, and bodies and parts of bodies and a glaze of blood across everything, which ridiculously reminded him of raspberry drizzle, except for the blood that had pooled around Laura, where her legs used to be…
That was the last thing Bishop remembered until he was sitting in a metal chair in some other room, being examined by a medic.
He was no longer so cold. And he could hear.
“Mr. Bishop, do you have any pain?”
Bishop turned tear-blurred eyes toward the speaker. It was a young woman. She was wearing a look of grave concern. He wondered how she knew his name, until he saw her eyes looking at his chest and he remembered the name tag. He looked down. It hung incongruously from a piece of lapel on the remnants of the dinner jacket he still had on. An FBI-issue terry-cloth wrap had been thrown around his shoulders.
“Do you understand me?” the woman asked.
He nodded. “No pain,” he said.
“I’m going to leave you here,” she said. “You have a few cuts and burns but-”
“What happened?” he asked stupidly.
“An explosion,” she said. “If you’ll wait here, I’m going to take care of someone else.”
“I’ll wait,” he said. His eyes dropped to the floor. A dusty tile floor. There were planters nearby. He saw dark shops beyond. He had been through here earlier in the day, walking toward the ballroom with
…
“Oh, Christ!” he cried. He tried to stand, dropped as his legs refused to cooperate, and sat, looking around.
He didn’t remember the explosion, but he remembered the moments before it. He and Laura were sitting at their table, almost dead center in the big hall. They were talking pleasantly to people they didn’t know, a couple who seemed enchanted with Laura, and waiting for Julie to step to the podium. Then the world went red and he felt as if he were flying.
He woke, briefly.
Bishop’s thoughts drifted backward into waves of elapsed memories, of the times his daughter needed him. To be there. To show up. He summoned up the first words she’d been able to sound out for herself, during a short family trip to Florida when she was five, written on a bus window. E-mer-gen-cy. Emergency exit. He could still see her proud smile, her darling little legs cheerily kicking at opposite tempos, unable to reach the floor or the seat in front of her. Searching through the fog, he remembered the times he pretended to rise from the dead during her school’s haunted hayride nights. Despite the thick, gnarled makeup he wore, she could always tell when it was her father clawing at the side of the wagon. And despite the multitude of shrill, shrieking children, he could always single out his daughter’s excited squeal. He always made her the lucky victim, the most special rider of the night.
But he struggled to retain the thought of her face as it was then, as her present, more familiar features took hold of his delusional imagination.
Laura was glowing, her head turned slightly away from him, forward. Her light summer dress swaying proudly like a new flag, her hair flowing as if it were a tropical shore. He followed her as she slowly ran, silently along the slate pathway leading to their home, home toward her mother. Her mother. His wife. His late wife. She had been the embodiment of his future, of his daughter’s future. His departed companion was the eternal bond between them, the rope connecting the climber to the cliff. And when that was detached, Bishop had to become Laura’s security. His daughter’s guide, her unconditional friend, her devoted supporter. Her father.
Bishop saw himself stop short only paces away from them. His family. The only links to what he could call real life. Laura embraced her mother like they were seeing each other for the last time, like only children know how to hold, except it was Bishop who couldn’t stay there, who didn’t feel right, and then she looked at her father as if to say, “Thank you.”
He had been there for her. Whenever he could be, in whatever shape the world had left him in. With whatever love he had protected for her inside his heart. It was always there. And always would be. And no one was ever going to remove that from him.
And now…
He looked for his wristwatch, saw that the pressure he felt there was his bandaged forearm. He had neither a wristwatch nor a shirtsleeve. He let the arm drop, then raised his hand in order to cry into it. He wasn’t sure exactly why he was crying. But then a functioning part of his mind began putting it together. The medic had said there was an explosion of some kind. He had been knocked over and out, injured. His daughter…
“Dear God…”
He had an overpowering urge to see her, to hold her, but his body was trembling. Someone, one of the medics, saw him and came over to him, decided that he was not all right and that he needed to go to the hospital. He let himself be moved, lifted, wheeled for what seemed an interminable time. He was dropping, wheeled again. There were sights, shapes, sounds, but all he could see was his daughter’s destroyed body lying next to him, her pale flesh so still.
He was crying again, shaking, and then there was a pinch in his arm and it was over.