Chapter 42 Erin
Erin
I was editing a memoir I had acquired quite by chance by a young woman born a conjoined twin who had lost her sister in the operation that was supposed to separate them at the age of twelve.
It was a complicated story of love and loss and sacrifice.
The physical struggles they faced together as children and the emotional scars left behind were profound.
I hadn’t published a memoir before, but Carla had alerted me that this could be big.
The writer was forty-five years old and had one prosthetic leg, and she had endured sixty-five surgeries in her lifetime, and yet the story was full of hope and gratitude for her life.
We had a TV in the office lobby, usually tuned to CNN but silenced. I was working through the manuscript at my desk when I heard Ruth saying, ‘My God,’ and at the same time my phone began to buzz. I picked up and it was Dad.
‘Where are you, honey? Are you in the office?’ I could hear the concern in his voice.
‘Yeah, I’m fine, what’s up?’
At the same moment Ruth burst into my office, exclaiming, ‘There’s been explosions at the marathon. I think they’re bombs!’
Dad heard what she’d said. ‘That’s what I was calling about. Don’t leave the office, you hear me?’
I thought of Carla and Suzie, who were lining the route.
I walked into the next room. Ruth had turned up the volume.
‘Okay, Dad, I’m just watching now.’ There were chaotic scenes on the TV as plumes of smoke were seen emanating from two sites near the finish line on Boylston Street.
People were running away but there were lots of others lying injured on the ground.
The image of one man, a bystander with half his leg blown off, is seared into my brain.
I assured Dad that I was okay. Ruth and I abandoned our work and sat grimly transfixed by the news and the images of horror unfolding in our city, but something else caught my eye too.
After a while the same footage was being played over and over.
It was shaky, from someone’s camera phone I guessed.
A blast from the right-hand side of the street, people falling all round and then screaming and shouting.
As the commentators talked over the images, I identified Milo running towards a man on the ground who appeared to have been hit by shrapnel, blood pouring from his right thigh.
Milo lifted him up and put his arm around the man’s shoulder, then half carried the man out of shot.
Another man followed him, pointing away from the blast site.
I hadn’t known Milo had been released. Surely my family should have been informed. Did Dad know?
But the Boston bombing was a bigger story than Milo, and I spent hours on the phone that day.
The cell towers in the area were overloaded, and we could only text.
Carla and Suzie were fine but Carla’s cousin, who had been standing as an onlooker near the second bomb site further up the street, had bad foot injuries.
Surgeons fought to save his lower limb. For days, twenty blocks of Watertown not far from where I lived were on lockdown as it became clear that this was a terrorist attack, and the perpetrators were two brothers with a Chechen background who had been radicalized online.
If they hadn’t been caught, they intended to target Times Square next.
It was a terrible time in the history of Boston. Three young people died, including an eight-year-old boy, twelve people lost limbs and two hundred and eighty-one were injured.
But Milo was out of prison and, watching the images over and over, I realized that the man who had followed him out on to the street was his old school friend Ben Roche. At least Margie’s messages would stop now.