April 15, 2013

Two blocks away. We heard a loud crash in the distance, and I assumed that it was a truck backfiring. I thought this until we heard it. The rush of what sounded like a million sirens. The harmony of the ambulances, police cars, and firetrucks caused both a spark of panic and curiosity to ignite in me.

All the sudden there were cameras and microphones in our faces. Reporters were asking us if we had witnessed the explosion and what happened.

“Explosion?” I repeated to myself. My brain was too exhausted to comprehend what was going on, after all I had just run the Boston Marathon.

“There are rumors of a bomb, many injuries, and some deaths near the finish line,” I heard a reporter say.

We walked through the wet streets back to the Revere as the calls started pouring in. The first one my wife answered was from Nikki’s concerned mom, who was hosting my daughter Katherine for the weekend and had seen the news. As more worried relatives drowned us with their calls, I realized I was one of the first to finish out of all my friends and that gave me a head start to get farther away from the finish. Once we got back to the comfort of the big white beds in the hotel room, we started trying to contact people.

“Mom, we’re ok, we’re safe,” I overheard my wife saying to her mother.

Her voice, scratchy through the phone replied, “What happened? Why wouldn’t you all be ok?”

“Turn on the news.”

I got word that my best friend’s wife had been waiting near where the bomb was rumored to have gone off, and that she was still unaccounted for. Every feeling of exhaustion that was taking over my body was instantly swapped with fear. We waited about ten scary minutes before we finally heard that Stacy was found and not harmed. As time went by, we got less and less worried since the number of the runners that were unaccounted for kept decreasing by the hour.

On the flight home from the worst trip we’ve ever had to Boston, I was contemplating what I was going to tell my daughter about what happened. She was only six and would not understand. She would not understand that about half of the adults in her life could have died on the seemingly normal Monday morning, and that her parents were two of them. When she gets a little bit older, I thought to myself, she’ll realize what happened and why she should be thankful that we were two blocks away.