Danielle Steel - Amazing Grace

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.