A Quiet Death

FIVE

Sitting next to me on the sofa Wednesday evening, Paul scrolled through the channels – WRC, WUSA, WJLA, not to mention CNN, FOX, MSNBC and LYNX. I snatched the remote from his hand, aimed, and turned off the TV.

‘I’m sorry, darling, but I just can’t deal with it. Blah, blah, blah, twenty-four seven. You’d think that absolutely nothing else was going on in the world except for this Metro disaster. They’re running the same footage, over and over again.’

I covered my eyes with my hand, but the images still burned on the inside of my eyelids. The twisted wreckage. The walking wounded. The orange, basket-like stretchers. The yellow body bags.

Indeed, the crash and its aftermath had pushed everything else out of the headlines. So what if fall elections were nearly upon us and the Republicans were likely to take over the House? Who cared if wildfires were burning out of control in the Rockies? A damaged oil rig was still spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico, an intern at Lynx News had gone missing, and widespread flooding continued in Pakistan. Reporting on these events had been relegated to the inside pages of the Post and the Times, or reduced to television crawls, while full-blown coverage of the Metro crash went on and on and on.

One by one, the names of the victims were being released. So far, in addition to the train driver, whose name had been announced almost immediately, the victims had been identified as a sixty-three-year-old rabbi from Alexandria on his way to spend a week with his grandchildren in Lanham, a German couple in their early seventies who were vacationing in the United States for the first time, an elementary school teacher, thirty-two, on her way home after work to Cheverly, a forty-year-old unemployed computer programmer heading to CSC for a job interview, and Tashawn Jackson, sixteen.

When pictures of the victims were published in the Post, I remembered the German couple. They’d been sitting at the front of the car, gray heads together, consulting a Metro map, but I didn’t recall seeing any of the others. Except for Tashawn, the boy who died because he’d been too busy listening to his Nano to give up his seat to me.

Tashawn Jackson, the boy who unknowingly saved my life.