Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (4 page)

BOOK: Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice
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Getting in was not easy—it looked, for a time, like no school would give him a chance. In a last-ditch effort to keep his dream alive, he applied outside the country, to a school in Grenada. Accepted, he excelled; then, against the odds, he applied for a transfer to the University of Miami and was accepted. Finally on his way to becoming a doctor, King decided to join the army reserve. He had been given a chance to learn lifesaving skills that very few people possessed; bringing those skills to American soldiers at risk seemed like the right thing to do. He was an intern in Boston, working long hours for terrible pay, when a recruiter came to his living room and commissioned him. Weary from a long on-call shift, King raised his right hand and recited the oath of enlistment, swearing to defend the Constitution, while his yellow Labrador retriever, Rachel, looked on, his only witness. The year was 2000. In 2001 America would go to war; King’s decision would put him on the front lines of two conflicts. After being sent to Iraq for four months in 2008, he went to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, and to Afghanistan for three months in 2011. He saw terrible things and survived close calls. When a massive truck bomb injured dozens of American soldiers in Sayed Abad, Afghanistan, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, he dealt with the carnage. Another time an IED blew up people standing near him. He learned what fear really felt like, what true vigilance was.

And he gained new reverence for his life at home. A lazy, simple day like this was more precious to King now: wandering around the convention center with his wife and daughters; buying a new
BOSTON MARATHON
2013
baseball hat to wear in the race tomorrow. The hat purchase was one of his marathon traditions. His runner friends objected; it was bad luck, some said, to wear a hat bearing the logo of the same race you were running in. You were supposed to wear a seasoned hat, one that had been with you in training or at other races. King dismissed the superstition. He always bought a new hat—the women’s version, to fit his small head. He had made it his ritual, and he wasn’t changing it now.

 • • • 

H
eather Abbott had taken the day off from work, as she always did, so she could go to Boston with her friends on Marathon Monday. That was their tradition: They went to the Red Sox game in the morning, then to the finish line of the race. It meant getting up early and driving to Providence to take the train, but they laughed a lot along the way, swept up in the festive mood and the welcome break from routine.

Heather was a runner, too—short distances, not marathons. Running was just one of her active pursuits, along with paddleboarding and Zumba dance fitness classes. She had a good time doing it, but she was also disciplined. It was like that with everything she did; her fun-loving side disguised a steely ambition. In high school, in the small town of Lincoln, Rhode Island, near Providence, she had thought about applying to the University of North Carolina. Her parents were baffled and resistant. She attended a small college in Massachusetts instead, but always felt she had been meant for a bigger place. She studied accounting—her mother had encouraged her to learn a skill—but she soon discovered a more engaging field: human resources, otherwise known as HR. Plunging into it, she learned on her feet, building an HR operation from scratch as the start-up she worked for grew from a dozen to one hundred employees. After going to work for a bigger company, with thirty-three thousand workers, in 2003, she traveled constantly, supervising HR departments in eight states. She had purchased her first condo, in North Providence, at twenty-four; a year and a half later, she sold it on her own and traded up to a bigger, better one.

By 2003 she had earned an MBA from Providence College, attending school at night while working full-time. When she went looking for a new job in 2007, Raytheon and Dunkin’ Donuts both made offers. A global defense and aeronautics firm with more than seventy thousand employees, Raytheon won her allegiance. It offered her more money, and its HR department was bigger. She became an expert in compliance, handling large, randomly scheduled government audits. She specialized in discrimination claims, defending the company’s managers when they were accused of wrongful treatment of employees. It was the work no one else wanted to do, yet Heather liked it. She liked problem solving—untangling thorny conflicts and guiding them toward resolution.

A decade of advancement had left no doubt: She had what it took to be successful. Now she had to figure out what to conquer next. When she decided, in 2009, to move from North Providence to Newport to be closer to her job, she had thought she’d try it for a year. She wasn’t sure if she would like it—insular and privileged, a historic resort town and a party destination, Newport was its own world in more ways than one. She hadn’t counted on the closeness of the friendships she would find there, the kinship and belonging that would cast a spell. She wanted to step beyond the bars and parties to see what else there was, but she knew she would miss those things, and especially the people, after she moved on. The summer ahead could be her last in Newport, and Heather intended to make the most of it. Tomorrow’s trip to Boston would help kick the season off.

 • • • 

H
e was out in Boston’s Copley Square by 5:00
A.M.
It was Sunday, the day before the 2013 Boston Marathon. Dave McGillivray walked the course of the 5K he would put on in a few hours for some 6,500 runners, one in a series of races and fitness events that always preceded the big one. He would record a critique of the day into his iPhone as he went, planning to write it up later. There were always lessons for next time, and he didn’t want to forget them. In his memoir,
The Last Pick
, he had quoted a Chinese proverb: “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” McGillivray was the kind of guy who had lots of credos, but that one he had followed faithfully.

Thirty-five years earlier, he recorded a verbal diary of what was surely the craziest of all his crazy ventures. He arranged, in 1978, to run clear across the country, a stunt he had devised to raise money for the Jimmy Fund, a Boston charity that supported adult and pediatric cancer care and research. He wanted to start in Medford, Oregon, and finish in his hometown of Medford, Massachusetts. The first night on the road, he stayed at a campsite. A stranger gave him a portion of his fresh catch of fish. Over the next seventy-nine days, he ran across deserts, through the mountains, and into the plains, some 3,452 miles in all, a member of his support crew blasting music from a trailing moped. He and his team adopted a six-week-old puppy. McGillivray ran through rattlesnakes, nosebleeds, and grasshopper swarms. He lived on junk food, downing a six-pack of Coke after each day’s run. Outside Lincoln, Nebraska, he jumped aboard a moving coal train and off the other side because he didn’t want to wait for it to pass. His family, through phone calls and news reports, charted his progress as he went. On the night of August 29, he ran into Fenway Park to a boisterous welcome, taking two laps around the field before the baseball game, showered with cheers and proudly donning a Red Sox cap tossed to him by relief pitcher Bill Campbell.

If that was a high point, almost twenty years later McGillivray would find himself at his lowest, when he and his first wife divorced. Here was something he couldn’t remedy with preparation and training. Hard work wouldn’t just push it away. He was devastated. He hated subjecting their two young sons to the breakup. He prayed, sometimes by the hour, that he could get through another day. At one point, near rock bottom, he called his sister Susan and said maybe he should just end it all. Susan was his lifeline, and she helped him bounce back. He eventually remarried and had three more children. McGillivray, in his memoir, described marathons as an apt metaphor for his life. He had run through heartache, and also through joy. “There are hills and valleys. The weather changes from year to year,” he wrote. “Mostly, though, at the end of the day, it’s up to me to get the job done.”

The job, on this Sunday, was to make sure the day’s fitness events all went well, and that everyone was geared up for tomorrow. Later on, he stopped by the runners’ expo. He checked in with his marathon team. The day felt slow, which was how he liked it. There was little to report, little that required his urgent attention. The copious planning of the organizers was paying off. They were going to have a good race.

 • • • 

S
hana worked on Sunday, her regular shift in East Boston. It would have been nice to have the next day free—Marathon Monday had been her day off on the schedule—but she had volunteered to work an extra shift. Patriot’s Day might not be a big deal anywhere else, but in Boston it was a holiday, and that meant double pay. The extra money in her check would make it worth it. She had worked the marathon before; the crowds were laid-back, and the mood would be festive. Boston could be a cranky place. If there was one day when the old city felt carefree, it was Marathon Monday.

Shana had warmed to Boston the moment she arrived, a decade before, in the spring of 2003, on a visit to Northeastern University. She was a junior in high school on Long Island, getting ready to apply to colleges. She had never been to Boston; that was part of its appeal. She knew she wanted to go someplace new, and her love for the city was instant and complete. “Something clicked and I knew I wanted to be here,” she said. “I loved how old it was and how safe it felt. . . . Even the air smelled right.” She was seventeen that spring. The memory of September 11, 2001, a year and a half earlier, was still fresh; the fear the attack had inspired had been imprinted on Shana and everyone else in New York. Her father was working a construction job in Manhattan that day, and for several terrifying hours, her mother was unable to reach him. New York City never felt the same to her again. In Boston, even after she left the cocoon of college life to join the police department, she never felt vulnerable the way she had in New York. She experienced moments of chaos—a suspect resisting arrest, a victim sobbing in her arms—but they were only moments. It never felt like the world was unraveling.

The residue of 9/11, the fear and the desire to take back some kind of control, was part of what drew her to law enforcement. Another driving force was her childhood. On her street, in her Long Island town, Shana’s house had been
that
house: the one with the parents who fought, where the police sometimes were called. Not that many years had passed since she was a kid, and Shana vividly remembered how it felt to face the cops in her living room—the crippling sense of her own powerlessness, the certainty that nobody was hearing what she said. Becoming a police officer herself gave her some control over such chaotic moments. Now, when the kids she met in troubled homes turned away and told her that she didn’t understand, Shana explained to them that she really did. Mostly, though, she listened. She focused on the kids in the middle of bad situations, because they still had time to turn out differently.

Shana had used the tension in her childhood home as motivation. It drove her to get good grades, to get out and go to college. By the time she was nearly done at Northeastern, she knew what she wanted to do. With a handful of classes left before graduation, she left school to enter the police academy. It was time to move her education to the streets. Now it was five years later, and with the turmoil of last fall behind her, she felt like she had been given a second chance. She had done good work before, but now that she was sober, she felt a sense of limitless potential. She was more and more convinced that things had happened for a reason. She had made her decision to stop drinking and stuck to it, and hard as it had been, it had made her stronger.

Shana felt clearheaded, fit, optimistic. Ready for anything. And her day tomorrow at the marathon should be easy. Her friends would be at the finish line, and they would stop by to see her. It promised to be a fine day in her favorite city.

 • • • 

K
rystle made her plans for Monday. She seemed to have friends everywhere. A group of them arranged to meet downtown. Some would be going to the Red Sox game. Then they would gather together near the finish line, maybe hit a bar along Boylston. The weather looked promising. The boyfriend of one of her close friends was running. Maybe they would get to see him cross.

 • • • 

D
avid King laid out everything he would need in the morning: his Newton running shoes; his race bib, number 2594; the Vaseline to put between his toes. He took a picture of the pile and posted it on Facebook. Then he made himself a dry gin martini. The only thing left to do was sleep, and that was easy. King was used to sleeping in fits and starts on call at the hospital. He had once napped on the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport during a firefight, lifting his head occasionally at the snap-snap-snap of the gunfire, and lying back down when he decided it wasn’t that close. Sleeping at home was a luxury. Once his head hit the pillow, nothing could get in his way.

 • • • 

S
hana was almost religious about wearing her bulletproof vest. It wasn’t required after the first year on the job, but she wore it anyway. You never knew when you were going to need it. But for a shift near Copley Square on Marathon Monday, the vest was overkill—even Shana could see that. It was heavy, and she would be on her feet all day. The streets would be full of police; she would be surrounded by backup. Tomorrow was one day when she would feel safe without it.

 • • • 

B
y Sunday night, the forecast had assured cooler weather for this year’s marathon. For Heather, that meant resigning herself to wearing her brown leather boots—again. By April, she was ready to break out some lighter shoes. This was New England, though. Patience was required. Spring was close, but not yet in full bloom. Plenty of warm days were coming; plenty of time for open-toed shoes and bare ankles.

 • • • 

D
ave McGillivray observed his typical rituals on the eve of the marathon, grabbing a quiet dinner and then returning early to the solitude of his hotel room. He kept the radio and TV off, to focus. He went through his mental checklist, visualizing, over and over, the next day’s events in minute detail. He sat at the table with his laptop open, reviewing the notes he’d made from prior marathons. He kept his phone and two-way radio close, to field any reports of trouble. By 9:30, he was in bed. He put his phone on vibrate and went to sleep with it in his hand, so he wouldn’t miss a critical call or text. He felt a calmness.
We got this
, he thought.

BOOK: Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice
2.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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