Despite it all I laughed. I could imagine my mother pestering the hotel staff, demanding that they get a call through even if they had to dive down under water to get the phone. The MS had affected her body, but nothing could diminish her spirit.

“I’ll go and make those calls,” Tad said.

I showed him into my father’s office and left him there. The sound of the TV in the other room drew me toward it. I sat down on the floor to watch.

A lot of the footage looked as though it had been shot with home video cameras. It was mostly short scenes, some of which seemed familiar to me already. There was an overturned train. Shots of a huge boat that had been picked up and carried far inland, and was now left high and dry with the retreat of the water. Scenes of waves overwhelming break walls and crushing trees, people desperately running for their lives, the whole thing punctuated by the sounds of screaming and yelling. There were rivers of water, so thick with debris that the surface was barely visible, racing between houses and buildings. Cars and buses were overturned, almost submerged, and people were clinging to them, clawing to get up, out of the water, trying to save their lives.

The scenes continued to roll and an unseen announcer began to speak.

“The death toll continues to rise. Preliminary estimates are that over one hundred thousand lives have been lost, making this one of the most deadly natural catastrophes in recorded human history. While these numbers are almost beyond belief, experts believe that the final tally could be twice as high as that. The wave destroyed roads, airports, rail lines, television and radio stations and relay towers, telephone lines and cellphone towers, and other methods of communication.”

That’s what I was thinking. They were fine but they couldn’t call me because the telephones were gone.

“Central authorities in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia report that they have not been able to make contact with more remote communities to ascertain the extent of damages and fatalities there. Thus far, these pictures, taken either by people on the ground at the time or by plane, provide the only visual record.”

The picture behind him changed to the shots of devastation I’d already seen. Flattened buildings. It looked as if an entire town had been squashed by some kind of gigantic steamroller.

“And while the vast majority of the victims are nationals of the affected countries, there have been reports of deaths of people from close to forty countries worldwide. This is particularly a factor in the tourist resorts in the south of Sri Lanka and in the resorts in Thailand. We now have a report, direct by satellite phone, from one such resort in Thailand.

Resort…Thailand. I suddenly sat up straighter.

“Hello, this is Peter Phillips here in the New York office,” the announcer said. “Can you hear me?”

There was a delay of a few seconds before an answer came. “Yes, Peter, this is Caleb Sawyer, reporting from Phuket, Thailand.”