There was silence. Was the phone trying to make a connection or was it dead? Was that the reason nobody had called me, because they couldn’t? I wanted to talk to somebody, but if they couldn’t reach me, that might mean that they were all right and they just couldn’t tell me…It started to ring.

“Hello!”

“It’s me.”

“Beth! I was trying to call you!” Tad exclaimed.

“You heard from my parents?” I asked hopefully.

“No, no, nothing,” he said, and my heart fell. “I just needed to know where you were, what was happening. I’ve been trying all evening but the international lines are all busy and I was worried sick, not knowing and wondering if you were okay and—”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m in Phuket.”

“It looks awful,” he said. “I mean, on the news. The whole beach area is a disaster.”

“I’m not on the beach. I just landed. I’m inland and walking toward the coast. It’s less than three miles from here. I just hoped you’d heard from my parents.”

“They probably just can’t get to a phone,” Tad said. “They said that the whole phone system along the coast has been wiped out.”

Somehow that was reassuring. It wasn’t that anything had happened to them, it was the phones. Like all those people lined up at the phones at the Bangkok Airport—they wouldn’t be able to call until they got that far.

“You’ve been following it on the news,” I said.

“It’s on every channel. They’re saying it’s the biggest natural disaster in the history of the world. They keep upping the death counts. They think it could be over two hundred thousand people killed.”

I think Tad and I both heard what he said at the same time.

“But not that many in Thailand!” he exclaimed. “That’s mainly in other places…Sri Lanka and Indonesia were hit the hardest. And India and the Maldives and Malaysia. There have even been deaths in Kenya and Tanzania. Thailand wasn’t the worst hit, not even close.”

I knew what he was doing, trying to make me feel better. I also knew he wouldn’t be lying. But still, I had to ask, I had to know.

“How bad was Thailand hit?” I asked.

There was a pause. “Pretty bad.”

“How many deaths?”

There was an even longer pause. “I don’t know exactly…I don’t think they really know yet.”

“How many do they know?”

“Five thousand dead,” he said quietly. “Another three thousand still missing and over ten thousand injured.”

I felt my whole body go limp as a shiver ran through it, in spite of the heat. I needed to sit down. I slumped to the ground.

“Those are almost all local people,” Tad said.

I could tell by his voice that he was scrambling to make me feel better. It wasn’t working, but I was glad he was trying. I had to hold on to something.

“The reports are of whole villages being wiped out,” Tad said.