she says. "I finally told him to get lost. I couldn't take it anymore."
After almost a month, Marianne Smith is able to start absorbing the loss of her husband. As long as the planes are going out she holds on to some shred of hope, and that keeps her in a ghastly kind of limbo. Several weeks after Rick's death, she dreams that he comes up to her with a sad look on his face and says, I'm sorry, and then gives her a hug. It's the only dream she ever has of him, and it constitutes a goodbye of sorts. Marianne takes her children to a memorial service in Rick's hometown in Pennsylvania, but not to the one on Long Island, because she knows there are going to be a lot of television cameras there. ("Children don't grieve in front of crowds—they grieve in bed saying, 'I want Daddy to read me a book,'" she says.) George Bush sends her a letter of sympathy, as does Governor Mario Cuomo. Marianne discovers that, as a widow, she makes people extremely uncomfortable; either they avoid her or treat her like a cripple. Marianne Smith, who started out as an avionics technician for an F-16 squadron, decides to face her widowhood by going to law school and becoming a lawyer.
John Spillane gets a job as a New York City fireman, in addition to his PJ status. One night he's half awakened by the station alarm, and for some reason the room lights don't go on. He's terrified. He finds himself by the exit pole thinking, "It's okay, you've been through this before, just keep your head." All he knows is that it's dark, there's not much time, and he's got to go downward—exactly the same situation as in the helicopter. By the time he finally understands where he is, he's put on all his fire-fighting clothes. He's fully cocked and ready to go.
The storm hasn't yet finished with people, though; hasn't stopped reverberating through people's lives. Eighteen months after the ditchings, a nor'easter roars up the coast that, even before it's fully formed, meteorologists are referring to as the "Mother of All Storms." It has a distinct eye, just like a hurricane, and a desperately low central barometric pressure. One ship in its path watches wave heights jump from three feet to twenty feet in less than two hours. The storm drops fifty inches of snow on the mountains of North Carolina and sets all-time barometric records from Delaware to Boston. Winds hit no miles an hour in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Coast Guard rescues 235 people off boats during the first two days alone. Wave heights surpass sixty feet off much of the East Coast and creep up toward one hundred feet off Nova Scotia. Data buoys record significant wave heights—the average of the top third—only a few feet lower than in the storm that sank the Andrea Gail. By the narrowest of margins the "Halloween Gale," as that storm has come to be known, retains the record for most powerful nor'easter of the century.
Caught in the worst of this is the 584-foot Gold Bond Conveyor, the freighter that, two years earlier, had relayed the Satori's mayday to Boston. The Gold Bond Conveyor has a regular run between Halifax and Tampa carrying gypsum ore, and on March 14th, about a hundred miles southeast of where Billy Tyne went down, she runs into the Mother of All Storms. She's the only vessel of any kind to encounter both storms at their height, and they happen to be two of the most powerful nor'easters of the century. One could say the vessel was marked. That evening the captain radios Halifax that waves are breaking over their upper decks, and shortly after midnight he calls again to say that they're abandoning ship. The seas are a hundred feet and the snow is driving down sideways in the dark. Thirty-three men go over the side and are never seen again.
But it's still not over; the Halloween Gale has one last shoulder to tap. Adam Randall has been working steadily on the Mary T, but in February, Albert Johnston hauls her out for repairs and Randall has to find another job. He finds one on the Terri Lei, a tuna longliner out of Georgetown, South Carolina. The Terri Lei is a big, heavily built boat with a highly experienced crew, and she's due to go out at the end of March. Chris Hansen, Randall's girlfriend, drives him to Logan Airport for the flight south, but all the planes are grounded because of the blizzard—the Mother of All Storms. He gets a flight out the next day, but when he talks with Chris Hansen on the phone from South Carolina, she tells him she's worried about him. Are you okay? There's a funny sound in your voice, she says.