At the whim of contingency

It was 3:49 a.m. when the bedside table quaked under the vibrations of my cell phone.

The noise of it must have melded with the soundtrack of a dream I'd been having, it fits nicely with the ticking of a clock that was getting louder as I searched my old high school for a classroom I'd never seen. Finals week. As I awoke, I was slow to recognize what was happening.

From between my sleep-puffed eyelids, I could finally see that the screen was aglow with a new message from my daughter.

I wasn't concerned as I counted out the time difference by tapping my fingers one by one against the palm of my hand. 

Seven hours. It's past 10 a.m. where she is and the school day should be in full swing. 

I reached out a bare arm to retrieve the phone so I could better make out the words:

"I'm ok. None of my friends, nor I, were hurt. We are all good."

I am fully awake now. 

I'm all thumbing as I send off a message asking what had happened. Capital letters tower in the center of lowercase words, some of which, off by a single letter, don't make much sense as I reread them. Trying to fix it only makes it worse.

I send it anyway.

Google doesn't give her time to translate Mom before a search engine hits me in the solar plexus with reports of a catastrophic train collision in northern Greece, where my daughter is studying at an American university abroad. 

Headlines told of the course of events that was still unfolding. Maps and photographs showed the horrific news of a passenger train had collided with a freight train as it ferried students back to Thessaloniki from Athens where many had just spent a five-day holiday. 

As fortunate as we are that she was safe, I felt equally fortunate that I hadn't spent a moment wondering if she would be.

Especially, as I lay in the dark with the light of my phone flickering past the mounting evidence of the enormity of this tragedy, 

My daughter assures me she is fine, but I know the weight of it hasn't set in yet; It certainly hasn't for me. 

I have not, can not, put myself in the nightmare of having to grasp an entirely different set of contingencies for which no one can ever fully prepare.

I bristle over well-meant words of comfort though I shouldn't. I'm not above offering agnostic prayers of my own, pretending that universal forces and gut feelings are somehow benign. 

But I know it's just the mind trying to make sense of the unknowable. Trying to parse all the steps we need to take without laboring each one until our feet feel like they are made of lead. 

A lump forms in my throat when she tells me she and her friends considered taking the train from Athens but decided air travel would save them some cash. 

"It's rattling to think it may have saved more than that."