April had just moved into her new house, and had been working hard to get it unpacked and decorated. It was a beautiful home that she and her husband had put a lot of hard work into. They had lived humbly and managed their money well, and it was paying off as their dream home became a reality. I was so excited to see how it looked. I saw it once right before closing, but was anxious to see how it turned out with all the decorating and furnishings. We arranged for me to come over with my kids at 3:00 on Tuesday, February 6th, to see the house, and let our kids play together.
The night before, I got an email from a friend I hadn’t seen for a while, she was going to be in my neighborhood for something the next day, and mentioned waiting until her husband got home so she could leave her kids with him. I asked her to bring her kids to play at my house instead, so she wouldn’t have to wait. Our kids are the same ages, and hadn’t played together for a while. I emailed April to let her know of my new plans, and that I would have to postpone seeing her house until the next day. She emailed back that she was making plans for a dinner party that evening so it would work out fine for her to have the extra time. Then she emailed me a brownie recipe she’d raved about a few weeks before.
My friend dropped her kids off on Tuesday at about 4:00 p.m., and a few minutes after she left, I got a call from my husband who was at work. He said "Greg’s house is on fire", and I was a bit confused and said "well, tell him to put it out!" My only assumption was that perhaps a small fire broke out in the kitchen or something. He said "No, it’s really on fire, I think we need to go." Because I had my friend's kids with me, and because April's house was a 40 minute drive from mine, I wasn’t really sure what we were supposed to do. Still not imaging it as anything more than a burnt casserole, I was resistant to my husband’s suggestion, but called my friend to let her know what he had said, and that I didn’t know what to do. She asked if she should come back for her kids and I said I didn’t know, I was still confused, if there was a fire, it should have been put out by now. My husband called back after hearing from his parents, and this time said "it’s bad, they can’t find April and the baby, I think we need to go out there." I was sure April was probably at a neighbor’s house or the store, and that any little fire that was there would be long gone by the time we arrived, but this time I listened, and had my friend come get her kids, and my mom came to get mine.
I left to meet my husband who left work and was on his way toward me. We left his car in a parking lot and headed to April’s home. I was still shrugging the whole thing off because I figured we couldn’t really do much good, and it really never occurred to me that it was something serious. A few minutes later after meeting my husband, we got a call saying that April and the baby had been life-flighted to the hospital. Ok, so now I knew it was something serious, but figured it was still a small fire and they had maybe been burned, but all was well. We still headed toward her house. Another 10 minutes after that, we got another call saying only the baby had been life-flighted and that April was still missing. And then we heard the word "explosion". Now I was really confused. Houses don’t just explode. Something must have been exaggerated or explained wrong. I mumbled to my husband "I was supposed to be there today, I was supposed to go there at 3:00."
We turned the radio news channel on just to see if it had any traffic reports for the route we were headed toward, and the first words we heard were "breaking news, a home in Saratoga Springs has exploded, after a natural gas leak, and 2 people are missing". My heart and stomach and brain somehow all got tangled up in my throat and the rest of the drive was a blur. Exploded? Two people? Who’s the other person? And why are they missing? The drive seemed to take twice as long as it should have, with the way my husband was driving I thought for sure we’d get pulled over or in an accident. We finally arrived in the neighborhood but the streets were blocked off and there were several fire trucks, police cars, and any other type of emergency vehicle you could think of. We had to park on the street, and started running toward the house where we were stopped by an officer. We said that we were family and he let us past. As we approached the house, the magnitude of what happened started to set in.
We saw flames and smoke shooting out of what was left of the house, which was pretty much just the walls of the garage. There was debris everywhere and the ground was completely muddy from how long the water hoses had already been spraying the house. We ran to Greg, who was standing in front of the garage, he turned to my husband, his oldest brother, and through his tears he said "I lost my sweetheart". What a strange thing to say, I thought to myself, we didn’t lose her, she’s probably out shopping and doesn’t even know what happened. But then my father-in-law approached us and started to fill us in.
April had been outside with a neighbor, walking their kids in strollers. They had been evacuated from the home because a contractor broke a natural gas pipeline in their yard. The gas company had been out and repaired the leak, and a worker asked April to take him to the water heater so he could relight it. April asked one of the workers if it was safe to go back inside and he said yes, she left her neighbor in the garage with the kids in their strollers. April and the gas worker went in through the garage to the basement, and then the entire house exploded. The brick and concrete walls around the garage were all that remained, which acted as a shield to Greg and April’s daughter, Olivia, still in the stroller, and the neighbor that was there with her own son. Olivia’s stroller had blown over, and Olivia had a small scrape on her mouth but was otherwise unharmed. She had been life-flighted with my mother-in-law to the hospital as a precaution, to check for internal injuries. Greg was actually only across the street when it happened, he saw her go into the garage, and then after the explosion he ran in after her, but when he opened the garage door to the house, there was nothing left, no floor to step on to.
I was finally able to accept that April was in fact in the house when it exploded and not out shopping, but I still refused to even imagine that she was not alive. I was sure the concrete walls of the basement would have protected her, and that she was just down there waiting to be rescued. As more family arrived, we huddled together in front of the garage and held a family prayer. I called my mom to fill her in, and to let her know that it would obviously be a long night and to plan on having my kids for a while. She said when she went upstairs in my house to get my 5 year old son, she found him and my friend’s son, kneeling in his room to say a prayer for April.
I didn’t think it would be very long until they found her, I told Greg I was sure she was behind a cement wall and was just waiting for us to find her. He whispered "I hope you are right" but I think he already knew otherwise. There were still flames coming out of the basement, and the firefighters were holding water hoses over it. We started to look around and take in the scene more, their brand new couch was on the roof of a neighbor’s house. We could see their dining room chairs on one side of the lot, and their office furniture on the other side. Toys were across the street and all over the yard. My husband saw her computer in the dirt near the edge of the property, and ran onto the property to grab it, despite being waved off by firemen. It was completely melted on the outside. We also grabbed a plastic box that had been in her bedroom, and set those things on the sidewalk. It was unreal how their belongings were scattered from one end of the street to the other.
We watched for what felt like an eternity, as the fire would settle down, and then start back up again. I had to fight myself to keep from running onto the property and jumping into the basement to look for her. Instead I focused on how relieved we would all be when they found her and brought her up to safety. I had the whole thing visualized in my head. I could see her in a fireman’s arms, covered in black with torn clothes and wet hair, but still as beautiful as ever. The fireman would climb out of the basement in an heroic leap and the family and neighborhood and workers would all cheer and cry and breathe a sigh of relief and then Greg would take her in his arms and tell her he was never going to let go of her again. I saw it so clearly in my mind and played it over and over again and started to forget that I couldn’t feel my toes or fingers as I stood there in the mud, in the February air.
By now it was about 7:00 p.m. and quite dark. I didn’t want to move, but knew that I needed to sit in the Red Cross truck to warm myself for at least a few minutes. It was so hard to walk away from the house, I didn’t want to miss the big moment when they brought her to safety. I allowed myself a few minutes of warmth and then returned to the street in front of the house, glad I hadn’t missed anything. My husband knew I was still completely convinced that she was coming out alive, but even I started to face reality as it occurred to me that even if she had survived the blast, she had been in the basement for over 3 hours now, breathing in smoke, being doused with water, and probably was freezing cold. I started to get upset with the firefighters. I’ve seen movies, why can’t they rush into the basement and find her? My husband assured me that they would be in there if it was even slightly safe, but that they could not go in until the fire and smoke cleared.
By 8:30 p.m. it was starting to sink in more that she was not going to survive this, whether she had survived the initial blast or not. We had been told that she would have died instantly though, but in my mind I could still see her, huddled behind a wall of safety, waiting for rescue. The fire was starting to stay out and the smoke was clearing, and the firefighters were then able to go into the basement and start removing debris. About an hour later, we heard the news that the bodies had been found. "Bodies?" No, they must mean "people". The "people had been found". Why didn’t they say that? It was confirmed many times, that yes, the bodies had been found, that both April and the gas company worker had not survived. I started to wonder what would have happened if I had been there at 3:00 that day as planned. Would I have stopped her from going in, or would I have gone in with her? If I had gone in with her, we would have had all of our children with us. Could I have prevented this? Or did not going save my life and my children's?
It was hard to accept the truth, but at the same time, I had no choice. Nothing like this, not even close, had ever happened to me or anyone I know and I just kept thinking I’d wake up in bed and laugh and cry at the scary nightmare I was having, and then I’d email April to tell her about it. But of course that wasn’t the case. We stood numb, in the puddles of mud, until they finally finished the investigation part of the recovery, and pulled the bodies out of the basement. They were both in bags, on stretchers, and we were not allowed near them, and we knew it was probably better that way. It seemed so inappropriate to see the bag with April’s body. My still active imagination had pictured something more beautiful for her, like Snow White in a glass case. It was after 11:00 p.m. when they had taken the bodies away, and after more hugs and a lot of tears and a lot of "I’m sorry"’s, we started our way to our car. On our way down, we grabbed what was left of her computer and the plastic box, and Greg opened it to find her wedding tiara, the pearls she wore on her wedding day, and some other personal mementoes. We took the computer with us and Greg went with his parents to their house, having lost all his personal belongings, his new house, and the woman he had loved with all his heart for more than three years.
I couldn’t sleep at all that night, I tried, but by 6:00 a.m. I couldn’t lay still any longer. I got up and went downstairs, and wrote Greg a letter, and bawled and bawled. A few hours later we went up to my in-laws to figure out what to do next. I was asked to take Olivia to the dentist, her only injury was a scrape on her mouth and gums, and it looked fine but they wanted to have it checked. I held that little girl so tight, and thought of all she would have to face in life without her mother. It was so hard to take her to the dentist, because that is where April worked. She had worked there for a long time, and even after having Olivia, she filled-in shifts there when she could because she loved it so much. They were all crying when I got there, and I had been crying the whole way down. They told me how much they loved her and how unbelievable this whole thing was. They checked Olivia’s mouth and gave me some ointment for it and said she’d be fine. I drove back to my in-laws house, and headed out with my sister-in-law to the remains of April’s house, to see if we could find anything in the rubble that was worth saving.
