HOUSTON – “Honey, take shelter. I love you.”
I blinked a few times, rolling over in bed and looking again at my phone. I read the words again. The text message hadn’t changed.
Why would my mother text me that?
I had nine missed calls from my father. Something was wrong.
I woke up from a nap at my sister’s apartment in Honolulu to these messages on my phone, one after another, my sister begging me to call her. I was alone in her house with the sun pouring into the guest bedroom, and I thought for a moment I might still be dreaming.
There was an emergency alert on my phone. It was the kind you see when there’s an Amber Alert or a flash flood warning. It was in all caps. It looked urgent.
“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
I yanked my phone from the charger and ran to the window, looking down at the tree-lined valley below my sister’s apartment and at the glistening Waikiki skyline beyond it. There were cars meandering down the road. They weren’t speeding or screeching to a halt. No one was flailing their arms out of the windows. I didn’t hear jets screaming through the sky. There was no shouting or panic coming from the homes next door or in the neighborhoods or streets below me. There was nothing but blue sky, sunshine and the sound of birds chirping from the papaya trees. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see or hear, but this wasn’t it.
My confusion and panic were short-lived though, when I dialed my dad. He told me right away it was all a mistake. I quickly learned that the two minutes of confusion I felt paled in comparison to the 38 minutes of horror they had just lived through.
My family and I were separated that morning. They had been hunkered down at their beachfront rental on the North Shore of Oahu, more than an hour’s drive away. I had driven into town the night before to drop a family member off at the airport. Later that morning was when I decided to take my fateful nap.
My father was the first to get the alert on his phone.
He said he went to ask the rest of the family if they had gotten it, too. Shortly after that, all of their phones began to buzz with the same message.
A red banner flashed across the television telling them to stay inside and away from windows. It was real.
My father said he ran outside with my sister’s husband to look at the sky. My mother started to panic. There was nowhere safe for them to hide from whatever was coming. They settled on the detached garage and told me they huddled inside there for a while, shaking.
They tried frantically to call me over and over again. After almost a dozen attempts, the calls stopped going through completely. It was just a dial tone. My mother thought I was going to die all alone. That’s when she must have settled on the text telling me to take shelter and that she loved me. What more could she do? I assume that she prayed, silently or aloud I am not sure. My sister would tell me later that my mother said perhaps it was better that I was asleep when it ended.
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It would be more than half an hour before they realized that all of it was a mistake.
When we finally reunited later that afternoon, everyone collapsed on the couch in my sister’s living room. They were drained. Apparently, fearing that you and your entire family will be incinerated in a nuclear blast is exhausting.
Afterward there was uncomfortable laughter as we debriefed and took turns sharing what each of us had thought and felt. We watched television and wondered in disbelief how they were all saying their goodbyes and facing their demise because someone “pressed the wrong button.” It was almost comical.
Admittedly, all of us spend some time contemplating our own mortality and how we would spend our final moments. I never expected to have that question abruptly answered for each of my family members all at once, and to then laugh about it later over turkey sandwiches.
I would like to say that I went on to spend my next days somehow enlightened, living life with more gusto and being present in each moment. But it was remarkable how quickly things snapped back to normal. We went back to checking our emails that still piled in, no matter how often we deleted them en masse. There were lines at the corner store for ahi poke. A little girl hung on her mother’s arm whining about something she ordered.
Perhaps we, like many other families, should be thankful that we have another interesting vacation story to tell or simply something to laugh about over next year’s Christmas dinner.
All I know for sure is that after it was all said and done, it was the best deli sandwich I had ever eaten.