by Emily Giffin
9:45: The Capitol is evacuated
At ten minutes to ten, Tom Brokaw, who has now joined Matt and Katie, tells us that the FAA has shut down all air traffic nationwide. “The country is immobilized,” he says.
A new report comes in of “massive casualties.” They say that people are jumping from the burning buildings. I sit in shock and horror, imagining having to make that decision. It’s like the game Scottie and I played when we were little—would you rather burn or freeze to death? Only this is real life. This is actually happening—and right down the street from me. I hear more sirens outside my building, horns honking. I walk to the window, open it, and look out. The sky is still blue, no trace of smoke. Yet.
I return to my television, staring at the screen, watching as one of the towers appears to be crumbling, literally falling to the ground, sinking into itself. Disappearing. It’s impossible to believe that everything and everyone who was in the building is now gone.
I try Grant again. This time, I’m told that all circuits are busy. I switch to my landline. No luck. I dial Scottie, then Jasmine, then my mother. Still nothing.
Suddenly desperate for human contact, I consider knocking on a neighbor’s door. Any neighbor. But I can’t tear myself away from the television. From the images of people running through the streets of lower Manhattan, looking back over their shoulders at the carnage.
Tom Brokaw is now saying that there has been an “untold loss of life in the nerve center of America.” He calls it an “efficient and effective attack on the heart of this country.” How does he string sentences together in the midst of this crisis? Is someone writing his copy—or is he saying all of this off the cuff?
More news comes in. Another hijacked plane. A crash into a field in Pennsylvania. Somerset County.
The other tower collapses just like the first. Gone.
My cellphone rings with a number I don’t recognize. My heart skips a beat, praying that it’s Grant.
“Hello?” I say.
“Hey. It’s me,” I hear Jasmine say.
“Jesus,” I say, only now realizing that I’ve been trembling.
“I know.”
“What number is this?” I ask her.
“Jake’s cell,” she says, referring to one of our colleagues. “Mine’s not getting a signal.”
“Mine either,” I say.
“Yeah. A lot of cell masts are…were…on top of the North Tower,” she says. “I’m surprised the television signals are working at all….Anyway, we stopped at his apartment to get his camera. We’re headed your way.”
“My way?”
“Yeah. Downtown.”
“To the World Trade Center?” I ask, realizing with a fresh sickening wave that the towers no longer exist. That our skyline—one I knew long before I’d ever seen New York in person—is no more.
“We’re going to see how close we can get,” Jasmine says, like the insanely brave reporter she is. “But I heard everything’s evacuated south of Canal Street…and Port Authority’s closed all the bridges and tunnels.”
“What about the subways?” I ask.
“Spotty, I think,” she says. “Some lines are definitely closed. I think we’ll probably end up walking. Talk to people along the way. Do you want to come with us? Or are you too sick? You sound like shit.”
“I sound worse than I am,” I say, having actually forgotten that I’m sick.
“So do you want to come? Meet us in Union Square?”
I think of my mother, remembering my promise to stay put. I also think of Grant, not wanting to be away from my home line in case he tries to call. But Jasmine is my friend, and I am a reporter, and this is my city. This is our country. So in a shaky voice, I tell her yes, I’ll be there as soon as I can.
Thirty minutes later, I am standing in the middle of Union Square. It is desolate, just like all the blocks along the way. I hear the whine of sirens in the distance, but otherwise the city is eerily quiet and still. There is no traffic, no hustle and bustle, and instead of the usual feeling of anonymity and being “lost in a crowd,” there is a weird, raw intimacy. Strangers make eye contact, a hundred words passing in each horrified glance. Across the square, two girls are hugging and crying.
I sit on a bench, waiting, aching. I look up. The sky is still blue, and there is no sign of death or dust in the air. Not even a trace of smoke. I feel a breeze on my face and remember the images on my television, the way the wind was blowing the smoke toward the harbor and Brooklyn.
Jake and Jasmine finally appear with their backpacks and cameras and notepads. As they near the bench, I can see that Jasmine is wearing an I VOTED sticker; I’d forgotten all about the primary election today. I rush toward them and hug them both. It occurs to me that Jasmine isn’t ordinarily a hugger, but she’s the one holding on the tightest.
“Sorry it took us so long. We had to walk. The subways are shut down now,” she says.
“All the lines?” I say.
She nods, as Jake walks off toward the girls across the square, one of them now sobbing loud enough for us to hear.
“Can you believe this shit?” Jasmine says, shaking her head, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looks skyward.
“No,” I say, following her gaze. “I really can’t.”
“What did they tell you at work?” I ask.
“Jerry’s on vacation,” she says, referring to our assignment editor.
“Oh, that’s right.”
“But we had a conference call, and went through some story angles….He told us to just get down as close as we safely can. Talk to people. Take pictures.” She bites her thumbnail—a habit she’s been trying to break for years, and likely won’t be conquering anytime soon. “Jake thinks we should hit the hospitals…and the blood banks. And police and fire stations,” she says as he returns.
We briefly come up with a game plan, then start walking west and south in the direction of the World Trade Center. What was once the World Trade Center. About three blocks later, the burning smell hits us all at once. It is smoke, but mixed with the stench of chemicals. Melting plastic. And something else, too. Something unspeakable.
By the time we reach Seventh Avenue, we can actually see the smoke, and it’s getting harder to breathe. Jake suggests that we pick up some masks at Duane Reade, and I agree, thinking of yet another story angle. How our local news channel at home always covered the stores before a blizzard, bread and milk flying from the shelves. “We should talk to as many local shop owners as we can,” I say.
Jasmine agrees. All of us are now in reporter mode, gathering facts, taking notes and photos and testimonials from everyone we can.
Every story is about people. I keep hearing my favorite professor’s words in my ears. Never has his statement been more true, I think, just seeing the fear and grief and shock etched on the faces of everyone we pass. As we near Canal Street, the chaos, confusion, and noise grow, along with the number of emergency vehicles, police, and people. Throngs of pedestrians are walking, running, pushing strollers, riding bikes, limping in the opposite direction from us. Some are calm and stoic; others are hysterical or weeping. There are too many images to process, all of them disturbing in their own ways, but the most heartbreaking to me is a teenage boy standing on the corner, holding up a photograph of a woman. I know who she is to him even before Jasmine gently asks the question.
“She’s my mom,” the boy confirms, his hands shaking, his eyes wide with terror. “She works at the World Trade Center. I can’t reach her.”
“Where’s your father?” I blurt out, hoping that he has one. That he isn’t all alone out here.
“He’s checking the hospitals,” the boy says.
Jake pulls out his notepad, opens it, and asks questions. The boy tells us his name is Dylan. He’s seventeen. His mother is a paralegal. She works on the seventieth
floor of the South Tower. At this point, he starts to cry. Jasmine and I both put an arm around him, as Jake takes down the boy’s name and phone number.
We keep moving, encountering more Dylans—people frantic and searching. We go to three hospitals, two blood banks, four churches. We gather names, take notes, and write stories in our heads. All the while, I check my cellphone—which still isn’t getting a signal—and pray.
Around four o’clock, we walk back uptown, stopping at Mustang Harry’s, a bar on Seventh Avenue between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth. The place is packed, but nobody is speaking. Every television is turned to CNN. Jake orders us beers and we find a place to stand, leaning against a wall, watching the replays of those planes filled with people, now gone. Flight attendants and pilots and business travelers and people headed out on vacation or to visit loved ones. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children and husbands and wives. All of them gone.
At some point, we decide it’s all too much to bear, let alone watch, and we leave the bar, each of us heading home to our respective computers. We have work to do. Stories to write. Answering machines to check. Calls to make. I need to call my mother and Scottie as I know they’ve been trying to reach me. I also want to check on Matthew—who fortunately works in Midtown. Most of all, I need to talk to Grant. By now he must have tried to contact me.
When I walk in my door, I see seven new messages on my answering machine. Surely one of them is from him. I hit play, and listen to my mother, then my sister, then my brother, then Scottie, then a close friend from college, then my mother again. With one message to go, I hold my breath, waiting, praying.
I hear Matthew’s voice: Cecily. Are you there? Please call me as soon as you get this. I just want to make sure you’re okay….I’m home now—they evacuated the MetLife Building….God…I can’t believe this is happening. Please call me and let me know you’re okay….And Cecily? I love you…so much.
I call everyone back, in the order they called me, telling them that I’m okay. That I love them.
Then, for the first time all day, I let myself really break down and cry.
* * *
—
Day turns to night as I keep trying Grant. To no avail. There is no new news, though I learn new things, listening to foreign policy experts talk about al-Qaeda, a militant Sunni Islamist multinational organization founded in 1988 by men named Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, both of whom look so harmless in their flowing white robes. How could they, from their rocky caves in Afghanistan, have masterminded this disaster? It doesn’t make sense. It still doesn’t seem real. I try to write. I pray. I doze in twenty- or thirty-minute increments. I forget to eat, and then finally remember and walk to the diner and order a burger and fries that I can’t make myself eat, only to return home and listen to more messages that are not from Grant. My panic builds.
Somehow, with the help of Jasmine and Scottie, I manage to hold on to a sliver of hope, playing our collective excuses back on a loop. His cellphone is broken or lost—and he never memorized my number to call from a landline. He went to his mountain house just after he left my apartment early this morning, and doesn’t have cell service or an Internet connection or a television; maybe he doesn’t even know what happened. He lost a close friend in the towers, and is too filled with grief to do anything, including contact me. He has spiraled into depression, something we are all experiencing to various degrees, but his is even more crippling due to his brother’s situation. He’s injured in a hospital somewhere. He’s buried alive in the rubble, waiting to be saved. He will be saved.
But with every passing hour, it becomes harder to suppress another explanation. The one that I can’t and won’t say aloud, and my friends won’t say, either. At least not to my face. They are thinking it, though. I hear it in the tentative way they ask if I’ve heard from him—as if I could possibly forget to tell them that I had. I hear it in their wavering reassurances that they are sure the call will come. I tell myself the same. Any minute he will call with a breathless, crazy story. Any minute now he will knock on my door and give me one of his huge, tight hugs.
* * *
—
The next day, I go in to work both because I have to and because it’s better than waiting by the phone. It’s chaos at the office, but quiet, sickening chaos. Jake, Jasmine, and I turn in all of our little snippets, as we are told to keep at it, to “focus on the flyers and the faces.” I make a list of all the hospitals, and visit them one by one, both tackling my assignment and looking for Grant. Somehow I remain in a state of denial, even as I discover that nobody—nobody—is finding their loved ones.
Another night falls. Questions swirl. Can people survive in rubble for more than thirty-six hours? That is the one they keep asking on the news. Meanwhile, my editor assigns Jasmine and me the candlelight vigil in Washington Square Park. We go as reporters, taking notes and photographs, but we are also there as grieving New Yorkers—Americans—joining in prayer and song and solidarity. Everywhere we look there are makeshift memorials—bouquets of flowers; burning candles and incense; chalk messages on the street and sidewalks; and endless placards with names and faces of the still missing. They are affixed to street signs and lampposts and construction fencing and the base of the statue of George Washington and the iconic stone arch itself. Some are elaborate posters with color photographs and long, poetic tributes; others are children’s crayon drawings with scrawled messages to Mommy or Daddy; still others are bare-bones xeroxed flyers. The scene is as haunting and devastating as a hundred funerals in one public square, yet it is also one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Even as my heart breaks, it overflows with faith in God and the inherent goodness of humanity. Love will win, I tell myself. I will find Grant, I tell myself.
And then, just as Jasmine and I decide to leave to get a much needed drink, I see him. His face. His gorgeous eyes.
“Oh my God, Jasmine,” I say as I feel my knees start to buckle under me. “It’s him.”
“Where?” she says, scanning the crowd, her expression hopeful.
I realize that she has misunderstood, that she thinks he is actually here, in the flesh.
“No. Not like that,” I say, shaking my head, pointing up at the flyer of Grant’s face, taped to the arch. In the photo, he is grinning in a bar, holding up a shot glass, of all things. The word MISSING is handwritten in neat capital letters beneath his photo, along with his full name and age. GRANT SMITH, 30. Below that is a 917 contact number and a plea to “call with any information.”
“That’s him?” she says, looking shocked, then quickly composing herself.
I nod, feeling certain that I’m about to pass out.
“Jesus,” she says under her breath, putting her arm around me, then easing me to the ground right as my legs start to give way completely.
“Honey…honey, look at me,” she says, sitting cross-legged in front of me, her hands cupping my cheeks. She lifts my chin, forcing me to make eye contact. “This could be a good thing.”
“How?” I say, my voice shaking.
“Because…this is a lead,” she says, looking back up at the flyer, then pulling her notebook from her messenger bag. She turns to a fresh page and writes the phone number with her mechanical pencil, underlining it so hard that the point breaks. She clicks for a fresh point, but has nothing else to write.
“A lead?” I say. “This isn’t a lead. It’s further proof of…of…a dead end.”
The word dead rings in my ears.
“You don’t know that…maybe he’s been found….”
“Found? Found how? And where?”
“I don’t know. Found in a hospital or something…We need to call the number,” she says, but very tellingly, makes no move for her cellphone.
I hug my knees as hard as I can, then drop my forehead between them, the way people do to keep from fainting.
“No. He would have called me. He would’ve found a way to call me,” I say, my voice muffled.
“He can’t call you if he’s badly injured…or…or in a coma,” Jasmine says, as I marvel at how dire the world is when the idea of being in a coma is good news.
“Or dead,” I say.
“Cecily, honey, this flyer changes nothing,” she says, rising to her feet. She brushes dust off the seat of her white jeans, then walks a few paces over to the picture of Grant. I watch as she carefully peels back the tape from two sides of the flyer. She carries it to me, then puts it in my hands. I look at him, hit by two waves. One of love, the other of pure horror that his beautiful face is among the faces of this tragedy.
“What do you mean it changes nothing?” I say, my voice frantic. “It confirms he’s missing.”
“It confirms he was missing….But it’s not like whoever hung this thing is going to come back and take it down if—when—he’s found,” she says. Jasmine is not a bullshitter, so I know that she is clearly trying to convince herself, too.
I stare at her for a long beat before I shake my head and say, “Come on, Jasmine. They’re not finding anyone.”
“But people can live a long time without food or water….Remember those coal miners in West Virginia…and that baby—what was her name? Jessica? The one who fell down the well?” Her voice sounds panicked and desperate. “They rescued that baby. And those miners. All of those people.”
“Yes, but they’re not pulling people out of that rubble. You’ve seen the photos….It’s all ash and debris….Those people were cremated out there.”
I let out a sob as Jasmine closes her eyes. “He could still be at a hospital—”
I cut her off and say, “No. You’ve been to the hospitals…and the blood banks….All that blood and nobody needs a drop….You either got out of those burning buildings—or you didn’t. You know that. I know that. Everyone knows that.”
“But it’s only been thirty-six hours, Cecily,” she says. “It’s still chaos down there. There have to be some survivors. A few. Even one. Have faith that he’s that one. Have faith in a miracle.”
