by Gae Polisner
She nods, and I start to close the door, spotting my father’s straight razor on the sink. With Uncle Matt staying here and sharing Dad’s bathroom so much, Dad uses ours more and more.
What if she really was going to jump? To kill herself?
I can’t just leave those there.
I grab two washcloths from the cabinet, use one to swipe the razor from the edge, leaving the other one there for her to use.
I close the door.
The lock clicks behind me.
If she was going to kill herself, what was I thinking bringing her here?
I bury the razor in a wastebasket in the hall, and carry the wings—freaking wings, are you kidding me?—out to the small terrace off my parents’ bedroom, and shake them off as best I can while staring south at the sky.
From here, it is clear and blue—a normal day, but for the acrid burnt smell that has already made its way across the river.
It chokes me, making my eyes tear up. I need to focus and keep moving.
But now that I’m home, I feel stuck in slow motion.
I head back inside, closing and locking the terrace door. Everything feels off. Everything seems foreign and wrong.
We’ve been attacked, right? So, does this mean we’re at war?
In Kerri’s room, I pick up speed, hanging the wings over the back of the desk chair, trying to find the girl something to wear. But everything my sister owns is pink and sparkly, like it’s been puked from the closets of Disney.
I run to my room instead, find a pair of pajama pants from a few years ago, plaid with a drawstring so she can tighten them. I dig out my prized U2 PopMart Tour T-shirt Uncle Matt got me for my fifteenth birthday, also too small on me now, and lay those out on top of my sister’s bed.
There. Good enough.
It’s not like she’s staying.
It’s not like she’ll need them for long.
OPEN WINDOW
Turn on the shower,
wait for the water to get hot.
In this room:
Sink,
washcloth,
medicine cabinet,
washing machine,
dryer.
Magazine basket,
pink robe.
None of it feels like mine.
Breathe,
stare in the
steamed-up mirror.
Wipe the glass with my hand,
but nothing
comes clear.
I race to the kitchen and grab the scrap of paper from the fridge.
In Mom’s handwriting: Chase Knolls Garden Apartments. Suite 4B.
I should have remembered Chase Knolls.
I dial the number but get a busy signal; redial, same thing. It’s the fast kind of busy like the number is broken.
The circuits must be jammed. Everyone is trying to reach someone.
I slip the paper back under the magnet and dial my dad instead. He said to, and I really need to hear his voice, but that call doesn’t go through, either.
I dial Chase Knolls again, frantic, and stand against the counter listening to the endless beeping in my ear.
Eyes closed,
the warm water soothes.
(The smell of vanilla,
sweet and familiar…)
Suds slip down
my skin
(… tubes, blood …
shattering glass…)
but nothing can rinse it all
away.
I hear Kerri’s door close down the hall.
Maybe this is all some really crazy weird dream, the kind you wake yourself from and laugh because you dreamed it was a dream within the dream.
On the bed: plaid pajama pants
and a blue T-shirt with an
upside-down planet on it.
I pull them on.
The shirt
hangs from me,
(… wasting away…)
same as the pants.
I sit on the bed and wait,
the heat, the shirt, the room,
all making me squirm.
I knock on my sister’s door, wait, then open it.
The girl sits on the bed in my stuff, all of it way too big.
For a second, I’m stunned. She looks totally different clean and showered, eyeliner gone, jagged hair wet and smoothed down. Under all that ash, her face is still tanned from summer, pink-cheeked from the hot shower, and her wide-set eyes are deep brown and warm. Up close they have cool amber flecks in them.
She looks sweet and lost. She looks pretty. And scared.
“Was the shower okay?” I look away, self-conscious, then back again. She nods. “That stuff okay?” I indicate the clothing, and she shrugs. “It’s big, I guess. I’ll try to find you something better in a bit.” She nods again, and I walk in far enough to take the wet towel from her trembling hands.
Kyle stands there.
He doesn’t seem like anyone I know.
“Okay?
Okay?
Okay?” he asks.
I can’t answer,
I’m not here,
I’m crawling out of my own
skin.
He waits, so I try,
nod and breathe past the
scraping pieces in my chest:
(brick,
stone,
metal,
glass).
Try to ignore how it aches.
“Okay, I’ll leave you be, then,” I say.
She stares out my sister’s window. My eyes follow. From this angle, all you can see is blue sky.
“Maybe rest for a while. I have to talk to my uncle, let him know that you’re here. I have to reach my mom, too. I’ll put your clothes in the washer and come back again.”
He closes the door.
The purple room hurts my head.
Purple rug. Lavender walls. Purple curtains.
Out the window,
the tops of apartment buildings
(a second glint of metal
breaks through the clouds…).
Wires,
blue sky,
Brooklyn Heights, he had said.
I walk to the window,
unlock it,
and
pull.
I’m about to throw in the load of wash, but instead I turn back to my sister’s room and crack the door open without knocking.
I nearly freak. The girl stands at the window, which is open. Only partway, though, because of the window guards.
“Sorry,” I say, startling her. “Are … are you sure you’re okay?” She turns, wide-eyed, and blinks. “I won’t bug you anymore, but I figured I should know your name.”
She stares blankly.
“What I should call you, I mean.”
She steps away from the window, and I relax a little.
“I don’t know,” she finally says.
When he leaves, I try again,
but the window only opens
a few inches.
I back away,
defeated.
He said to rest, but I don’t feel tired.
I feel
strange and
on edge.
I sit on the bed and stare down at
the ruffled pillow,
the white comforter with its hideous
black, pink, and purple design.
Stars and music notes repeat across it,
and movie things:
black clapboard slates with white letters that read,
ACTION!
TAKE!
ROLL SCENE!
Across the pillowcase:
BE THE STAR YOU ARE.
This is not my room.
I’m in a story I know from elsewhere.
(A girl comes to a cabin in the woods,
eats porridge,
sits in three different chairs,
sleeps in the wrong beds.
“This porridge is too hot …
this porridge is too cold…”)
&nbs
p; Words that move on a conveyer belt through my gauzy head.
I stumble out of Kerri’s room and down the hall.
How can she not know her name?
Jesus. She’s not only suicidal, she has no memory. Maybe she hit her head and blacked out. I should take her somewhere, but where? I’m too afraid to go out there right now, and, anyway, the hospitals are going to be filled with wounded people. Besides, she doesn’t seem hurt. Or look hurt. She’s not fainting or bleeding, or—I don’t know. My stomach twists. I need to take her somewhere, anywhere that’s not here.
I need to reach my parents.
I need to check the news.
But first, I have to deal with Uncle Matt.
A poster of three
long-haired boys.
I close my eyes against them,
against their girlish hair and the bright yellow background.
(Flashes of sunlight …
long black strands scattered
across
a worn linoleum floor…)
I shift my weight on the bed.
The Three Bears trudge across my brain.
The door to the guest room, where Uncle Matt sleeps, is closed. I open it slowly. I won’t know what to say if he’s seen the news.
Worse, I won’t know what to say if he hasn’t.
This I know: It will kill him either way. It will devastate him not to be down there with his unit, doing his job. Down there with Dad and Uncle Paul.
My heart bangs in my ears as I search for the right thing to say. What to tell him first. How to break news I don’t understand.
How to explain about the planes, and the building, and the girl.
But he’s asleep in his wheelchair, head down, in front of the television. I can tell by the way his body slumps to the side.
Usually when I get home from school, Karina has dressed him, bathed him, and moved him into the living room. But Karina never made it here this morning.
The television is on, but the volume is muted.
He doesn’t know yet. If he knew, he wouldn’t be sleeping.
My eyes freeze on the images—the falling building, the wall of white smoke filling the screen, the people running from the South Tower collapsing, over and over again—then shift to the news crawl at the bottom of the screen. It says the North Tower collapsed. A mistake. It was the South Tower. I watched it go down.
I back out of the room, pulling the door shut, hoping Uncle Matt will stay asleep for a while more. Closing my eyes, I rest my head against the door.
But the images keep coming.
On the ceiling,
a dull wink of stars.
The plastic glow-in-the-dark kind,
in daylight, the color of
old teeth.
I close my eyes and count backward
100 … 99 … 98 …
Numbers, clear and
exact,
don’t require me to think.
97 … 96 … 95 …
I remember the shower,
the elevator,
and
the bridge.
94 …
I remember the boy.
93 …
Kyle.
Everything before him goes blank.
Watch the old-teeth stars and
keep counting,
92 … 91 … 90 …
This bed is too soft.
The North Tower, the news said. What if that one went down, also?
I walk to the living room and stand, useless, not wanting to look out the window.
I dial Dad—busy signal—then try the Chase Knolls apartments again.
Busy signal.
How am I supposed to reach anyone?
I leave my phone on the couch and walk back to the kitchen. Maybe the landline will work better. I dial Dad first—still busy—but the Chase Knolls call rings through!
A machine picks up and tells me to dial 0 if I’d like to leave a message for a guest.
Fuck!
I head to the bathroom, trying to steady myself, telling myself to get things done and not to worry. Mom is far from the attacks, and Dad is trained to deal with exactly these types of situations.
The washer is mid-cycle, so I walk back to the living room, find the remote, and turn on the television. The ticker still shows the North Tower.
I brave it and turn, look out the big picture window with a view of the East River, but through all the smoke, I can’t see a thing in downtown Manhattan.
The explosion on the bridge.
Was that the North Tower going down?
Jesus, what if my dad was in there?
“YOU … DAH…”
I flip channels. They all show the same thing. One building imploding, then the other.
On channel after channel, the buildings collapse. People run from them, away from a barreling wall of white smoke.
If my dad was in there, he’d have been trying to rescue people. There’s no way he would have run.
A reporter breaks in, holds a hand to her ear and nods as if she’s learning new information. She ticks off things that have happened since this morning. Both towers are down, and the Pentagon has been hit. And a hijacked plane has crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
“We believe it may have been headed for the White House,” the reporter says, her eyes full of panic and tears. “So it’s a blessing,” she adds, but can’t finish. The freaking news reporter is crying.
“We’re hearing reports—we don’t know how many other targets are in danger. Military jets have been scrambled,” she says, pulling herself together, “dispatched to head off flights around the country.” She nods at whatever is being said in her ear, then adds, “I … forgive me … I’ve just been told they’ve been issued the authority to shoot down planes from anywhere within the United States.”
FUCK. My mom and sister might be up there.
I dial the Chase Knolls apartments frantically again, listen to it ring and ring, listen to the message pick up, and dial 0 as told, to leave a message for a guest.
“Please,” I say. “A message for suite Four B, Alyse Donohue. She’s staying there with my sister. Please ask her to call me. This is Kyle. I’m in New York. I’m her son.”
I hang up, press my face to the living room window, and squint out again at the East River. Police boats cover the surface, their red lights flashing through the smoke like in some movie. I don’t remember ever seeing a police boat on the river.
On the television, the reporter is in motion, walking swiftly, saying how they need to move their operations, that the local stations are losing their signals because three of the network’s transmitters have been lost. “They were on top of the North Tower. Whole communications towers are out. People are struggling to reach their loved ones.” She pauses and looks intently into the camera: “So, we’re asking our viewers—begging—that if you don’t have to make a phone call, you don’t.”
I turn my gaze north toward upper Manhattan, where Marcus lives. I was going to call him and make sure he got home. I haven’t talked to him since we left Mrs. Bright’s classroom. He would have headed uptown with another teacher when Mr. Bell took us to the bridge. I guess I’m not calling him now.
Up there, at least, just a few miles from the towers, the sky is deceptively clear. Like it was when I woke up this morning.
A million what-ifs bounce around in my head just as the reporter says something about another flight being hijacked and going down.
“Let me retract that,” she corrects immediately. “We don’t have a confirmation on that yet.”
I reel back from the window, but even inside our apartment there’s no escaping any of it. A faint burnt smell seems to cling to the air. Plastic. Rubber. Jesus, I don’t want to know what else.
Or maybe it’s me. Maybe the smell is stuck to my clothes.
I’m doing nothing useful here. I should go shower also.
A door closes, opens, then closes again.
E
ach small bang makes me jump inside my skin.
The shower runs.
The long-haired boys gawk at me from the wall.
Out the window, clouds bob on blue sky.
Behind my lids: a hospital bed.
Faces slip past,
mere shadows.
Names and objects
like skittish
eye floaters,
threatening to slip in from
beyond
the periphery.
The shower is good, makes me feel more relaxed. Mom always says that after laughter, water is the best medicine.
Mom.
I tell myself she’ll be okay.
Her. My sister. And Dad.
One thing I know about Dad: He’s a badass. If anyone can walk out of there, he can.
Then again, Uncle Matt was a badass, too, and look at him now.
The shower still runs.
I wander out of the purple room and
down the hall
to the master bedroom.
It’s neat and pristine:
White bedspread with a paisley design.
Blue curtains.
A framed painting of flowers in a vase.
(… Pink peonies …
everything shattered…)
A master bathroom,
cluttered.
A toilet equipped with rails.
On the sink, a parade of pill bottles.
I pick them up, one
by one:
Ketorolac Tromethamine,
Celebrex,
Coumadin,
Tylenol—Codeine,
Valium.
I slip the last bottle in my pocket,
shaking it first,
to be sure.
I dry off, change into clean clothes from the basket next to the dryer, and head back to the living room, noting Kerri’s closed door as I pass.
I sit and stare at the television. The reporter from earlier is gone, replaced with a new one.
On the couch, my cell phone message light flashes. I pick it up and listen, happiness filling me as Mom’s voice filters in.
“Oh my gosh, Kyle, honey, I can’t believe I got through. Call me. It’s all over the news…” Not surprisingly, she’s freaking out. Okay, so maybe I am, too. I can barely hear her over my own heart pulsing in my ears. “… I need you to call me. I tried your father but can’t reach him. Kyle, please … call me here as soon as you can … Oh, shoot … the number is…” She fumbles for something, says, “Kerri, give it to me! Please,” then reads off some number I don’t recognize. “We’re at LAX. Our flight was supposed to leave in an hour. I didn’t even know until…” Her voice trails off, and she starts to cry. Finally she whispers, “Well, clearly it’s not leaving now.”
