The Memory of Things

by Gae Polisner

If a tree falls in the forest and you’re not there to hear it, does it really make a sound?

  I flip my pillow to the cool side, and stare around my room. Her fingerprints are here. The pillow smells the way the vanilla had smelled, so much better in her hair.

  And, in the corner by my closet, my electric guitar is out and waiting, now propped against the wall. Tomorrow I’ll practice some pieces for jazz band. In my head, I run through the chords to some of the songs I used to know how to play. With time, I’m sure it will all come back to me.

  I close my eyes and picture her here—Hannah—on my bed, listening to me play. I try to hold on to how it felt to have her listen, how it felt to kiss her, and to hold her hand in mine.

  Over and over, I think of her wading into the Atlantic.

  “It’s like I’m here, solid, but I’m not connected to anything. I’m completely untethered.”

  “You’re tethered to me,” I say aloud.

  * * *

  Out in the hall, the sound of bags dropping, a key in the lock, and my parents’ hushed voices. I roll onto my stomach, hang my arm over the side of the bed, and pretend to be asleep.

  “I’ve got the bags, Alyssa. Let go.” Dad, as always, wanting to do everything.

  The door opens, and Kerri’s voice bursts in. “Hush!” Mom whispers. “You’ll wake your brother. Seriously, Tom, leave them here. We’ll unpack it all later.”

  The door closes, and Dad drops the bags obediently. I change my position, pull the covers over my head, and play possum like I used to when I was little. I’m not ready to talk with anyone yet.

  “Go straight to your room, Kerri,” Mom whispers again. “You can nap, and I’ll wake you in a few hours.” To Dad: “She was petrified, Tom. I couldn’t get her to sleep a wink on the plane.”

  Dad says, “Can’t say I blame her. I haven’t really slept much, either.” There’s a pause, and the sound of bodies shifting, then footsteps moving down the hall. “Come on, pipsqueak,” Dad says to my sister. “I’ll tuck you in. You need to get some shut-eye.”

  I hear Dad walk her to her room. Her door opens and then, a few minutes later, closes again.

  Later, when we wake for the day, when we shower and all sit at the kitchen table, our house will be normal again. The girl won’t be down the hall.

  Hannah.

  I lift off the blankets and hold my hand to the light from the window. On my palm, scrawled across the lifeline, is her phone number.

  I close it in a fist, sensing movement at my door, the presence of my mom in the hall.

  My doorknob turns, and the door cracks open. She slips in and walks to my bed.

  “Kyle?”

  “Unh,” I mumble incoherently, rolling away to face the wall. I’m hoping she’ll buy that I’m sleeping.

  She leans down, presses her hand to my back, then reaches to touch my cheek.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she whispers. “So grateful. I hear you did a tremendous job. I love you so very much.” Her voice cracks a little at the end.

  “Me, too, Mom,” I offer sleepily. I don’t want to talk, but I need her to know that I do. “I love you, too,” I add.

  I need her to know that, and that I’m happy she’s home safe and sound, and that Kerri and Dad are, too.

  Honestly, I’m still a little scared.

  About tomorrow, and the day after that.

  About next week, and when school will reopen, and where. Worried about whether we’ll get hit again, and what might happen in the city.

  But for right now, we’re all okay, and here, together. And it’s kind of amazing to be tethered. To have a face I belong to.

  Author’s Note

  It’s a beautiful Tuesday morning in September. My older son is in his first-grade classroom, and I’ve just dropped my younger son off at his Long Island preschool when I emerge to an onslaught of anxious chatter in the parking lot. Something unusual has happened in New York City.

  I don’t stick around to find out what. I have work to do and only a few hours before it’s time to pick up my toddler again. I get back in my car and switch on the news.

  A freak accident: A plane has flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  By the time I reach home and turn on the television, a second plane has hit the South Tower, and no one is talking about accidents anymore.

  I was only two years old in 1966 when my father, a young surgeon, was drafted into a MASH unit in Vietnam. He returned a year later, and I came of age in the relative peace and insulation of the post–Vietnam War America of the 1980s and 1990s. Now, less than fifty miles from my idyllic Long Island home, in the city where I lived for nearly a decade after college—a city I love—all that I know is unraveling.

  I frantically call my husband at his law firm, twenty miles closer to the chaos. It is still early enough that many people don’t know, so the phone lines aren’t yet jammed. But when he answers, the enormity of the tragedy becomes palpable. The younger brother of a close colleague of his works at Cantor Fitzgerald, a company located precisely where the first plane hit.

  My husband heads home as the news escalates, reported with a swift, unchecked panic the likes of which I’ve never seen before. On-air reporters break down despite efforts to maintain their composure. The Pentagon has been hit; the Twin Towers have gone down one after another; a plane bound, reporters believe, for the White House has crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Because the government fears more attacks, military jets are scrambled, U.S. airspace is cleared with an order to shoot down unauthorized planes, and the death toll, later reduced by more than half, is reported likely to top six thousand.

  Are more attacks coming?

  Are we at war?

  I manage to locate my sister, who still lives in Manhattan, then race to gather my boys from their schools.

  I don’t remember what I said when I pulled them from class, but I do remember what we did when we arrived home: We played Wiffle ball on our front lawn.

  I know this sounds incongruous, but it was a picture-perfect day here on Long Island, and my primary goal at that moment was to shield my children from my fear. I knew I could not go back into our house and turn on the news, risking the carnage they might see. The broadcast images were terrifying: Buildings imploding, collapsing, pieces raining down like confetti. People bloodied, covered in dust and ash, running from that impossibly huge wall of barreling white smoke …

  So, under azure, cloudless skies, on a warm pre-fall morning as our world forever changed, the boys and I played Wiffle ball, and I fought to keep my eyes from darting to now wholly untrustworthy skies.

  * * *

  As the months passed, and we all began to share and heal, it became clear that the irony of the weather was not lost on a single New Yorker that day.

  Life stabilized. I returned my boys to their schools and daily routines, went back to my own part-time legal work and writing, vacuumed the house, read books, and made dinner plans with friends. But, for more than a year, I remained terrified in a way I had never before known.

  And, through it all, what was there to do but keep moving?

  So we did. We went to school and work, we played games and made pancakes for breakfast, we forged onward. Even as anthrax scares escalated, the threat of war grew, and the post-9/11 statistics staggered us all.

  Over 2,700 people lost their lives on 9/11, at least 343 of whom were firefighters and paramedics, and twenty-three of whom were NYPD police officers. In the years following, those numbers have nearly doubled due to cancers and illnesses believed to be related to the tragedy. In the months after 9/11, only 291 bodies were recovered intact from Ground Zero. Nearly two thousand families received no remains whatsoever. Fires burned at the site for at least ninety-nine days, and the estimated economic loss to New York was more than $105 billion.

  The statistics were mind-boggling, but they weren’t all horrifying.

  On 9/11, there were more than thirteen thousand babies born in the Uni
ted States amid a rising death toll. And in the days after, at least thirty-six thousand units of blood were donated to the New York Blood Center. New Yorkers proved to be resilient—a resiliency rate quoted by mental health professionals to be better than 65 percent in the months after 9/11—and general suicide rates six months post-9/11 decreased significantly.

  But statistics can’t illustrate the sense of unity that blanketed our nation in a way not felt since immediately after World War II. We moved forward boldly, and we did it together.

  * * *

  At some point, my writer’s brain started to whisper a mantra:

  Write about it. Tell a story that might help you to bring the incomprehensible under control. A story about how we keep going, keep moving forward. How we heal.

  The Memory of Things eventually became that story.

  I didn’t start the story right away. Not for years, in fact. In my heart, I knew it was too soon. Too soon for me to try to write it, too soon for others to read it.

  But, in time, the images started to come.

  The girl came first, crouched in fear.

  Covered in ash.

  On her back, a pair of playful costume wings.

  And a boy. A boy who might save himself by having to save her first.

  Make it a simple story about hope.

  Make it a story about human resilience.

  Make it a story where people still laugh, still brush their teeth, still fall in love, a story where people redeem one another by small gestures, a story where people have no choice but to keep going in the face of huge tragedy and unspeakable loss.

  * * *

  I know the events of 9/11 are fiercely personal to each and every one of us, and, as such, I know—and fear—I cannot begin to do justice to individual experiences on that day, or to the loss of human life that came with it. Through this story, I can only grapple with my own experiences, and my own memories of that moment in time, as flawed as those memories necessarily are as the years pass.

  I ask my readers to remember that the story within these pages is pure fiction. Though I have taken great care to sift through countless articles, time lines, and brutal photographs from the day, as well as having the manuscript vetted by a police officer (who was also, at the time, a young mother) sent down to the Twin Towers that morning, I have taken liberties, too, as we do when we are writing fiction. In the end, this is nothing more than Kyle Donohue’s story. A story about a boy who has to hold it together during one week amid a swirl of unthinkable tragedy he is forced to deal with on his own.

  Ultimately, this is not a 9/11 story, but a coming-of-age story, one about healing and love. Still, I have tried to capture some of the sights and sounds and fears of that day—especially here in New York—and, more importantly, the astounding sense of camaraderie and resilience that we all experienced, and have tried to hold on to, in the days that followed.

  This is a story about hope.

  Acknowledgments

  Books, like so many difficult endeavors, take a village to get from idea to well-told story to book on the shelf. This one was no exception. In this regard, my deepest gratitude to the following:

  To Kathleen Coletti, Sergeant NYPD (retired), then also a young mother with young children at home on Long Island, who so bravely evacuated people from the towers that morning, and who read my manuscript with such great care to help shape and vet the important details of the story.

  To Jane Small, for reaching out to tell me how the brief excerpts I shared on Facebook had made her want to read more, significant because it was the first time since 2001 (when she, herself, weathered the tragedy from mere blocks away) she had a desire to read a “9/11” story … then, for reading the manuscript again and again through every menial chore, to get to the heart of the story, and for making me believe others would find—and love—the heart of the story, too.

  To my other first-round Beta readers: my mother, Ginger (who paints the way I only hope to write one day), blogger and reader extraordinaire Kelly Hager (a constant friend and cheerleader), and my dear friend Annmarie Kearney Wood (who always reads fast and makes me believe I have something worth pursuing). And, my second-round Beta readers: Evelyn Cruise (whose wonderful insight pushed me to be more careful and thoughtful), Cathy Burger Montiero (who read enthusiastically and gave me much-needed gold stars), Jessie Grembos (for all her amazing feedback and multiple reads), and Wendy Watts Scalfaro (who read at least twice with great care and encouragement).

  To Robin Reul for her extraordinarily astute (and, thus, painful) notes. Oh, how we need those, especially from those we admire!

  To Chris Lupone and Krysiek, aka “Polish Chris,” for vetting the Polish words in the manuscript.

  To Nicole, Meadow, and Brayden, for walking the neighborhood bridge with me to make sure I got it all right.

  To the members of #TeachersWrite, who so often return my enthusiastic shake of pompoms with so much of the same; to my Facebook peeps, who read excerpts on a weekly basis and click “like” or, now, “love,” and/or leave me endless words of encouragement that do matter; to the members of The West Neck Pod, who keep my body flowing without which no words would flow; and to the members of the Nerdy Book Club, who spread more book love than any other group on the face of this twirling planet.

  To Ben R., for giving the manuscript so much of your time and skill, and, more so, for encouraging me to let the book be what I had always wanted it to be …

  To Jim McCarthy, hugely, for getting and appreciating what I do, believing in my ability to ultimately do it well, for always reading and being available, and pushing me until the story is all he knows it can and should be.

  To Vicki Lame, the Brave, for wanting it and getting it, period, like the badass she is, and for more than words could ever do her justice. In fact, please edit these. I love and admire you like crazy.

  To David Curtis, for The Most Beautiful Cover of my Wildest Dreams.

  And, to the team at St. Martin’s Griffin, including Brandt, Peter, Jessica, Karen, Annie, and countless others I haven’t yet met, who I know, as I type, are working tirelessly to get this story into the hands of readers because they believe it is worthy and important.

  Lastly, of course, to my family, and, especially, David, Sam, and Holden, who always inspire me to be better, and to do better, and to make you all proud; and to my sister, Paige, and all the others who live in New York City who carried on with their day-to-day living in those early, terrifying, smoke-and-tear-filled days after we were hit.

  If I have missed someone important, please know you have my undying thanks, and that it is not because your input didn’t matter vastly and completely, but rather because neither my memory nor organizational skills have weathered how very long it took to write and revise this book, and get it to publication.

  May you always be tethered.

  Also by Gae Polisner

  The Summer of Letting Go

  The Pull of Gravity

  About the Author

  GAE POLISNER is the award-winning author of The Summer of Letting Go (Nerdy Book Club Best YA, Teen Ink Editor’s Choice) and The Pull of Gravity (Bank Street Best, Pennsylvania School Librarians Association Top Forty, Nerdy Book Club Best YA). She cohosts Teachers Write!, a virtual writer’s camp for teachers and educators. An avid distance swimmer, when not writing, Gae can be found in a pool, or better yet, in the open waters of Long Island, where she lives with her family and a suspiciously fictional-looking small dog she swore she’d never own. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

 
Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  I

  Tuesday Morning, 9.11.01

  II

  Tuesday, Late Afternoon Into Evening, 9.11.01

  Late Tuesday Night Into Early Wednesday Morning, 9.12.01

  III

  Wednesday Morning, 9.12.01

  IV

  Wednesday, Late Afternoon into Evening, 9.12.01

  Thursday Morning, 9.13.01

  V

  Early Friday, 9.14.01

  VI

  Friday Evening, 9.14.01

  VII

  VIII

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Gae Polisner

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE MEMORY OF THINGS. Copyright © 2016 by Gae Polisner. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover design by David Curtis

  Cover illustrations © Shutterstock

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-09552-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-09553-4 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781250095534

  Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: September 2016