by Wendy Mills
“I took them up ‘Three Pines,’” he says, naming a popular easy climb. “The one girl was good. She reminded me of you. The other two were hang-dogging the whole time. Pretty much useless.”
I remember when he took me climbing the first time. We went out on a cool morning when the Gunks smelled of wet earth, the cliffs draped in frothy pink and white blossoms, and lady’s slippers quietly bloomed in the dappled fall of sunlight. Dad walked me through the basics and then set me loose on the side of the mountain, his hands steady on the belay rope as he talked me through those first terrifying moments as my feet scrabbled for purchase. I was so excited, I was trembling, and when I got stuck halfway up, Dad got a friend to take the rope and free-climbed up next to me.
“Always look down when you get stuck,” he says, hanging on easily with one hand and his feet. “Figure out how to move your feet up first, and then stand up, don’t pull up. Girls don’t have as much upper body strength, but you don’t need it. You have all the power you need in your legs.”
I got through it, and when we stood together on the cliff top, hawks circling our heads, the sky so big and deep, I was untouchable.
“You’re not bad,” he said, and in Dad-speak that meant you did awesome. “Climbing isn’t about strength, it’s about balance and creativity; knowing what your body can do, and understanding what the rock is able to give.”
It’s probably lame to admit that the reason that I kept climbing at first was so Dad would look at me like that again. Later though, it was all for me.
Dad starts going through the pile of mail I brought up, using the pocketknife he always carries to slit open an envelope and pull out a bill.
Somehow the memory of us on the mountain gives me courage. “Dad, why was Travis in the towers? Do you know?”
He stops, the knife stuck in the middle of the envelope. My grandfather’s initials, HLM, are inlaid into the handle, and I focus my eyes on the letters shining in the sun playing peek-a-boo through the kitchen window.
“My father went to Vietnam and came back with a Purple Heart,” he says, and when I glance up, his eyes have turned as hard as granite. “That’s what kind of man your grandfather was. I try to live my life the same way. You do what you need to do, even if you don’t want to.
“What was your brother doing there that day? I have no idea. I know where he was supposed to be though. He was supposed to be at his grandfather’s memorial service, but he wasn’t man enough to be there.”
I stare at him speechless. It’s the most I’ve ever heard him say about my brother.
“Your mother wants to sit and chat about a boy who has been gone for fifteen years, and is never coming back. She says if I don’t go to this memorial they’re planning for him that she’ll stay gone. Well, fine. She has to do what she has to do, and so do I. There’s no point talking about it, do you understand? Nothing we say means a goddamn in the end. Nothing matters, do you hear me?”
Suddenly he is shouting, and I take a rapid step back.
“A group of jihad-loving maniacs took out your brother and three thousand other people and all the talking in the world isn’t going to change that!” He’s breathing so hard and his face is so red that I’m afraid he’s going to have a stroke.
I turn and flee for my room, hearing his rage echo like cannon blasts in my head even after I quietly shut my bedroom door.
Dad misses his shift at the shop again, and I fill in for him, trying not to feel funny that I’m in charge of two bubbly, giggling college students who spend more time on their phones than with the customers. I feel so much older than them. Thankfully, neither of them seems to know what I did, so I don’t have to field the furtive glances and meaningful pauses when I walk into the room.
It’s after seven by the time I get out. Even though I can drive by myself now, my birthday having passed mostly unnoticed in May, Dad has taken his truck, and Mom has her car at her new apartment. I go old-school and jump on my bike.
The darkening sky is full of neon tangerine clouds as I pedal down to the river and the cemetery. It’s been a while since I’ve been here, one 9/11 anniversary a few years back. I came by myself that day too, but Mom must have been there before me, because there was a fresh wreath on Travis’s grave.
I wonder if Dad ever comes.
I find my brother’s grave, and sit on the lush green grass beside his simple headstone.
TRAVIS HAROLD MCLAURIN
DECEMBER 28, 1982–SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
BELOVED SON AND BROTHER
I run my fingers over the cool stone.
What were you doing there, Travis?
A plane wings its way across the sky, and I stare up at it, wondering where it’s going, thinking about planes that were loaded with fuel as they began trips across the country, and instead turning all those thousands of gallons of jet fuel into bombs when they hit their targets.
I sit for a while as the air darkens, and then I get up and find my grandfather’s grave, which has a small “Veteran” medallion affixed to it.
IN MEMORY OF
HAROLD LAWRENCE MCLAURIN
JUNE 5, 1941–SEPTEMBER 6, 2001
ALWAYS BRAVE
I’d never really thought about how close together my brother and grandfather had died. One had lived sixty years, the other only eighteen, but they had died within five days of each other.
My father said Travis should have been at my grandfather’s memorial service.
Why wasn’t he?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alia
“I shouldn’t even be here. I’m supposed to be in school,” I say after a while, just to fill the awful silence.
The intercom has remained stubbornly silent. It makes me want to hit it.
“I’m not supposed to be here either,” Travis says in a muffled voice. “I should have just gone to his memorial service.” This last is almost inaudible, and I lean forward.
“Your grandfather’s memorial service? It’s today?”
He nods and looks at his watch, and reflexively, I do the same. It’s 8:58. “In about an hour.”
“But why are you here then?”
He shakes his head and looks away.
“I’m sorry to hear about your grandfather,” I say, when he doesn’t answer. “Were you close?”
“Yeah.” He fiddles with a button on his shirt and won’t meet my eyes.
“I’m sure he’s in heaven,” I say gently, trying to ease his obvious pain. “From what you’ve said, he sounded like a wonderful person.”
“My family goes to church every Sunday, and I thought I believed in God, but lately I’m not sure I can believe in a God who sits back and lets so many bad things happen to good people. I kind of envy people with all that faith; it would make things so much easier.”
I can’t imagine what it must be like to not have something to believe in. I remember lying in bed when I was younger, listening to my father softly reciting the Quran. I floated on the melodic chanting and fell asleep to the music of the words, feeling as if my very soul beat with them.
I don’t pray five times a day like I’m supposed to, but I pray as often as I can. That’s when God speaks to me in my heart, where there are no words, and I feel sorry for this boy that he can’t feel that for himself.
The smoke is getting thicker, a cloud lazily swirling around the overhead light.
“Are you sure you don’t have a phone?” I’d kill for a cell phone right now. A few kids in my school have their own, and I’d asked my parents for one, but they said it was too expensive, even though they both had one.
“I left it at home,” he says shortly. “I didn’t want anyone calling me.”
“Why?”
“I just didn’t, okay?” he says. “Just because we’re stuck in here together doesn’t mean I have to tell you every last thing about myself.”
I focus on the smoke, trying not to cry.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Travis says, and shakes his head. “It�
��s just a pretty bad day for me.”
“Sure, okay.” I don’t want to be mad at him. He’s the only person I have right now.
He jumps up again and starts pacing around the elevator. I watch him, worried, because I still can’t help but feel sudden motions are going to send us plummeting.
“Hey!” he yells suddenly, pounding on the elevator doors. “Can anyone hear me? We’re stuck in here! Hey!”
He yells like that for a while, and then stops and turns to me.
“I can’t stand the waiting. We’ve got to try to get out of here.”
“But how?” I ask. “How do we get out of here?”
“I don’t know.” He looks up at the smoke, which has gotten even thicker. He puts one foot on the railing and then pushes himself up so he can reach the ceiling.
“Push up, don’t pull,” he says, and I look at him with eyebrows raised. He smiles a little. “It’s a climbing thing my dad always says.”
“You climb?”
“Nah. Dad was never able to talk me or my brother into loving it the way he does. He’s got one more kid to try to brainwash—maybe it’ll work on her.”
He feels around the ceiling, holding his breath against the smoke, but it’s smooth metal panels, with no obvious way to remove them. He pounds on them with the heels of his hands.
“We need to get the doors open.” He climbs down and turns to the gleaming metal doors.
“How?”
“I have no clue!” he snaps. “Instead of asking how every five seconds, why don’t you try to come up with some ideas?”
“You don’t need to yell!” I yell. I grab my backpack and dump it onto the ground, looking for something that might help. My notepad spills out, and Travis picks it up.
“This yours?”
“Yes,” I say, trying to take the pad from him.
He flips forward to the last thing I drew and looks at it for a long moment and then back up at me.
My face is burning, because it’s a picture of him, the one I sketched quickly in the elevator after I saw him in the sky lobby the first time. The one with hearts trailing from his head as he stares at Lia.
He grins, a quick flash of smile, but all he says is “you’re good,” and hands me the pad back.
Completely humiliated, I take it, and then shake out the rest of my backpack junk: schoolbooks, folders, pens and pencils, my insulated lunch bag. I unzip that and look at the bottle of Coke and sandwich and a Tupperware container of my mother’s nasi gila, or “crazy rice.”
Travis watches me, then reaches into his pocket and comes out with a pocketknife. Something else comes out with the knife, a small paper bag, which he shoves back into his pocket quickly.
I stare at him curiously. What was that? But he turns his head away and toys with the knife, so I focus on that instead. “Why do you have a knife?”
He doesn’t answer, and I huddle back against the wall, realizing I don’t know this guy, and I’m stuck in here with him. And how did he get the knife past security anyway?
Travis ignores me as he unfolds the knife. I notice there are initials on the handle, and I lean forward so I can see them.
HLM.
No T for Travis.
It’s not his.
“Oh, I get it,” I say. “You stole it.” I feel disappointed, though I’m not sure why.
He makes a buzzing sound, his eyes on the knife. “Try again, Sherlock. It was my grandfather’s. He gave it to me when I turned sixteen.”
I shake my head, not sure I believe him. He inserts the knife between the crack of the doors, pries it open an inch, and then uses his fingers to pull. The muscles in his arms bulge and his face turns red as the doors slide open, one reluctant inch at a time.
“A little help here?” he says, his voice straining.
I jump up and grab the other side of the door and pull. I have no idea whether they are just heavy or if there is some sort of mechanism that is pressing them shut, but it’s hard. The doors open a couple of inches and then stop.
“Pull!” Travis gasps.
“I … can’t … pull … any harder!” I gasp back, wishing I had Lia’s superhuman strength, but I don’t, and have to let go.
“Find something to keep it open,” he says, his voice straining.
I look around, and then see my thick, fat American history book. I grab it and shove it between the doors, and Travis finally lets go. The doors shudder but stay open.
But just a few inches. We’d have to be a mouse, a hamster, a ridiculously small purse dog to get through them.
He collapses to the floor, and I sit beside him.
“Now what?” I ask, my voice small.
This time he doesn’t snap at me for asking unanswerable questions and instead just drops his forehead onto his arms.
I jump up and go to the control panel. I study it for a moment and then hit the intercom. “Hello? Is there anybody there? We’re stuck in the elevator! Do you hear me? We’re stuck in the elevator!” My voice trembles, and I start jabbing the intercom button over and over again.
There’s a distant boom! and the elevator starts swinging again, like the pendulum in one of those old-timey clocks my grandmother has in her house.
“What’s going on?” I look frantically at Travis. I may not know him, may not even like him very much, but he’s the only human being here.
The elevator rocks unsteadily, and dust and water trickle from the ceiling.
Abruptly, the lights go out. I stand still in shock. What did I do? My finger is still pressing the button, and I slowly release it, hoping for some reason that it will make the lights come back on.
It doesn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jesse
There’s a large crowd at the Peace Center when I get there on Saturday night in late June. It’s been a few weeks since my first awkward day here, and it’s gotten better, though some of the kids still whisper about me when I come for teen outreach on Thursday afternoons. Since I’m supposed to be here two days a week, I also come in on Tuesdays and help Yalda with whatever she needs help with. So far, I’ve stuffed backpacks of food for needy kids, drawn posters for an interfaith meeting, and helped arrange a blood drive.
I was doing inventory on a new shipment of Rab and Sherpa jackets at the climbing shop, so I’m late and all the chairs are taken. I find a place by the wall and lean against it.
I see Sabeen and Adam, and Sabeen smiles at me. Adam gives me a long look from under his eyelashes and then turns away without acknowledging me.
I swallow, and twirl my ponytail around my finger, around and around and around, until it pulls painfully against my scalp.
There’s a screech of amplifier noise, and Yalda, dressed in a long-sleeved tan dress, her hair covered with a white scarf, taps on the microphone. She clears her throat.
“Thank you, everyone, for coming out. The fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 is coming up in less than three months, and we have a very special guest tonight. Anne Jonna was in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and has a story that she’d like to share with us here at the Peace Center. With no more ado, I’d like to present: Anne Jonna.”
A thin, dark-haired woman steps up to the podium and adjusts the microphone as the crowd claps. She doesn’t say anything at first, just bows her head and closes her eyes, her lips moving in a silent prayer. Around me, others bow their heads as well.
After a moment, she looks up with a beautiful, luminous smile.
“Thank you so much for your warm welcome,” she says. “In September it will be fifteen years since the unthinkable happened: planes crashed into the Twin Towers and brought them tumbling down; a plane smashed into the Pentagon; and a group of brave passengers lost their lives in a silent Pennsylvania field. It is one of those rare days in history that is etched into our collective souls. That day could be defined as a day of fear and hate, but I saw something else. Inside the towers, I saw incredible acts of bravery from people of all walks of life. I saw peop
le just like you and me doing what they could to help others in a desperate situation. To me, the bravery and basic human kindness shown by ordinary citizens that day is a shining example of what it means to be human.”
She begins to describe her day in the tower, starting so innocently as she sat at her desk checking e-mails and eating yogurt, and then, bam, out of nowhere, everything changed. One plane hit, then another, and then the towers began to fall.
The towers were only half-full. A lot of people weren’t at work yet, and the horde of tourists hadn’t arrived to visit the observation deck on top of the south tower, or the restaurant on top of the north one. It could have been so much worse. Anne Jonna made it out, and so did approximately twelve thousand other people.
But my brother was not one of them.
I stand at the edge of the group that crowds around Ms. Jonna, and listen to people thank her for her story, and tell her where they were when the planes hit—standing at my kitchen counter drinking a cup of coffee, on a flight over California and we had to land, lying in bed cuddling my two-year-old daughter. I wonder why it’s so important that people recount their own story whenever the subject of 9/11 comes up. I want to yell, “What does it matter where you were? People were dying, my brother was dying, and you were home safe in bed!”
But Ms. Jonna listens patiently, and I realize that maybe everybody’s story is important, because 9/11 didn’t just happen to the people who died, it happened to the entire country. People were living their lives, doing everyday things, when suddenly the planes hit, and time ripped into two pages titled “Before 9/11” and “After.” With their clumsy stories, they are saying: “We all felt it. We remember where we were when the world changed.”
But what about those of us who could not remember that day? I’ve seen the footage, watched the big, clumsy planes crash into the towers like some sort of low-budget action film. Which is worse? To know that things used to be different, or to never have known that more innocent day at all?
