by Wendy Mills
I’m trembling, and I tug on my ponytail as I inch closer to Ms. Jonna. I want to have the courage of those people in the towers, people as ordinary as me who found an incredible well of strength inside themselves that day. What would happen if I said all the words that are hiding inside me, so many that it feels like my chest might burst with them? What if I told Adam that I thought what Nick, Hailey, Dave, and I did was wrong? What if I told my dad that the things he says about Muslims are terrible and hateful and I wish he would stop?
I am standing in front of Ms. Jonna, and her face is kind and smiling. The smile fades as she looks at me.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
I stare at her without speaking. Up close, she has lines at the corners of her eyes, and silver threads running like tinsel through her hair.
“Do you need to sit down?” she asks. Around us people are picking up bags, calling good-byes.
“My brother was in the towers,” I say, and it feels like something comes unblocked in my throat.
Ms. Jonna takes my arm and draws me away from the podium to a table, and we sit.
“Did he die?” she asks quietly.
I nod, and feel my eyes burn like they know they should be crying, but no tears come. I’ve never cried for Travis. How can I cry when I don’t even remember knowing him?
“No one knows what he was doing there that day. He shouldn’t have been there. He shouldn’t have died!” I’m talking too fast, but now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to stop.
“Honey, none of those people should have died,” she says, and her voice is full of sympathy. “I knew several people who didn’t make it out, and I ask myself every day why them and not me. I felt guilty for a long time. What happened taught me that life is unpredictable; I’ve considered every day since a gift.”
She puts her arms around me and gives me a hug, and I lean my cheek against her shoulder for a moment.
“If you need anything, let me know,” she says, patting my back.
“I want to find out what happened to my brother,” I say. “His name was Travis McLaurin, he was eighteen, with dark blond hair and greenish eyes. If you ever hear anything about him, could you let me know?”
“Give me your e-mail address, and I’ll ask around,” she says. “I know it’s frustrating not knowing what happened to him, but I need to warn you that most people never found out what happened to their loved ones in those final minutes.”
“Thank you,” I say, and scribble my e-mail address on a piece of paper.
She squeezes my shoulder, and I get up. I almost run into Adam, who is standing directly behind me. He looks at me, his eyes dark and shadowed, and I know that he heard.
I put my head down and go for the door.
As I bike toward home, I slow near Teeny’s house, seeing Emi’s car in her driveway. I wonder what would happen if I went up to the door and knocked. Would Teeny say, “Yeah, no, loser, climb back into your hole” and slam the door in my face? I’d seen my friends’ faces when I went back to school. I wasn’t the person they thought I was.
My phone dings, and I see that I have a message from Deka.
Hank says look in his closet, the Tupperware container with blue lid in the back.
Dad has been different in the weeks since Mom left, and he exploded at me for asking what Travis was doing in the towers. While Mom has launched us into a flurry of girl-outings and church services that have left both of us bewildered and exhausted, Dad has gotten quieter and quieter.
But since that night I’ve caught him looking at me a couple of times, a strange expression on his face. He’s stopped watching the news, and now watches fishing shows, or ESPN, and while he still yells at the TV, it’s because someone missed a fish or dropped a ball.
He hasn’t slept in the room that he used to share with my mother.
He’s sitting at the counter doing some paperwork, a pair of glasses perched on the end of his nose. He hates those glasses, hates that he can’t see the way he used to.
“Where were you?” he asks when he sees me.
I hesitate, surprised by the question. I can’t remember the last time he asked where I was.
“Community service,” I say, which is partially true, though I didn’t have to go tonight.
“How are they treating you? Okay?”
“Okay,” I say. “Everybody’s been nice, actually.”
He stares at me a long moment, as if there is more that he wants to say, but then just nods and looks back down at his papers.
Conversation with Dad officially over, but at least it didn’t end with him screaming.
I hurry past him and throw my bag in my room, and then continue down the hall to Hank’s old room. Mom turned it into an office, and it’s full of bookcases and a desk covered with fourth-grade schoolbooks and old tests. I head for the closet, which is jammed full of stuff Hank left when he went away and never came back.
Underneath his ice hockey equipment, I see the clear Tupperware container with a blue top, like the one Mom used to put cupcakes in to send with me to school on my birthday. I pull it out and set it on her desk. I glance guiltily at the closed door, half expecting to see Dad there, and then dig my fingers underneath the plastic lid. It comes loose with a pop. The plastic is old and fragile, and a piece of it breaks off in my fingers.
Inside is an answering machine.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Alia
The dark is so heavy and thick that I feel it weighing on me as I sink to the floor. I slide back against the wall, feeling the metal of the railing against my head, and the cool smoothness of the wall through the back of my shirt. Somehow I’m convinced that Travis has disappeared and it’s just me in all this blackness. It feels hard to pull air into my lungs, and I start breathing in short, quick gasps.
“Travis?” I ask, panting.
“Yeah, don’t move.”
I hear him rustling around, but I can’t seem to slow down my breathing. I’m getting light-headed.
“Alia? Just calm down, okay?” I hear his voice, but it seems like it’s coming from every direction out of the darkness.
Suddenly, there’s a scraping sound. Once, twice, and then I see a flare of light.
Travis holds up the lighter so I can see his face. The smoke lazes around the flame, muffling the brightness of the light. Just a few minutes ago the smoke was looping around the top of the car, but now it is circling down closer to us, like a hungry animal biting at the tender place at the back of my throat.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s get back to work on the door.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I say.
“That’s the plan,” he says grimly.
Travis’s face is eerily lit by the flame of the lighter as he pulls on the doors. This time, they slide open almost easily.
“What the hell?” Travis says. “The power going out must have unlocked it. There should be another door—”
He holds up the lighter so we can peer through the doors at what’s beyond.
A white, blank wall.
“We’re stuck between floors,” Travis says bleakly. Then he curses, and the lighter goes out.
“Man! It’s burning my fingers.” His voice is muffled by the press of darkness.
“Let me have it. Let me have it!” I reach over toward him, patting with my hands until I find his stomach. He tenses, and I jerk my hands away, thankful that he can’t see my burning cheeks.
“Here.” He reaches out until he finds my hands, and clasps them between his own, dropping the lighter into my palm.
It’s hot to the touch, and it takes me a try or two to get it lit.
“Now what?” I ask, eyeing the white wall revealed by the open elevator doors.
Travis suddenly reaches back and punches it. A small dent appears, and white powder poofs out.
“Ouch!” He holds his knuckles. “It’s drywall.” He coughs. The smoke is getting thicker, and it’s harder to breathe.
T
ravis sits on the floor, ducking his head away from the smoke filling the top of the elevator, and uses his knife to cut a square in the drywall. When he pries it out with his fingers, there’s another sheet behind the first.
Cursing, Travis starts punching it, but it’s awkward from a sitting position. He stands and starts kicking, but immediately begins choking from the smoke.
I look over at my lunch bag and crawl toward it. I grab the Coke, unscrew the top, and pour some of the liquid on a napkin. I hand it up to Travis.
“Try breathing through this.”
Without speaking, he takes the napkin and presses it to his nose and mouth. He goes back to kicking at the wall, and big holes appear. He drops to the ground again, and uses the knife to pry out another piece.
Still another layer of drywall.
“Dammit!” Travis cries.
I take the napkin from him and wet it again, and he presses it to his face as he stands up and starts kicking. He’s angry, furious, and the piece of drywall disintegrates under his flying feet.
“Okay, okay!” I cry. “Stop!”
He collapses to the floor, coughing. I pick up the knife from the floor and start cutting through the remaining wall, awkward with the lighter in my left hand.
“Oh, no,” I moan when I’ve removed the last piece.
Because behind it is a layer of white tiles.
Travis is still coughing, curled up on the floor. I pick up the soda and douse the front of my shirt. Taking a deep breath, my head close to the floor, I stand up and pull my shirt over my mouth and nose, feeling the stickiness of the soda on my lips. I begin kicking at the tile, crying out as my toes slam into the wall.
I hear a cracking noise, and suddenly there’s a flash of faint light and a shatter of falling tile. I drop down to the floor, gasping for breath, and push my face close to the hole.
“It’s a bathroom,” I gasp. Except for the dimness of the emergency lights, everything looks so normal: clean tile, sinks, toilets. I half expect someone to be washing their hands or fixing their panty hose.
But there’s nobody there. I can still hear alarms going off, quieter here in the open.
I withdraw back into the dark, smoky elevator.
“Get up,” I tell Travis. “You can’t give up—we’re almost there.”
I push my face to the hole and take several deep breaths before standing up and kicking again. For a moment, I am in Lia’s world, and I can see the scene:
Girl in charcoal gray shadows, the white glow of her scarf the only contrast, her foot in the process of hitting the wall as large chunks of tile fly into the bathroom beyond and explode onto the floor.
I redouble my efforts, because I can do this, I have to do this, and suddenly Travis is yelling hoarsely from where he still lies on the floor.
“Alia! That’s it. That’s enough!”
I’d been in a sort of frenzy, and it takes me a moment to understand what he’s saying. I drop to the floor.
“Go,” Travis says. “Go, go, go!”
I squirm through the ragged hole, barely noticing as broken tiles scrape my shoulders and hips before I drop onto the white tile floor.
A moment later, Travis follows me.
He’s covered with white dust from head to toe, and for some reason I laugh.
“You should see yourself,” I say.
“Right back atchoo,” he retorts and smiles. “That’s what my brother Hank used to say when he was little. I’d tease him, and he’d say, ‘Right back atchoo.’”
“How old is he now?” I ask.
“Sixteen. And I have a baby sister. Jesse. She’s a pain, but, man, she loves her some Travis.”
I smile at the big-brotherly combination of affection and exasperation in his voice.
“Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath. “What now?”
“Let’s go find out what the hell is going on.”
“I need to call my parents,” I say. “They must be worried about me.”
We turn toward the door, but it suddenly occurs to me that my parents have no idea I’m here.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jesse
I stare at the answering machine, feeling a deep pit of awful in my stomach. I get up and go back into the closet, searching for another Tupperware container, but there isn’t one. I’m not sure what I was expecting from Hank, but it wasn’t this.
Hank is so much older than me that he always seemed more like an uncle than a brother. He went away to college when I was just four, choosing a college halfway across the country instead of the one right here in town. Mainly I remember him coming to visit, though I have a few memories from before he left. He gave me a pickle, told me it was a cookie, and I believed him. He used to let me ride on his shoulders, and we would gallop around the apartment, him yelling “duck!” every time we approached a doorway. The last time I saw him, he gave me an awkward hug and said in my ear, “Don’t let them get you down, Jess, okay?”
I will always be his baby sister, and he’s trying to help me in his own way.
I unplug Mom’s printer and plug the answering machine into the wall. When I turn around, I see that there is a red light blinking.
A message.
All of a sudden, I can’t breathe.
Do I want to listen to this? Yes and no ricochet off each other in my head.
I press the Play button, and hear a guy’s voice, scared, but trying not to sound like it.
“Hello? … there? I’m … World Trade Center. Hello? Anyone there?”
I realize with a cold, knifing certainty that this is my brother Travis’s voice. I don’t remember having heard it before, but who else could it be?
“Hello?”
“Listen … bad. I don’t know …” There’s a lot of static, and Travis’s voice is jumbled and unclear. Then, “… I … you, Mom, and Hank and Jesse and, and … Dad, I know you … okay?”
I shiver as he says my name. I might not remember him, but to Travis I was a cute and cuddly toddler he had already learned to love.
There’s a long pause, and then I hear a girl’s voice in the background, crying as she speaks.
“Tell them … mother! Tell … Ayah … find him … love … so much! Tell …”
Travis’s voice again, “That’s … with me,” and the message ends.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alia
As soon as we push through the doors into the hallway, we can smell smoke again. The hallway is empty, and a few ceiling tiles lie on the floor. I can see daylight out a window, and it seems so strange that the sky would still be blue, that the sun is still shining, that the world outside is rolling along like it always does.
“Where is everybody?”
The buildings are usually filled with people, coursing and humming through the corridors and lobbies and elevators. I’ve listened to summer concerts on the plaza, ice-skated in the winter, visited my father in his offices numerous times, and there are always people.
“Let’s see if we can find someone.” Travis sets off purposefully down the hall.
“We need to find a phone,” I say, hurrying to keep up with him.
We run down the hall, jumping over some debris on the floor, and stop in front of the doors to the first offices we find. Even though emergency strobe lights are pulsing and alarms are going off, even though we know something is wrong, it still feels weird to just bust into the office.
Travis puts his hand on the door handle. I guess we are both half expecting to find people behind the door, working away at their desks, and we will back out with apologetic smiles, whispering, “Sorry, our mistake.” Actually, I close my eyes for a moment, praying that’s what we’ll find. Please God, if it is your will, make everything go back to the way it was this morning. How could everything go wrong so quickly?
“There’s so many people here that they gave the buildings their own ZIP code,” Travis says, and I know he’s wondering like I am where all the people are.
He take
s a deep breath, and opens the door.
I know even before I peek over his shoulder that the office is empty. It’s obvious people left in a hurry. Coffee still steams on a desk, a chair is knocked over, and a drawer is open, full of women’s shoes, like someone hurriedly switched shoes right before leaving.
“There’s a phone!” I run to the phone on the desk nearest to us.
“We should call the OCC,” Travis says as I pick up the phone. “They’ll know what’s going on.”
I don’t answer, because I have every intention of calling my father and mother. It doesn’t matter either way, because all I hear is a fast busy signal. I jiggle the receiver a couple of times, but it’s the same thing.
“Everybody must be calling out,” Travis says, after taking the phone from me and listening for himself. “I don’t know what’s going on, but it must be bad.”
I nod, because I know he’s right. Nothing less than a full-scale emergency would drive everyone out like this.
“Gramps said during the ’93 bombing, there were some people who didn’t evacuate,” Travis says. “We’d probably find people if we kept looking, but I don’t think we should take the time. Let’s get out first, and then we can worry later about what’s going on.”
“Okay.” I swallow hard. I’d hoped we could find some people to tell us it was all okay, that we were panicking for nothing.
Travis is heading for the door when he stops, his hands in his pockets, like he’s searching for something.
“What are you doing?” I ask, wanting to go, to get out, right now.
“No,” he says, his face tight. “No, no, no.” He’s patting his pockets more frantically now.
“What?”
“I’ve got to go back,” he says.
“Go back where?”
“The elevator,” he says, and takes off running back the way we came.
I run after him. “Are you crazy? You can’t go back into the elevator!”
But he doesn’t seem to hear me.
I put on a burst of speed, thankful for my mornings spent running, because I’m determined not to get left behind.
