by Wendy Mills
You really don’t think about your parents loving each other. Those big displays of love like you see in the movies are hidden, maybe behind closed doors, or maybe just so buried under the minutia of life that they even forget. But in the beginning, did they all start with the same big, fiery explosion of feeling I have for Adam?
I squeeze the small USB flash drive I hold in my hand and take a deep breath.
I need to do this. For them, for me, for all of us.
“Mom,” I say. “I have something to tell you.”
I tell her all of it, why Travis was in the towers, about Alia, and what I’ve been able to piece together about what they were doing in those desperate minutes. When I’m done, all that is left is the ending. She’s crying, and I’m shaking, because it’s such a relief to tell her, but at the same time her grief is tearing me apart.
I think about how busy she always stays. It reminds me of that cartoon character that starts running so fast he’s this big blur and you just know he’s worried about stopping and all his pieces just flying apart. That’s the way she has been for fifteen years, and it breaks my heart.
“There’s one more thing,” I say, and the words feel like glass in my mouth because I don’t want to do this, but I have to. This is too big for me to carry by myself.
I go to the spindly desk where she keeps her laptop and carry it over to the coffee table. She watches without speaking as I turn it on and slip in the USB drive.
“Emi cleaned it up so we can hear the whole message. Listen,” I say, and click Play.
Travis’s voice comes out of the speakers.
“Hello? Is anyone there? I’m inside the World Trade Center.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Alia
“Hello? Is anyone there? I’m inside the World Trade Center.”
Travis closes his eyes in disappointment, and I know immediately that he’s gotten an answering machine.
“Hello? Anyone there? Hello?”
He lowers his voice and turns away from me.
“Listen, it’s bad. I don’t know if we’re going to make it out. I wanted to tell you … I wanted to tell all of you I love you. I love you, Mom, and Hank and Jesse and … Dad, I know you hate me, but I love you too, okay?”
In a horrible instant I understand what Travis has been hiding from me, and what I must have known too. He’s not sure we’re getting out of here.
We may not get out of here.
I clutch my stomach and rock back and forth, my mouth open, but no sound comes out.
And then it does.
“Tell them to call my mother!” I cry, an explosion of pain and sound. “Tell them that Ayah is here, and I’m trying to find him, and that I love her and Ayah so much! Tell her that!”
“That’s Alia with me.” Travis puts his arm around me as he continues to talk into the phone. “Hello? Hello?”
He curses and pulls the phone away from his ear.
“Come on,” he says. “We’re going. Now.”
I open my mouth to argue, to tell him that I need to find Ayah, but suddenly we hear a horrifying rumbling sound like a thousand trains approaching the station and the entire building begins to tremble.
Chapter Fifty
Jesse
The recording ends. My mother started to cry as soon as she heard Travis’s voice, tears slipping down her cheeks as she grips the side of the laptop with both hands, as if that would bring her dead son closer.
“I never knew what he said,” she whispers. “I never knew exactly what his last words to us were.”
She bows her head and weeps for the son she will never see again. And suddenly, I am crying too, for my mom, for Travis, for Alia. For myself. I wonder what kind of big brother Travis would have been. I wonder what he would have become.
I wonder what the world would be like if 9/11 never happened.
My mother and I rock in each other’s arms for a long, long time.
The next morning, when Adam picks me up, she hugs me hard at the door.
“Jesse, I love you,” she says. “Remember that. Always remember that.”
“Yeah, but Dad doesn’t,” I say bitterly. We stayed up almost all night talking, and I’ve told her about Adam, and the fight with Dad.
“You know that’s not true.” She gives me a gentle shake. “It’s just easier for him to get angry than to deal with the pain.”
“Then he’s going to die a lonely old man,” I say. “It’s not my job to put you two back together, okay? That was too much for me to take on. You guys have to do it yourselves.”
Three hours later, Adam and I enter the light-filled entrance atrium of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Two rusted steel tridents that used to be part of the outside wall of the north tower stand tall against the glass.
I’m feeling a sense of urgency that is out of proportion to the solemnity of the museum, and Adam follows me without complaint as I head toward the stairs instead of taking the slow escalator filled with chattering people. As we start down the long flight of steps, I see a photograph of the Twin Towers standing tall and proud, and something turns painfully in my stomach.
Head down, I hurry down the stairs, from daylight into darkness.
The exhibit begins with a series of overlapping panels showing how people reacted to the news of planes run amok in the skies: people staring upward, people crying, pointing, their expressions scared, angry, confused. So many emotions soaking a wick that shines bright and horrifying even all these years later.
We follow the ramps deeper into the basement of the old towers, listening to the ghostly voices jumbled together in fear and confusion as the tragedy unfolds, their faces silent and horror-stricken.
We continue to an overlook of a cavernous hall. Adam and I stop to read the display in front of us. The massive wall to our left is a surviving retaining wall from the original World Trade Center, which held back the Hudson River as the towers fell. In the middle of the hall stands a tall, rusting column covered with painted numbers and letters, mementos and posters.
“It’s the last column they removed from the original Twin Towers site,” Adam says.
I nod, thinking about how hard it must have been to let that final piece go so they could build something new.
We continue down the ramp, going deeper. I start to breathe too fast, because while I can hang onto the side of a cliff with nothing but air and sky around me, I feel crushed under the weight of all this concrete and steel.
Missing persons posters are projected in light onto a dark wall, gradually fading in and out. Thousands of these posters plastered Lower Manhattan after the towers went down. In the confusion of the first couple of days, people held out hope that their missing loved ones were walking the street dazed, or had been taken to a hospital. But the hospitals were mostly empty, and the people on the posters were dead. So few of the missing were ever found alive. As the days passed, the posters fluttered on walls, lampposts, and subway entrances, a cry of desperate yearning and misplaced hope.
I search for one with Alia’s name on it, but there isn’t one.
Adam grabs my hand and we continue on, but I’m thinking: Where is the poster Anne e-mailed me about?
At the bottom of the ramp, we reach the Survivors’ Stairs, part of one of the sprawling World Trade Center’s many staircases. Hundreds of people had used these stairs as an escape route, and it had somehow survived the towers falling.
“Do you think we’re going to find the poster?” I ask Adam as we stand at the top of the stairs. “Do you think we’ll ever know what happened to them?”
Chapter Fifty-One
Alia
The screeching, tearing, thundering noise gets louder, and as we watch, the other tower slowly begins to drop, the floors at the top pancaking onto the ones below them, the top of the building disappearing into smoke. Then, all of a sudden, the entire building just falls, rushing past our window with a horrendous roar.
The building trembles, and a great cloud expl
odes toward us, dark and boiling.
“Get down,” Travis yells. “Get down!”
He pushes me to the floor and draws my face into his chest as the smoke engulfs us. Every breath hurts, and I close my eyes and pray as hard as I ever have in my life.
The other tower fell, it fell straight down like a waterfall of concrete and steel, and, oh God, please help me, because is this one going to fall too?
Travis tightens his arms around me, shielding me as parts of the ceiling fall. It doesn’t feel like it will ever end, and I hold on to him with all my strength.
Eventually the terrible roaring, clanking noises subside, and Travis unwinds his arms. I sit up, coughing and spitting. The smoke has begun to clear, and I can make out the corner of the desk, and then the chair, and then bookcases farther away as the smoke continues to spiral out the window. I rub my eyes with the palms of my hands, and Travis coughs, his forehead on his knees.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I keep saying, but I’m not sure if I’m saying it out loud or if it’s in my head. I feel numb, and somehow unattached from myself, as if my mind has floated free like a balloon.
The smoke above us swirls slowly out the broken windows. We are hundreds of feet in the air, and as much as I wish I could just fly out the window, I’m not Lia, I’m not a superhero, and the only way I’m going to survive is to get up and walk down hundreds of steps.
“Gramps always used to say that they would never fall,” Travis says, but he’s not really talking to me.
He starts crawling across the floor, pulling me with him. He is leaving tracks of blood on the floor, and when I glance down at my hands, I see my palms are speckled with glass. I don’t feel any pain.
“We need to get out,” Travis says. “If the other tower fell, this one could too.”
I crawl faster, trying to keep my head below the smoke, but it’s still so thick that I have to stop every couple of seconds to cough. Travis reaches up to a desk and grabs a vase. He yanks out the flowers and, before I can protest, puts a hand to my hijab.
“What—? No!” I grab the ends of the scarf and clutch it to my head.
“You need to use it to wrap around your face so you can breathe,” he says hoarsely.
I shake my head back and forth, tears spilling down my cheeks.
It seems like forever ago that I put it on, even though it was only a few hours ago. I’d give anything to go back to earlier this morning before planes started crashing into towers, and entire buildings dropped out of the sky.
Without speaking, Travis lets go of the scarf and dumps the water at the bottom of the vase over the front of my shirt.
“Pull it up over your face, then,” he says, his voice husky with smoke. “Come on. We’re going to get out of here alive, okay? We’re going to make it.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Jesse
We go down the modern-day stairs beside the chipped and crumbled Survivors’ Stairs. What did it look like before? I imagine Travis and Alia on a similar staircase, deep within the World Trade Center, their hands sliding down the railing as they flee the smoke and the flames.
At the bottom, we wander through a vast hall, looking at the “impact steel,” bent unimaginably when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower. In just a little over an hour and a half it would all be over. I wonder what Travis and Alia were thinking. I wonder what they thought had happened. Because how could you ever imagine the truth?
No one could.
An elevator motor, as big as a small car, sits near a crumpled fire truck.
“It’s amazing anything at all survived,” Adam says, his voice quiet.
Inside the memorial exhibition, the sight of the thousands of faces on the wall, the faces of people who died on this very spot, freezes me.
“I can’t do this,” I say in a small voice.
I know Travis’s picture is probably there. Is it the same picture that has shown up in every article since he died? But that’s not the Travis I’m searching for, the eighteen-year-old boy with a cocky grin, an entire lifetime stretching before him. I’m looking for the Travis who was here that day, desperate and scared, whose remaining lifetime was measured in minutes.
I’m looking for a girl named Alia.
Outside the exhibit, I try calling Anne Jonna again, but get the same recording that she would be out of town until Monday. I wish I’d thought to ask her earlier where she saw the missing persons poster of Alia in this huge, echoing museum, but it’s too late now.
“Come on,” Adam says, tugging me over a small bridge toward the glass doors of the historical exhibit.
We wind through the exhibits, following a timeline outlining the terrible events of that day, passing artifacts found in the rubble: baseball tickets, shoes, wallets, eyeglasses, an old-fashioned Rolodex; a wheel of a plane; an in-flight magazine from one of the doomed flights. We hear voices of people from answering machines leaving their last messages, and pass a secluded room with photos of people jumping or falling from the top floors of the buildings. We pause in front of a fireman’s hat, battered but still recognizable. There is a pay phone from the observation deck of the south tower, a bike rack with bikes like faithful steeds still waiting for their owners to come back.
Inside a glass case is part of a store, shirts hanging on racks, a sign reading $29.99. It looks like any other store display, except everything is covered in a thick layer of dust and the people who worked here, shopped here, left and never returned.
So many things, and while they are just things, they belonged to people who had lived and breathed and loved. They are tangible symbols of the innocent people who were caught up in a day of horror and fear. How twisted is the world when your shoe could become part of a museum exhibit?
I go faster and faster, searching for some trace of Alia, of Travis.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Alia
I crawl after Travis.
It’s hard to see where we’re going, and as we get farther away from the window, it gets harder to breathe. We can hear the fire crackling now, and see a dull orange glow as we make our way slowly toward the stairwell door. My hands slip and slide across cards from a broken Rolodex, and a picture taken at Disney World—of a girl probably eight years old and smiling happily—is smoldering.
“I forgot her purse,” Travis says and stops, shaking his head and coughing.
“You can’t go back,” I say, and a moment later he keeps crawling.
Please God, please get me out of this, I say over and over in my head.
As we get closer to the reception desk, part of the ceiling and wall right in front of us crashes to the floor.
“Run!” Travis says, leaping to his feet and grabbing my hand.
We run to the stairwell door, and when Travis slams the door open, I see that the entire stairwell is covered with dust. Inches of it cake the floor and walls, and float lazily in the air.
Travis starts down the stairs, and I follow.
I want to go up, to find Ayah, but I understand now that he would want me to go down.
To get out.
To stay alive.
There’s no one in the stairwells as we race down the stairs, sometimes skipping three or four steps at a time. Our feet slip and slide in the dust, and the constant turning on the landings makes me dizzy. My hand is sliding down the railing so fast that my palm burns. We are both coughing, but Travis is almost choking, and I realize that while I have my shirt pulled up around my mouth, Travis’s grandfather’s shirt is too small for him, and he’s having trouble keeping it over his mouth.
“Wait,” I say. “Wait.”
Travis stops in a landing beside an abandoned coil of fire hose and two fire extinguishers. I wonder if we are all alone in the exhausted, dying tower.
I realize Travis is crying.
“I lost them,” he says.
“What?”
“I lost his ashes.” He coughs. “They must have fallen out of my pocket.”
Tears streak the dark ashes on his cheeks, and ash and dust crowd the air. All of it is becoming ashes now.
Travis coughs again, and I unwind the scarf from around my head. For a moment, my hands are tangled in the ends of it and I pull it to my face, because even through the smoke I can smell my mother’s citrus scent on it, and the faint scent of beeswax that always reminds me of Nenek.
“Take it,” I say, offering it to Travis.
His eyelashes are caked with dust and his eyes are red, and at first he doesn’t make a move to take it.
“You need it,” I tell him, and wind it gently around his neck and mouth, my fingers brushing his cheek, and he closes his eyes briefly.
I don’t need the scarf to be strong, to be Lia. Today, despite all the fear and chaos, I was Lia. She’s always been there inside me. Faith and strength aren’t something you wear like some sort of costume; they come from inside you.
“Thank you,” he says, his voice cracking.
“You’re welcome.”
I turn and lead the way down.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Jesse
If we hadn’t been searching for it, we never would have noticed it.
My breath catches, and Adam pulls me close, wrapping his arm around my shoulders.
MISSING
ALIA SUSANTO
There’s a black-and-white picture of a young, laughing girl in a head scarf, trees and brownstones behind her. How did her parents pick which picture to use? How do you make that choice?
She’s wearing the scarf, the one found with Travis.
I’m trying not to cry, and Adam pulls me tight against him.
I feel like I’m a leaf fluttering in the wind, shuddering and falling down, down, down. I’m crying in earnest now, because it is all so senseless. All those people died, people who got up in the morning and went to work, laughed and cried, loved and dreamed. All of them gone, and for what? My brother was a kid who liked to play music with his friends. And Alia. She looks my age, small and feisty with a happy smile.
