by Wendy Mills
How did they deserve to die?
Chapter Fifty-Five
Alia
Everything is burning. Small fires race across the tops of doorways, and it’s so hot that I feel like I’m in an oven. We’ve slowed down because the stairs are so dark and slippery with water and dust. If we break an ankle, we’ll never get out of here. But we’re getting close. We’re almost there.
Below us we can hear shouting—go, go, go!—and the pounding of running feet. Some people are still in here with us, and somehow that knowledge comforts me, because we’re not the only ones left.
Travis is behind me, and I look back over my shoulder and his face is focused, grim.
That’s when we hear the sound.
The sound of a thousand trains coming all at once.
“No!” Because I know what it is; I heard the same sound right before the other tower fell.
I start running, Travis right behind me, but now I can hear a banging sound, like a gigantic metal ball bouncing down the stairwell above us. The entire building is shaking, concrete falling in chunks out of the walls.
Travis sprints past me to one of the stairwell doors and tries to open it as the entire building twists. He yanks on the door, and it suddenly flies open, slamming him against the wall. A gust of wind comes down the stairwell, a hurricane of dust and wind that sweeps up both of us and sends us flying down the stairs. We end up in a corner of the landing, and I hear a screeching sound, like a million banshees, and the winds gets stronger as the building comes rushing down at us.
I love you, Ayah.
Travis curses and shoves me into the corner, using his body to shield me.
I love you, Mama.
I can hear Travis praying.
I love you, I love you, I love—
Chapter Fifty-Six
Jesse
It’s the last weekend before my senior year starts. My friends and I have driven out to the lake and are lying out on towels, sneaking sips of wine coolers that Myra snagged from her parents’ fridge.
“Seniors rule,” Teeny says lazily, digging her toes in the water and accidentally flipping some at Myra, who yelps.
“When’s Hank coming in?” Emi asks me, her lips blue. She’s dressed in a sleek black Speedo, back from a marathon swim.
“Tonight,” I say, feeling a frisson of happiness. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen Hank in almost four years, and he’s bringing Deka and Joshua.
Things have changed in the couple of weeks since I returned from the museum. I was devastated when we got back, and Adam and I spent hours at our picnic table by the river as I talked and talked, trying to make sense of everything, trying to understand why.
But there’s no understanding why. It’s like trying to understand why lightning strikes where it does, or why mothers buckle their toddlers in their car seats and drive them into the ocean. There is no why. There is only incomprehension.
I’m not sure what my mom said to Dad, but they are talking again, and he’s even agreed to see Hank. Mom and I still live in the small apartment in Mary’s garage, and we’ve grown closer. She cried when I told her about finding Alia’s missing persons poster, and I realize that what had started as my quest had become hers too.
She says Dad wants to talk to me, but so far I’ve refused. I’m not ready.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready.
“Where’s Mr. Hottie? I thought you said he was coming,” Myra asks. She dropped her phone in the lake when we first got here, and we’ve been laughing at her all day because she’s so lost without it.
“He’ll be here,” I say, taking a pull from the wine cooler and handing it to Emi, who wrinkles up her nose but takes a drink anyway.
“I can’t believe you’re dating him,” Teeny says. “I mean, how can you have a normal conversation with him? I’d be like, ‘Dude, don’t move. Don’t talk. Just sit there so I can look at you.’”
I laugh. “We’re not exactly dating,” I say. “It’s complicated.”
It is complicated. Adam isn’t supposed to be dating, and though he’s told his parents that he has feelings for me, he is still struggling with his faith.
But he’s worth waiting for, and I’ll be patient while he figures out how to balance religion and love in this messy, mixed-up world.
“Your dad really is going to go to the 9/11 thing?” Emi asks curiously.
I shrug. “I guess so.”
Mom has evidently told him everything that I discovered about Travis, and something has changed in him. My mom keeps telling me he’s trying, and she thinks I should be trying too, but I tried for seventeen years. I’m done trying.
Although I’ve kept searching, I haven’t been able to find out anything else about what Travis and Alia were doing in those last minutes in the towers. I tried calling the number on Alia’s missing persons poster, but it is a pizza delivery store now. I’ve found no trace of Alia Susanto. Late at night, I wonder if Alia’s parents knew she was in the towers. There were thousands of remains that were never identified; they rest now in a repository inside the 9/11 Museum. Could Alia be among them?
I ache to think that when my mother gets up to talk about Travis at the fifteenth anniversary memorial, she will not know the exact shape and texture of my brother’s death. It’s not only the loss that burns but the open-endedness of it. How can we accept that we will simply never know the end of the story?
I see Adam walking across the sand, and I get up to meet him. He waves at my friends, who giggle, and we walk hand in hand along the shore, the pebbly sand crunching under our feet, the blue water gleaming beside us.
“Hey, you,” I say, and he twines his fingers tight around mine.
Summer is slowly sliding into fall, and the tips of a few trees are starting to glow gold. Everything changes, no matter how much you want it to stay the same.
“How was your first week?” I ask.
Adam started college last week, and it’s far enough away that he’s in the dorms but close enough that he can come back and visit every weekend.
“It’s lonely without you,” he says.
“What, you miss me or something up there at the big university? You better not be practicing your newfound kissing skills on anyone else,” I tease.
He laughs. “No, I think we need to practice more before I showcase my skills to the public.”
I grin. “You could take it on the road. I shouldn’t tell you, but you’re a seriously natural talent.”
He laughs again. “Of course I am.”
We walk in companionable silence, and I work on treasuring right here, right now, because that’s important.
“You going to talk to him?” he asks after a while.
“I’m not sure why you’re so gung-ho about me talking to my dad, since you’re the reason we’re not talking, and the last time we had any type of conversation, he called you a terrorist.”
He shrugs. “He’s still your dad. What’s between you and him has nothing to do with me.”
“But it does,” I say, though in some ways it’s not true. What’s going on with me and my father has been going on for as long as I can remember.
“The last time we fought, I was too scared to tell him about my feelings for you. It was like I denied you, and I’m afraid I’ll do it again. And that makes everything that’s between us mean nothing,” I say, not able to look at him.
“You know it’s not nothing,” he says, and pulls me closer so we are walking shoulder to shoulder.
“But what is it?”
“What I feel for you … that can’t be wrong,” he says after a moment. “Other than that I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either,” I say, “but we’ll figure it out.”
Mom has gone to pick up Hank and his family at the airport, so I know my dad will be alone.
When I come up the stairs, I feel myself tensing, because I’m listening for the TV, I’m listening for him yelling, and this is exactly how I don’t want to feel. T
his is why I have been avoiding him.
I almost turn around and leave, but as I stand on the stairs I realize that if I don’t do this, for the rest of my life I will wonder if I can be brave enough to do all the other things I want to do.
When I get upstairs, the apartment is dark and quiet. I think that I was wrong, that he’s not here, and my courage begins to fade.
“Dad?” I call, and my voice echoes.
“Jesse?” I hear movement in the back, and a moment later he comes out, freshly showered and shaved, a towel around his neck. He’s shaved off his beard, and he looks younger, more vulnerable.
I stand by the counter, and a lifetime of hurt and pain and unsaid words swirls between us.
I take a deep breath. “I’m tired of living my life scared that you’re going to stop loving me. I did things, and I regret them, but I was just too afraid to say the things I needed to say. I can’t live like that anymore, keeping everything locked up inside. I’m in love with Adam, and I really don’t know where that’s going to take me, but I’m your daughter and it shouldn’t matter. You should love me just the way I am.”
He stands there for a long moment.
“I do,” he says finally, and his voice cracks. He clears his throat. “I do love you, Jesse. I’m sorry that you ever doubted that.”
His eyes are glistening, and I realize that he’s crying, he’s crying for me, and this is how a waterfall thaws, one small drop at a time, until the whole thing tumbles to life again.
“I can’t live my life as small as possible anymore,” I say.
“I don’t want you to,” he says, and he scrubs his eyes with the end of the towel.
We stand on opposite sides of the room, and there’s not going to be an emotional reunion, me sobbing in my father’s arms, because that’s not who either one of us is, but I think, maybe, there’s hope.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Jesse
The reunion with my brother is rocky, but good. Hank isn’t ready to forgive Dad completely either, but we’re all trying, and in the end I suppose that’s all we can do. You can forgive, but it’s impossible to forget, and the trick is how to live with that.
The apartment over the shop has been filled with my nephew’s ringing laughter and the big, warm lightness of my mother’s smiles. My father has not said much, but he sits and watches his grandson with eyes that are happy and sad, and when Joshua climbed into his lap, he held him tight and pressed a scratchy kiss to his forehead.
Hank and his family are staying in my old room, and my mother and I go back to her apartment at night and make hot chocolate and watch her sappy reruns.
“I’m proud of you, Jesse,” she says a few days after Hank arrives.
“For what?” I ask, looking at her in surprise.
“For being you.”
She goes to bed, and I pull up a search engine and scroll through the hundreds of stories of people who were there the day the towers fell. So many different perspectives on the same day.
While Adam and I were in the museum, we saw a wall made up of 2,983 squares painted every shade of blue. It’s supposed to represent how people remember the color of the September sky the morning the towers fell. No shade is the same, but they make a perfect montage of color. Every person has a unique experience to add to that day, building a wall of memory that will never fall down.
I google “Alia Susanto 9/11” as I have many times over the past weeks, more out of habit than anything, because it’s hard to stop searching.
There’s something new at the top of the page, and I stare in disbelief before clicking on the link.
It’s a recent news article entitled “Muslim Graphic Novelist Tackles the Difficult Subject of 9/11 as 15th Anniversary Approaches.”
Beside the article is the cover of a comic book, a hellish vision of the towers burning as the second plane hits, and in the forefront is a girl in traditional Muslim garb. It appears that she is flying, and lightning bolts shoot from her fingertips.
On her head is a white scarf covered with swirling red and green flowers.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Jesse
Parking is hard to find in the Brooklyn neighborhood, but I eventually find a spot and walk up to the building with a bright green awning shading the front steps. It’s a cloudy September morning, and people are on their way to work and school, oblivious to me as I stand staring up at the building and wondering what I’m going to find inside.
I had texted Adam at school when I found Alia’s scarf on the cover of a comic book, and the name of the woman who wrote it.
Adam called his father, and by the next day his father had an address for me.
I ring the buzzer, and a woman’s voice answers and buzzes me up.
She wanted to see me, Adam’s father had said. She wanted to see me as soon as possible.
Upstairs the door opens before I get there.
A woman stands there, dark curly hair bouncing around her pretty face. She looks solemn, but when she sees me, she lights up.
“You look just like him,” she says, and pulls me in for a hug as if it’s the most natural thing in the whole world.
“I thought you were dead,” I say to Alia Peterson.
That’s why I couldn’t find her. The girl in the towers with my brother had become a woman with a different name and a different life.
I follow her into the high-ceilinged apartment, full of light and color and a bin of kids’ toys in the corner.
“This was my parents’ apartment, but they moved back to California to be near my nenek when she was dying.” She sits on the couch, wrapping her arms around her knees, and nods for me to sit. “John and I were married by then, and there was no question that we wanted it.”
“You weren’t easy to find,” I say.
“I’m so glad you did,” she says simply.
There’s a silence, but not uncomfortable, and I feel like she is drinking me whole with her wide, depthless eyes. After a moment she nods, and smiles.
“I’ve always thought of you as a baby. I don’t know why you never grew up in my head,” she says.
I reach into my purse and pull out the scarf, yellowed and faded, and hold it out to her.
She doesn’t take it, and then she does, bringing it to her face and closing her eyes. She sits for a long time with her eyes shut, and I wonder what she’s thinking about.
Finally she opens her eyes.
“Can you tell me about Travis?” I ask. “I want to know everything.”
She sits, and her gaze, while still on me, is not seeing me anymore.
“I’ll start at the beginning,” she says. “That’s where you always have to start to really understand.”
She leans her head back against the couch and begins.
“I wake that morning thinking about what to wear, the taste of candied dreams lingering even after I open my eyes …”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Alia
Travis is lying on top of me, and I pray with him as the wind whips at us and the banging sound gets louder, picking up speed.
“Nooooooo!” I scream as the wind tears me out of Travis’s arms.
The blast of air sweeps past all that was and never will be again. Gone is the endless view from the Windows on the World, and the 198 elevators that raced up and down like zippers. Gone are the people settling into a workday, the computers and Rolodexes, the pictures of smiling kids, wives, and husbands, the cardboard box prayer mats in the 106th-floor stairwell. Gone are the thousands upon thousands of pulse beats that made up the heart of the towers. All of it is being swept away in a few terrible seconds, wiped away in a rush of wind and a cascade of concrete and steel.
I reach out my hands toward Travis, and he lunges at me with both arms, but a cloud of dust and smoke comes rushing down the stairwell at us, and I’m flying through the air …
“That was the last time I saw him,” I say to Travis’s sister, with her wide blue eyes wet with tears. The a
ngle of the sun has changed while I’ve talked, and thick golden light full of swirling dust motes falls on the side of her face. I study her, trying to imprint her face in my mind so I can draw it later.
So young. She’s so young, but then, so was I. In a way, we were all so young when we woke up that September morning.
“I don’t think I could have done all that stuff you guys did,” Jesse says. “I would have run out as fast as I could.”
“You never know,” I say. “You never know until it happens.”
“So what happened then? How did you make it out? There weren’t a whole lot of people who survived inside when the towers fell. It must have been a miracle.”
“I used to get mad when people said that,” I say, and smile slightly at that long-ago Alia, self-righteous and hurting. “I had no idea how, or why, I made it out, and so many other people didn’t.”
People called it a miracle, but they never did again when I screamed that why weren’t there miracles for all of them? For all those people who died?
Why wasn’t there a miracle for Travis?
“When I woke up, the sky was the first thing I saw. I was coughing, and these waves of smoke kept billowing around me, but as I lay there, the smoke would clear for a moment and I could see the blue sky. I was on top of a smoking heap of rubble, and the tower around me was gone.” Despite everything that happened, that memory is the one I revisit the most often. The blue sky shining over all that destruction.
“Wait,” Jesse says. “How? How could you have survived?”
I shake my head, because only God knows how and why. There is no explanation. It took years before I could accept that simple fact.
“I don’t remember a lot about what happened after that. I remember bits and pieces, scrambling down a mountain of rubble, full of tall spikes of metal, and fire. I was limping because my knee hurt, every bit of me hurt. I—I don’t know how I got down from there. The next thing I remember, I was in a wasteland and nothing looked right. Smoke and dust were everywhere, and I waded through dust that came up almost to my knees, and I coughed up black stuff that tasted like death. I almost ran into a crumpled fire truck before I saw it. I reached a street, but I was so disoriented, I didn’t even know what street it was. I saw a few people, just ghosts that moved slow and dazed in the smoke.”
