by Wendy Mills
It’s hard to explain to this girl who was barely alive when all this happened what my memories of that day are like. Some are rock hard and crystal clear, but some are ephemeral and slip out of my grasp every time I reach for them. The doctors said it was because I suffered a concussion, and they were so dismissive that I never told anyone the rest of it. That I felt someone beside me as I clambered through contorted metal beams and smoking rubble to get out. The sensation was so strong that I could almost feel a hand in mine, but when I looked no one was there.
“Later,” I continue, “I found myself walking with a crowd of people. I remember them being completely silent, but I’m not sure that I hadn’t just shut down at that point. It seemed like people were walking slowly and almost aimlessly, as if we were going someplace but no one knew where. People were lined up in long lines in front of pay phones, so desperate to reach across the horror to find someone they loved on the other side.
“The last thing I really remember is just standing and watching the ash fall like snow, and thinking it looked so pretty.”
I clear my throat and check my watch. John will be back soon, but I don’t want to rush this no matter how worn out I suddenly feel. Jesse has curled up on the couch, a forgotten soda in her hand, and I think for a moment how much she looks like Travis, something about the arch of her cheekbone, the way one corner of her mouth tilts ever so slightly upward.
“I woke up in the hospital with a concussion, three broken ribs, and a badly sprained knee. I had been unconscious for two days, and no one at the hospital knew who I was. My parents were frantic with worry. Thank God, my father had made it out, helping a coworker who had been injured when the first plane hit, but my parents didn’t know I was in the towers until the hospital called them. My parents thought I might have run away, and made a poster using a picture my friend had taken of me that morning.” I smile thinking of Kaitlin and Tanjia. “It was the only recent picture they had of me in the scarf. Everyone—everyone who knew I was at the World Trade Center died that day.”
Poor sweet Mr. Morowitz with his funny suits and big smile never made it out, nor did the coworkers who were helping him, and there is nothing in this world that can explain how I survived and he didn’t. Nothing at all.
“My parents asked the hospital to keep my identity a secret. By that time, the anger toward Muslims was growing and my parents were frightened. I was in a fog for a long time. I cried, and drew, and my parents let me grieve.
“I cried for a week straight when Travis’s picture and mini-obituary appeared in the New York Times’ ‘Portraits of Grief.’ I had known he was dead, of course I did, but seeing that made it more final than I could bear.
“I was so sad, but I was also angry at Travis’s dad. Your dad. I was so angry at everything and everybody. I didn’t realize it then, but when something terrible happens, all we have left is choice. You can fill that awful void inside you with anger, or you can fill it with love for the ones who remain beside you, with hope for the future.”
“But why were you mad at my dad?” Jesse asks. “Not that my dad doesn’t piss me off, don’t get me wrong, but why were you mad at him? It takes a superior level of jerkiness to piss off people who don’t even know you.” She grins and I smile back, my heart aching as I see another piece of Travis in her.
“It’s hard to explain now, but at the time I was upset that he had made Travis feel like a coward. That Travis died the way he did knowing his father felt like that about him. I called him, you know. One day about a month after it happened. I found the number, and I was literally shaking with rage when he answered. I think I said something like, ‘I know you think your son was a coward but I want to tell you what he did in the towers.’ I meant to tell him the whole story. For almost fifteen years I’ve been wanting to tell the story to someone who knew and loved Travis. But I was foggy on pain medication, and it all went wrong somehow. He was screaming, and I was screaming back, and then he hung up on me. I never called back.”
“Dad hears what he wants to hear,” Jesse says slowly. “He always has.”
Her old-young eyes are so full of pain that I have to look away. I think about Ayah, and feel so lucky to have him still in my life, and so thankful that I had a father like him when I was growing up.
“After that were the gray days. The city smelled like smoke and ashes; exhausted police walked the streets, and people carried flowers and left scribbled poetry on lampposts. I spent hours at the makeshift memorial at Union Square, holding candles as I stood shoulder to shoulder with thousands of other grieving people. I insisted on wearing a scarf, even though my mother was petrified every time I left the apartment. Bad things were happening to Muslims, but I was too caught up in my own grief to notice. In fact, all I felt was the unity and accord of my bewildered city. It became my city after that, even though when I moved here I didn’t want to stay.”
In those months, my eyes would trace the shape of the towers in the sky over and over again, my mind refusing to believe that they were gone, the absence of them so much bigger than they ever were in real life. I cried the night I first saw the ghostly tribute of light outlining where the towers used to stand, pillars of pure light reaching up into the sky and pushing back the darkness.
Time passed, dragging a trowel across my memories, leveling out the pain and horror, pulling radiant nuggets of grace to the surface: the people in the stairwell who were able to put aside their fear and make room for the injured, who offered a kind word when someone faltered, and helped a stranger. The determination of the firefighters and policemen as they charged up the stairs. It was meeting the eyes of a random person in the weeks after the towers fell, the phoenix of fierce solidarity that rose from the ashes of that day.
“The city and I began to heal,” I say, “though I still dropped into deep depressions sometimes, and the sound of a car backfiring or a door slamming could send me into a panic. I would get spectacularly angry for no reason, and sometimes I would catch a phantom whiff of burning jet fuel. My drawing got me past the worst of it. Seeing a therapist also helped, and she talked me through the incredible guilt I felt for simply surviving. How do you think about what clothes to wear, about school, or watch the sunlight glittering off the river, when so many people could no longer do those simple things? Eventually, though, things went back to some semblance of normality. I graduated, and I went to NYU to study art.”
“And your parents? You said they didn’t want you to be a comic book artist, and that’s exactly what you did,” Jesse says, gesturing at the poster-sized magazine covers of Lia on the walls, which John insists on hanging though I wish he wouldn’t.
I smile. “For a while, the important things became important. It was like we all hit an invisible reset button. My parents were so happy I was alive that I think I could have told them I wanted to be a—a rodeo clown, and they still would have been okay with my career choice.”
Jesse is silent for a long time, playing with her golden ponytail, and I sit quietly.
“Do you ever think about why?” she asks finally. “Why this all happened?”
I nod, because of course I have. At times it was the only thing I could think about.
“People do terrible things. People do beautiful things. It’s against the black backdrop of evil that the shining light of good shows the brightest. We can’t just focus on the darkness of the night, or we’ll miss out on the stars,” I say.
“I know you’re religious,” she says after a moment. “My … friend is pretty religious too, but sometimes I think that so many people die in the name of religion and I just don’t understand how we can keep believing in things that seem to tear us apart.”
I was here once, when I was her age. I remember what it felt like.
“We’re all going in the same direction,” I say gently. “It may not feel like it at times, but we all want the same things. We’re just on different paths.”
She nods, and the door opens, and John wheels in the stro
ller. He stops when he sees Jesse and raises his eyebrow at me.
I remember the first time I saw John, with his mess of curly blond hair and laughing brown eyes. It was right after I sold the first of my Lia stories, and he was sitting in the park throwing a Frisbee to his dog. I immediately began sketching him, and when he turned and smiled at me, I knew I’d found him.
In my happiest times, like when I held my baby daughter for the first time, I feel Travis there. He is there in the unfinished part of my childhood, in the cocky smile of a young teenage boy I see on the subway. He is there in the potential of my daughter who would not be here today if it weren’t for a shaggy-haired boy who died too soon.
I get up to kiss my husband and lift my daughter out of the stroller. They’ve been at the park, and she’s sweaty and bright-eyed, and her chubby arms reach for me.
Jesse has followed me over and smiles at my little girl as I bounce her up and down in my arms.
“What’s her name?” she asks.
“Hope,” I say. “Her name is Hope.”
Chapter Sixty
Jesse
Alia and I sit near the reflecting pools, two enormous waterfalls that flow into the ground where the Twin Towers used to stand. Around the edge of the pools are bronze panels inscribed with the names of the fallen, and above our heads the peak of One World Trade Center disappears into the clouds.
Alia, in a pretty patterned scarf, uses her foot to rock the stroller holding her sleeping daughter.
I look down at the glossy comic book in my hands. It is Alia’s tribute to 9/11, and all that happened that day.
As I flip through the pages, I see Alia has drawn my brother with eloquent, sure strokes: the strong edge of his clenched jaw, his slightly mismatched eyes. I see my brother in the elevator, with his shaggy hair and eyes wide with pain. I see him climbing through a hole in the wall into a bathroom, and helping Julia down the stairs. I see him dragging Alia away from the windows as the south tower fell.
I’m crying as I finish.
“It’s a prologue,” Alia says quietly. “It’s how ordinary Alia became Lia the Superhero. Because after that day, she knew she could do anything.”
I nod.
We sit in a silence of mutual grief, a small shared space of sorrow.
I stare at the black pools, the water falling like endless tears into the place where the towers used to stand.
My brother died here. The towers fell here. Close to three thousand people died in pain and terror while the world watched in horror. I thought about what it must have been like that day, to be watching on TV as the towers fell. How could you bear to watch?
How could you bear not to?
The clouds have cleared up, and it is a sparkling-clear early September afternoon. Children are running around, and people are taking selfies with the reflecting pools in the background.
We sit for a long time, and I think about Adam. I hope that we can work it out, that we can navigate all the obstacles facing us. It might take some time, but if he and I can’t make it work, with all the love that is between us, what hope is there?
“Are you ready?” Alia says to me. “Are you ready to see his name?”
She stands, and I stand with her.
A leaf of the Survivor Tree, found broken and burned at ground zero and nursed back to life, drifts softly down and lands on the pavement in front of us.
“I’m ready,” I say.
Alia reaches into the stroller and lifts her sleeping daughter, cuddling her against her chest as she leads me to the edge of the waterfall. She shows me how to slide my hand underneath the bronze panel and dip it into the shallow pool of water. I lay my hand on Travis’s name, and a perfect imprint of my hand shows up dark and watery on the bronze panel.
“Good-bye,” I whisper.
Alia and I stand together as the imprint of my hand on my brother’s name fades until there is nothing left, except hope and love and the blue forever of the September sky.
Author’s Note
There are so many accounts of bravery in the towers, shown not only by first responders, but by ordinary people as well. I wanted Alia and Travis’s story to do justice to as many of them as possible. Their story is not based on one person’s experience, but rather on a montage of experiences, to try to capture the fullest extent of what was going on inside the Twin Towers that fateful day. In most instances I stayed true to actuality, but in a few cases it was necessary to stretch that to include what I thought Alia and Travis’s narrative needed to show. Their escape from the elevator was based on the experiences of six men who were trapped in an elevator on the fiftieth floor and freed themselves with the help of a window washer’s squeegee. Alia’s miraculous escape was based on what happened to Pasquale Buzzelli, who became known as the 9/11 surfer. You can read his story in his book, We All Fall Down: The True Story of the 9/11 Surfer.
In the original version of this story, Alia did not survive. After long conversations with my editor, we decided that Alia’s survival was important, because while almost three thousand people died, most people in the towers that day did make it out. During the days after 9/11, people came together in amazing ways to make sure that those inside the towers and the first responders who died trying to save them would never be forgotten. That decision helped shape this book into what I had always intended it to be: a message of hope even in the midst of tragedy.
You will not find Travis McLaurin’s name on the bronze panels surrounding the reflecting pools at the 9/11 Memorial, just as you will not find a missing persons poster for Alia Susanto in the 9/11 Memorial Museum. While All We Have Left is based on extensive research, the people depicted are my own creations. For anyone looking to read more about the tragic events on 9/11 at the World Trade Center, I highly recommend: City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center by James Glanz and Eric Lipton; 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn; and September 11: An Oral History by Dean Murphy. These books were invaluable to me as I wrote this book.
As with any religion, there are many different ways in which a Muslim approaches the practice of his or her faith. It is impossible to capture the full breadth and scope of any religion, and the words and actions of my characters are not necessarily reflective of every Muslim’s beliefs. I think it is also important to remember that 9/11 happened to all Americans, no matter what their religious affiliations. People of all faiths died together that day.
The more I read about the profound courage displayed that day, not only in the towers, but at the Pentagon, and in the air over that Pennsylvania field near Shanksville, the more I realized that this is what needs to be remembered about 9/11. Even in the face of incomprehensible evil, the human spirit prevailed. This is what I hope the children of today and tomorrow will understand about the day the world changed.
Acknowledgments
A big shout-out to my editor, Mary Kate Castellani. This is a much stronger, better book because of your thoughtful suggestions, Mary Kate. Thank you! Also, my thanks to all of the awesome people at Bloomsbury who have worked hard to make my books look so pretty inside and out, and to get my stories into the hands of readers.
I met every week for nine months with a delightful group of people as I researched and wrote this book. I appreciate you all for taking me into your homes and hearts, and showing me what real-life Islam looks like.
Thank you, Bapak, for your patience as I bombarded you with questions about Indonesia, and an increasingly frantic list of questions about names and pronunciations. Also, thank you, Jill Nelson, for reading my climbing scenes over and over. I am so lucky to have friends and family with such diverse, interesting life experiences. As always, any mistakes are my own.
If you ever get the chance to visit the 9/11 Memorial Museum, I would highly recommend it. The staff is helpful and informed, and the experience left me both humbled and uplifted. I would also like to thank the staff at the Rock and Sn
ow in New Paltz for answering all of my nosy questions.
Thank you to my agent, Sarah Davies, who is the best agent an author could have. Truly. Also, thank you to Bettina Restrepo for reading this book in its early stages.
Thank you, Mom and Aunt Joyce, as always. I don’t know how I could do it without you.
And to my readers, including the many dedicated book bloggers: You guys rock! Thank you so much for supporting my books.
Finally, to the loves of my life: Zack, Gavin, and Eddie. You are my world.
Copyright © 2016 by Wendy Mills
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First published in the United States of America in August 2016
by Bloomsbury Children’s Books
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