Mrs. Lawson comes back and looks stricken. I finish the book and get the kids going on a new drawing project—pumpkin carriages—and go over to her for the update. She tells me they don’t know how many people were in the towers—it could be as high as twenty-five thousand, although it’s probably more like ten thousand. And there is another plane that hit the Pentagon. There could be more. Nobody knows.
She tells me this in a whisper. Then we walk back over to the kids and try to gather enough orange crayons from the other tables so they can all draw pumpkins. The world is falling apart, and this is what we have to offer.
Spencer’s mom arrives and says it took her ages to get to the school from uptown, since everything has shut down. She says that Sammy and I can come back with her to the Upper East Side. But that’s so far away, and I’m worried that if the phones stay down, there will be no way for Mom to find us. I have to believe she’s going to be here any minute. Plus, I don’t want to leave Mrs. Lawson alone. So Sammy and I say goodbye to Spencer, and this is the point—now that his mom is here—that Spencer begins to cry, loudly protesting that he doesn’t want to leave, that school’s not over yet. He’s crying about the wrong thing, and I find myself almost jealous of that.
It takes all of his mom’s promises for Spencer to be persuaded—Sammy can come over later; Daddy will be home from work when they get back; they can have dessert before dinner tonight. Mrs. Lawson and I are so enthusiastic about each of these things that I half expect the other kids to chime in with their own tears, to see what rewards they’ll get. I hope they won’t, because I don’t think Mrs. Lawson and I could take it.
Eventually Spencer leaves, with his mom promising to keep calling my mom’s office until she gets through. We are about to resume our carriage drawing when an announcement comes on the PA saying that all teachers and their classes should pack up their things and report to the gymnasium. We are going to be leaving the building.
Neither Mrs. Lawson nor I know why this is happening or what it means. Since the weather is so summery, there isn’t much bundling up to be done.
In the gymnasium, the principal gently announces that one of the towers has fallen and people are being encouraged to move north of Fourteenth Street. Because of this, the administrators have decided to evacuate the building and move everyone to another school, on Seventeenth Street. It’s only a twelve-block walk, and everyone is going to stick together. The school secretaries will stay in the office to field calls, and the guard will stay in the main hallway, so if any parent or guardian comes by, he or she will be redirected to the new school. He also adds that transportation and communication in the city are extremely difficult at the moment, so if our parents haven’t arrived or called, it is probably not for a lack of trying.
I am still upset with my mother, though. And scared.
If you ever lose me, I remember her saying when I was little and we’d go to a department store, just let one of the salesladies know, and they will take you to where I can find you. Even though I’m seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true—that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.
The principal does not ask if anyone has any questions. He tells the classes to line up behind their teachers and starts releasing them, oldest to youngest, into the hallway and out the front door. Each teacher has been assigned another adult—a custodian or an aide or a volunteer parent—to help keep everything in order. I look over to the first graders and see that Marisol is there with her sister. There’s no way that we’re going back to the high school building, and nobody seems to think it’s odd that we’re here. We catch each other’s eye, and I almost wave. We have a kinship now, as thin as a thread, but permanent.
One of the towers has fallen. When it’s our turn to leave, it’s like something in me is finally willing to listen, and suddenly I understand what it means. The tower doesn’t exist anymore. Something I’ve seen my entire life—something so much larger than my entire life—is gone. That is my first reaction. And then I think about all the people inside. There must have been people inside.
When we get to Sixth Avenue, I feel like I’m in one of those myths where the one thing the woman can’t do is turn around and see what’s behind her. I am holding Sammy’s hand and this girl Lizzie’s hand, following Mrs. Lawson, and all I can think is, Don’t look back. If I turn around, Sammy and Lizzie will also turn around. If I turn around, they will see it. If I turn around, I may disintegrate.
The street is jammed with people walking north. Some were clearly close to the towers, since the smoke and the dust cling to their skin and their clothes.
“What happened to them?” Sammy asks, and I don’t know what to say. I can’t even think of a good lie. So I treat it like he’s asked a different question and tell him we’re almost there, even though we still have five blocks to go. I wish I was still at the age when I needed explanations, and would receive better versions than the truth whenever I asked.
The only time I’ve seen this many people on Sixth Avenue has been for the Halloween Parade. I am amazed at how respectful everyone is. There are skyscrapers collapsing behind us, and nobody is pushing, nobody is yelling. When people see we’re a school group, they’re careful not to separate us. Stores are not only giving away sneakers, but some are handing out water to people who need it. You’d think they’d take advantage and raise the price. But no. That’s not what happens.
I am looking everywhere for familiar faces. There’s a small line of people moving against the march, weaving their way downtown. There’s no mistaking their purpose as they push forward. Every single one of them has a reason. It must be someone they love. Or a desire to help.
Don’t look back, I remind myself. Don’t look back.
I hear my name called out—“Claire!”—then Sammy’s. He’s quicker to react.
“Mom!” he yells. He stops walking, pulling me and Lizzie to a halt. And then she’s running over, and Sammy lets go of me, and it’s okay because Mom is right there, and we’re slowing up the line, and Mrs. Lawson is getting farther ahead, so my first words to Mom are “We have to keep walking.” She doesn’t question this. She is crying to see us, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen her crying to see us, and she’s practically carrying Sammy even though he’s too big to carry anymore, and she’s telling us how happy she is to have found us, and how hard it was. She had to walk all the way from Eighty-ninth Street on the East Side because she had a meeting there, and as soon as she can, she’s going to buy all of us cell phones. And what I want to shout is I thought you were dead, but not in front of Sammy or poor Lizzie, who I don’t even know, whose parents still aren’t here. I explain to Mom why we’re walking north; she nods, and I get a good look at her—she’s holding it together, too, and I want to tell her she doesn’t have to do that for me, because I might not be able to do it for her. I can tell she’s also trying not to look back, but she does it—she looks over her shoulder—and the tears won’t leave her eyes.
“It’s so horrible,” she says. “I hope you didn’t see …”
And I think, What didn’t I see?
Later that night, after Sammy is asleep, we piece it together, mapping out our day against the news. We are in an apartment on Eighteenth Street where Mom’s friends Ted and Lia live. I was friends with their daughter, Rana, when I was little, but Rana is away at college now. Mom, Ted, Lia, and I watch CNN at midnight as they give us the chronology of what happened.
While I was holding Sammy’s hand and Lizzie’s hand, while we were following Mrs. Lawson, the second tower fell. We were too far away to hear it or to feel the ground shake. If you weren’t watching—if you hadn’t turned back to look—there was no way to know. You could imagine they were both still there. Just in the same way we imagine our own apartment is there, waiting for us, untouched. We’re not allowed to go home.
“We are not supposed to comprehend something like this,” my mother says to me as we watch the latest update before she heads to bed. It’s a sentence that I keep repeating to myself. I even take solace in it. I cannot comprehend. I don’t want to comprehend. Instead I will try to remember what matters. I will do this as I wonder what happens next.
Even though they tell me to sleep, I watch the news all night.
I don’t want to know anything, and I want to know it all.
WAKE UP, IT’S OVER
Jasper
I missed the whole goddamn thing. Slept late, woke up to the phone ringing, was completely oblivious. In fact, I was pissed that the phone was ringing, because it was before noon, and it was the house line, which meant it probably wasn’t for me. I had two weeks before I had to go back to school, and I’d been planning to spend those two weeks sleeping. And when I wasn’t sleeping, I was planning to nap. So I would’ve had the machine pick it up, only I’d unplugged the machine a couple of nights before when someone was leaving a message that I couldn’t deal with—something about getting out the vote, blah blah blah—and the only way I could think to shut it up was to pull out the plug. I was maybe a little drunk at the time, so it made sense then. But now the phone was ringing for the eleventeenth time and I realized if it was important and I didn’t get it, my parents would find out and I’d be wading knee-deep in the shit. So I stumbled out of bed in my boxers and yelled at the phone to hold on, I was coming.
It was still ringing when I got there, and I was a little surprised when I picked it up and said hello and my mom started saying thank God it was me, thank God I was okay. My first reaction was, what the f**k have the neighbors been telling her, and did they really call Korea to let her know I was drinking so much? And then my father was on the phone, too, and he was saying they were watching CNN and it was just terrible, completely terrible, and it had taken forever for them to get through. I had to say I had no idea what he was talking about, and then, only then, did he say, “Did we wake you?” And I wasn’t going to lie—I said, yeah, they had, so this whole phone call wasn’t making much sense to me, and that’s when he told me the World Trade Center was gone—that’s how he said it, “The World Trade Center is gone,” and I honestly thought, Does he mean Grandma? because that’s why he and Mom were in Korea in the first place, but obviously I was wrong on that count, because Grandma was fine, it was just all these other people who were dead.
As he was telling me this, I walked over to the window, and, Jesus, even from Park Slope you could see that something completely hellish had happened. There was all this smoke billowing up from downtown. And the Twin Towers were nowhere to be found.
“Holy shit,” I said. “I mean, holy shit.”
This was probably the first time I’d ever cursed while talking to my parents, but they didn’t reprimand me. Mom was saying she wished she could be with me, that they would try to get home on the first available plane. I asked them what else was going on in the city, and my dad couldn’t resist it, he said, “For once in your life, turn on the news.” So I took the phone into the other room and turned on the TV, and it was amazing to see what was going on practically next door to me, and it was totally surreal that I’d slept through it all. My parents were telling me to go to the grocery and stock up on water and canned goods, like Brooklyn was going to be under siege at any minute. I said yes to everything they said, and then when my mother started crying, I told her I was going to be fine, that I knew how to take care of myself, which is why they’d left me alone here in the first place. This made her cry even more, the idea of me being left alone, and I assured her I still had a lot of friends who hadn’t headed back to college yet, and if I needed somewhere to go, there were plenty of places I could crash. When that wasn’t enough, I even said I’d take my cell phone with me so she could reach me whenever. This made her quiet down a little, and my father said that it was probably time for them to go, and that I shouldn’t hesitate to call them if anything went wrong. For one stupefying moment he was quiet, and I actually thought he was going to say he loved me or something out of control like that. But as usual, he left that to Mom, who—also as usual—overcompensated, although in a situation like this, when your only son is almost seven thousand miles away from you and his city’s under terrorist attack, I guess there’s no such thing as over doing it.