All We Have Left (33 page)

“It’s not working!” I wanted to let someone,
anyone
, know that we are here, and what’s going on. Do people know how bad this is?

Travis starts to say something, and then he looks down at Julia’s purse that he has carried up all those stairs. He pulls it off his shoulder and dumps it onto the desk. A wallet, keys,
pens, a card on a cord just like the one Dad carries to work every day, subway tokens, and …

A cell phone.

With shaking fingers, Travis flips open the phone and dials three numbers.

9-1-1.

He listens, his face full of hope, but immediately it fades.

“Busy,” he says briefly.

“Try someone else,” I urge. “Maybe if you call someone else, it’ll work.”

He dials again, listens, and then shakes his head.

“Still busy. Alia, we need to go.” Travis looks up at the flames spreading out like hungry vines in the ceiling above us. “We need to go
now.
”

The smoke is getting thicker, and I know he is right.

“One more time,” I say, because I can’t let go of my belief that if only people understood what was going on here they would be here, helping.

More people are jumping now, and I’m trying to not look out the narrow windows. I close my eyes, but I see them anyway.

I force myself to concentrate on Travis’s face, the strong line of his jaw, the way his straight blond hair sweeps across his forehead as he holds the phone to his ear.

I move closer to him.

“It’s ringing,” he says.

Adam follows me to Emi’s house, where he waits patiently as I run in, and then follows me to the climbing shop so I can drop off Dad’s truck. There are no lights on in the apartment over the shop when I slip the key back under the seat and walk over to Adam’s car.

We don’t speak, lost in our own thoughts, as he drives me to where Mom’s staying, a small apartment in her friend Mary’s garage. Mary sometimes rents it out to budget-minded climbers, luring them in with the promise of a home-cooked breakfast.

“We’re going to do this, right?” I ask as we stand in the driveway. “Tomorrow morning?”

“Just promise you won’t go tonight. There’s nothing to see tonight.”

I hesitate, because I want to run, run, run as fast as I can. But he’s right, there won’t be anything to see until tomorrow morning.

“Early,” I say.

“Early,” he agrees and presses a kiss to my forehead.

I lean my head against him for a moment, and then step away.

“You sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”

It’s tempting, but I know I need to do this myself.

He nods and turns to get back into his car. I watch him go, and then take a deep breath and go into my mother’s apartment.

As late as it is, Mom is sitting on the couch watching
I Love Lucy
.

“Jesse!” She’s surprised to see me, but recovers quickly. “I made breakfast for dinner, if you want a feta and sausage omelet.”

She winces a little, and I know that she’s thinking of Dad, because that’s his favorite kind of omelet.

I never really realized how much she loved my father until she left him. I look over at the small refrigerator where she’s got September 11 circled on the calendar, and has written the time of the memorial the town is planning for Travis. It’s something she never would have dared to do when she was still living with Dad. In the past, it was like September 11 didn’t exist, though as the anniversary approached, Dad would get quieter and drink more, and Mom would work herself up like
some sort of windup doll, leaving a path of casseroles and a sparkling-clean apartment in her wake.

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.”

“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.

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.