People Who Knew Me (30 page)

His robe was still damp from his own morning shower. I didn't mind; I wrapped it, and him, around me happily. I hadn't even heard him in the shower earlier. I hadn't even heard him get up. He'd kept his promise of letting me sleep, totally undisturbed. I twisted my wet hair up into a bun on the top of my head and went to the kitchen.

As luck would have it, Gabe had all the supplies needed for pancakes—even a raspberry syrup in the side of the fridge that had an expiration date of July 2001. I figured it would still be good. It smelled fine. I sent him a text message:

Making pancakes. Leftovers will be in the freezer to go with your coffee in the morning.

Then another:
I must really like you.

I'd just gotten a phone with text-messaging capabilities. The technology, the anticipation, was new to me. I waited for his response, my phone sitting right next to the mixing bowl, lightly dusted in flour. It'd been a while since I'd done this—made breakfast, felt like someone's significant other. He wrote back:

I promise you I'll eat breakfast every day of my life if I get to eat it with you.

I smiled so big that I wondered what someone in the next building would think if they saw me through the expansive kitchen window. I covered my mouth, almost embarrassed by my own bliss.

He wrote again:

Going into my meeting. Will be thinking of you when I really shouldn't be.

I didn't write back because I wanted to be respectful of his work time. He had a big presentation. I knew that.

It was 8:30
A.M
..

I finished one batch of pancakes while humming along to the remake of “Lady Marmalade” on the radio. I went back to the bathroom, found a comb in one of the drawers. It was a small comb, meant for short, male hair. I hung up the robe and waltzed, naked, to the bedroom. I sat on the bed, knees bent underneath me, my hair gathered in front of me, dripping onto my bare chest. I clicked on the TV and went to work on my tangles. I needed a haircut. My hair was getting long, unruly. I'd call the salon later that day. Maybe they could get me in for an appointment before my dinner with Gabe.

I was watching
The Today Show
on NBC. Matt Lauer was interviewing an author, a guy named Richard Hack who had written a book about Howard Hughes. I wasn't particularly interested. I was waiting for the weather report to tell me if the sunny skies would stay. Suddenly Matt Lauer interrupted the author and said they wanted to go live to a picture of the World Trade Center. Then someone off-camera told him they didn't have the image yet. Matt Lauer said there was a breaking story and they'd be right back. It was 8:51
A.M
. according to the ticker on the screen.

I didn't think to change the channel, to check what other stations were reporting. I didn't think it was something serious. After all, newscasters called snow flurries a “breaking story.” During the commercial break, I went into the kitchen for a pancake. I was eating it—no plate, just straight from hand to mouth—when Katie Couric and Matt Lauer appeared on-screen together at 8:53
A.M
. They said a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. They had very little information.

I dropped the half-eaten pancake onto the bed and went closer to the TV screen, staring at the picture of the building with a hole in its side, smoke billowing out. It was the north tower—my tower, Gabe's tower. The hole was high up. The Berringer office was high up—on the 101st floor. I tried to count how many floors down the hole was. The towers were 110 stories each. I knew that much. The hole was seven, ten, twelve stories down? I was reluctant to know for sure.

I ran, still naked, to the kitchen, to my phone. I expected to find a text message from Gabe, telling me about this crazy accident that had happened, how they'd evacuated through the stairwells and were on the street, looking up at the scene in disbelief. There was no text message, though. I wrote:

Watching the news. You okay?

I waited. In the background, an eyewitness was talking to Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. She was calling in from a cell phone. It was hard to hear her. There were sirens in the background. She told them about the ball of fire she saw when she came out of the subway station to go to work at the Ritz-Carlton. She said pieces of the building were flying. She said the smoke was incredible. She said she couldn't see the top of the towers through the smoke. Katie and Matt told her that it was a plane that crashed into the tower. She didn't know it was a plane.

Finally, my phone screen lit up. But it wasn't Gabe. It was Drew calling. There was no sound—I'd turned off the ringer. I saw his number flash four times. He thought I was in the tower, at work. I couldn't bring myself to answer the phone. I was frozen, paralyzed. He left a voice mail. I didn't listen.

My mom called next. I let it ring again. Another voice-mail notification appeared. I couldn't respond to anyone. I wanted to reserve my phone for Gabe.

Em, I'm scared shitless. They're saying a plane hit the tower. Please tell me you're OK.

A text message. Marni.

Those were the only people who had my new number—Drew, my mom, Marni. And Gabe, of course.

I brought my phone to the bedroom, resumed my seat on the edge of the bed, knees bent underneath me. I turned up the volume on the TV, as if I'd understand more if it was louder. My phone screen lit up with another text message from Marni asking if I was okay. I wasn't, though. I wouldn't be until I heard from Gabe.

Drew tried calling again. He didn't leave a message.

Katie and Matt were questioning another eyewitness, a woman named Elliott. She was talking about the air being filled with hundreds of pieces of paper, like confetti, when, at 9:03
A.M
., she screamed, “Another one just hit!” Katie and Matt gasped. The offscreen news crew gasped. Elliott's voice was shaky. She wondered aloud if there were air traffic control problems. Nobody knew then what the reality was.

They cut to a woman named Jennifer. She kept saying, “It was a jet.” Al Roker said, “What are the odds of two separate planes hitting both towers?” Matt proposed that it might not be an accident, that it might be something deliberate. That's the word he used—“deliberate.”

My phone lit up—my mom again. Then Drew again. My mom didn't leave a message. Drew did.

The towers—both of them—were slowly being consumed by fire, lines of red running down the sides, leaving behind black and plumes of gray. Eyewitnesses confirmed the towers were leaning. Katie said it was pandemonium. Matt wondered how people got out of the building, if the elevators were jammed. I tried Gabe again:

You got out, right? Please call me.

Maybe he'd left his phone at his desk. That's what I told myself. Maybe his phone wasn't working. Maybe no messages were getting through. I expected him to walk through the front door, to hold my naked body and tell me everything was all right. We'd both cry.

At 9:15
A.M
., Katie said the planes were hijacked, that it was a terrorist attack. At 9:17
A.M
., Matt said the potential for injury and death was high. At 9:20
A.M
., they were already talking about what kind of military action to take. I shivered. I got under the bedsheets, pulled my knees to my chest, my wet hair on Gabe's pillow. Goose bumps rose up on my scalp.

The blue sky was going dark. The newscast was focused on whether or not military jets should be deployed to protect the rest of the city. They didn't know anything about the people in the buildings. They didn't know what had happened to Gabe.

Please call if you're there. I'm scared. I love you, dear friend.

Marni again.

At 9:30
A.M
., George W. Bush came on and said, “Today we've had a national tragedy,” as if the event were already in the past, as if it weren't still happening. He said the government would help the victims and their loved ones. But who were those people? Was Gabe a victim? Was I a loved one? Bush said we'd track down the terrorists. But we didn't know who they were, either. There was a moment of silence, and then he left the podium. People clapped. I didn't know why they clapped.

I held my phone in the palm of my hand, against my chest. It was wet with my sweat. As the moments went on, I looked at the phone with less and less hope and more and more dread. If that first plane hit the north tower around 8:45
A.M
., Gabe would have been out by 9:30
A.M
., wouldn't he? Maybe he was helping other people. Maybe he was walking the streets around Battery Park, dazed and confused. Maybe there was no way for him to get home. But, assuming he wasn't injured, he could walk—it was less than two miles for him to get from the chaos back to me. It would take him no more than thirty minutes. Maybe he was injured—on a gurney a safe distance from the disaster. I told myself to be patient. I told myself it was too early to conclude anything.

“Just wait,” I said aloud. I was stroking my belly when I said it, assuring my unborn baby, my Claire.

At 9:42
A.M
., the news coverage cut to the Pentagon, where there was more fire and billowing smoke. Another plane crash, they said. I wanted them to go back to the towers.

At 9:59
A.M
., they said big chunks of the south building had fallen away. A few moments later, they realized it wasn't chunks; it was the building itself, flattened, demolished. All that was left were huge puffs of white smoke, clouding where the tower had once been, engulfing the surrounding buildings. A street-level view showed people running, the smoke chasing them. Katie said eyewitnesses claimed to see people jumping out of the buildings. At 10:14
A.M
., Katie said, “It looks like a movie.”

At 10:17
A.M
., they said they were worried about the north tower collapsing. Gabe's tower. At 10:28
A.M
., it did. And that's when I cried my first tears of the morning. Up until that moment, I'd been dedicated to the lie that everything would be fine.

I looked at my phone again. Nothing. I wrote Gabe one last message:

I love you. So much.

I left the TV on, but pulled the covers up and over my head. I crawled closer to Gabe's pillow, hugged it as if it were him. I stayed like that, in that position, until the next day, when my stomach growled ferociously, my unborn baby asking me to feed her, reminding me that life goes on whether you want it to or not.

 

TWENTY-FIVE

When I woke up, the sky was an ashy gray and I knew that the day before was not just a bad dream. I turned off the TV. There was nothing new to know. I'd listened to the reports throughout the night, from under the covers. People were dead, so many people. They wouldn't know the exact numbers for days, weeks. Loved ones were tacking up
MISSING
posters on the streets—outside hospitals primarily, but also on streetlamps, walls, trees, store windows, subway signs, wherever a piece of tape would stick. I already knew what others would realize in a few more days—these
MISSING
signs were really obituaries, remembrances.

I looked at my phone. I had two voice mails from Drew, one from my mom. There was nothing from Gabe. He was gone—a fact that settled in as night turned to dawn. I had no need to post a
MISSING
poster for him. I wished I'd met his mom so I could call her, so we could console each other. Nobody knew about Gabe and me. Some presumed, I was sure, but nobody
knew
. I had no consolation.

I went to the kitchen, found the plate of pancakes right where I'd left them, batter still left in the mixing bowl for the second batch I never made. I picked up one of the cold pancakes, ate it mindlessly, trying to satisfy my annoying hunger. I opened the fridge, took out a carton of milk, drank straight from it. I was still naked.

I went back to my phone, considered the prompt alerting me to my awaiting voice messages. I listened:

Drew—concerned, but still composed:

Em? I'm—I'm watching the news. They're saying a plane just hit the tower—the north one. Is that your tower? I think it is. Fuck, I should know that. I tried calling your office, but the phone's dead. Call me when you're safe, okay? Okay, call. Please. Love you.

I saved the message. I wasn't sure why.

*   *   *

My mom—confused, totally confused:

Emily, can you call me? It looks like there was some kind of plane crash where you work. Gina from next door is here. Call when you can, okay?

*   *   *

Drew again—panicked this time, possibly crying:

Em, God, please tell me you're okay. I don't know what I would do if— God, please tell me you're okay. I love you, babe.

*   *   *

I started to cry. He was so afraid, so desperate, so convinced that he couldn't live without me, when really that was all he'd been doing for months. I wished, in that moment, that I was dead, that I could visit Drew as an at-peace spirit and tell him he'd be fine. Because he would. I knew he would.

And that's when it occurred to me that I could be dead. That they thought I was dead. More than likely, there was a
MISSING
sign for me, an obituary, a remembrance, somewhere on the streets of Manhattan. That's something Marni would do—post a sign. She'd use the prettiest picture of me she could find, maybe the one from when we'd had lunch together a few weeks before. It was a beautiful Friday, we were sitting outside at this new restaurant in Chelsea. The light was just right. She said, “Did you just get laid? You're glowing.” I'd planned to tell her about Gabe and me that day, but she overtook the conversation with her own relationship woes. I figured I'd tell her at the next lunch. We were trying to make it a monthly thing.