There suddenly wasn’t enough air in the library for everyone to breathe. Naheed could feel it. She could see the principal talking and hear what he was saying, but nothing was making sense. It was like he was an actor in one of those end-of-the-world movies. This wasn’t real.
“There is nothing to be afraid of. Some parents have called the school and are on their way to pick up their children. If your parent is one of those, you will be notified in your classroom. Again, you will go to your regular fifth-period class. Thank you, and now your teachers will direct everyone back to their classrooms. And there will be no more discussions about this until further notice.”
As soon as the principal walked away from the podium, the noise level in the room rose, like a boiling kettle that suddenly started to steam. Everyone began talking. A few girls started crying, like those few girls will always do.
Now Naheed knew for sure what Eliza had been upset about in science and why Mrs. Salinger had snapped off the television. Why parents were running to school to pick up their kids. But still it felt far away. There were things like this on the news all the time, weren’t there? Bad things, scary things.
Life wasn’t a movie.
It was going to be okay.
Wasn’t it?
Naheed slowly stood with the rest of her class, uncertain of what she had just been told, voices rising up around her.
“My grandmother lives in Pennsylvania.”
“An attack? What does that mean?”
“My dad lives in New York.”
“They probably went after all those secrets stored in the Pentagon. I bet they stole all our secret files and spies and stuff.”
“No, I heard it was a bomb.”
“It’s not a bomb. If it was a bomb, we’d all be in those underground shelter places.”
“It’s no big deal. It’s not like it’s a war or anything. They always want to scare us with this stuff.”
And so on.
The students started to shuffle back to their classrooms. The gym teacher let Naheed’s class have a study hall, but no one was allowed to even whisper. Naheed took out her math work and tried to concentrate, but by the end of the day many kids had gone home, and with each one leaving, another little bit of information from the outside world got left behind.
Hijackers.
The World Trade Center.
Fire.
When the bell rang for dismissal, the remaining students all poured out to the front of the school, and with no teachers to stop them, everyone was talking. The buses sat idling with their doors wide open.
People jumping to their deaths.
Plane crashes.
The White House evacuated.
When was this end-of-the-world movie going to be over?
There was Eliza standing in line, waiting to step up onto her bus, and Naheed’s plan for apologizing to her seemed a hundred years in the past. It seemed like a silly speck of sand in a sandbox that was getting bigger and bigger with every frightful story that flew from parent to kid, from brother to sister, from friend to friend, from one kid to another.
Air travel grounded.
Buildings collapsing.
All at once Naheed knew she needed to get home. She hurried along the sidewalk and found her own bus, number fifteen.
“I heard it was terrorists,” the boy in the front of the line was saying. He sounded almost excited.
Naheed couldn’t see whom he was talking to. She could hardly hear above the sound of her own heart pounding.
“What do you mean, terrorists?” someone else asked.
Naheed could hear her own exaggerated breathing inside her head like she was inside a wind tunnel. People were starting to push, to stand as close to one another as they could, backpacks bumping, everyone’s feet taking little steps closer to the doors. Naheed felt the heat of the sun warming her hijab. She brushed away a band of sweat that formed on her brow. She tried to calm herself.
Three more steps and Naheed would be on the bus, that much closer to home. Just breathe.
Two more steps.
She’d find a seat. Everything was going to be okay.
“It was Arabs.” The voice rose above the others.
One more step.
“Yeah, you know, Muslims. The ones with those things on their heads.”
* * *
Naheed didn’t get on the bus.
It was just after three. The sky was clear, quiet, and the bluest blue she had ever seen. Naheed stepped out of line. She hiked her backpack up over her shoulder and took off down the access road toward the elementary school. Their school got out an hour after the middle school. It was about a half-mile walk. She needed to find her sister.
One Year Later
September 11, 2002
Ground Zero, New York City
At first it had been exciting, like being famous. Certainly, it was as close to being famous as pretty much anyone from Shanksville had ever been. There were news vans set up like permanent trailer parks—surrounding the strip mine, outside the school, and along US Route 30. There were satellite dishes and food trucks and newspeople everywhere. There were people who just felt they had to come, to see the site of such a tragedy and pay some kind of respect to those who had died.
There were the others: the conspiracy theorists, the morbidly curious, the wannabes, and the just plain crazy.
And then there were the families and friends of the victims of 9/11 and Flight 93, who came almost immediately after the crash, whose swollen eyes were ringed with black circles, whose hearts were cracked open and torn apart. They had come looking for an answer or a story or a piece of something, anything, to take away with them.
But there was nothing.
No answers. No closure. Nothing to take away.
So instead they left something.
They left stuffed animals, notes, ribbons, pieces of clothing, books, flowers, Bibles, flattened pennies, poems, photographs, jewelry, tiny trinkets. They tied their objects, their hearts, their sorrow, to the forty-foot-long chain-link fence that had been installed at the crash site; they wrote things on the tall white boards that had been put up for that purpose.
All kinds of people, hundreds a day, driving down roads that, a year ago, only a few cars and a couple of kids on their bicycles had traveled.
For a while Will’s sisters set up camp on their front lawn just to give directions to all the visitors who inevitably made a wrong turn or two. They dragged out a folding table and chair and hung a sign: FREE DIRECTIONS. They took turns sitting there for weeks, until the grass under their chair turned brown, until even they got overwhelmed by all the people, the endless stream of lost, brokenhearted, patriotic, curious people. So much pain it wore a path in the streets and across everyone’s hearts, threatening to obliterate everything else.
And this, the one-year anniversary, only promised to bring more interlopers. It was an opportune time, Will’s mother had decided, for the family to get out of town, far from Somerset County, away from the crowds that had taken over Shanksville.
And where else to escape the crowds?
To New York City.
Seriously?
But Will knew why his mother had wanted to come. She had been awarded tickets to the 9/11 memorial service for her charity work, because she had spent the better part of the entire last year helping to set up the temporary memorial. She was in charge of cataloging every single item that was left behind or mailed to Shanksville. No object was too small or invaluable for her attention, not a water-soaked matchbook, not a box of broken crayons, not an empty wallet with barely visible initials stamped into one corner.
With each recorded memento of grief, Will’s mother found hope and Will’s family began to heal. The heroes of Flight 93 affected Will’s family in a different way than they might have affected someone else’s family. The people in that plane were heroes in the most important way—making a choice, not knowing the outcome, but knowing that acting was better than not ac
ting. Doing the right thing because the right thing was what you were supposed to do. Only this time the whole country was mourning with Will’s family.
Rooney and Callie just seemed excited to be in New York City. They all had taken the train yesterday from Johnstown to Penn Station and found their room at the Milford Hotel, right in Times Square.
The entire day they had acted like regular tourists. They walked four across along Broadway, craning their necks, looking up at the giant billboards and down at the rows of window displays, cameras, suitcases, NYC memorabilia, clothing stores, makeup stores. On Fifth Avenue there were entire stores devoted to just one designer, to sunglasses, to Nike, to the NBA, which of course Will wanted to go to and his sisters didn’t complain too much about.
If this was the only part of New York City a person came to, he might never know any different. The city was alive with shopping and sightseeing, smells of steaming hot dogs and salty pretzels on every block. Vendors selling hats, selling pocketbooks, selling photographs.
“Look, Mom.” Callie stopped and pointed.
A man sat on a tiny folding stool before a trifold display of photographs, mostly of the New York skyline.
“These photos will be worth a fortune one day,” the man took the opportunity to say. “Photos of the World Trade Center. I took them myself.”
Will scrunched up his face. It didn’t seem likely. He had seen the exact same photo at another guy’s booth a block away.
“No, thank you,” Will’s mother said.
This morning, Wednesday, September 11, they had to be downtown by eight o’clock. The reading of the names would begin at the exact time that the first plane had struck the first tower, 8:46. There were sure to be crowds. They were sure to have trouble with the subway map. They were sure to get lost at least once, so they left the hotel at seven in the morning and arrived at Ground Zero in plenty of time.
* * *
Some people will say that the distance a person happened to be from where one of the planes went down is in direct proportion to how deeply they were affected by the events of a day that came to be called simply 9/11. For instance, people who lived in Lower Manhattan were more a part of the tragedy than those who happened to be on the Upper West Side, than those who lived in Westchester County, or who were in school in upstate New York, or who called Seattle, Washington, home.
But that isn’t true.
And some people point to the number of deaths—more than 2,700 at the World Trade Center, 343 of them firefighters, 246 in four planes, 125 in the Pentagon, citizens from over ninety different countries—but that doesn’t quite tell the story either.
Because in the end it was just about people: mothers, fathers, friends, foes, sisters, brothers, children born and not yet born, sons and daughters; people from all over the United States and then all over the globe, whose lives would never be the same. Because the world changed that day, slowly and then all at once.
There were stories, so many stories. They started appearing immediately, everywhere in New York; stapled, taped, thumbtacked all over the city, photographs and photocopies, flyers, letters, sticky notes, and desperate pleas.
Please. Please, have you seen this woman, this man?
In the aftermath of the fallen towers thousands of people were missing. Thousands. The city became a giant scrapbook, a living, breathing, weeping album of the missing; every telephone pole, the side of every building, every tree, had become a collage of faces, an entreaty to understand, to share, and to find answers and mourn.
* * *
Aimee’s mother hadn’t been able to get a flight home to Los Angeles until that Friday, and when she did, she said it was like entering a military zone. At JFK Airport army personnel were everywhere. No one in line spoke above a whisper. Scheduled flights were delayed by hours, security took an unprecedented length of time, the flight itself was terrifying, but on Saturday morning when Aimee woke up, her mother was standing in her bedroom doorway.
And a year later they had decided they all had to return, together, for the one-year anniversary.
* * *
Sergio would be there, of course. Gideon had gotten him an extra ticket from the guys at Engine 209, Ladder Company 10, to attend the ceremony at Ground Zero inside the roped-off area, right on the flat expanse of dirt where the Twin Towers once stood. Sergio needed to be there. He wanted to. So much had happened in a year.
It wasn’t going to be a holiday, not like Presidents’ Day or MLK Day, so there was still school that Wednesday, but it was called Patriot Day and he was given permission to miss school.
His grandmother wanted to go with him, and they both stood for nearly an hour before they could even get in. Apparently, a lady was going to play the flute and, one after another, relatives of those who were killed were going to walk up onto the stage and read the names, nearly three thousand, out loud. Many of Gideon’s friends were among them. Gideon himself was going to be one of the readers.
This last year Sergio had spent a lot of time at the firehouse, and Gideon had even come to visit them in Red Hook. Sergio’s grandmother made dinner, and the three of them stuffed themselves, and they watched Jeopardy! on television afterward.
Gideon helped Sergio with his homework, not that Sergio needed it. Gideon taught him basic first aid, and when Sergio had a test in biology, they studied together. And in a funny way, having Gideon in his life, and knowing what had happened to the country, made Sergio less angry at his father, less angry at the world. It had made him more afraid and less afraid, both. There was so much to mourn, and so much to be proud of, so many reasons to be at this memorial.
* * *
Naheed and her family were making the pilgrimage as well, all the way from Columbus, Ohio, even though there had been days this past year when they had been afraid to leave their house.
That afternoon, a year earlier, Naheed and her sister had walked home together—nearly two full miles. Uncle Iman and Aunt Judith were still there and wouldn’t be able to leave for weeks. Naheed’s father was pulling into the driveway. Her mother had also left work early. She rushed into the house, with tears in her eyes. She pulled her daughters close and held them there.
“So many people,” she kept saying. “So many people.”
She had the look on her face, of a pain that was not her own but was for the whole world, that look that most all grown-ups seemed to express in those following days. Naheed and Nouri listened to and watched the television, but it all seemed too horrible to be real and too far away to have any significant impact on them personally.
Until a brick came sailing through the air a few weeks later, breaking glass and landing on their living-room floor.
Until a Middle Eastern restaurant in Columbus was targeted by a firebomb. “It’s owned by Israelis, for heaven’s sake,” Naheed’s father kept saying.
Until a gas station attendant in New Jersey was shot, not a Muslim, but a Sikh from India, because he was wearing his traditional turban.
And now Naheed’s parents were taking them to New York, right into the belly of the beast, to grieve with the rest of the country, because her father vowed, “We are Americans, and no one is going to take that away from us.”
* * *
For so many complicated reasons there would never be another morning as simply beautiful as September 11, 2001. People always talk about the weather when they don’t have anything else to talk about, when the conversation is light, or feels stilted, or someone is just too peaceful, lazy, or preoccupied to think about anything more taxing.
But after that day the weather, and the way people remembered it, became something more; something potentially more deceptive, and yet something much more meaningful, more fragile and rare, and even more beautiful.
* * *
Wednesday, September 11, 2002, was sunny but not as clear, and the wind blew unrelentingly across Manhattan.
Aimee held tight to her mother’s hand as they moved through the crowds. Her father walked
close behind them. They finally found a spot and stood for a while on the platform on Fulton Street, with the other people who had also stopped walking, who had also come to be part of something larger than they were, something that drew them to this place even though they knew no one personally who had vanished into the white-clouded air that day. They couldn’t get any closer without a ticket, and the streets were roped off for blocks.
Below, at the memorial, they could see those who were standing, the families of the victims, holding flags, clutching flowers, holding photographs, holding babies in the air, as if those looking down, and those far above, could see them and know and feel.
“It could have been you, Mom,” Aimee whispered, because how many times had she wondered why and why not? Who gets a second chance? A third? A fourth? And why did someone else get none?
It had taken Aimee a while to find the kind of girls that she felt comfortable with in her new school, and it wasn’t that Bridget and Vanessa were enemies or anything, but Aimee didn’t need that kind of drama. Not after what she had been through.
“I want to go down there,” Aimee said.
The warm air blew persistently, as if trying to drive away the sunshine. Above, the flags snapped like whips, and the crooning of the wind harmonized with the steady sound of human crying.
“That’s just for family,” her father said.
“I know, but I just need to stand there, or get a little closer at least. For one second.” For a full year Aimee hadn’t wanted to let her mother out of her sight. She had nightmares and got stomachaches when her mother went away on trips. But now Aimee let go of her mother’s hand and headed toward the line of people inside the velvet ropes. Her mother reached out to stop her.
“Let her go,” her father said. “We’ll wait right here. Aimee,” he called out. “We’ll be right here. Don’t be long.”
She turned back around once and nodded. She needed to let go and she needed to grab on, and she needed to stand directly in the center of the universe that almost wasn’t.