The Lies That Bind

by Emily Giffin

  “Just be patient with him,” she tells me during one of our coffee breaks. “It may take him a minute to get back to where you were, but that’s normal given everything he’s been going through.”

  * * *

  —

  On the morning of Grant’s return, I wake up with a summer cold. As dreadful as I look and feel, I tell myself that it’s a good thing—that it takes the pressure off us to be romantic. We can just talk, and I can find out how he’s feeling and doing. It will be emotional, but we will be fine.

  But as the hour of his touchdown approaches, I become racked with nervousness that only intensifies when I go home and wait for the phone to ring. The hours pass, and it never does. Finally, around eleven, I take a dose of NyQuil and drift off to sleep, delirious and disappointed, succumbing to nightmares about our breakup.

  I wake up to the sound of my apartment buzzer, my alarm clock telling me it’s nearly one in the morning. I throw my covers off, get out of bed, and press my intercom, saying hello.

  “Hi, it’s me,” I hear Grant say.

  “Come up,” I say, hitting the buzzer, then pacing by the door.

  A moment later, I’m opening it, and he’s hugging me so hard, and I know, right away, that nothing has changed.

  He tries to kiss me, but I move my face, and tell him that I have a cold and don’t want him to get sick. He says he doesn’t care. I resist again, for his sake, so he kisses me on the cheek, then the neck.

  “I love you,” he whispers.

  “You do?” I ask, getting chills that aren’t from my fever. “Are you sure?”

  He nods, then takes me back to my bed, and shows me just how much.

  I awaken the next morning to the sound of my ringing phone and the foggy memory of Grant kissing me goodbye. I hear the answering machine click on and Scottie’s voice, frantically telling me to pick up, pick up, pick up!

  His last “pick up” sounds especially urgent, so I force myself to get out of bed and walk over to my desk, grabbing the receiver as he rambles on about some crash he just saw on the news.

  “Hey. Hey. I’m here,” I say, feeling dizzy.

  “Oh my God!” he says. “Are you watching?”

  “Watching what?” I sit on my desk chair, putting my head in my hand, rubbing my throbbing temple.

  “A plane hit the World Trade Center!” he shouts into the phone.

  “What?” I say, confused and convinced that Scottie is exaggerating.

  He repeats himself slowly, as I picture a two-seater prop plane clipping the antenna atop the tower. Or maybe one of those sightseeing helicopters, offering spectacular views of Manhattan, crashed into the side of one of the towers.

  “Do they know who was flying it?” I ask him.

  “No! But it’s nuts! Turn your TV on. Now! There’s live footage!”

  “What channel are you watching?” I ask, though I know he’s a Today show loyalist.

  “NBC,” Scottie confirms, as I walk over to my sofa, grab my remote from the coffee table, and click on the television.

  Sure enough, a shot of one of the twin towers fills the screen, enormous plumes of black smoke pouring from a gaping gash toward the top of one side of the building. A smaller hole appears on an adjacent side, smoke billowing out and skyward from that opening as well.

  “Wow,” I say. “That’s a lot of damage.”

  I turn up the volume as Scottie and I listen to Katie Couric and Matt Lauer discuss the situation with a breathless, stuttering eyewitness named Jennifer. In a heavy New York accent, she explains how she emerged from the subway and looked up at the towers just as she heard a loud explosion and saw a big ball of fire.

  “I’m—I’m in shock,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Are they sure it wasn’t a bomb?” I ask Scottie, remembering the World Trade Center bombing from the early nineties.

  “Yeah. Pretty sure. They’re saying it was too high up to be a bomb,” he says.

  “Or maybe a gas explosion of some sort?” I say. Although I called in sick last night, I’m surprised that work isn’t demanding that I go cover the accident.

  “No. They’re saying it was an airplane,” Scottie insists, just as Matt starts to speculate about the size of the plane, pointing out that it seems unlikely a small plane could cause so much damage to two sides of the building. Small planes tend to crumple and then fall down, he says.

  “Do you think people had a chance to move away from the windows?” Scottie asks. It is the kind of completely speculative question he always asks, whether we’re watching a movie neither of us has ever seen or analyzing a current event like this one.

  I’ve learned over the years to humor him, so instead of saying what I’m thinking—which is, How the hell would I know?—I simply say yes and then expound further. “I feel like if you have an office view that high up, your desk would probably be facing the window. So you’d see it coming…I hope.”

  I glance at the time on my VCR, and see that it’s two minutes before nine o’clock. I tell Scottie that most white-collar New Yorkers—the ones who would likely be working on high floors of the World Trade Center—don’t usually get to work before nine, often closer to ten, so different from the Midwest, where people start their day at sunrise.

  “Unless they’re traders,” I add, thinking of Grant again, watching smoke continue to pour from the building, the wind blowing it south toward the other tower. It occurs to me that I don’t know exactly where he works—only that he’s downtown somewhere, at a firm that’s a series of WASPy names. I remind myself that there are tons of office buildings in the financial district.

  A second later, Katie Couric tells us that reports confirm it was a small commuter plane. I multiply the deaths in my mind, going from single digits in a private propeller plane to double digits in a commuter from, say, New York to DC. Maybe even more, depending on how many people were killed in the building.

  I think of Grant again, feeling a sharper stab of worry, but tell myself not to start down that paranoid road. Even if he does work in the World Trade Center, what are the chances that he works on those very floors of that very building? Besides, I doubt he’d be going into work on his first day back, especially when he was at my place so late. There’s just no way, I think, but I still want to call him. Just to hear his voice. Just to make absolutely sure.

  I tell Scottie I’ll call him right back—that I want to check on Grant. He reluctantly says okay, as I hang up and dial Grant’s number. It rings, then goes to voicemail. I start to leave him a message, but hang up, and call Scottie back.

  “Do you think this could be terrorism?” he asks instead of saying hello.

  “Terrorists on a commuter plane? I seriously doubt it,” I say, walking over to the refrigerator, pouring a glass of orange juice. I down it while Scottie keeps up a running morbid monologue, speculating about the number of fatalities and the size of the fire and the likelihood that the elevators would be working and the evacuation plan for the building and how many people could potentially be trapped by flames and whether a helicopter could fly close enough to the windows to save anyone.

  At some point, I tell him to stop, that he’s freaking me out. Then I walk back over to the TV, flip the channel to NY1, our local cable news, and see a different wide-angle view of the towers that appears to be taken from Midtown—maybe the Empire State Building. I listen as a witness describes the “staggering sight” from his office about six blocks away. In a calm but still horrified voice, he says he heard the engine of an airplane that sounded fast and low, like a military jet in an air show; that he is now staring at the hole in the side of the building that appears to be in the vague shape of an airplane, with the other side of the building blown out; that he hopes it is an optical illusion, but that the building now appears to be bending to the west. I relay all of this to Sco
ttie.

  “Jesus,” he replies under his breath, as I turn the channel back to NBC to hear yet another witness talking to Katie. She, too, describes an enormous fireball that looked to be three hundred feet across; a three-block cloud of white smoke; hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper floating like confetti; and the area swarmed with emergency vehicles.

  I stare at the television, trying to process the scene as I see what appears to be another plane fly into view, on the upper right corner of my screen. “Wait. Do you see that?” I say to Scottie.

  “See what?” he asks.

  “That plane,” I say. “Flying near the building. On the right of the screen? Or is that a helicopter?”

  “I don’t see anything but smoke,” Scottie says, as the shot tightens into a close-up of the hole in the building. From this view, it appears that at least five floors were struck. Maybe more, though it’s hard to have the proper perspective on a building so big and tall.

  A beat later, the woman talking to Katie shouts into the phone, Oh. My. God. Oh! Another one just hit!

  I can hear Al Roker gasp while Scottie screams in my ear. I freeze, even holding my breath, as the woman goes on to say that the plane appeared to be a DC-9 or a 747.

  “Now do you think this is terrorism?” Scottie demands.

  A jolt of fear hits me, but I still force myself to say no, that I bet it’s an air traffic control issue. I think of my dad, so grateful that Southwest never flies into or out of New York, but also remind myself of what he always tells us—that he’s way more likely to crash his car than one of the Boeing 737s in his fleet.

  “Air traffic control? On a perfectly nice day?” Scottie says. “NBC was broadcasting on Rockefeller Plaza earlier this morning….It’s beautiful there, isn’t it?”

  I glance out my window, confirming saturated blue skies, not a cloud in sight. “But if the instruments aren’t working, then does it matter what the weather is like?” I ask, thinking aloud, hoping.

  “Pilots don’t just fly planes into buildings! No matter what air traffic control is telling them to do!” Scottie says. “This has to be terrorism.”

  Deep down, I know he’s probably right, and I feel the fear growing in my chest and stomach, as Jennifer, the first witness, gets back on the phone with Matt. “I—I’ve never seen anything— It looks like a movie!” she says, now hysterical and breathless. “I saw a large plane, like a jet, go immediately, headed directly into the World Trade Center! It—it just flew into it, into the other tower coming from south to north! I watched the plane fly into the World Trade Center! It was a jet! It was a very large plane! It was going south! It went past the Ritz-Carlton hotel that’s being built in Battery Park! It went—flew right past—it almost hit it—and then went in…”

  Katie calls it shocking—and says something else I can’t hear over Scottie. I shush him, as the witness continues, “I’ve never seen anything like it! It literally flew itself into the World Trade Center!” Her voice is now shaking, as if she’s about to hyperventilate.

  I sit there, staring in disbelief, as they show a slow-motion replay from a different angle of what is unmistakably a jet, careening toward the tower before smashing into the side. It looks like a special effect in an end-of-the-world movie, the plane literally disappearing, absorbed into the building—poof!—before exploding into a huge ball of fire. It can’t be real. It can’t be real. Yet I’ve just seen it with my own eyes. Chills run down my spine as Matt Lauer spells it out, Now you have to move from talk about a possible accident to talk about something deliberate that has happened here.

  At this point I’m freaking out inside. They replay the footage, followed by a close-up of fires raging, thousands of pieces of paper floating in the air like a ticker tape parade.

  “What we’ve just seen is about the most shocking videotape I’ve ever seen,” Matt says, his voice steady, yet somehow not at all calm. He’s completely freaked out, too. I can hear it. I can feel it in the air.

  “What are the odds of two separate planes hitting both towers?” Al Roker asks, his voice trailing off as the screen goes fuzzy for a second.

  “It’s completely impossible to understand why this is happening—and to figure out what in the world is going on,” Katie says.

  One beat later, I get call waiting, and see that it’s my mom. I tell Scottie I have to go talk to her, then click over to hear my mother muttering something.

  “Mom?” I say.

  “Oh, thank God!”

  They are words she never uses unless she is actually thanking God—and another chill runs down my spine.

  “Are you okay? Are you watching this?” she says, either on the verge of tears or already weeping.

  “Yeah,” I say, answering both questions at once.

  “What in the world is going on?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. It’s just…awful,” I say.

  “I called your cellphone first,” she says. “And it didn’t even ring. Or go to voicemail. I was so scared….”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” I say, wishing I could hug her. “I think the circuits are just overloaded….Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s right here, sweetie. He’s not flying today, thank God….How close are you to those buildings?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Maybe forty blocks?”

  “That’s it? Only forty blocks away?”

  “Mom, that’s pretty far,” I say, trying to reassure her. “It’s, like, two miles away.” Even as I say it, I realize how near that really is, in the scheme of the world, and I find myself eyeing my windows, thinking about an escape plan. As if an escape plan would do any good if a jet plowed into my apartment.

  “What’s the tallest building near you?” she asks, as I get a flashback to all the times she corralled my sister and brother and me into our basement during tornado warnings. We’d hunker down with sleeping bags, sometimes all night long.

  “The Empire State Building is, like, twenty blocks away,” I say.

  “So, a mile?”

  “Something like that…I promise, Mom. I’m totally safe here,” I say, as it occurs to me that this isn’t a promise I can make.

  “Okay. Just please…stay put,” she says. “Don’t go to work today.”

  “I won’t,” I say. “I already called in sick last night.”

  She asks if I have enough groceries and water. I tell her that I do, even though I don’t, as a chorus of sirens wails outside my apartment.

  “Is that near you?” she says. “Or on television?”

  “On television,” I fib again. “Please don’t worry, okay?”

  “Okay,” she says, then says she needs to go to call my brother and sister, and other relatives, to let everyone know that I’m okay. “Just stay put.”

  “Okay, Mom,” I say.

  “I love you, Cecily.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.”

  It is how we always end our phone conversations, but this time is so different, and I get a little choked up as I hang up, staring at my TV as various shots of lower Manhattan flicker across the screen. It looks like a war zone, the air thick with smoke, the once blue sky now gray. Almost black.

  I turn up the television as a report comes in confirming that the first plane was hijacked. Hijacked. The word gives me a fresh set of goosebumps, as I try not to imagine the terror endured by the passengers. Maybe they didn’t know what was happening. Maybe they were sleeping or flipping through magazines or chatting with their co-workers as the cockpit was invaded. But the pilot would still have to know. And maybe the flight attendants, and a few business travelers in first class, too. And whether or not they knew, they’re all dead now. Dead.

  I call Grant again, but this time it goes straight to voicemail. Now officially terrified, I listen to his brief outgoing message before leaving a disjointed message for him. “Hey. It’s me
,” I say, sinking back into my sofa, trying to control my imagination. “I’m sure you’ve seen what’s going on by now….I can’t believe it….But I just want to make sure you’re okay? And all your people?…Call me as soon as you can. Please. I love you. Call me.”

  I hang up, feeling exhausted and numb, listening to a correspondent dub this an “obvious terrorist attack.” My mind races. Who would do such a thing? Who would be willing to kill himself in order to crash a plane? I guess it happens, though. I think of suicide bombers in Israel. What’s the difference? Just a different weapon.

  A view from the harbor, looking south to north, fills my TV screen. Sun sparkles off the still water in surreal contrast to the smoldering buildings and black sky in the near background. This should have been an ordinary early fall day, I think, as another correspondent mentions the possibility of scrambling military jets. Someone else says, Yes, but then what? Scramble jets against whom? Who and where is our enemy?

  I look at my VCR again. It’s now 9:26 A.M. A Reuters wire comes in with the most chilling report yet—that a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, in one of the towers, called and said: We’re fucking dying. He then hung up. When they called him back, he didn’t answer his phone.

  My hands shake as I try Grant for the third time, listening to his voicemail again. Nauseous, I hang up and stare at a split screen on my television. On one side, the city continues to burn, helicopters circling the flaming towers like birds. On the other side, President Bush stands behind a podium at an elementary school in Florida. His earnest eyebrows are even more furrowed than usual, his voice filled with anguish, as he tells the American people that he promises to “hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.” A moment of silence follows before he finishes, May God bless the victims, their families, and America.

  I have never loved a president more in my life, I think, as the reports keep rolling in, one more surreal than the next. I start to scribble notes on a yellow legal pad.

  9:37: Explosion at the Pentagon

  9:45: White House is evacuated