by Hannah Paige
“Okay, according the paramedics they’ve started receiving people for minor injuries. They’ve got a place for us to set up,” Lee reported, and they all ducked under the tape, following him to the far side of Ground Zero. They stepped over hunks of debris, glass. One of the nurses, a young girl, probably even younger than Ian, stepped in some dribbles of blood, but kept moving, staying right behind Ian until Lee stopped.
“In there, the EMTs have already started setting up. Let’s go,” he ordered.
Without a second to reflect on the quality of the makeshift ‘hospital’, the group of volunteers passed through the doors, under the golden arches, and into the McDonald’s. A pile of only the most basic supplies cluttered one of the tables; the ketchup and mustard bottles had been shoved off to the floor. Lee started wiping down the tables as a pair of EMTs brought in a huddle of people who were coughing through their shirts, held against their mouths. Ian looked to his left where the nurse with, now, a bloody shoe, and the anesthesiologist were clearing boxes of individually wrapped apple pies out of the way so they could set up IVs. Ian looked over the supplies. If someone came in with a major injury, Ian might just have to start praying today, because they simply wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
A few more people were brought in, mostly passersby who had suffered scrapes from the explosions. Another rumble and a crash came about an hour later, but from where they were, Ian couldn’t tell what happened. He cleaned, in the abundance of free time that he had recently inherited. Up until now he had dreamed of free time, had cherished every second that he had off of his feet. Now he just wanted something to do. He found himself wishing for a wave of people that he could help to come through the door. At least then he would know that people could be helped, that they weren’t all beyond saving.
At about 1 pm, the smoke finally cleared outside the McDonald’s windows. Ian ventured a glance outside and saw that the pedestrians had thinned a bit, but the body count had risen. Blue and yellow tarps laid out like a patch quilt, with blood and grime as the stitches, on the cement. There were too many to count. He wandered outside and found Lee sitting on a stack of concrete. His green scrubs were splattered with red and his face had turned a pale grey. He was sitting next to a yellow tarp with a woman’s hand sticking out the side.
Ian knelt down a few feet in front of Lee, “What happened?”
Lee’s eyes were glazed over, red and swollen and empty, “They asked me to amputate. I’m…I’m not even qualified for that, I didn’t have anything I needed. They just asked me to cut her leg off so that she could get out from under the rubble. They wanted me to free her by chopping her leg off. I didn’t—I didn’t know what to do. She was screaming and they were yelling at me to do something, just do something. So I did,” his voice broke on the last sentence and Ian rested a hand on Lee’s shoulder. The man was shaking under Ian’s hand.
"She died of blood loss. Blood loss, for God’s sake. After all that.
“I couldn’t even save her. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t,” he balled his hands into fists and started beating them against his head. “I couldn’t save her! I couldn’t do anything! Idiot, couldn’t save her!” He screamed at himself.
Ian lurched to a standing position and tripped on the tarp, trying to reach Lee to keep him from hurting himself. In the process the top part of the tarp flipped over, exposing the upper body of the woman who had bled out.
Ian could just make out her pale-pink blouse, ripped down the side, revealing the white bra that she wore underneath—now more grey than the creamy color it had started out as. Her skin was covered with a layer of dust, but he could still make out the natural, pale coloring underneath, sprinkled with a significant dosage of freckles. Her cheeks still looked pink, even with the soot—turned a muddy brown color, probably after having been muddled with her own tears—caked on them. Ian could still see the coppery highlights in her bright blonde hair.
Honestly, Ian had wanted to see Jill Adkins sooner rather than later. But not like this.
April
“Hi, my name is April McCann,” she shook her head at her own reflection in the mirror, “Too ‘first day of Kindergarten’. Hello. April McCann. Nice to meet you. What are you meeting the President? You know these people, April. They already gave you the job. Relax. It’s training, on-the-job training. No different than the classroom. Just a different venue.” With real people that are really hurt, she tried not to think.
The phone rang on the bedside table, sending her orange tabby cat, Skittles, scrambling off the bed to escape the noise. He embodied, heart and soul, the saying ‘scaredy-cat’. April plucked the phone from its base, twisting the spiral phone cord around her pointer finger, “Hello?”
“You haven’t slept at all, have you?”
April smiled at the sound of her best friend’s voice over the line, “Aw, Ed, you know me too well.”
“I better. Once you know someone in high school, the rest is easy.”
“That’s awfully philosophical of you,” April muttered, easing down to her knees. She crawled to the foot of her bed and lifted the bed skirt to see Skittles, a trembling ball of panic.
“I’ve been trying out that whole tai-chi thing, even taking yoga classes, they’ve been helping me find my center, and a date for this Friday night. I forgot to tell you, one of the instructors who teaches in the same building as yoga does one of those cycle classes. I tried one last week and I almost passed out, but damn, the instructor was fine.”
April reached past the dust bunnies under her bed and dragged Skittles out from his dark hiding place, pulling him into her lap, “Are you sure you weren’t just distracted by the bike shorts? Because that would be a sucky consolation for your self-induced hyperventilation.”
“Excuse me, but I deserve a little more credit than that! It was not the bike shorts. While a contributing factor, they weren’t the only one. So, a couple days went by and he asked me out, standing in the parking lot. Sure, I would have appreciated a more flattering setting, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.”
April could hear Skittles start to purr, clearly relaxing in her arms from his traumatic experience with the telephone, “Good for you, Ed. Hey, if this one passes inspection, do I get to meet him?”
“Oh sure, but you know the deal. You meet mine and I meet yours. Anyway, back to you. You know what you’re going to wear today?”
She frowned, tucking the phone against her shoulder, “Not a clue.”
She heard rustling on his line, sounded like him getting out of bed, if she was correct, “How about that new white dress you bought last weekend?”
“Ed, that’s a cocktail dress. This isn’t a dinner party, I’m supposed to look professional.”
“Fine, but it makes your legs look two inches longer, all I’m saying. You could wear your orange blouse, that pretty tangerine sheer one with the white zippers on the shoulders. Orange is your power color, that’s a perfect blouse.”
April plopped Skittles back on her bed and grabbed the phone base, bringing it with her to her closet, “That is a great shirt.”
“Oh, I know it is, I picked it out for you. Pair that with some khaki pants, then maybe your orange flats, brighten the whole outfit up.”
April pulled out all the articles of clothing, laying them out on her bed, “You’re good at this.”
“Don’t I know it. I’m telling you, they should start a show with a couple of guys like me giving out fashion advice. The networks would make millions.”
April laughed, brushing Skittles off the khaki pants spread at the foot of her bed; cats were genetically drawn to laying on clothes, and her fur-laden closet was proof, “Yeah, I’ll be sure to get NBC on the phone after I’m done with you.”
“What time do you have to leave today?”
April recalled the math that she’d done the day before; she was not going to be late for her first day, “The commute is going to be about an hour, but I want to leave time for extra traffi
c, just in case. Since I have to be there at eight-thirty, I’m going to leave at seven, which means I have to start getting dressed at about six, so really, I’m not awake all that much earlier than I would have had to get up if I had slept through the night.”
“You’re just trying to excuse yourself for freaking out,” Ed pointed out, matter-of-factly.
April stuck out her bottom lip, “Hush. Don’t you have something better to do than pester me about my neurotic nature?”
Ed laughed, “At four-thirty in the morning? I think not. Why don’t you see if you can even just get an hour of sleep? I’ll hang up, you can put on some of that soothing music. In yoga they sometimes play nature music and half the time the woman next to me knocks right out.”
“I didn’t think there was any sleeping in yoga. Don’t you pay for those classes? I wonder if that woman realizes she’s paying for a nap,” April muttered.
“I’m going to hang up now, and you better be climbing into bed. Shove that fat cat over and get under the covers.”
“Yes sir. Shoving cat,” she groaned, straining to slide her obese cat to the other side of the bed, “In bed. Pulling sheet up,” she giggled, holding her cotton sheet under her chin.
“Good. Now get some rest. Your alarm is set, and you will not be late to work tomorrow. Knock ’em dead. Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Morning, Ed,” she leaned over Skittles, who was giving her a stony glare, and returned the phone to its home.
At six-fifty-eight, April called goodbye to Skittles—he’d holed up in the laundry basket after April had most unceremoniously heaved him out of bed so that she could make it—and pulled her door closed. She made the precarious journey, cautious not to get the dust from her gravel driveway on her cute shoes, up to the row of apartments that served as a suitable barrier between the noisy street and April’s house, or as Ed referred to it, ‘that nerve wracking lean-to surely constructed from an old garden shed’.
The cab ride across the bridge and into Manhattan was fairly uneventful: the usual traffic jams and angry drivers. April couldn’t stand the sound of constant horn-honking, so she traveled with her headphones, bobbing along to The Beach Boys as she laughed at the muted faces of impatient drivers through the backseat taxi window.
The car pulled up outside the police station at exactly eight-twenty: ten minutes early, perfect. April climbed out after handing the driver her pay for the day; she might have to invest in an alternative way to get to work, noting how much lighter her wallet felt. Her hand jittered on her purse—blue, to pair nicely with her outfit—as she stood on the curb, looking up at the building. It was intimidating, with gaping glass windows and concrete blocks towering above her head. Pushing her chin up, she hiked her purse securely on her shoulder, raked her hands through her hair one last time, and headed in.
“Good Morning. Hello,” she said as people whisked past her, some in uniform, some in formal outfits. She saw a few women in suits, and others in dress pants and crisp shirts; she breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that she fit the unofficial uniform.
She approached one of the officers by the front door, who waved her through the metal detector. “Good Morning. It’s my first day,” she said laying her purse down to go through the scanner machine.
He nodded at her, then returned his attention to her purse on the screen. April stepped through the metal detector and retrieved her bag, giving the officer a bright smile.
“Have a great day, sir!” she waved at him, joining a crowd in the elevator—the civilian hub was on the second floor—but he didn’t return the gesture. She looked at the woman next to her, wearing a purple pastel blouse, “Is everyone here like that?”
The woman responded with a deep-set frown that looked as if it had been festering on her face since puberty—one insensitive comment from a fellow adolescent and she’d never dropped the scowl. April took a step back, closer to the elevator wall, “Alrighty, then. Could’ve just said no.”
The cranky woman got off on April’s floor and marched right on through the maze of dark cubicle stations, while April hovered by the elevator, as if it had become her home, her only portal back to a world she knew. Workers in their own stations were answering phones, repeating the words that April had made her mantra over the past few weeks of classroom training: 911 what is your emergency? Then it became real for April. She wasn’t in a room full of students anymore. This may still be considered her ‘on-the-job training’, but there was nothing elementary about it. She didn’t feel like a student. She felt like a soldier being thrust into battle with all the right weapons, but hardly enough training to suffice.
A young man walked past her, and April watched him turn his head, looking at her once more, before deciding to turn around. He held his hand out to April, “You must be the woman starting today.”
She pushed out a pulse of laughter: a choppy, pathetic reaction to humor in her nervous state, “Is my deer-in-the-headlights stance that transparent? Gee, I thought I was radiating confidence.”
He gave her a sympathetic half-smile, “You look fine, just new. It’s not as scary as it seems, just answer the phone, remember your training, you’ll be fine. We’re going to put you next to Marla. She’s been here for a long time. If you have any questions, feel free to ask her.” April followed him down a queue of desks to an empty one, next to the puss-face, purple-shirt woman.
April felt her shoulders droop with her own embarrassment, “We’ve met,” she muttered, feeling Marla’s eyes start to burn her skin.
“Really? Fantastic. Now, here is your desk, your phone, the computer. I’m sure you know all this, it’s the same technology used in training.”
April felt like she was looking at a shark, ready to snatch her right out of her cute orange flats and make a meal out of her; she was used to dealing with guppies. She took the cushioned black chair, setting her purse down at her feet, and felt a hand rest on her shoulder.
“Remember, you’re prepared for this. You’ll be fine, I have no doubt. Besides, it’s a beautiful Tuesday morning. You ever hear of anything monumental happening on a Tuesday?”
April’s mind was so scattered at the moment, she couldn’t remember if she’d had breakfast this morning, let alone recall historical events.
He left April and Marla by themselves and for a brief moment nothing happened. April just sat there, staring at the phone, her clammy hands twiddling with the height adjuster on her seat. Marla’s phone rang and April heard her talk a woman through the first steps of labor, helping guide her breathing over the phone until the ambulance must have arrived and Marla hung up.
Then April heard it; what sounded like a missile, the kind that April only heard in cartoons when Wile E. Coyote accidentally dropped one on himself. Then out the window she saw a mushroom cloud, the color of orange bell peppers that have sat on the grill too long, puff out of one of the towers of the World Trade Center. For a split second, every operator stopped talking and, if she had been able to pay attention to anything else besides the explosion only blocks away, April could have heard a fly land on her computer screen.
Then, as quick as the room had gone silent, April heard something snap, maybe the air, maybe time, and all at once the phones lit up the dim room; with their blinking red bulbs, it looked like a gruesome Christmas tree lighting.
Marla got to her phone first, as did some of the other seasoned employees, and April heard their voices echo around her. She felt frozen in place and only moved once she felt someone hit her arm. She looked down to see that it had been Marla; she snapped her fingers and pointed to April’s phone, ringing and ringing and ringing on the table in front of her.
April sat back down in her chair. “Okay, okay, pick up the phone, April. Pick it up. This is what you’ve been trained to do. It’s no different than in the classroom. Come on, pick it up,” she breathed and grabbed her headset, clamping it around her ears, and pressed the answer button, “Hello, 911 what is—”
“What do you think m
y emergency is? Did you see that! Did you see the explosion! I’m walking to work and I just—What’s happening!”
April heard the panic in the man’s voice, and she remembered her lessons; calm, keep them calm, always lean towards vague order, “Sir, can you tell me—”
“Oh, God, my wife, she’s in there. What if—”
The line ended.
“Sir? Sir, are you still there?” April called back to the man.
She told herself to think, think, remember the steps. What did she need to do? Dispatch. She hit a couple keys on her computer, but before she completed the steps, she heard the ambulances screaming down the street. She heard the sirens of the cop cars that started nearby, downstairs most likely, and trailed until they were blocks away, where, now a second mushroom cloud bloomed alongside the first in the morning sky. April hadn’t heard a second explosion go off, had no concept of time passing in the frazzled room.
April hit the second red light on her phone; this time leaving out the greeting that now seemed schoolgirl-ish, “Hello, how—”
A woman’s voice, so young and thin, shrieked through the phone, “There’s smoke! There’s so much smoke everywhere, I can’t, I can barely see.”
April didn’t think; there was nothing in her training that had prepared her for something like this, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but can you tell me the telephone number from which you are calling?”
“What?” the woman’s voice sounded muffled, garbled over the line.
Probably because there was so much smoke clouding the receiver…and her lungs. April blinked, shoving the thoughts out of her head. She needed to focus and stay here, on the line. She couldn’t think about that, any of it.
“The phone number. I need your phone number.”
“646-754-11—”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, 646-754-11, and then what?” April called.