“Mommy,” I said, “How can the sky fall?”
Aaaaaarrrg!”
I let out a loud cry of frustration as I ran the round brush through my hair, trying to get that one stray piece to stay put.
I slammed the hand mirror down so hard that I broke it.
Great, I thought. Seven years of bad luck.
It was already 8:00 a.m., and I had to leave for school, so I picked up my bag and fumed past my mom. She was sitting at the dining room table finishing up her bran muffin like she did every morning, before she left for work a few minutes later. There would be a slab of butter smeared on the plate, a few crumbs clinging to the knife, and she’d drop it into the sink before she left, carrying her purse and her tote bag with her.
“Have a good day,” she said as I passed by.
“Thanks. I hate you,” I responded, slamming the door behind me.
Her crime that day was a leftover from the day before: she hadn’t reminded me to take an umbrella, and as school let out on the first day of seventh grade, the skies over Battery Park City had opened up into an uncharacteristic monsoon. I ran across the flooded ball fields to catch the bus home, the same field my best friend Gina and I had stubbornly sat on the sidelines of at Downtown Day Camp for so many summers, refusing to run around and play, designating ourselves as “water monitors.” I got home soaking wet, which, of course, was my mother’s fault.
But that morning was a beautiful day, like so many other beautiful days you don’t really notice when you’re twelve years old.
Normally, I walked to school with my neighbors Charles and Nadine, and Charles’ mom, Ann. That morning, Charles and Ann were already long gone, since he had taken the first dentist appointment of the day. Nadine and I ambled along our usual route through City Hall Park and were through the school doors by 8:15 a.m.
Before class, I stopped to plunk my backpack in my locker, taking two composition notebooks and my pencil case with me, the one with the dog’s face pictured from a funny angle, making his eyes look huge.
Eventually, I walked down the hall, past the green lockers, to my first period class, science with Mr. H.
He began the lesson on biomes and ecosystems.
“An ecosystem is a community of living organisms that interact with nonliving components of the environment like water, air, and soil.”
Vrrroooooooooooom.
Boom.
The floor shuddered and the shelves rattled.
Then, there was silence.
Everyone looked around wide-eyed, more with curiosity and surprise than fear. I thought maybe it was a truck tire popping, and looked over at Devin, who was almost smirking. Behind him, the clock read 8:46 a.m.
A few kids ran to the window that faced Stuyvesant High School, directly across the street, but saw nothing unusual.
“Sit down, guys,” said Mr. H.
I went over to the other window, which faced the West Side Highway, looking out over Chambers Street, but there was nothing to see there, either.
“Guys, if you don’t get away from the windows, you’re all getting detention.”
We ambled back to our tables.
“This is New York City,” said the teacher, who was from Canada. “Loud noises are everywhere.”
He turned toward the white dry erase board to continue, but Ivan interrupted, because he was one of those kids who always interrupted.
“What if they bombed the World Trade Center?” he asked.
The room stayed quiet for a split second, until Allison shouted, “My mom works in the World Trade Center!”
As if on cue, the wailing of sirens began echoing against the classroom walls, the lights flashing across the whiteboard. When we went back to the windows, we could see firemen hopping out of trucks and walking downtown along the West Side Highway. The side of the truck said Engine 6, the station one block from my apartment, but we couldn’t see where they were going. They just walked until they disappeared.
Mr. H sighed, and continued.
“Biomes are different areas of the world that have similar climates, weather, and living things.”
Through the small window of the classroom door, we could see teachers running back and forth in the hallway. Two minutes later, there was a knock at the classroom door.
Mr. H went into the hallway and returned seconds later, all signs of color drained from his face.
“They’ve bombed the World Trade Center,” he said.
They? They who?
“We’re sitting here to wait for further instructions.”
Allison’s hands flew to cover her eyes. I had only met her two days before, but I got up and dragged my lab stool next to hers. I rubbed her back, not knowing what else to do.
Okay, they bombed the World Trade Center, but we’re not in the World Trade Center.
Mr. H did his best to keep composed as he stood silently at the front of the room with his hands clasped in front of him.
After another knock, and another step into the hallway, Mr. H announced, “Gather your things, and don’t stop at your lockers. We’re having an emergency assembly.”
We didn’t go to the auditorium, where an assembly would have normally been, but to the cafeteria.
“Nobody leave the building under any circumstances, and stay away from the windows.”
Don’t have to tell me twice.
I looked around at the tables full of kids, then over at Patty, who always wore the same big black trench coat. Gina and I had made fun of her at camp for being “big,” and I was pretty sure she hadn’t forgotten about it.
“A plane flew into the Twin Towers,” she was telling everyone around her.
That’s impossible. I blew it off like someone told me the walls were made of candy.
A second thought flickered by like a flash of lightning. What if it’s true?
“There’s no way it’s a plane,” I said. “It was obviously a bomb. We’ll probably just get the day off. It won’t be a big deal.”
She looked at me like I was an idiot.
“I’m telling you what I heard,” she said, rolling her eyes and turning away from me.
I walked over to Devin, who was listening to the radio on his Discman. He was one of the few students who had a cell phone, which he was holding in the palm of his hand.
“It’s not working,” he said, looking down at it. “But the radio is saying that a plane hit the building.”
I sat down next to him, fidgeting with my pencil case, zipping it open and closed and sighing, impatiently, wishing I knew what the hell was going on. I looked over at Christine. We weren’t especially friendly—she was closer to Nadine—but we said hello in the halls, and I knew that we lived a few blocks from each other. She was wearing two big T-shirts to cover her enormous chest and was talking to some other kids I didn’t know.
“Today is my birthday,” said Shane as he walked by all of us to go to the bathroom.
All I wanted to do was go to my locker to get my bag, my MetroCard, and the rest of my books. I just wanted to write, to do something other than just sit there, absorbing this weird energy.
I’d done that day’s writer’s notebook assignment the night before and dated it 9/11/01. I had written about the MTV awards and ice cream and how excited I was to get my braces in a few months.
The next time I looked up, a group of men with large helmets and green uniforms had burst through the cafeteria doors.
“That’s the bomb squad!” Devin said loudly.
Thirty seconds later, he made another announcement, but only a few of us heard it.
“A second plane just hit the other Tower.”
Nobody in the cafeteria heard the second plane hit, but as soon as the bomb squad started speaking with teachers, the chaos began.
The principal, Ellen, announced that everyone was to be evacuated within five minutes. Parents began rushing into the building, frantic, screaming.
Suddenly, Ann and Charles appeared in the doorway of the caf
eteria.
Instinctively, I ran over and said, “Ann, can you believe this?” The idea of her taking me home flashed through my mind, but I didn’t like to ask anyone but my parents for anything.
I looked at the men in the large helmets with the tiny visor windows over their eyes and then at the parents shoving their way into the building, crying and rambling incoherently.
Where are my parents?
My mom worked at Rockefeller Center, and my dad taught in Staten Island, so they certainly weren’t going to show up here.
But what if they’re on their way down here?
What if I’m not here when they get here?
They wouldn’t get down here that quickly. You can call them from home to let them know you’re okay.
“Take me with you, please,” I said to Ann, interrupting my own string of thoughts.
“We’re not supposed to let anyone go without a parent,” Ellen said.
Her eyes darted from Ann to me, then flickered wildly over the crowd in front of her.
Grandma.
What about Grandma.
At home, you can make sure Grandma and Grandpa are okay, too.
“I walk her to school every morning. I can take her home now,” Ann said reassuringly, nodding in a way that conveyed authority.
Ellen gave her approval with a tentative nod before being swallowed into a sea of people. The last person I saw inside was Alex, the sixth grade global studies teacher, who was craning his neck near the window and looking up.
He stayed in the cafeteria until the building was evacuated five minutes later.
He stayed with the students as they were shepherded away from the school, screaming, crying, and running up the West Side Highway.
He stayed, even though his brother was on the 101st floor of Tower 2.
When the three of us pushed open the double doors of the school building and walked out onto the street, something stung my nostrils, causing a burning sensation.
What’s that smell?
It looked like we had stepped out onto the movie set of a disaster film.
Police cars and fire engines had parked in all sorts of places.
Peoples’ screams were fading in and out as they clambered into each other. Cars were stopped dead along the West Side Highway, bumper to bumper. Camera crews were barking orders at each other. Ambulances were receiving people bleeding on stretchers. Everyone else was standing still, looking up, as plumes of smoke and ash billowed from the gashed mouths of both towers.
I looked up then, too, watching as the building vomited paper, feeling the heat across my face.
“Let’s go, kids,” Ann said, and we headed up Chambers Street with one objective: get home.
CHAPTER TWO
You never do get to go back to anything, but it really takes a long time to learn that.
—Diane Di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik
The World Trade Center is one of many things I wish I’d known to remember more clearly before it was taken away.
They were two very tall buildings, just like all of the other very tall buildings in our neighborhood. The walk over to them was all concrete and tricolored streetlights, hot dog carts and business people, taxi cabs and horn-honking traffic jams, smells that cycled between cologne, exhaust fumes, leather, and burnt hot pretzels.
To me, it was just another big space we walked through to get to Hudson River Park, with its sandboxes and swings and the cement elephant sprinkler whose thin stream was always shockingly cold. It was where we went for Krispy Kreme doughnuts, my mom’s favorite, or to read stories in the book nook of Borders bookstore. The lobby had endless windows, a Sam Goody—they sold CDs, which, at one time, were used to play music—and my favorite clothing store, the Children’s Place.
Nearby was the World Financial Center, which hosted all sorts of fun events with hayrides, characters in costume, and musical shows. The ceiling was made of glass, and from it hung strings of shimmery lights, which cascaded downward like vines, tickling the rows of palm trees that reached up toward the sky from below.
What I remember most clearly is the plaza between the two buildings, the one with the fountain. In the middle of the vertical spouts of water was a big gold circle, and I always tried to get away with touching it as the water trickled down the side. The sun would hit the sphere and make it look like a magical, glistening ball of light that I just had to get near.
“You’ll get a disease,” my mom, Denise, always said when she caught me moving toward it, gently yanking my arm away.
I’d settle for sitting right alongside it, eating some sort of snack, maybe watching an outdoor performance, trying not to be too annoyed that someone decided to send water dancing down a big shiny ball if you weren’t supposed to play with it. To me, it seemed like a big sprinkler that adults didn’t know how to use, and wouldn’t let me use.
The way I remember that sphere most clearly now, though, is on the back of a truck, demolished, being carted down the West Side Highway.
Completely destroyed.
* * *
Ask my parents why I’m an only child, and they will tell you to take a look at the tape.
Actually, they’ll direct you to a giant box of tiny videocassette tapes under the bed, all starring me.
The other reason I am an only child, they will tell you, is because that’s the way I wanted it.
“You didn’t want to share anything, including Grandma.”
It’s a wonder that I didn’t grow up to become a reality TV star, having been raised with my every move on camera, my father or myself narrating my life for the viewer. There I was at age two, crouching in the corner to make a poop in the potty and reciting nursery rhymes.
At age three, singing “Puff the Magic Dragon,” tossing around plastic food from the plastic play stove, playing, in a rare moment of quiet, with my sticker books, dragging around a yellow-and-red microphone attached to a tape recorder, singing and hosting talk shows or reading books out loud.
At age four, picking up my dress with a spiteful smile while I danced around to some movie soundtrack, my dad’s voice interjecting from off screen, “Helaina, if you do that again I’m turning the camera off.”
At age seven, singing the entire score of Cats like a seasoned Broadway veteran who was about to hang up her feathered hat for one final performance, brow furrowed as she unleashed a ballad in an impassioned falsetto.
One of my favorite videos takes place at a petting zoo on a farm. I’m two or three years old, wearing white frilly socks and a pink dress with a pineapple print. I’m slowly chasing after some kittens, asking, “Are you hungry, little baby?” and emphatically tossing hay in their respective directions.
“I have some food for you, baby!” I said, teetering after this one, then that one, trying to pick them up.
I look at the camera in sad confusion.
“He doesn’t want to love me, Daddy.”
Right at that moment, the camera is turned off, and when the picture comes back on, I’m holding a kitty up in front of my face, smiling.
Daddy to the rescue.
In the next shot, my mom and I are watching as another child takes a pony ride, undoubtedly waiting for my turn, or my fourth or fifth turn. I’m standing up on the white fence, and my mother has one hand on my back to keep me from falling. Her other hand finds its way to my head of full black curly hair, which she starts fluffing. My tiny arm shoots straight up in the air and lands gently, palm down, on her shoulder, accompanied by a very accusatory “Hey!”
“Uh-uh,” my mom says, glancing over my shoulder with her lips pursed and her eyebrows raised from behind her big, red-framed glasses.
“Daddy took a picture,” she said.
“Of the horsey?” I ask innocently, not turning around.
“Of you hitting Mommy,” she says, to no further comment from me.
Even before then, when I was teeny tiny, my dad would swaddle me in a bunch of blankets, wrap me up tight, and even when it w
as cold out, take me out onto the terrace and tell me that I was a papoose. I loved this more than anything, feeling safe and snuggled on this adventure that existed just a few steps away.
“Make me a papoose!” I would say. “A papoose!”
As soon as I learned to talk, it was clear that I would never be shy.
Everyone around me knew that I’d be more than happy to engage them in conversation, offering some tidbit I’d learned about caterpillars in preschool or some advice about their own lifestyle choices, like the time I informed a woman in the elevator that she was “just a little bit heavy.” I would tell people, as a three-year-old, “that age is just a number” when they asked. I emphatically chatted up neighbors like Tony, an old man who wore a fedora and smelled strongly of the aftershave that clung to his thick white gristle. Tony would give me a dollar for being so smart—on the days he gave me five dollars, I damn near lost my mind.
“We’ll put it in her college fund,” my dad would say.
My dad is a short man, about 5'8" and thin by nature. He still has a full head of hair, which cycled from black to salt and pepper and, finally, gray. His weight fluctuated at times, increasing when he quit smoking, decreasing when he started going to the gym religiously. His brown eyes and thin lips pop against his naturally tan skin, and he always dressed in “cool” jeans, tank tops, or well-made suits with shiny ties. He always smelled of expensive cologne, which he sprayed generously when he got ready for work in the wee hours of the morning. Along with his naturally booming voice and big smile, it helped him command a much bigger presence than his height ever could.
My father grew up in Brooklyn with his father, a baker—who was also an alcoholic—his mother, and his two sisters. In Lower Manhattan, specifically, absolutely everyone knew him. He was active on the Southbridge board, where we lived, on Community Board 1, and on other volunteer committees, including a youth committee that he stayed on long after I graduated from middle school, high school, and college. If you needed a hand, he was your guy. People stopped him to talk to him about noise outside of their window or if they were having trouble getting their kid into a school. I thought he was the mayor of everything, capable of fixing everyone’s problems. My mom would get annoyed when he went out of his way for people, occasionally saying, “Why are you helping them? It’s not your job.”
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