Mobs of people were running past Church Street and Broadway, women and men, black and white, too old to run and too young to understand. Some of them were bleeding, some were wheezing, a few were vomiting, but many were just screaming, covered in white, splattered in red. They all ran uptown together, arms flailing. I desperately tried to cling to Ann. We could barely push through all of them—we were the only ones going the opposite way.
If you leave me, I’ll die.
There was an unspoken understanding between us all that no matter how dangerous it was, we had to get home. Grandma and Grandpa were home. Home was the only way Mom and Dad would be able to find me.
If they’re still alive.
All of those years of my mother coaxing me out of her arms as I cried and grabbed at her before school started, came down to this moment.
“We’re all going to die,” Charles kept saying. “We’re all going to die.” He stated it, then he screamed it, then he mumbled it, and then he would start over again. Each time he said it, my fear became more and more real. Soon, I believed him. All signs pointed to the end, and I finally started to accept that it was all over.
Ann and Charles will die quickly, and I’ll be all by myself bleeding from my head.
No, we’re going to be taken hostage by the people who are doing this, sent to concentration camps to be tortured, like in The Diary of Anne Frank.
We changed our route once again and headed down Duane Street to police headquarters, right by the courthouses and St. Andrew’s Church. We passed firefighters and police officers dragging battered people, holding them upward. I couldn’t tell if they were alive or already dead. We arrived at another checkpoint near the Municipal Building to find seven or eight police officers standing there.
“We want to go to the church,” Ann insisted, thinking it would be a way in.
“You have to go uptown,” the police barked, motioning frantically with their arms.
Under any other circumstances, we all would have turned around, authority-respecting folks that we were. But scared, exhausted, and desperate, we persisted, trying to move past them. In turn, the officers all locked arms and formed a human wall, creating a barrier with their bodies to protect Police Plaza from the three of us. We turned back toward the courts, lost with so many others in a whirlwind of dust, pieces of paper, shoes and screams, screams unlike any that I had never heard before.
I had also never heard God’s name said aloud so many times, and yet it seemed that he was the first to go missing in so many people’s lives.
* * *
As everyone else ran from whatever was happening, I was still determined to run to it, whatever it was, because I had to get to Grandma.
Did I remember to tell her I love her?
I thought I was going to somehow protect her when I got there, and, at the same time, I had a horrible feeling that it would be too late.
“Helaina, keep your shirt over your face,” Ann kept reminding me. There was dust and ash everywhere.
Parents and big kids were stuffing little kids’ heads underneath their shirts. A man ten feet in front of us on the street clutched his arm, his face twisted up in pain, fell to his knee, and then hit the floor.
Who’s going to call 911 for him? How’s he going to get help? He’s going to die alone, in terror, buried under ashes, to the sound of screams.
Ann came up with a new plan to try and sneak down Worth Street through Chinatown and circle down to the East River. At the corner of Oliver and Madison Streets, a few blocks from the Smith Public Housing Projects, we stopped at a bodega, a small hole-in-the-wall store that sold lottery tickets, brand-name baked goods wrapped in cellophane, and cigarettes. The store was still open. Ann said we should buy water—I hadn’t realized I was thirsty until then, but my throat was aching from the dust and the running. At that point, I could have been missing a foot and I’m not sure I would have noticed.
Through the doorway, we saw another plume of smoke fill the sky.
Then, we heard what seemed to be the entire city shaking and rattling as if hit by an earthquake. The lines of the doorframe became wavy, the way that gasoline makes everything on the horizon behind it appear fluid like waves.
Mobs of people ran past the store, screaming, “Run for your life!”
We stayed in the store, each one of us frozen. I looked at Ann and swallowed hard. It was like an icy cold hand suddenly grabbed the back of my neck and began to squeeze.
For some reason, at that moment, I declared, “I’m going to become a nun if I make it out of this alive!” I didn’t fully understand what a nun did or didn’t do, but I knew that they were somehow close to God, special and protected. I reached for Ann’s hand. Charles held her other hand, and we waited for the smoke to clear, though I don’t know for how long, and then left the store.
The procession of people covered in blood and ashes, mouths open and limbs thrashing in all directions, continued to hurry past. Whatever had happened seemed like it had ended—it was quiet except for the sound of coughing and sirens.
My hands were wet and I was sweating, but I suddenly went cold. My muscles tightened, and I felt many things at once. I felt like I was holding my breath for an eternity. My shoulders tingled as the fear rippled down my back. I felt dizzy but startlingly alert. I had never been more awake, more aware, in my life. I felt like I had been kidnapped, blindfolded, tied to a chair, and forced to listen to other people screaming out in pain and the sound of chainsaws gearing up, not knowing what was next for me.
We sat on a bench in a small park in the Smith Projects, waiting for Ann to tell us what to do next. Everything was blurring together: gray smoke, cement, cops, cars, wallets, shoes, water bottles. We still had no idea what the hell was going on, and we were, as we had been the whole time, so close to home.
My thoughts returned to my parents.
Are they alive?
Is this happening all over the city?
There was nothing to do but wait where we were; we could not, for a while, run toward our buildings, because that was the direction that the smoke was coming from.
My grandparents were so close and yet worlds away.
I’m not even going to get to say goodbye.
I started to silently pray.
God, I’m sorry I stopped praying, but please …
I couldn’t get past please. I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know what to ask for. Worst of all, I had a feeling it didn’t really matter. Whatever was happening was clearly still happening, and whoever they were, they weren’t going to stop until we were all dead.
I used my hands to wipe my eyes and my nose, again forgetting to pull my black shirt back up over my face. Once the smoke began to clear, slowly fading gray to white, we headed to South Street. We couldn’t turn back now. I looked up at the FDR Drive overhead as we walked along the water underneath it, squinting to see one abandoned car, then another. Through a gap in the layer of white ash I could make out the color of the convertible: blue. The driver’s door was left open and the top was left down. Some people were huddling next to car radios, but most were walking quickly uptown.
There was no traffic on the FDR, under the FDR, on neighboring streets. The day had fallen silent but for sporadic sobs and the faint murmur. The city had stopped. I listened for more sounds, terrified of what I might hear and what it would mean. I thought bombs—or worse—would go off on the Brooklyn Bridge, City Hall, Wall Street, the Courthouses, all within blocks of our buildings. And although I was with Ann and Charles, I felt entirely alone.
We kept walking, hoping there would be no more cops to stop us.
We looked from Peck Slip to South Street, and I shielded my eyes with my hands and linked arms with Charles, who was still holding Ann’s hand. I would have given anything to at least know what was happening.
“Helaina, please cover your face, don’t breathe this in,” Ann pleaded.
I want to go home. I want to go home.
A bal
d man in spectacles wheezed and coughed violently into a handkerchief as he stumbled toward the East River. He was covered head to toe in ashes, barely able to see. Debris flew off of his shoulders in the breeze he created by rushing past us.
“God bless you,” Ann said to him, her lips quivering before her face collapsed in on itself and she let tears fall.
I thought it was only a matter of time before we became part of the ashes that covered the neighborhood, scattered across the water, or brushed onto a curb by a street sweeper, down a drain.
But, miraculously, the path was clear. Ann’s building, 100 Beekman Street, was the first one on our square block, near Peck Slip and Pearl Street, but she insisted on taking me home first.
I didn’t know what home meant now, or what it would look like, but I knew we were finally going to make it.
We walked past Wolf’s Diner, past the trees planted in the middle of the block, past the bar where all the neighborhood drunks gathered, through the tiny tunnel that led right to my front door. People were packed shoulder to shoulder in the lobby. It was dark, and among all of them, I recognized only two people. Everyone looked like they had rolled around in sawdust. We headed for the stairs, and I ran up the steps that I had climbed so many times before, running away from home up to Grandma’s house.
When I pushed open the staircase door, I saw Grandma at the end of the hall, standing in the doorway of her apartment, holding the white chorded phone to her ear.
“She’s here, Paul!” Grandma cried into the phone. “She’s here! Oh my God!”
She was already sobbing, and I started to cry. So did Ann and Charles.
I ran to her, and she hugged me harder than I thought possible. She kissed me twelve times in a row, just like when I was little. Grandpa was standing next to her, hugging Charles, hugging Ann, hugging me.
“If it wasn’t for you, she’d be dead,” Grandma kept telling Ann.
“No, I put them in harm’s way by taking them out of school …” Ann said.
My grandmother gently thrust the phone to my ear, smoothing my hair and kissing my head as I assured my dad that I was ok. There was this sense that time was limited—the dark lobby, the elevators out, Devin’s cell phone that had stopped working. We quickly called my mother next. She was still at work.
Through tears she asked, “Are you okay, baby?”
She’d never called me that before, and never would again.
“I’ll get down there as soon as I can,” she sobbed. Then the phone line went dead.
Charles and Ann kissed my grandmother goodbye. She thanked them again, profusely, and then they were gone.
It was 11:00 a.m., but if you had told me that ten hours had passed, I would have believed you.
I turned toward the TV, which was showing the same images over and over. The planes hitting, from this angle, now that angle, freeze-framed, in slow motion, now from closer up. Over and over and over.
And Over.
And Over.
And Over.
Then, they fell down, one then the other. They just … fell.
Finally, I understood. That’s what we were running from all morning. That’s where the dust was coming from.
I picked up the remote and flicked through the stations. My neighborhood was on every single one, and yet, where that same view should have been right outside of the window a few inches away from my face, I could see nothing but black.
Then, new images surfaced, sending a cold, heavy pit of fear into my stomach. The Pentagon had also been hit, and yet another plane had been hijacked. Planes were destroying the entire country.
This is going to go on all day.
The world is ending.
I’m never going to see my parents again.
I stopped on CBS and saw that the Price is Right was on, the only entertainment program still running in the middle of everything. I peeled a banana and forced myself to eat it. I tried to look out of the window in the living room, the one that faced Beekman Street and the Twin Towers, but I still couldn’t see anything. For an hour that’s all I could see. Darkness.
I wandered in and out of each room, and, with shaking hands, picked up the books that I used to make Grandma read over and over: Bert and Ernie in Don’t Forget the Oatmeal, Mad about Madeline, The Book of Mermaids. Though only a few hours had passed, I saw that my childhood was now far away, millions of years behind me. The safety of these books, and of this house, of this neighborhood, of the city, of the world, had dissolved.
I sat at the table and thought about all of the things I’d never get to do: walk to school or take the subway alone, get the puppy I’d always wanted, get my period, fall in love. Gruesome and horrific images flooded my twelve-year-old brain.
What if I become an orphan?
What if someone dumps my parents’ bodies outside our apartment door?
What if Grandma dies first, and I lay dying next to her, and that’s how it ends?
I tried shouting “ha!” the way my father taught me to do when I got scared as a child, but it didn’t work.
The sky, the air, the view outside the window, and the view inside my head, was black. There was nothing to make the fear stop.
The next two hours, along with whatever Grandma and Grandpa were saying or doing, do not exist in my memory.
* * *
Around 2:00 p.m., the blackness gave way to a dusty beige storm. The first thing I saw was a man wearing a gas mask, standing alone in front of New York Downtown Hospital, handing out flimsy fabric facemasks to whoever passed by. I later found out that ambulances were taking everyone to St. Vincent’s on Twelfth Street, but over eight hundred people had walked downtown to this emergency room covered in ashes. The streets were empty of vehicles except for the odd MTA bus letting off groups of people.
Grandma gave me the extra key to our apartment downstairs so I could go close all of the windows, but the damage had already been done. The kitchen table was covered with a fine layer of what looked like sawdust, as were the beds and the floors. But it wasn’t sawdust, as we were to discover later. Our couch and our beds were the final resting places for people we did not know, whose dusty remains had blown in through the windows.
The TV had been left on in the living room, and I turned to see the freeze-framed image of a man jumping out of the Tower, a white marker circling his body in case it was in any way unclear that this man was committing suicide.
Was that the man I heard earlier?
I went back upstairs and kept checking for my mother out of the same window I used to look out of when I was little, waiting to spot her coming home from work. I would sit on the thin ledge, Grandma protecting me from falling by standing behind me. We would watch for her every day, and when I finally saw Mom walking toward our building, her red coat, her tote bag, her purse, a shopping bag full of something, I would push my face up against the screen of the open window and scream, “MOOOOOMMM-AYYYY!” and she would look up and wave, along with a few other startled passerby.
I looked, and looked, and looked, and with every passing moment, I grew more afraid that she was not coming home. But around 3:00 p.m., the doorbell rang, and I nearly flew into the other room.
“Mommy!”
There was my mother, looking exhausted, holding her purse and her tote bag. I was expecting her to throw her stuff down and scoop me up in her arms, having thought that I was dead.
When I was little, I always asked my mom what she would do if anything ever happened to me. “I wouldn’t want to live anymore.”
She opened her arms to hug me, holding on for just a second longer than she normally would have, and when she let go, she had an exasperated look on her face.
“You have no idea what I had to go through to get downtown.”
* * *
She had walked into her office building on Fifty-Second and Madison to find people sobbing, someone screaming. When she walked into the conference room where the TV was on, she almost fainted.
“Th
at’s my daughter’s school! My parents are down there!”
She went down the hall to her desk to put her stuff down, and heard everyone scream again. A second plane hit. Everyone began to flee the office.
“If you need to leave, leave,” said her boss.
But my mother hadn’t heard from me, so she wasn’t going anywhere.
She called my dad, who said that the I.S. 89 administration stopped picking up the phones, and that when he spoke to Grandma after rumors started swirling about a first plane, he figured she could walk over and go get me, in case school let out. He, like many people, thought it had been a helicopter. She called Grandma, who, luckily, had not gone to get me, but hadn’t heard from me either.
Then came the collapse.
“They’re falling! They’re falling!” people were screaming.
“What do you mean they’re falling?” she shrieked. My mother thought I was dead, and so she, too, was dying inside. Everyone was trying to console her as she cried, holding her head in her hands, but there was no use.
As soon as she got the call from me at 11:00 a.m., she tried to get on the train.
“Sorry, uptown is running, downtown isn’t,” police told her.
My mother, who is very claustrophobic, braced herself to face her fear, but had to let three MTA city buses pass by on Third Avenue because they were literally packed to the brim. She faced her nightmare and pushed on to a fourth bus when she saw a space open up, between people running off, running on, going in the back way, all sorts of chaos.
When the bus got to Union Square the bus driver said, “Everybody off, no busses past Fourteenth Street.”
“How am I going to get downtown?” she asked the driver.
“I don’t know, lady,” he said. “But it’s not going to be by bus.”
She began walking, sweating, feeling faint because she hadn’t eaten.
In heels, she walked miles down Bowery, where they were giving out cups of water by the Bowery Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter.
After 9/11 Page 7