After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  What if Grandma is walking around when something happens?

  What if she gets lost?

  Who’s going to die first?

  What if Grandma had been on her way to the beauty parlor in Chinatown on 9/11?

  I pictured people pummeling over her, her having a heart attack, the cops telling her she couldn’t go home. She was too old to run.

  Grandma could’ve died.

  Stop.

  Grandma is going to die.

  STOP.

  Grandma is going to die. She’s going to die. And you won’t be able to save her.

  STOP!!!!!

  Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

  My CD/Radio/Cassette player was working, so I played the only CDs I had, listening to “Unpretty” and “No Scrubs,” the CD single of Mariah Carey’s “Heartbreaker” Featuring Jay-Z, and the remix, with Missy Elliot, Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again.” I lay on the floor of my room, with its pink carpet, even though I wasn’t supposed to because of what was in it, flipping through an old magazine and singing along absent-mindedly, thinking about all the times I’d sung and danced along when there was nothing else to think about but singing and dancing along. It took a week before the thought settled in: there was no more “future” to think about. There was no “eventually” or “one day” or even “soon.” Nothing else mattered. We were all going to die.

  Journal Entry, 9/19:

  Today I stayed waiting for Daddy at the dentist for a really long time. I had such a bad stomachache. We took the bus, then some Spanish woman was talking really loudly in my ear. My dad was in pain from something called a root canal. He isn’t mean so he didn’t ask her to stop talking so loud.

  The elevators were working again, and when I got home, I rode upstairs with a young guy who was holding a clipboard.

  He asked me in a very pleasant voice, “How are you doing?”

  I sighed.

  “Hanging in,” I said.

  “You know, if you say you’re doing great, you’ll believe it and feel great,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I smiled weakly.

  “So, how are you doing?” he asked again.

  “I’m hanging in,” I said again, walking right into it, on autopilot.

  “No! You’re doing great!” he said.

  I laughed.

  Then I walked down the hallway to our apartment, and stopped laughing.

  That evening, they set up a game room for us in the basement of the community room.

  Charles and Nadine were playing video games, and I hated video games, so I just watched. I was bored and at the same time on edge, listening to Charles talk about his elaborate escape plans and his ideas about what would be next.

  “Next will be the water. They’ll poison the water. Do you know what was in those buildings? We’ll probably mutate and die of some weird contagious nuclear disease. Biological warfare is coming, I’m telling you. And our city is always going to be the number one target, which makes us the number one targets. The next attack will be by land for sure, not air again. And there’s no way we’re going to be able to survive the next one. No way.”

  Charles, by now, was already developing sleep paralysis. Essentially, he was waking up from a nightmare, but not actually waking up. His body did, but he didn’t, almost like being paralyzed.

  “My dad said, ‘We should get all of those sons of bitches.’” Charles continued. “I hope we go to war. My grandma said we should do to them what we did to the Japanese and drop an atomic bomb on them.”

  Charles also had this new “thing” where he suddenly reached out to choke people, just putting his hands around our necks and squeezing, but not hard enough to actually hurt us.

  Charles and some other friends in the neighborhood decided to go exploring through the dark garages. For a moment, roaming in the darkness with flashlights, he was able to recapture the feeling of childhood wonderment that now belonged to another lifetime. When security discovered them, Charles shouted back, “We’re afraid to go outside because the air is poisonous.”

  The guard let them stay.

  Another day, I went over to Charles’s house to try play a computer game called You Don’t Know Jack and listen to show tunes—his choice, not mine. I noticed a funny contraption, a makeshift cage, in the corner of his room.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He launched into a story, because Charles loved to tell stories.

  “Well,” he said. “On Wednesday morning of last week, it was dead silent when we woke up. I got out of bed needing badly to use the bathroom, like my usual routine. Wake up, bathroom. But the toilet wasn’t working. My dad’s coworkers had told him that the bathroom at their office would be available. So, we had to walk through a dust storm down Water Street, half awake and in our pajamas, over to Maiden Lane.”

  “Uh-huh …” I said.

  “It’s usually bustling with people on their way to work, but Water Street was deserted. Like a ghost town. Anyway, on the way back, we found a small bird on the ground. It was injured. My dad picked it up and brought it back to our house. We turned my old wrestling ring play set into a cage for the bird, and fed it water and grains. We nursed it to back to health, and this morning, we set it free. It fluttered off the terrace and faltered slightly before hovering over the Brooklyn Bridge. It picked up speed, flew into Brooklyn, and flew out of sight.”

  * * *

  In the week that followed, the absence of the Towers left a dull, dank feeling in the air. The weather seemed to always be overcast, and even on the rare sunny day, there was nothing to smile about. The heavy smog from the burning pile lingered, and it became our sky. Everyone was worn and haggard. Every loud noise sent a surge of fear through my body. More photos of faces were put up in front of the hospital, and I decided that nothing could be accepted at face value. I knew, not thought, that something else, something worse, was going to happen. It’s like watching Jaws when they “catch” him the first time. There’s too much movie left for that to be the end of Jaws.

  The dread of going back to school was not the average disappointment of going back to school after a “break.” It felt like a legitimate death sentence. By now, I had started sleeping in my parent’s bed with them again. When my mom finally got ahold of my pediatrician, the doctor said, “You have to get her out of there,” so I wedged myself between a foot of space on the floor between my mom’s side of the bed and the wall, using their comforter as a mattress.

  I eventually got to see the end of Giuliani’s initial speech from the morning of September twelfth, when some station re-ran it.

  “Not only are we going to rebuild, but we are going to come out of this stronger than ever,” he concluded. “Emotionally, politically, much stronger as a city, and economically stronger too. We’re going to work on that right away.”

  After a while, the beige color of the ash turned to gray, and the first time it rained the gray didn’t wash off of Fulton Street.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The military checkpoints, the sirens, the rubble. This is all familiar to Ellen Foote, who lived in Beirut for years with her foreign correspondent husband long before she was the principal of a middle school in Battery Park City, in the shadow of the World Trade Center.

  Many of the three hundred sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at Ms. Foote’s school, Intermediate School 89, felt the seismic shock when two airplanes hit on September 11. From the floor-to-ceiling windows on the school’s south side, they smelled the smoke and heard the cries.

  These sights, sounds, and smells evoke the days when Ms. Foote and her husband, Steve Hindy, a former correspondent for The Associated Press, lived across the street from the American Embassy in Beirut, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

  In the days after the attack, she located all but two of the families at I.S. 89, despite telephone lines so tangled that calls to Chinatown sometimes rang in the ticket office of the Mets baseball team.

  She spent time, daily, with a s
ocial studies teacher who saw the terrorist plane hit the exact spot where his older brother worked at the World Trade Center, yet stayed with his pupils until the last was safely at home.

  In retrospect, her job in Beirut seems a peaceful one, assembling research material for journalists at the Arab World File. And, in retrospect, her reason for coming home seems ironic. When her husband left Beirut, he was offered a new posting in the Philippines.

  But Ms. Foote balked. “I’m tired of being an Ugly American,” she told him. “I need to go back to New York and feel safe.”

  —Jane Gross in “Changed Lives: A Principal’s World Suddenly Turned Into Beirut,” New York Times, September 26, 2001

  One morning, my mother got a call.

  “The kids are going back to school at the O’Henry Learning Center.”

  “No,” I said as soon as she hung up. “I’m not going back.”

  “Yes, you are,” my mother said. “And I’m glad you’re going back.”

  Things had not been especially easy for us as of late. We were both irritable, anxious, jumping when we called one another’s name, flipping out if the folded shopping cart started slipping from its place up against the wall, falling to the floor with a “clap.”

  So now, what? We were supposed to magically “forget everything” and go back to normal, pretend that it was just school as usual?

  This is foolish.

  We couldn’t go back to I.S.89 because of the realities that still exited in Lower Manhattan. Crews were still digging through rubble and finding bodies, and the entire area resembled a war zone. The air was toxic; they kept testing and retesting it, but those chemicals hung around for a very long time. Simply put, the student population of I.S.89 couldn’t go back to their school building because it wasn’t safe.

  Ironically, there we were, though, Charles, Nadine, Christine, and several others who lived not in Battery Park but in buildings on the East Side that made up this forgotten population. Everyone knew about Battery Park, but no one knew about us.

  It was decided that Charles, Nadine, and I would take the A train to Fourteenth Street to get to the new school relocation. We weren’t used to taking mass transit to get to school, so our mothers came with us that first morning. On the two-block walk to the train, a new backpack clunking against my lower back, I peered closely at the Pakistani man in the newsstand, his face framed by cigarettes, magazines, and candy. The men who sold bootlegged copies of CDs and movies would not be out in a few hours, like they normally were, since they didn’t have any sort of legal identification at all. The hot dog man was not on the corner.

  I couldn’t believe I was putting myself back in the same exact situation again, and it also seemed that it was a bad idea for someone like me to be getting on a train.

  They were taken to camps in trains.

  Somebody could hijack the train and take all of us there.

  What are the chances of that happening?

  As likely as two planes hitting the same target.

  On the subway platform, the sense of dread and doom spread like a bad stomachache. Above us, something rumbled loudly.

  What was that?

  Charles’s eyes widened.

  It was only the 2/3 train passing above us on the upper level, but we didn’t know that; even if we did, it wouldn’t have mattered.

  There’s absolutely no way I’m going to be able to deal with this.

  “Mom, I can’t do this,” I said quickly, vibrating with anxiety. A surge in my chest sent me moving quickly toward the stairs before I even realized it. “I need to go home.”

  “No!” said Charles, obstructing my path. “We have to try to get back to normal, or else the terrorists win.”

  “Terrorist” was a word we had now come to associate with the people who “did it.” I was already sick of hearing the new phrase, and it had only been two weeks.

  If we don’t take the subway, the terrorists win.

  If we don’t fly, the terrorists win.

  If we don’t go out to eat, the terrorists win.

  What did it even mean to let them “win”?

  Thousands of people were dead. Thousands of other lives were ruined. Everything was closed. The Towers were gone. “They” were burning our flags and cheering. “They” already won. In fact, it wasn’t even a matter of winning. There was no battle. They just destroyed everything.

  The train ride was bizarre. If people riding the train were afraid, they didn’t show it. No fear in their eyes or bodies, nothing different about these commuters. Rowdy kids screamed and shoved each other, people pushed and sneered and read their books and went about life as normal. I felt like I was going insane.

  We emerged from the subway stairs and walked toward Seventeenth Street and Eighth Avenue. It was narrow and unfamiliar. The delis looked dirty, the streets looked too busy, and the people looked too different. Charles, Ann, my mother, and I all made our way to the middle of the block. Nadine and her mom had gotten off at Canal Street so Nadine could throw up; she was on antibiotics, and her mother had given her chocolate cake for breakfast.

  Hundreds of parents and children were mobbing the entrance. My breathing began to quicken, and I froze in place.

  “Come on,” my mom said.

  I wouldn’t walk.

  “You have to be brave,” she said. “You were always so brave.”

  Everything in my body defied moving forward, but my mother pulled me toward the building anyway. The first thing I heard was Thomas’s mother telling him, “Don’t worry, its ok, just go.” Thomas, who was short, like me, with shiny dark hair and brown eyes, hesitantly pet their dog, Eddie, goodbye. I caught his eye, and we walked toward the double doors of the building entrance. Kyle, whose mother had escaped from the 101st floor of Tower 1, was standing in front of the security desk and pointing to his mouth. He was going to be sick.

  As we squeezed our way through the crowd, looking like two backpack-and-sneaker wearing deer caught in headlights, Thomas began telling me what the past two weeks had been like.

  He told me about traveling from hotel to hotel, how his mother had bought chicken nuggets from a store and asked the hotel to cook them on his birthday, so he could have something that felt like a homecooked meal. He told me about the giant convention center where people went to figure out whose homes were intact, and who had to go to which hotel and how they would pay for it. He told me about this little kids’ area they had at the center, which was run by therapists who provided crayons and paper and told them to “draw how they felt.”

  “Do you guys have a plan?” I asked him as we were jostled around with the crowd, referring to what they would do when another attack took place.

  “If it happens uptown, we meet at the movie theatre down in Battery Park. If it happens downtown, we meet at whichever hotel we’re currently staying at. We’ve already been to three.”

  There was a little American flag sticking out of his backpack—they were everywhere now, on stickers, on cars, in windows, on T-shirts.

  “United We Stand, Never Forget, These Colors Don’t Run.”

  The scene in the auditorium was absolute chaos. The first thing I did was check to make sure everyone I knew was alive. Everyone was. I saw Becca sitting with Henry and gave her a big hug. She looked tired.

  One little girl, someone’s sister, asked Becca how many people she saw jump.

  “I wish I didn’t,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said, plunking down in the empty seat on her other side. “No offense, but you look exhausted. You ok?”

  “I haven’t been sleeping,” she admitted. When she did manage to nod off after two or three days straight without sleep, she had recurrent nightmares that people were throwing themselves off of the burning towers and falling on top of her. Sometimes, she was one of the people, trying to figure out whether jumping or burning to death was the quickest way to die.

  After we broke off into our classes and found our first room, a random woman gave us paper
and crayons.

  “Draw how you feel?” Michael said, looking down at the paper. Michael had shown up with blue hair, for some reason, which made me think that his mother was way cooler than my mother.“Nobody’s going to take this seriously.”

  * * *

  The reporters found us on day two.

  “Did you see people jumping?” they asked us, thrusting microphones into our faces.

  “Don’t talk to them, just keep walking!” teachers and parents said as they ushered us inside. We had no problem with that. None of us wanted to explain to them what we saw, or ran from, or anything else they asked. But, even inside the building, all eyes were on us. Teachers and parents from the other schools whispered, “Those are the ones. That’s them.”

  A couple of teachers tried to initiate a discussion about what we’d been through in between some semblance of actual lessons about math and English, but it never caught on. Nobody wanted to share their private, most intimate fears with the class, but one person did offer something.

  “There are people who died, or whose parents died, so we don’t have the right to talk about it,” Trevor said matter-of-factly.

  That was the end of any group discussion.

  * * *

  The sun always shone brightly on I.S. 89, reflecting off of the Hudson River and the seemingly endless, glimmering windows of the World Trade Center. The sun was completely unobstructed, the Hudson River on one side and the West Side Highway on the other. Light filtered its way into the classroom, spilling across the tabletops marked up with pen and marker, draping across the carpet.

  By contrast, The O’Henry Learning Center was dark and boxed in by other buildings. Across the street was one of the city’s “worst” high schools, which had black bars on the windows and cops usually stationed out front around 3:00 p.m. The entire area felt like one big prison.

  In the park across the street, homeless people slept on benches and gangs huddled in a circle, smoking weed and waiting to jump younger kids. Within weeks, a few of our classmates—the ones who had suddenly become angry versions of their former selves from back in August—began smoking pot in the park with them and tagging graffiti on lampposts. The rest of us walked quickly past it with our heads down.