After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  At lunch, we made friends with the bagel guys at Chelsea Market on Ninth Avenue and gave them silly cards we made for them. We would do childish things, like the time I “washed her hair” with leave-in-conditioner while she lay in her bed, and we laughed until our sides hurt. We had bonded, most of all, over our shared desire not to go back to I.S. 89, minorities in a majority of kids who demanded we go back to our school so we could have our end-of-the-year dance there.

  I wrote a couple of op-eds for a local newspaper, the Downtown Express, about how I felt about returning to the school. I looked at the pros and cons of both sides, and ended both on the notion of “holding our heads high,” a gag-inducing cliché among adults, but a new phrase for me, at the time, and one that I rather liked.

  There would be more reports about the air quality on the news and in the local papers, and mixed reports that my dad brought home from the Community Board 1 meetings he attended.

  “It’s safe to go back, the air quality is fine.”

  “New results show that we need to delay the return, as it’s still not safe.”

  We had all formed opinions about going back, something teachers decided to initiate multiple heated discussions about.

  Greg said it made him feel safer—understandably so, since he didn’t do very well at the O’Henry Learning Center.

  I said that I did not feel safer.

  Thomas said nothing.

  We all saw those discussions as ultimately pointless, though, because it wasn’t up to us, anyway.

  * * *

  Ultimately, we returned to I.S. 89 with a couple of months left in the year, and were welcomed by a few camera crews—fewer than I was expecting.

  I was once again pretty annoyed with Paige, because I did not like the interview she gave to the local news station, New York 1, about going to back to I.S. 89. She sat there and talked about how excited she was to go back, how unafraid she was, like a kid who was totally fine. I was sure Ellen, the school principal, picked her out for that reason. I was angry because I felt that her reaction did not represent the rest of us.

  So, this time, we were all dying to get on the news.

  We only had a half-day that first day back.

  Debra, the eighth grade literacy teacher, announced we’d each be given thirty seconds to go through a giant pile of all the stuff that had been left in lockers on September 11th, to find what belonged to us. She stood there with her finger on a stopwatch she must have gotten from the gym teacher, and actually counted down.

  I instantly saw my backpack, the black one with the band of colorful daises across it; my notebook, with the big bumper sticker across the front; and a couple of binders full of blank loose leaf paper.

  Back in our science classroom, we were given some “gift boxes” that contained sparkly magic markers, a drawing pad, and a CD from either Jewel or some rapper.

  “What is this?” Becca asked. “A prize for surviving?”

  It was business as usual for the two months that finished out the rest of the year.

  Devin used AOL Instant Messenger to get me to admit that I had a crush on Kyle, promising not to tell him, even though, I should have known, Kyle was there with him.

  I tried everything to get Kyle’s attention, but he had a crush on the tall, skinny Japanese girl who wore thongs and a lot of eyeliner, so I went to the Victoria’s Secret at the Seaport to buy a black thong as thin as dental floss and some L’Oreal liquid eyeliner from the drug store and scrawled it on way too thick during class, staring into a compact mirror. My favorite shirt was a red tank top that hugged my B-cup boobs, one that Allison commented, “My mom said when there are those fabric lines across the front of a girl’s shirt, it means it’s too tight.”

  The guidance counselor, Emily, sometimes called me, Kyle, Marianne, and Jesse into her office for a therapy session because our parents had all indicated they thought it would be good for us.

  “So,” Emily would say, uncapping her pen and tossing her blonde dyed ringlets over her shoulder. “Who wants to start?”

  I always wanted to start. I was right there with all of my fears, thoughts, and feelings. The problem was, nobody else was.

  Kyle would never talk, not a single word. Jesse would kind of agree with me, with an emphatic “yeah!” and Marianne would usually question whatever the guidance counselor said, like, “Is that really supposed to make us feel better? Nothing you can say or do will make us feel better.”

  * * *

  In May, Peter, my summer camp crush, told the New York Times that he was afraid to go through tunnels, which he used to think were really cool. Now, he just thought about it being blown up, water flooding in, and dying a slow death. Nikki told them she was suddenly, months later, afraid Osama bin Laden would show up in her room, and she has disturbing dreams about him. She was checking through the window for the source of loud noises.

  Some of the elementary school kids from P.S. 234, the Times reported, were regressing to earlier childhood behavior, like hitting, kicking, calling names, even wetting the bed. Others hid in their closets every day, or ducked under desks whenever they heard noises.

  We also learned through this article that the Board of Education had concluded that about 200,000 of the 712,000 kids in public schools in grades four through twelve were candidates for “some sort of intervention” due to lingering trauma from 9/11.

  That’s what they did. They “concluded.”

  * * *

  Christine became attached to Mary, who encouraged her—all of us, in fact—to be aware of what was going on in the world, to learn about different types of people instead of believing in “propaganda.” We were always excited on the days that the TV and VCR were waiting in her classroom. Mary showed us documentaries like Four Little Girls about the Alabama bombings, and she showed us an episode of Boston Public, a show that my family and I watched together every week, about the use of the “N” word.

  They covered very real and dark topics that felt important. Bra protests, dead teachers, student’s parents locking them in the basement and sexually abusing them, a teacher so stressed out that she begins bashing her car when it breaks down, only to be interrupted by a student who came to find her to tell her she changed his life. We were all fans of that show, and its abrupt cancellation was something I did not take well.

  Christine also liked Mr. H, who had taken a special interest in her one day after looking over her shoulder and read the poem she was writing. He asked her if she needed to talk. She did. She usually didn’t let herself get close to adults, because they tended to leave.

  Mr. H announced, in June, that he would not be coming back.

  Mary announced that she was fired.

  The following September, they were both gone.

  * * *

  “I don’t know why I stopped seeing you,” Donna said.

  Fourteen years later to the day that I had that episode in Toys R Us, I’d found her, the woman who helped me get ready to board a plane to Disney World, who I stopped seeing after twelve weeks.

  “I think it was because the Red Cross or Crime Victims said I was only covered for twelve sessions.”

  “That must have been it,” she said.

  “But twelve weeks doesn’t seem like enough time to make sure a kid is okay after something like that,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “No, it’s definitely not. You know, they sent me downtown into another school in the Lower East Side. I stayed with those children for up to six years at a time, and was able to stay consistent with them over those years because we got a grant for trauma and a wellness center.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I could have really used that.”

  “We worked from this manual,” she said, holding up a white binder full of printed pages labeled Cognitive Behavioral Training for Children.

  “What were the kids coming to you with? What sort of issues?”

  “They were afraid, mostly. That more planes were going to go into
buildings. They were afraid to go to sleep. They had headaches and stomachaches, they were worried all the time. And I wanted to help them feel safe, so we did specific exercises.”

  “What were the exercises?”

  “Deep breathing, thought-stopping, meditation, mindfulness. I would ask them to tell their narrative, when it began, what happened, telling them not to blame themselves or feel guilty. Some of the kids had 9/11 issues, but others were dealing with different trauma, like the death of a parent.”

  “What was the end goal?”

  “To help them realize the difference between feelings and thoughts.”

  “That’s a big one,” I said.

  “Yes. For example, let’s say there’s someone who you think hates you. You may go to say ‘Hi’ and that someone doesn’t say ‘Hi’ back. Then, you think she’s ignoring you, and she hates you, then you feel bad, and you think that nobody likes you.”

  I nodded, understanding completely.

  “But then, I introduce this idea, ‘What if they’re shy? Maybe it’s not about you.’ Kids often end up with these self-fulfilling prophecies. The thought is, you’re going to do bad on a test. The feeling is that you’re stupid. So, the behavior is that you’re not going to study, and there you have it. It becomes a reality. It’s about navigating this cognitive triangle of thought, feeling, and behavior.”

  So many years later, the concepts were more than familiar to me; but then, we never understood them. Back then, I was given to Donna as a one-off patient who was given twelve sessions through which to recover.

  “These children had reactions to things for a long, long time,” she continued. “I would explain, ‘You need to learn to talk to yourself, because reactivity starts in the body.’ You have to learn to say, ‘This is happening right now, but I’m not going to die.’ It’s called positive self-talk. Otherwise, it becomes explosive.”

  “What about parents? What do you typically tell parents, in terms of how to help their kid through something like this?”

  “First you’d have to see where they are. If the parents doesn’t feel safe, they’ll impart that on the child.”

  “My mom was very nervous,” I said. “Do you think you gave her any advice?”

  “If I did, it would have been to assure her that you were safe.”

  “I think I was beyond a place where anyone could tell me I was safe,” I said. “It was a lot bigger than my parents, bigger than all of our parents.”

  “That’s why I try to get children to a place where they can soothe themselves. We’re never taught how to help ourselves when we’re anxious. As a teenager or child with trauma, you become hyperactive, hypervigilant, or the opposite, withdrawn. You get overstimulated and that becomes different in different people. Some teenagers cut themselves or feel suicidal. Others develop addictions. Some turn to sexually acting out.”

  “That sounds about right,” I said. “That’s what I heard from the other kids.”

  “You spoke to other children?” she asked.

  “The ones who were the most involved in that day had the most severe responses. A lot like mine. Of course, I didn’t know it until I spoke to them ten years later. We had mostly lost touch.”

  She nodded, then asked, “So what did happen to you after our sessions ended?”

  * * *

  In early September 2002, right before school started, my parents and I traveled to Italy, an eight-hour plane ride that was as unpleasant as you could imagine, while I tried to distract myself by reading Gossip Girl books and playing card games with my dad. Walking around in Rome, I was so embarrassed to be seen with my parents that I walked either in front of them or behind them and gave them dirty looks when they held hands.

  Two moments stand out strongly in my memory from that trip.

  The first is eating at a restaurant where the food just wasn’t good, the bald waiter asking us if we wanted something else, and then charging us for the something else, to our surprise—and leaving that restaurant to see a Church, one of the more famous ones. My eyes locked on a small family of Gypsies, a girl, a small boy, their mother, and a dog. I looked at my father, who was already going in his pockets for money.

  I handed the mother the gold coin and smiled, and I went in the church, where my own mother explained to me that you were supposed to write down a prayer and put it in the bucket, and then light a candle.

  “Please let that family and that dog have enough to eat. Please don’t let them go hungry.” I said it over and over, squeezing my eyes shut, feeling very aware and very uncomfortable that my mother was watching me.

  Back outside the church, the little girl was eating an apple, and the mother was feeding the dog some chopped up carrots.

  At the time, I thought it was a miracle.

  It could have been that because they found some more money, and they felt comfortable eating what they had.

  Either way, that moment banked itself somewhere deep in my subconscious, a sign that I could make some sort of difference to someone who needed help, and that something bigger really was listening to what I put into the universe.

  The second thing I remember was going for Gelato at some famous Piazza and catching the eyes of a stray dog. People were petting it, feeding it ice cream, and my dad said, “Poor baby,” petting its head.

  “Can we take him home with us?” I asked, knowing on some level how crazy that sounded, taking a giant retriever from Rome back on a plane to New York. At the same time, I felt that if I didn’t take the dog with us, I was never going to be able to live with myself; I would always be thinking about that dog.

  “He’ll be okay, honey,” my dad said. “People will take care of him.”

  Shortly after we got back, haunted still, as predicted, by the memory of that dog, I reminded my parents that I was now thirteen years old, which was definitely old enough to walk a dog. After years of carrying on, the clouds parted slightly that day, and I got a tentative, “We can start looking.”

  I was beyond excited to drive to the North Shore Animal League, but I wasn’t prepared for what I would see when we got there.

  All of those sad, lonely dogs, who used to have love—or worse, maybe they hadn’t—were just laying there, abandoned in cold cages, or pawing at them, begging to be let out. Tears rushed to my eyes, coming from a deep, painful place. I imagined all of them must have gathering around, with all the people saying “Aw, how cute” and moving on, probably so many times that the animals had given up hope. Some were so dejected that they didn’t even bother to move toward anyone.

  The puppies were kept in this giant stacked wall of cages in one isolated section. I locked eyes with a black and white dog who was shaking, scared of people, but nervously licking their fingers, almost frantically.

  “Hey you,” I whispered to him. “I promise, I am going to save you. I’ll be right back.”

  “Mommy, this one,” I said confidently as the pup went back to cowering in the back of the cage.

  “How big will he get?” My dad asked the shelter worker.

  “About forty to fifty pounds,” the worker said.

  “Oh, forget it,” my mom said, like she was dismissing my request for a pony instead of throwing my soul off of a cliff.

  I had become attached to him in those short moments, and abandoning him there tore something inside of me apart, prompting me to cry hysterically all the way home in a way I had never cried before. It wasn’t because I didn’t get my way. It was because I was supposed to save that dog. I told him he would be safe, and I left him, alone, scared, surrounded by noise and chaos.

  The sobs deepened with each thought of another animal I couldn’t save.

  How many more shelters are full of these dogs?

  How many aren’t in shelters, but suffering somewhere else?

  How can humans abandon such helpless, loving creatures can’t take care of themselves?

  I was starting to really, really hate people, even if I didn’t know them.

 
The following weekend, we tried a store in Brooklyn, a place we saw advertised in the back of the New York Daily News. The shop was located under the tracks of an outside train—something we didn’t have in Manhattan—in a damp, dark looking part of town.

  The puppies were kept in pens full of crinkly white paper, and the owner, as my dad would describe him, was like fast-talking used-car salesmen, grabbing their jaws and saying, “Look at that face, isn’t it precious?”

  For some reason, a Mexican woman brought five more puppies up from downstairs.

  One of them, a tiny, champagne-colored toy poodle, was so starved for affection that she kept climbing toward my face, almost swimming in place, even after she was already in my arms. She kissed my face emphatically, like her life depended on it. Again, I fell in love.

  “This is her. I want her,” I said; but my parents were skeptical because they didn’t like the sales guy.

  “I don’t think so Helaina, let’s think about it.”

  Again, I was devastated. I sighed loudly, muttering, “We better come back for her.”

  “We can just go home, missy,” my dad said. “We don’t have to try this next place.”

  I zipped it, because I didn’t want to hurt my chances of taking a puppy home.

  We drove to a shop in the West Village that my father’s friend had told him about, where they groomed dogs and boarded them when people went away. Of course, they also sold puppies.

  When we entered, ringing the tiny bell attached to the door, a man with white hair, glasses, and a plaid flannel shirt was yelling at someone picking up their dog.

  “Her fur is all matted and something is wrong with her eye! You should be arrested! You shouldn’t even be allowed to have a pet. Get out of here before I call the police,” he barked.

  I was too distracted to get upset over that myself. I looked longingly into a bin of playful puppies wriggling around on top of one another, kicking those same little squiggly scraps of white paper up everywhere. I asked to see the Shih Tzu and the Scottish Terrier.

  “Sure thing, sweetheart” the man said in a much different tone than the one he’d just been using. “Let’s take them downstairs so you can get to know them.”