After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  I spent the entire plane ride home with my bra still unhooked in the back. I thought about moving somewhere more quiet, like the majority of Vegas—the part that was all desert—knowing full well I didn’t have the guts to move anywhere, but fantasizing about what it would be like not to have to worry that the subways didn’t have metal detectors to catch a bomb, or that everything was a landmark waiting to be obliterated.

  * * *

  Shortly after we got back, Grandpa started falling more often, while he was wandering around, to the point where neighbors were finding him and bringing him home.

  “He seems very lost and very frustrated,” they would say as they dropped him off at our apartment.

  We knew it would break Grandma’s heart to put him in a nursing home, even if it was one nearby, so we resisted for as long as we could. We couldn’t afford to pay for someone to take care of him full time, and though Grandma tried, she was now eighty-eight years old and just couldn’t keep up. When he started wandering around, unable to state where he was, or where he was going, barely able to remember his own name, we had to relent.

  In August, he had to be permanently moved into the Village Nursing home, a depressing place in need of much more funding and staffing than it had, not unlike many nursing homes in the country.

  We went every Sunday—the only family, it seemed, that did.

  It was something I dreaded, seeing my grandmother upset, seeing all of these people who could not take care of themselves, just sitting and staring, empty, lonely. Nothing to do but sit around and think of the fact that they were dying. Seeing the other residents at the home—strangers—was almost harder for me, because nobody ever came to see them. They couldn’t feed or clothe themselves, they couldn’t go to the bathroom, and they couldn’t go for a walk or turn on the TV or call someone. They sat there confused, even scared, in pain, staring at the floor or at their hands, nothing to watch, nothing to eat, nothing to do. Everything around them was bleak, eerily silent. It even smelled of death. Nothing was coming for them but the end, and they were going nowhere else until that happened. Things only got worse, and then, they just stopped.

  Out of loyalty to Grandma, I went, no matter how upsetting it was. When we arrived, it was clear that part of Grandpa knew he’d seen our familiar faces before.

  When he could no longer speak, he just closed his eyes and let out long sounds, like the notes of a song.

  Grandma always started with, “What’s my name? Who am I?” which he could never answer, which made her cry.

  He used to answer with a laugh, and then could barely even make a gesture. He made sounds that sounded like gibberish, trying to communicate like an infant.

  He reached out to touch her face, and she kissed his fingers.

  Grandma tried to feed him like she was on a mission, like somehow making sure he ate everything in front of him was going to help, so we always went around lunchtime.

  She would also try to get him to talk, a cause that became fruitless.

  We took him out for Chinese food across the street from the nursing home, a place with a Lazy Susan that had room for his wheelchair and had the kind of American Chinese food that he liked, until he began choking and could no longer eat solid food.

  My father would wheel Grandpa right up to the piano and play for everyone at the home, assume his position near the window, and sing for an hour like he had at my preschool.

  “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” was a fan favorite. Some people would tap the table and mouth the words or nod their heads, which were bent toward their chins. “Unchained Melody” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” were also popular.

  While my dad sang, I could read the fear on Grandma’s face like a book. She always told us that she wanted to die before anything like this ever happened to her.

  She’s scared that she’s going to be next.

  “I’d do anything to help him,” Grandma said through tears. Turning to him, she said, “You’ve got to get better so you can come home. Why are you getting worse?”

  He just continued playing with his bib.

  “It’s ok,” I would tell her. “He’s doing good. He’s ok.”

  We all knew he wasn’t coming home, and that this would go on for several more years, every Sunday, until it stopped.

  * * *

  The last time I ever saw Vin, I was sitting with my father and two NYPD officers in the lobby of his Gateway Plaza building.

  The fight had been a whirlwind. I opened the unlocked apartment door the same way I had every day for the past year and a half, letting myself in just as I had all the times I brought him his juice and muffin when he was sick.

  He was still angry from whatever we had been fighting about the night before, so, the second I put my brown Coach purse down on the exercise bike, he pushed me out. I tried to push my way back in, and he kept pushing me out. He threw me into the wall of the hallway so hard that my heel instantly turned purple. I could barely put weight on it.

  My bag was still in his apartment so I didn’t have my phone, keys, wallet, or anything I could use to get help. I had to keep knocking on the door and ringing the doorbell, but there was no answer on the other end.

  I went down to the lobby and asked the doorman, Angel, if he could please open the door with the spare key so I could get my things.

  “What are you talking about?” he said from behind the security desk. “No. I should call the cops on you for trespassing.”

  Angel didn’t like me very much.

  At that moment, I saw Reena walking though the courtyard. She let me use her cell phone to call my father, who was there within ten minutes.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Dad shouted at Angel.

  “If you don’t give me the phone, I’ll have you arrested too for obstruction of justice.”

  The doorman immediately handed the phone over with a shrug. I was in a daze, trying not to let it all register.

  The police got the spare key from the doorman, and we found that nobody was inside. They saw the holes Vin had punched through his bedroom door.

  “He’s not a violent guy at all, is he?” they joked, sarcastic. They handed me my purse, and I had to recount what happened word for word. I heard my voice but didn’t know who was speaking; it was all too unreal.

  As we filled out that report, Vin came walking through the lobby with his mother: after pushing me out, he had actually climbed out of his bedroom window to exit the building and go to a doctor’s appointment.

  The policemen told me to stay away from him, and of course, this would be how it had to end; in a tragedy so severe that I literally could not turn back. Still, I refused to press charges.

  The next day, Vin still called, texted, and e-mailed as if it was just another fight.

  I sat at my desk at work—I was working as an administrative assistant in the office of the company that ran Downtown Day Camp—and waited as my father called Vin and told him not to contact me again. I made myself a cup of rosehip tea, which I hated, but nobody in the office “believed in coffee.” I sipped it, limping around on my purple heel, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

  I messaged Gemma, asking her to de-friend Vin on MySpace. By then, Gemma became someone I only called while crying, asking her to steal packs of Parliament cigarettes from one of her mother’s many cartons and meet me with it. “Why don’t you just break up with him?” she’d ask.

  Now, she said: No, I’m not going to de-friend him.

  Before I could blink an eye, Vin had taken to his MySpace page to write this long explanation of what he believed happened, tracking everyone I talked to that was a mutual friend. He wrote on their pages that I was a slut, a lying bitch, a psycho who cut herself, a whore. He threatened to send naked pictures of me around the city with my address written on the back, spread details about our sex life, tell all of my secrets.

  He posted that the cops checked me for bruises and told him that “Nothing was there, that
they looked like mosquito bites,” that he should be careful, because, they told him, “I could hit myself over the head with a frying pan and say he did it.”

  It felt like all of New York City was watching me, laughing at me, saying awful and embarrassing things, conspiring against me.

  One week later, I was interviewed by My9 news for the five-year anniversary of 9/11. I remember the reporter, a middle-aged blond woman, kept asking me the same questions over and over, not liking my answers, because they weren’t dramatic enough.

  “But how did you feel,” she kept pushing.

  She got the answers she wanted, syncing them up with footage from that day.

  At the end of the segment, the reporter stood in the cafeteria of I.S. 89, where a community meeting was being held.

  “Her mother says that Crime Victims is only paying for a short portion of Helaina’s long-term therapy.”

  Days later, my mother and I were eating at an empty, dark diner that felt hollow, somewhere on University Place.

  “Please eat,” my mom said.

  I stared at my sandwich like it was ten feet tall and made of mud.

  “I cant. I really can’t,” I said.

  It didn’t matter that I hadn’t eaten all day. I just wasn’t hungry.

  I picked up the turkey BLT and took a slow and painful bite. I don’t know who it was more painful more, me or my mother. Even when I could force food down, I couldn’t even taste it, and I ate so quickly that I only knew the taste from the smell.

  I went to a new stomach doctor in Murray Hill, who stuck a camera down my throat and showed me a disgusting picture, explaining the reason I couldn’t keep anything down and barely ate was because I had developed ministomach ulcers, and Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

  He prescribed several medications that were supposed to help it go away.

  I was entering my senior year of high school, and Dr. C took me off of the medication that was supposed to “even me out.” I clearly wasn’t Bipolar. The source of that up-and-down hysteria was gone.

  She also, finally, prescribed me sleeping pills, after my mother relented from her tirade that “seventeen is too young.”

  * * *

  Thomas, by this time, was settling in to his new high school in Florida. His mother had moved him there because they just couldn’t take the stress of living in Lower Manhattan anymore, or the danger that living with his father presented.

  Things were quiet in Boca Raton, with enough promise of safety to support his decision to repeat the ninth grade, since that would mean free college tuition at a state university when the time came. He didn’t have to worry about anyone attacking them in Florida, but he did have to worry about his mother, who would cry despite herself, saying, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this alone.”

  He blended in with the other kids at his new school, who were almost entirely white, suburban kids who acted decades younger than Thomas felt. They had no idea why the 9/11 anniversary would be anything to care about. It wasn’t a part of their lives at all, as far as he could see.

  But it was part of his, which was why, on one seemingly ordinary day, when a teacher came in and said, “There’s been an incident, everyone needs to head into the gymnasium,” he felt the blood drain from his face and his body surge with fear.

  Everyone else half-cheered, or said, “Oh no, we’re all going to die!” and laughed.

  It was why Thomas stayed far away from the windows.

  It was why he sat by himself on the bleachers, heart pounding, sweating, immediately taking out his phone and texting his mom, what’s happening? As the other kids made overblown speculations and had fun doing it. You’re all stupid.

  He sat there, on the bleachers, for a full hour and forty-five minutes with the rest of the school. No teachers had information, his mother wasn’t answering, and there were no smartphones for Googling.

  When they were released at 2:45 p.m., his mother came straight from her office, an interior design firm, to pick him up.

  “It was nothing,” she explained. “The store across the street was held up at gunpoint, and they haven’t caught the guy yet.”

  * * *

  Dad parked the car somewhere near the West Side Highway, and the four of us got out to head to Lilly’s, the “fancy-ish” Chinese restaurant next to the movie theater we liked to go to on Vesey Street.

  We started to feel the drip drops of rain as we made our way from the car to the restaurant’s entrance a hundred feet away.

  Mom and Dad were walking ahead, and I was walking with Grandma, holding her arm tightly in mine.

  “Uh oh, we’d better hurry,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t want to get her hair wet.

  That had been the running joke of our lifetime—my grandmother never wore a hat, or a scarf over her hair, and you weren’t supposed to touch it. She wouldn’t even go out in the rain, most of the time, because she didn’t want to mess up her hair.

  I started to move faster, and she tried, but then she stopped.

  “Helaina,” she said my name with a gentle warning.

  I saw a subtle struggle in her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “I can’t catch my breath. Hold on,” she said, and we stood still.

  The drops began to fall quicker from the sky, and I knew something was wrong. My parents were too far ahead, already through the glass doors, assuming that we were right behind them.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  But we had to stop again after a few steps.

  “I can’t breathe,” she said.

  “Let’s get you inside so you can sit down,” I said, opening the heavy glass doors.

  We went to our table, and she sat there, uncomfortable, trying not to show that she was struggling.

  “I can’t breathe,” she said again.

  My dad immediately got up from the table and asked the hostess to call ambulance. I sat there, frozen, not knowing what to do.

  “I just peed myself,” she said quietly.

  The EMTs came in, and everyone else eating their soup dumplings turned to look at us.

  The men put her on some sort of weird contraption, the kind you’d carry your luggage on at the airport, and rolled her, upright, outside to an ambulance. I stood with one foot up on the wall as she went inside the vehicle with my mother, watching as a young neighbor of mine walked by but didn’t say anything.

  “They’re going to have to take her to the hospital,” my mom said.

  “I’m going with her,” I said, getting into the ambulance and sitting down next to where Grandma was laying with an oxygen mask over her face.

  “Okay,” my mom said. “I’ll go in the car with Daddy.”

  * * *

  They told Grandma she needed a heart valve replacement, or she would only have a few months to live.

  I ran my nails along the foot of my white wooden daybed from IKEA, staring down at the floor, the small blue rug, the desk with all sorts of trinkets and baubles on it. The things I knew other less fortunate kids would be grateful for, but left a sour taste in my mouth, a reminder that this was still the holding cell for the same life I wanted to somehow disintegrate out of. The TV was on for background noise, as it usually was twenty-four hours a day, an attempt to drown out the echoes of everything that had happened over the past five years, which reverberated off of the walls.

  Being alone was like watching a scary movie, going to change the channel when something too gruesome or disturbing came on, and realizing the batteries didn’t work. It was like getting up to try and change the channel on the cable box, bringing myself even closer to those sounds and images, and realizing that also doesn’t work. It was like trying to turn the TV off, seeing that it won’t go off, and trying to leave the room, then realizing the door wouldn’t open.

  So you can understand why, living like this, I needed a distraction from the movies playing in my own head. Nobody else really wanted to spend time with me, except for Hailey, at
lunch, and Jordan, but Jordan didn’t like Hailey, so there was that, and besides, Jordan was always with her boyfriend.

  I switched my MySpace profile picture to a photo of me in a gray button up sweater, chest pushed up slightly, six-pack abs on display, wet, curly hair held up in one hand, elbow propped toward the sky, a vacant stare into the camera.

  I started “friending” male friends’ of existing friends I had on MySpace, justifying that because they were not total strangers, it didn’t count as “meeting strangers online.”

  Want to meet? they’d message me.

  Yeah, do you have a car? I’d write back.

  There was a thrill that came along with going off with an older guy, a tough looking guy, getting drunk, and living to tell about it. Or, maybe I’d get lucky, and I wouldn’t.

  For a few hours, I could try to escape my family, my neighborhood, my life, through whatever physical distance that a used car with empty bottles rattling around under the seats could provide. I tried to find ways to just keep myself going, just get to college, that was my new goal. Just get through it.

  I thought about how Grandma used to run me though a repeated ritual of saying “no!” to strangers who tried various attempts at luring me into their cars with them. I was very adamant about the emphatic “no!” I gave her each time, feeling proud that I had somehow “outsmarted” her in every scenario of candy and ice cream promises.

  On this particular September day in 2006, darkness followed me into a beaten up white Chevy with a guy named Q who picked me up in his car and brought me out to Queens. We stopped at a liquor store under one of the bridges somewhere. I was wearing a pleather jacket, one with a snap on a strap around the neck. I had never seen a liquor store like that one. You didn’t actually go inside; someone sat behind glass window, and you told them what you wanted. You slid the money through a slot and they passed your bottle through an opening. We got a $10 bottle of something way bigger than we would have gotten for that price at a liquor store in Manhattan.