Somehow, my hand moved. Although I cannot say I controlled the movement yet, it still rose out of the debris more from reflex than thought. The motion brought with it a fragment of reality. I move, I thought. Therefore, I must live.
My hand rose slowly. It hovered just outside the halo of my pain. Cringing, I pushed through that invisible barrier and felt a brittle crust. Dust and fragments of ceiling tiles and specks of pulverized cinder block coated my hair like fallen snow. I brushed at it, and the pain flared exponentially, forcing me to close my eyes. My hand remained still as I fought to keep myself conscious. It hurt so bad I felt waves of nausea. But I knew that if I lurched, the pain would be too much to take.
As that first tidal wave of agony lessened, I slipped my hand back down. One eye opened, and I looked at chalky-white fingers, the tips coated in the brightest red I have ever seen. It burned into my eyes and everything wavered. I blinked, and only then realized it was blood.
Those alarms would not stop. They surrounded me. In a way, the noise reminded me of insects in the late summer, with that same cadence but mind-splittingly loud. At the same time, they sounded like shrill fire alarms. Opening my other eye, I tried to focus my vision. At first, everything remained white. Slowly, though, I saw a shape. It looked like a protective mask, the glass cracked, and a large metal tank. A rubber line spread across the jagged floor, disappearing under a large mass of what I took to be asphalt or crumbled concrete.
My hand moved again, but this time it seemed like a conscious decision. I reached out, gently touching the smooth surface of the mask. When my hand came back, I noticed a streak of red on the glass. I remember staring at that, for how long I have no idea. And I remember wondering if the blood had been there before or if it came from my finger.
The alarm continued. I had to move. The sound tore at the nerve endings inside my head like a fire burning beneath my skull. I put my hand down, the first step in attempting to stand. The ground shifted under me. That’s when I realized there was no floor, only sprawling debris.
I struggled and the pain intensified. The more I tried to move, the darker my world seemed to get. As the fog-like dust settled, I realized that the only light came from a ways off. I couldn’t tell if it was sunlight or artificial. The air felt so heavy and smelled so bad that I assumed it was the latter, but it was all I had.
Eventually, I rose to my knees. I felt so dizzy. But I fought through that. I had to. For some reason, that part of the brain that has remained unchanged since humans first walked with two legs took over. It called the shots. It told me to move, to get out. Something awful had happened. Something big. There was alarm and devastation. I couldn’t even find a floor. Above that metallic smell, something new filled my nose. I didn’t place it right away, but I knew it meant danger. I believe, looking back, that it might have been the sulfur smell of natural gas. At the time, I just somehow knew nothing good could come of it.
When I got to my feet, the dizziness worsened. So did the nausea. I heaved, but nothing came out except a groan from the pain. I dropped to a knee, my hands cradling my head. I wanted to scream, but I knew that would be even worse. I needed to move.
Pushing through it all, I rose again. I took a step, stumbling in the rubble and falling. But this time I got up right away. I took another step, passing the mask and the tank. I stopped for a second, distracted by the fact that at least one of the alarm sounds came from that equipment.
I cannot and will not ever claim to understand the human brain. Nor will I ever really get what happened that day. Yet I have this one memory. It is so vivid and it happened as I looked down at the mask and tank just after passing them. A single word filled the void that had existed in my head a second before.
Firefighter.
I knew what that meant. Nothing else made any sense, but I understood. Someone had been wearing that mask. Someone had been trying to help people. Now, they were gone. I followed the rubber hose, even bending down to touch it. I traced it to the crack beside my feet. When I looked closer, I realized it was poured cement, a jagged hunk that had to be at least twenty feet long and twice that wide.
For some reason, I bent at the waist and slipped my bloodstained fingers under the crease where the hose disappeared. I grunted. To be honest I have no idea how hard I tried to lift that slab. Maybe not at all. Maybe with everything I had. It didn’t move, though. Nothing did. Except me.
7
Her husband never called back. Julia’s gut told her something awful had happened. Calls got disconnected all the time. Phones lost their charge. They were dropped. Even more common, thick fingers accidently hung up. So did cheeks and chins and God knew what else. But that didn’t make it any better.
“Mom, are you coming?”
That’s when she realized she was pacing. Evan had swim team in the morning. After that, they had planned to canoe down the Brandywine. It was expensive, considering all you really did was rent an old green or red canoe for a couple of hours, but the kids loved it.
Michael didn’t, she thought. He felt the place got too crowded. Julia was pretty sure that he had decided canoeing in general was boring. Nonetheless, he would go for her and for the kids. He would put on a good face about it. That’s just how Michael was, she thought.
Is, she should have thought, not was. Is.
“Mom.”
“I’m coming,” she said a little more sharply than she had intended.
Julia shook her head. This wasn’t the first time she’d feared that something had happened to Michael. She liked to think that every mom had these moments, times when a husband didn’t answer the phone when she thought he would. Maybe a message not being responded to for half a day, even when his calendar had been clear. There had even been dropped calls. She remembered one during a snowstorm two years before. She had been sure something awful had happened. Julia had envisioned tires locking up, maybe a semi plowing into her husband from behind. His car careening off the road, maybe into a frozen pond.
“Shit,” she whispered.
Julia was sure other people had thoughts like that. They had to. Without thinking about it, she dialed his number again. The call went to voicemail, so she decided to text him. Although he had asked her to keep everything on his new phone, she started a chain with both numbers.
Hey, call me. I’m worried
Julia stared, watching for the three dots that would tell her a response was coming. The screen remained unchanged. Closing her eyes, she remembered that night two years ago during the storm. She had tried to call him back right away then, too. And probably texted as well. After five minutes, her phone rang. He was laughing, actually, telling her how he had dropped the phone and hung up when he tried to pick it up off the floor of the car. She even chastised him, lightly, telling him that he should drive more carefully. He thought that was cute.
No matter how much she didn’t want to, Julia had to go watch the Phillies game. The boys expected it. She remained standing there, her phone in her hand, not necessarily due to the feeling deep in the pit of her being. That was part of it, but although she would admit it to no one, she had spent the last twelve years doing things that she really didn’t want to do because it made her children happy, or well fed, or alive and safe, even. Those selfless decisions added up, no matter how much she told herself they didn’t. The game was just the next one to throw atop that pile. A pile that was getting harder and harder to climb.
I can’t do this alone.
The thought invaded like a fly that swoops into the house as you are shutting the door. No matter how fast she might have been, how careful, it was getting inside. And once it was there, it could not be ignored.
The thought buzzed by again, but like an echo, softer and further away. She felt a wave of self-centeredness, both for the thought and the delay in watching the game with her boys. She was better than that, she thought. Stronger. So, putting the phone in her
pocket, she joined Evan and Thomas in the family room. She even laughed a little to herself, thinking she was crazy for all that worry.
8
That’s when I saw the other finger. It, too, was stained with blood, someone else’s blood. It was someone else’s finger. It’s unnerving to think about. Not that the finger of a corpse rested inches away from me. Nor that it lay in the rubble utterly alone, with no sign of who it might have belonged to. All those things might have overwhelmed someone under normal circumstances. For me, right then, and thinking back to that moment even more so, it was something else.
I see that finger every day of my life, now. It hovers just beyond every thought and every memory I have. I don’t know if I can describe that moment, really. Before seeing it, my mind felt, in a lot of ways, new. Not blank, necessarily. Not empty of thoughts or even empty of memories, though it was. Instead, it felt like a clear white sheet of sparkling paper, perfectly devoid of any mark whatsoever. On that pristine surface, the very core of what would be rebuilt as me over time, that finger painted itself in vivid horror. It became my genesis, my new beginning.
I stared at it. Once again, time diffused around me. I stood in a bubble where seconds flew yet hours never existed. My head tilted and a drop of blood slipped into the corner of my eye, quickly coagulating among my dust-covered eyelashes. I did not even try to brush it away. I felt frozen, somehow attached to this disjointed body part.
I never thought to crouch down and pick it up. I never even considered touching it. I did look at the mask and the tank and the tubing that disappeared under the rubble. I heard the blaring alarms, and I wondered if it belonged to some rescue worker.
Why would a rescue worker be here?
I’m sure that thought seems idiotic or, worse, fabricated. Yet that’s where my mind went. At the moment, I still hadn’t figured out that I had just survived what would eventually be called a terrorist attack on US soil.
Instead, I took a step. And then another. I moved toward the light and away from the shrill, jarring alarms that called out around me like the lost souls of the dead. With every step I took, I thought I rose to the land of the living. It would take me time to know how wrong I was. For instead of up, I traveled further and further down.
9
Julia stared at the television. As each moment passed, her thoughts floated further and further away. Her mind scrambled for answers, ones that might explain questions that scared her to death. She repeated over and over again: He’ll call. Any second, now, he’ll call.
At one point, she stood. Maybe, at first, she thought to go to the bathroom, or clean up some of the dishes from dinner. The boys, engrossed with a pregame interview, sounded like two grown men laying out the pros and cons of the designated hitter.
On a normal evening, that might tickle her. She might think about how raptly they paid attention. She might wish that they would pay that much attention at school, regardless of their exceptional grades. Inside, she might even feel an unspoken pride that her boys liked sports so much. How lucky that was.
None of that came to mind. She looped to the kitchen and moved to the front window. Her fingers pinched the seam of the drape. She moved the fabric slowly, like a young child might turn the crank of a creepy jack-in-the-box. She stood there, listening. When she heard the first car engine, she thought it was him, that he was home. But that hope was quickly snuffed out. Michael was in New York City. He wouldn’t be home for hours . . .
If at all.
God. She pressed in on her temples, trying to clear away those thoughts. She laughed, even, finding herself being childish. She had been a stay-at-home mom for over ten years with a husband that traveled more days than he spent at home. Michael being early should have shocked her more. Nonetheless, her gut just wouldn’t stop churning, itching at her nerves, telling them a tale that her brain just couldn’t handle.
Slowly, she paced one more circle and then rejoined the boys. By then, the first pitch was still almost an hour away. Without looking at her, Evan and Thomas made space between them on the couch. She settled in, and they inched closer to her, pressing into her, gently. Thomas’s head rested on her arm. Carefully, she wrapped him up and held him even closer.
The news broke two minutes later. For two minutes, Julia led her normal life. She had her children. And she had plausible deniability. Looking back, maybe she should have cherished that time more. Each second should have been placed on a pedestal to be worshipped. Instead, it passed too quickly and a new, shattering reality screamed out at her from, of all places, the television.
The red banner flashed across the top of the screen.
BREAKING NEWS: EXPLOSION AT NYC PENN STATION.
Julia saw it. She read it. But it didn’t register. Not as if she didn’t understand the words. They made perfect sense. Instead, for a moment, they felt like part of the show. Like lines in a movie in which a family unknowingly watched a ball game while tragedy struck from far away. She blinked.
In a time when presidential campaigns became reality television and news programs resembled the satirical shows that mocked them late on Saturday nights, Julia watched like this drama was happening to someone else, some fictional mother of two who lived in a Lifetime movie.
What will she do?
It was Julia’s thought. Her question. But she asked it about someone else, some heroine who must somehow overcome this . . . A high, tentative, heartbreakingly young voice made it all real.
“Mom?”
The switch turned. That young voice cut through the veil between technology and real life.
No.
Julia slowly turned. Evan, eyes wide, stared back at her. His mouth opened and his lips quivered just slightly. Like he’d used the only word that he could form.
The feeling rose up through Julia. Like a flood of molten lava starting at her waist and burning through her stomach, behind her ribs, and up her throat. It built there, solidifying, choking her.
Evan started to shake. Thomas, oblivious to the banner, noticed this. He leaned forward. One look at his brother, he burst into tears. He sobbed, sputtering out sounds meant to be words. But Evan just shook. His face turned red while Julia watched, frozen in a few seconds that spread out longer than a lifetime.
Julia grabbed her sons. She squeezed them to her, burying their heads, maybe as much for her survival as theirs. Her brain misfired, shooting rapid thoughts out as if she hoped to hit a different target than the one being announced on the television.
Maybe he wasn’t at Penn Station . . . Maybe he was already on the train . . . Maybe I read the banner wrong . . .
But she hadn’t. And his phone had gone dead.
Julia didn’t cry, not at first. Nor did she breathe. She held her boys and listened.
“At 6:00 P.M. this evening, reports confirm, at least one explosion tore through Penn Station in the heart of New York City. Emergency crews arrived on the scene immediately. As they worked to find survivors, a portion of the building directly above the station collapsed. At this time, authorities are unsure if a second explosion occurred or if damage from the first weakened the foundation of the arena. It’s being reported that first responders were killed in the collapse. And that at least one subway train crashed. Natural gas leaks are hampering rescue efforts. We go to Farin Glass on the scene.”
Julia shook, too, although she didn’t know it at the time. Evan pushed away from her, a primal noise escaping as he stood.
“It’s okay, baby,” Julia said.
She thought, at twelve, he couldn’t know that Michael was there. Maybe she didn’t even know. Maybe this was all a dream. But then she looked at him. And his eyes looked so much like his father’s. It was all too much.
“Call Daddy,” he said.
“I . . .”
“Call Daddy.”
Julia did not know what to say. She didn’t know what to do. N
o thoughts formed. No decisions. She needed to feel this, to comprehend and process what she had heard on the television. At the same time, she had to be there for the boys. She couldn’t be herself. She had to be someone else, someone above this. Someone who could remain calm. Could handle this. She had to do that for Evan, and for Thomas.
“Okay,” Julia said.
She dialed Michael’s number. It went directly to voicemail. She looked into Evan’s eyes. She didn’t see the pain and fear. Instead, she felt it deep inside her own heart. Her own soul. And she did something then that could never be undone.
“Hi,” she said to the sound of her husband’s recorded voice. “You’re okay, right?”
It happened without premeditation. She never dreamed that was what she would do. She’d always tried to be honest with them. When the small bumps of childhood occurred, she tried to let them navigate them. They needed that because life could be hard. It could be cruel.
It was cruel. For as she spoke, his mouth opened. This time, the corners rose. It was the most genuine and heartfelt smile she had ever seen cross her son’s face. And it pushed her down the rabbit hole.
“So you won’t be home until tomorrow,” she said.
Thomas squirmed. He looked up and saw his brother’s reaction. He started to laugh. Julia felt like she was going to be sick. She thought, What have I done? At the same time, it was too far now to turn back.
“Okay,” she said. “I love you.”
Julia pretended to hang up the phone. Evan wrapped himself around her.
“I knew it. I knew it. I knew he was okay.”
10
I didn’t know if it was smoke or more dust, though my thoughts remained so vague, like headlines instead of full stories. If it was smoke, I knew I wouldn’t make it. I’d suffocate there in the dark, stumbling along on a ground that seemed to move every time I took a step. If it was dust, I would still die, just twenty years from now, of cancer.
The Real Michael Swann Page 3