“I was in the gym. The TV was on.” He paused. “They’re saying there were two planes. Passenger jets. They’re saying people are jumping out of the buildings.”
“Oh my God,” I said, and looked up at the sky, like I was expecting a plane to come swooping down on us. I’d been to the World Trade Center. I’d shopped at the Borders in the concourse; I’d been, with one of my New York City beaus, to Windows on the World at the top of the North Tower.
“Don’t be scared,” Andy told me. “I can stay on the phone with you until you get somewhere safe. Just keep breathing. Keep walking. I’m right here.”
“They’re telling us to go to the Williamsburg Bridge,” I repeated.
“Where are you now?”
I checked the street signs. “We’re going east on Eighth Street.”
He covered the phone and I heard him ask someone a question. Then he was back. “Two miles and you’re on the bridge. You can do that.”
“I’ve never walked two miles in my entire life.”
“Not true. Remember our picnics by Lake Carlisle?” That was the lake back at Beaumont. We’d had lots of picnics there, lazy Saturday afternoons where either I’d rest my head on his chest or he’d put his feet in my lap and we would talk about our classes and our parents and the dreams we’d had the night before. “We walked around the lake and that was a two-mile loop. You’re going to be fine. You can do this. I know you can.”
I looked toward the plume of smoke, rising into the air, obscuring the beautiful blue sky.
“Talk to me,” I said in a hoarse voice that hardly sounded like my own. “Tell me where you are.”
He did. As I made my way down the FDR Drive and, eventually, all the way over the bridge, Andy told me that he’d graduated from college but was still living in Oregon, that he’d been recruited into a training program that housed and fed athletes, gave them coaching and plane tickets and shoes and clothes and got them ready for the Olympics. I walked along with people just as shocked as I was, some covered in soot, some of them crying. Sometimes I’d listen to Andy, and other times I’d catch bits of conversations—a girl whose fiancé worked for a trading company with offices in the North Tower, a mother whose kids were home with their grandmother, probably watching on TV, worrying about her, and she couldn’t reach them on the phone.
“What did you have for breakfast?” I asked Andy, and he told me about the pancakes he’d made with protein powder, how his roommate, Mitch, thought that they tasted like feet but ate them anyhow because he hated to cook.
“How about you?” he asked, and I told him about the bagel and coffee cart on the corner, how different New York City was from anyplace else I’d ever lived, how Philadelphia had made me want to find a city of my own. I walked, and he talked to me—about his workout that day, the case of foot fungus that had spread through the team, his coach and how he was different from his college coaches, and Mr. Sills, who’d come all the way to Oregon for Andy’s final college meet.
I was almost over the bridge, my phone’s battery beeping, signaling its imminent death, when Andy asked, “How is your heart?”
You broke it, I thought about telling him. “Fine,” I said instead. “It’s been fine.”
“You should come here,” Andy said.
I switched the phone to my other ear. I was in Brooklyn now, with no sense of how to find Amy’s place, or of what I’d do when I got there. People filled the streets, but there were no cars, no music, no honking horns, no crying babies. It was as if real life had been canceled for the day. I felt the way I once had lying on the operating table: the narrowness of the bed, the chill of the room, the terror I felt every time they put the mask over my face and made me start counting backward, and the certainty that the lights overhead, the mask, the doctors, were all the last things I’d ever see.
“Rachel?” The phone was beeping ever more loudly . . . and Andy was still there.
“Oregon?” I said. “Why?”
“Because it’s safe.”
“Safe,” I repeated. Safe sounded good to me.
Andy paused then, but not for long. “And because I love you.”
Andy
2001
It had been more than five years since he’d seen Rachel; almost three years since he’d called her at the sorority house and one of the girls had said, “Sorry, she’s out with Kyle.” Since then his world had narrowed to include just running, eating, sleeping, then running again; a stringent cycle of train, recover, repeat; race, recover, repeat; then train some more. She’d sent him a note when she’d graduated, telling him about her plans for graduate school, wishing him well, and he’d wanted to send a note in return, telling himself that he hardly thought about her at all, but that wasn’t exactly true. What was true, Andy decided, was that he was not thinking of her with the painful, burning urgency he remembered from the nights when she was all he could think of, when he’d spend days with his roommate’s car keys in his pocket, carrying on conversations with her in his head, waiting for her to call, ready to go. He came to consider Rachel calmly and with kindness as his first love, the one who’d showed him that love was possible. He hoped that she’d be happy.
All that had been revealed as the flimsiest kind of lie when Mitch O’Connell, a runner from North Carolina State, had come sprinting into the weight room, going all-out even though it was an easy day, saying “Something’s happening in New York City.” He knew that Rachel was there, and he’d been desperate to reach her, desperate to know that she was okay. Her parents had given him her number—they’d been, he thought, too terrified to tell him no—and she’d picked up on the first ring, and he’d talked her over the bridge, into safety, and realized he’d never stopped loving her at all.
For a week, she’d stayed in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, at her boss’s house, and she and Andy had talked every night for hours, the way they had as teenagers, or in college, when they’d stay up all night in her bed. When she went back to Manhattan they’d kept talking, with Rachel describing how the air was full of ash and how it stunk of burned plastic, how the streetlamps and walls were plastered with signs for the missing, photographs of loved ones who’d worked in the towers, and how the newspapers were full of stories of husbands and wives, parents and children, all praying that there’d been survivors; that somewhere, in some hospital bed, lay their husband or their mother, suffering from amnesia, not even knowing his or her name, but alive. She described scenes of people weeping on the streets, strangers hugging each other; of five-star restaurants sending pans of food to the firehouses and police stations and people starting college funds for the children of the men and women who’d died. “Everyone wants to do something,” she’d told him, “but nobody knows what to do.”
“Come here,” he told her over and over, until finally, in the middle of October, she’d decided that maybe a vacation would be a good thing. Andy had started counting the days, wondering what she looked like now, what he’d look like to her, whether things could still feel the same.
At last he stood by the baggage carousel in the Eugene airport. He’d wanted to go to the gate, but after what people were calling 9/11 there were new rules about airports. He was holding a dozen roses—not red ones, which she’d never liked, but apricot-colored, the petals tipped with orange. He’d been watching travelers coming down the escalator when he felt a hand on his shoulder and smelled coconut-scented shampoo and familiar perfume. He turned, and Rachel stood there, smiling. Her cheeks were rosy, like she’d been spending time outside, and he could see freckles dotting the bridge of her nose. She wore jeans, a light-blue button-down shirt, a colorful embroidered belt, and boots like the ones he remembered from her trip to Philadelphia. Diamond studs, also familiar, twinkled from her earlobes. Her hands were tanned and strong, and she looked not older, exactly, but more confident, not looking all around at the new place where she’d landed, but lookin
g right at him with a smile.
“Hey, stranger,” she said. “Do I get a hug?”
He took her in his arms, feeling the gentle swell of her breasts and belly against him, in a far more intimate embrace than she’d probably planned. Before he could enjoy it, she stepped away. She pointed out her suitcase and her duffel bag on the carousel. He scooped them both up and walked her to the car he’d borrowed from one of the trainers in order to go get his girl.
After she’d remarked on the beauty of the Willamette Valley, the cool air and the pine trees, and how clean it all smelled after New York, she settled into the passenger seat, smiling at him. “I’ve seen your name in the papers.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asked, suddenly shy and at the same time eager to know what she’d read, which pictures she’d seen.
“My mom and my brother keep up with you. You almost made the Olympic team last year, right?”
He nodded. “It was always a long shot.”
“But you can try again in 2004?”
“That’s the plan.” She was wearing dark-red lipstick, which was different. When he’d known her she’d worn lighter colors. He wasn’t sure whether or not he liked it. Then he asked himself why it mattered what he thought about her makeup. She lived in New York City; he lived in Oregon. She probably had a boyfriend and had just been too polite to tell him, and even if she didn’t, it wasn’t like there was the possibility of this being anything besides a friendly visit. Still, his brain conjured up his bedroom. Specifically, his bed, with its fresh sheets and freshly laundered comforter. He imagined Rachel’s hand in his, Rachel’s voice in his ear, saying Hurry. Hurry.
He squirmed in his seat, giving his nylon warm-up pants a quick tug. Rachel ducked her head. Do you think it’ll always be like this when we see each other? she’d asked him once, during one of his Beaumont visits, maybe the time when he’d driven for almost two days with only a three-hour nap to see her, all the way to Virginia in his teammate’s cousin’s old Tercel. It had been five in the morning when he’d gotten to the Gamma house, too early to ring the bell, and he’d thought he’d look like a stalker or a vagrant if he fell asleep in the car. He’d been sitting behind the wheel trying to figure out where to go when he heard a tapping on the window, and there was Rachel in her bathrobe, one finger pressed to her lips. Shh. When Rachel started talking it took him a few seconds to realize that she was actually there; that this was real Rachel and not dream Rachel, the one who apparently had lived in his head since college, and maybe even since Atlanta.
“I was thinking about this the other day. You know I’ve known you longer than I’ve known almost anyone in my life?”
He was prepared to argue the point—they’d known each other over a long time, but not continuously—but then he was pulling into the camp’s parking lot, and Rachel was looking around, wide-eyed, at the gyms, the tracks (there were three), and the people. A group of women ran by them, sleek as whippets in their briefs and singlets. “I think between the six of them they’ve got a breast and a half,” she said. She held her purse against her midriff. Andy gently tugged it away.
“You look fine,” he said. He wanted to tell her that she looked better than fine, that she was so pretty, that her body looked as lush as a bowl of fruit, all juiciness and curves. He had been to bed with a few of the women runners. Their legs were limber but all sinew and bone, and they were indeed flat-chested. Worse, some of them treated sex like it was a bonus workout their coach had assigned, pumping their hips like they were trying to get their heart rates up instead of having fun.
He drove her to the residences, which were nothing special, a ten-year-old collection of two-story brick buildings, with a freshly paved parking lot and a few extremely fit people carrying groceries out of their cars or laundry bags into them.
“Hey, Landis, you coming?”
Andy waved at Mitch. “I’ve got to go,” he told Rachel. He pointed out the hiking trail at the base of the mountain, handed her the keys to his place, and kissed her, the kind of kiss a husband might give his wife of ten years as she dropped him off at the train station. “Have fun,” he said.
“Hurry home,” she told him . . . and then she said, “I’ll want to see those feet later.” She turned toward the steps of his building, walking with an extra sway to her hips, the heels of her boots thrusting her bottom out in a provocative way. I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you leave, he thought—a lyric from one of the rap songs Mitch liked to play. He watched her and found himself enjoying the image of Rachel in his kitchen, Rachel in his bedroom, Rachel at the mirror, holding up shirts, putting on lipstick, playing with her hair.
Andy jogged from the lot to meet the rest of his team. “You just get laid?” Mitch asked, and when Andy shook his head no he said, “I hope you’re going to, because you’re grinning like a fool.”
Andy only smiled more widely, gave his laces a tug, and stepped onto the pebbled-rubber surface of Track 3, where he started to run.
•••
“What happened to us?” Rachel asked. They were having dinner at a French place that she’d picked, after grilling a few of his teammates for recommendations and then asking, in a half-serious, half-teasing way whether Andy’s training diet permitted something as wild and decadent as roast chicken. “Do they have salmon?” he’d asked, and she’d rolled her eyes, but then hugged him and said, “Never change.” He was remembering how they’d gone out when they were in college. He’d order grilled fish or a salad while Rachel would request a burger or pasta, and the servers would always bring her his food. “No, he’s got the dainty plate,” she’d say. Daintyplate, like it was all one word. “He has to watch his girlish figure.”
That night, she ordered roast chicken, and he had a turkey burger, not salmon, but still, and she laughed when he asked for steamed spinach instead of fries. “I’m not letting you have any of my mashed potatoes,” she said. “Just FYI.”
“I’m fine,” he said . . . but, of course, she tried to feed him a bite of her potatoes, which were creamy in the way that only a few sticks of butter could account for. They decided to share a bottle of wine. He had a single glass, and she had two, a glass more than usual, he thought—because of her heart she’d always had to be careful about alcohol. After a few lurches and stumbles, or instances where they’d both ask a question at the same time, they were talking as easily as they had back when he would visit her in college and they’d stay up all night. She’d told him about Alice, and how she thought she would never get the smell of the hospital out of her nose, and he’d tell her about how one of the ladies at an antiques shop in Voorhees thought that Mr. Sills was his father, and he’d never bothered to correct her. Rachel was a wonderful storyteller. With her voice and her face she could turn into anyone—Brenda, the truculent single-mom client who gave her little boy her yeast infection medication even though there was nothing wrong with his plumbing; Amy, her brassy-sounding boss; Jonah, who was, as she put it, limping through law school after obtaining his college degree on the six-year plan.
Over dinner, Andy told her how, on his last visit home, there’d been another little boy trailing behind his friend, holding Mr. Sills’s toolbox and handing him the nails.
“Were you jealous?” Rachel asked.
Andy shook his head, smiling. “Maybe a little. Mostly I was glad another little boy got what he gave me.”
Rachel said she understood, and could remember feeling the same way going back to see Dr. Karen, her pediatric cardiologist, after she’d aged out of her practice and finding a line of other little boys and girls in the waiting room. “I guess I wanted to think I was her star patient, her one and only . . . but there are always more kids.”
“That’s very mature,” he told her.
“I’ve grown up a lot,” she said, and attempted to look mature, folding her neck down and furrowing her forehead. Maturity lasted for about three minutes, and the
n she told him the story of how she’d been at a playground, picking up one of her clients’ kids because the client was stuck in a meeting with her parole officer, and how the little girl had come racing across the yard, clutching a plastic bag and shouting, “Miss Rachel! Miss Rachel! Guess what I have in my bag?”
“I thought it was, you know, an art project or cookies or something, and she says, ‘No, it is my UNDERPANTS, because I accidentally got some POOP ON THEM!’ ”
Andy told her about Mitch, who could be counted on to miss almost every flight he was booked on. “Even if he’s at the airport, in the waiting area, he’ll be in the men’s room when they do the final boarding call.” She asked him about a meet in Jamaica (hot) and the half-marathon in New Mexico (also hot) and the marathon he’d run in Rome (hot, humid, and the hands-down worst course he’d ever run, with miles of cobblestones that made his knees ache just remembering them). The conversation slowed, the silences stretching, until they were just staring at each other. Vaguely, Andy realized that the restaurant was emptying out, that there were servers clustered around the host’s stand, that the candle in the center of their table had almost burned down to nothing.
“Any dessert or coffee?” the waiter asked, his pen hovering.
“Nothing for me,” Andy said automatically.
“He will be enjoying the apple pie,” said Rachel, smiling sweetly. She’d piled her curls on top of her head, and he could see the pale curve of her neck, glimmering in the dim candlelight. “And I will have a fork and a glass of port.”
“Port?” asked Andy, when the waiter was gone.
“Yeah, I know, it sounds like I’m the Grey Poupon guy, but I had a . . .” She looked down. She’d changed her clothes during the afternoon and was wearing a black skirt and a fancy white shirt with lace around the collar. “I knew this guy. He liked port. At first I was like, do you drink it before or after you polish your monocle? But it’s really good, especially with walnuts.”
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