All We Have Left (21 page)

He takes a deep breath, and opens the door.

I know even before I peek over his shoulder that the office is empty. It’s obvious people left in a hurry. Coffee still steams on a desk, a chair is knocked over, and a drawer is open, full of women’s shoes, like someone hurriedly switched shoes right before leaving.

“There’s a phone!” I run to the phone on the desk nearest to us.

“We should call the OCC,” Travis says as I pick up the phone. “They’ll know what’s going on.”

I don’t answer, because I have every intention of calling my father and mother. It doesn’t matter either way, because all I hear is a fast busy signal. I jiggle the receiver a couple of times, but it’s the same thing.

“Everybody must be calling out,” Travis says, after taking the phone from me and listening for himself. “I don’t know what’s going on, but it must be bad.”

I nod, because I know he’s right. Nothing less than a full-scale emergency would drive everyone out like this.

“Gramps said during the ’93 bombing, there were some people who didn’t evacuate,” Travis says. “We’d probably find people if we kept looking, but I don’t think we should take the time. Let’s get out first, and then we can worry later about what’s going on.”

“Okay.” I swallow hard. I’d hoped we could find some people to tell us it was all okay, that we were panicking for nothing.

Travis is heading for the door when he stops, his hands in his pockets, like he’s searching for something.

“What are you doing?” I ask, wanting to go, to get out, right now.

“No,” he says, his face tight. “No, no,
no.
” He’s patting his pockets more frantically now.

“What?”

“I’ve got to go back,” he says.

“Go back where?”

“The elevator,” he says, and takes off running back the way we came.

I run after him. “Are you crazy? You can’t go back into the elevator!”

But he doesn’t seem to hear me.

I put on a burst of speed, thankful for my mornings spent running, because I’m determined not to get left behind.

Travis bursts through the bathroom door, and I follow right behind him.

“Stop!” I cry as I see him heading for the dark, ragged hole in the wall where we had slithered out just a few minutes ago. “You can’t go back in there!”

But he is already wriggling headfirst through the hole, grunting with the effort, and then he disappears back into the elevator car we fought so hard to get out of.

“Travis!” I cry.

I hear him cursing inside, and I rush to the hole and press my face to it. I pull back immediately, because it is hot and smoky and I can hear Travis coughing.

“What are you doing?” I yell furiously.

I take a deep breath and put my face to the hole again, and see Travis scrabbling around with the lighter in his hand. He finds something on the floor and stuffs it into his pocket. He is coughing badly, and as he comes back out of the hole, his eyes are streaming.

“What are you doing?” I shout at him.

He won’t look at me.

“Come on, we need to get out of here,” he mumbles as he heads toward the door to the corridor.

“That’s what
I
said,” I say, but he’s already gone.

Out in the hallway, Travis finds a stairwell door and yanks it open. The first thing I hear is running water, like someone decided to run a nice hot bath. Then I see the people, and my heart leaps with joy. Somehow I’d half convinced myself that we were the last people left in the building.

Travis is standing like a stupid statue in the doorway, and when I push by him impatiently, I see why.

It’s dark and hot, and water is sliding down walls from the ceiling and pouring down the steps. It’s smoky, like maybe there’s a bonfire close by that you could char some nice halal marshmallows on, but it’s not like any fire I’ve ever smelled. The stench is rotten, thick with chemicals.

People walk by, barely glancing at us. One man is injured and being helped down by a few of the others.

“What’s going on?” I ask loudly.

“We don’t know,” a man carrying a briefcase says.

For some reason I thought once we found people that everything was going to be all right. But these people, these adults, don’t seem to know anything more than we do.

We join the crowd going down, slipping on stairs made slick from all the water.

“How long is this going to take?” I ask.

“This is a piece of cake compared to ’93,” says an older man with dark strands of hair combed over his bald, freckled head. “When the bomb in the van blew up, a bunch of cars
in the parking garage caught fire and it sent this thick, black oily smoke up the stairwells.”

A lady with square blue glasses and a pretty dress glances over her shoulder. “I almost stayed in my office, because it took me ten hours to get out last time.” She shakes her head. “But this is different. I don’t know what’s going on, but this is different. At least they put in the emergency lights and
these
”—she points down at the stairs—“so we can see. Last time it was so dark you couldn’t see anything.”

I hadn’t even really noticed the glowing stripes of paint on the stair treads, and I try to imagine what it would have been like to go down these narrow steps in complete darkness. No wonder some people decided to stay in their offices the last time.

“Hey, what’s the holdup?” someone yells from behind us, and I realize that we have slowed to a stop.

“The door’s stuck,” someone calls back, and the crowd around us begins murmuring and jostling.

“
What
door?” the same voice yells. It’s a young guy in a suit with an arrogant face and eyes full of fear.

“Calm down, big boy,” the older man with the freckled head says. “We’re going to get out of here—we just need to stay calm.”

“I
am
calm,” the young guy yells back, not sounding calm at all.

As we crowd down the stairs, it’s so tight that I’m having trouble breathing.

Travis and I have made it to a landing, and below we see a few men beating on a door that inexplicably bars the way.

“What the heck?” someone says. “Why’s there a door in the middle of the stairwell?”

“And why’s it locked?” a woman asks in a wavering voice, holding a hand to the baby bump of her belly. “Did someone lock it on purpose?”

“It’s not locked, it’s stuck,” a person nearer the door calls back.

“Watch out!” someone yells, and a big man takes a few running steps at the door with a fire extinguisher in his hands. It slams against the door, and white foam spurts out, soaking the people directly behind him and floating up the stairs like a white mist of snow.

But the door doesn’t budge.

A woman starts crying.

“Wait, I know another way,” someone says, and all of a sudden everyone is turning around. Then we are going
up
, which feels wrong.

“It’ll be okay,” Travis says, sliding his eyes at me, but he doesn’t look like he believes his own words.

We go up and out another door. Small fires are flickering in the ceiling. Pieces of drywall and debris litter the floor, and wires hang from the ceiling like skinny black snakes curling above our heads.

“Don’t touch anything,” someone says, and I find myself pressing up against Travis as we edge down the hall, the fires
burning almost merrily over our heads. Ahead, we see a man with another fire extinguisher dousing the flames. Clouds of fine spray drift down the hall.

“Where are we
going
?” a woman shouts, but nobody answers.

Another door with an exit sign appears through the smoke, and people speed up as the flames begin to flare again.

“Go!” the guy with the extinguisher cries, but instead of following his own advice, he waits until Travis and I are past and then turns back to the flames.

I turn to look at him just before I go through the door into the stairwell. He continues to spray the fire, stopping only long enough for people to pass. His fire extinguisher is the only thing that is keeping this path to freedom passable.

I close my eyes and pray for him as I follow Travis down the stairs.

I listen to Travis’s message over and over again.

I make out a few more words after a while, but it’s so hard to understand what Travis is saying with all the static and background noise.

At some point I send Hank a message:

Who’s the girl?

But he doesn’t answer. He’s probably out in the field, and who knows how long it will take for him to get my message?

I listen to the last part over and over again. I have a feeling that Travis says the girl’s name when he says, “That’s … with me.”

Who was with him? Who was the girl who sounded so
desperate and young? Did she die with Travis, or did she make it out?

I’m shaken by her voice. She sounds like one of my friends. She sounds like me.

Why was she in the World Trade Center with Travis that day?

I hit Play so many times that by three in the morning when I finally give up, my finger is hurting.

When I wake the next morning, I know who I need to call, even though I have no idea whether she will talk to me.

I walk into Starbucks and see her sitting at our favorite table, the one by the window. She is sipping on a coffee, her finger dancing across her tablet screen.

I sit down.

“Hi, Emi,” I say.

“Hello, Jesse,” she says warily, fiddling with the rings in her ear and sitting up straight, the way she always does when she’s nervous.

“I, uh, need help, and I don’t have anyone else to ask. I know we’re really not friends anymore, and I get it. I wouldn’t want to be friends with me either if I were you. All I can say is I’m sorry. And … I need your help.” I shut up and try to read her expression, but her face remains blank, like an empty page loading for too long.

“I never said I didn’t want to be friends with you,” she says after a moment. “You pretty much made that choice.”

“I was messed up in the head, Emi. I don’t know what
happened. I really don’t. Everything got so weird with the tagging, and all the secrets, it just seemed easier not to talk to you guys. I didn’t know what to say to you.”

“The truth,” she says simply.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I begin. If you say something too much, does it become as meaningless as pennies thrown on the ground? Because this apology is worth a billion pennies, this one I mean with all my heart. “You’ll never know how sorry I am, Emi. I don’t want to lose you, and Teeny and Myra. I have no explanation, no excuses. But I’m trying to do something good now, and I need help.”

“They put my great-grandparents in a camp, you know,” she says, and I stare at her in confusion.

“What?”

“My mom told me. During World War II. They rounded up a bunch of Japanese Americans and put them in camps. Not because they did anything wrong, just because of what they were.”

“What?” I say again, because while I’ve heard about this in some class or another, I have no idea why she’s telling me about it
now.

“And when my grandmother was growing up, she remembers her next-door neighbor calling her a Jap and telling her he wished America had nuked all of us, not just those two cities.”

She looks at me seriously. “If you don’t like Muslims so much, how do you feel about the Japanese?” Which, of course,
slashes to the bloody friendship-heart of why she’s still mad at me.

“I don’t hate Muslims. I don’t hate the Japanese. I don’t hate
you.
” I pull at my ponytail, knowing I deserve this, but desperate for her to believe me. “Why would I have been friends with you for all these years if I didn’t like you?”

“I’ve asked myself that more than once,” she answers. “I never could come up with an answer. But what you did … writing those ugly words … that wasn’t who I thought you were. I’m not sure I could ever be friends with that person.”

I know I should say something, to explain, but I can’t, and I stare down at my lap, defeated.

I wait for her to get up and leave, but she doesn’t. After a while, I lift my head and see her calmly watching me.

“What do you need?” she asks.

“This thing is
ancient
,” Emi says, holding up a microcassette tape from inside the answering machine. “Wow.”