All We Have Left (29 page)

“This is she,” I answer automatically, leaning against the windowsill and looking up at the moon rising over the tops of the trees.

“My name is Julia Harris. Anne Jonna gave me your number. She said you wanted to talk to me about my experience in the World Trade Center.”

I feel a surge of excitement. “Yes! Thank you for calling. You see, my brother Travis, he died in the towers and—”

“Travis McLaurin? So he was your brother?” she interrupts me.

“Yes.” My pulse is
thump-thumping
. “Travis was my brother.”

“I’m so sorry he didn’t make it.” She pauses, and when she speaks again, her voice is choked. “I tried to call several times—”

“You called my parents?” I think about what Hank said about someone calling, and Dad getting so upset that he refused to talk about Travis again after that.

“I tried, but the number had been changed. I found the number on my cell phone bill, and I really wanted to—”

“Wait. Your cell phone bill?”

“There was a strange number on my cell phone bill. I didn’t see it until months later, but when I saw it … I knew it was them calling out. Travis was carrying my purse, and he must have found the phone. I’m glad it worked. Do you know if he got through? From the towers?”

“Yes,” I say numbly. “He left a message.”

She is silent for a moment. “Well, I guess that’s something,” she says. “I suppose … I suppose I was hoping he was able to talk to someone. I liked thinking I helped him do that, at least, after all the two of them did for me.”

“The two of them?” I press my phone tightly to my ear, feeling the rounded edges of the case pressing into my skin.

“Travis and Alia,” Julia says. “Do you know what happened to Alia?”

“No,” I say, feeling a crushing sense of disappointment. It’s not like I even knew Alia, but somehow she’s gotten all wrapped up with Travis in my mind. “I was hoping you could tell me about her. I’d like to contact her. Can you tell me what happened in the towers?”

I listen with fascination and rising dread as she tells me about Travis and Alia with her in the north tower, helping her down the stairs, giving her water, waiting as she recovered enough to go on. In my head, all I can think is:
102 minutes. They had 102 minutes from the time the first plane hit until the north tower came down. How long did they spend helping Julia? How much time did that leave them?

“Do you know anything else about Alia that might help me find her?” I ask when she finishes telling me how the firemen helped her down and put her in an ambulance, getting out right before the first tower fell. “I’d like to know what happened to her and Travis after that.”

“Me too,” Julia says, and sighs. “I thank God for the two of them every day. I moved away from the city after the attacks. I thought I could stay, but every time I heard a loud noise or saw a plane fly overhead, I felt so sick and scared. I moved back to New Mexico, and now I raise schnauzers. I looked for their names in the papers when they were doing the stories on all the victims, and I found Travis’s, but I never could find Alia’s. I like to think she made it out, but …”

“But what?” I ask.

“I think they would have stayed together,” she says. “The two of them.”

The thought is beautiful and horrifying all at the same time.

“But even if they didn’t find her—and I know they didn’t find a lot of the bodies—they still would have known that she was there,” I say. “She still would have been listed among the dead.”

“Sure,” she says. “That’s true. If anyone knew she was there in the first place.”

“Be careful,” Travis says to me. There’s water on the stairs, and he turns to give me his hand. I hesitate, and then take it.

His hand is warm as he carefully closes his fingers around mine. He makes sure I get past the water without slipping, and then we continue down. We pass an abandoned wheelchair at the top of a landing, and below we can see a woman being carried by several men. I wonder if they know her.

I think about what Julia had said:
There are angels walking among us today.

The stairway is so narrow, and there are so many frightened people jammed into this small space, and the
woo-ah-woo-ah
of the sirens is screaming in our ears, so loud it makes you feel like you’re going out of your mind. The funny thing, though, is that everyone is pretty calm. Nobody is shoving
to get ahead and everyone is just walking steadily down. When someone starts getting panicky, there has always been someone with a calming word. Both fear and bravery are con-tagious, I realize.

Travis is still holding my hand, and I know that he’s worried about me slipping, and maybe my touch is helping
him
feel better. I wonder suddenly what my parents would think about him.

“Will you tell me what happened?” I ask when there is a lull in the walking as something or someone in front of us holds up the line. “With your father?”

He looks over at me, his jaw working, and rubs the back of his neck.

“I was a coward,” he says in a flat voice. “And my grandfather died for it.”

“What?” My voice rises, and a few people glance over their shoulders at us. But the line is moving again, and we begin shuffling back down the stairs.

“Gramps had a group of guys he jammed with on Wednesday nights. They’d known one another since ’Nam, and they’d get together every week and play, drink beer, and hang out. Just like kids, except they were all like in their fifties and sixties. I went with him that night, and we left late, and a couple of punks came out of nowhere. One of them started slapping Gramps around, just punching him for no reason, you know? Gramps was trying to talk them down, to stay calm, but one of them pulled a knife … and I freaked
out. I ran. I left Gramps, and by the time I found someone to help, and came back, he was almost dead.”

He swallows and traces a finger down a thin crack in the wall. A woman in front of us is praying and working rosary beads, and their tiny clicking somehow feels reassuring.

Travis turns his head back to me, and his eyes are stark. “He was in the hospital for weeks. He was in a coma, and they said he might come out of it, but they didn’t know. So Dad moved him to a nursing home in our town, and he just wasted away, month after month, until finally he died. By the end, I was
praying
he would die. Isn’t that messed up? But I knew he wouldn’t want to live like that. He was always so full of life. He never would have wanted to just lie there like that. Never. But I put him there, and he never even opened his eyes so I could tell him
I was sorry.
God, I was so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say, when I can talk, my eyes full of tears for him. “You have to know that.”

“My dad says I’m a coward,” Travis says. “And he’s right, I know he is. I almost ran away from
you
, back there in the corridor. I started thinking, ‘I’ll just go down one flight, see if I can find somebody to help,’ and the next thing I knew, I was down two flights and all I could think about was getting out.”

“But you came back,” I say.

“Yeah. I did. But I didn’t want to, so I know my dad’s right about me. He hasn’t forgiven me for Gramps, and I can’t blame him, because I can’t forgive me either.”

“That’s terrible,” I say quietly, but suddenly I’m mad at Travis’s father. How could he make this good, kind boy feel like this?

“I got so angry,” he says in a low voice. “I wanted to
kill
those guys, but the police never found them, and sometimes I just wanted to kick someone’s ass,
anybody’s
.”

I don’t know what to say, so I squeeze his fingers and keep walking.

A little while later, I ask, “We’re going to get out of here, right?”

“Yeah, we’re going to get out of here.” He grips my hand hard as we follow the line of people moving quietly down the stairs.

“Doesn’t it feel like things will be different when we get out?” I’m not real sure what I’m trying to say, but how could you go through something like this and it not change everything?

Travis takes a piece of paper towel from a guy standing in a stairwell door holding a roll he had dunked in water, and hands it to me.

“Yeah, things will be different,” he says hoarsely as I press the paper towel to my face.

I see a heavyset man ahead of us being helped down the stairs by two men. Something about him is familiar, and I realize that it is Mr. Morowitz, my dad’s friend from his office, the one I talked to what seems like a lifetime ago.

“Mr. Morowitz!” I call. “Mr. Morowitz!”

The people in front of us let us by so we can catch up with him.

“Alia!” His eyes widen in surprise. “I’m so happy to see you! Did you find your father?”

“My father?” I frown. “No, you said he wasn’t in the building.”

“I need to rest a minute,” he tells his coworkers, and they guide him to a stairwell door, which thankfully is unlocked.

Travis and I follow them inside the office, which is quiet and empty. Mr. Morowitz’s coworkers, a big guy who looks like he played pro football and a tall man with short, neat dreads, help him slide to the floor. Mr. Morowitz takes several big breaths, and the tall man gently takes off Mr. Morowitz’s glasses, which have become fogged with sweat, and slips them into his front pocket.

“Thank you, my friend,” Mr. Morowitz gasps, and closes his eyes. He looks exhausted.

“Mr. Morowitz? Did you see my father?” I ask impatiently. Suddenly, I’m having trouble breathing.

“He must have … forgotten something … because I saw him come in soon after you left,” Mr. Morowitz says, fighting for breath. “I was just getting up to tell him I saw you when there was a whirring sound, and this big explosion, and the entire building just … lurched. Like in an earthquake, just shuddering back and forth. It sways in the wind,” he says, almost dreamily. “Up there, you get used to the window blinds going
clack-clack-clack
on a windy day, and
the water sloshing around in the toilet bowls. But this was different. The building leaned over to the side, and at first I didn’t think it would bounce back. I braced myself to keep from sliding. The windows shattered, and I could see all this paper floating outside, like a ticker-tape parade. And then the building careened back the other way. All I could do was hang on. As soon as I could, I ran for a doorway like they tell you to do in an earthquake. It got hot almost immediately, and smoke started pouring in. When the building stopped moving, I knew it was time to get out of there. All of us did. We didn’t talk much, just headed for the stairs. We’ve been coming down ever since. Slow and steady, right, gentlemen?”

“But my father,” I say, and there are black spots in front of my eyes. “What happened to my father?”

“I don’t know, Alia.” Mr. Morowitz’s voice is thick with regret as he stares up at me. “He was standing near the door, and then I didn’t see him again.”

“He might still be up there? He might be hurt, and not be able to get down?” I cry. “How could you just leave him like that? Why didn’t you check to make sure if he got out?”

Mr. Morowitz closes his eyes. “You don’t understand, Alia,” he says almost in a whisper. “It all happened so fast … we did the best we could. Andrew, here”—he nods at the tall man—“he went around and checked, but he couldn’t find anyone else. Only our receptionist, and she … she didn’t make it.” He swallows hard. “You have to understand, it was very smoky and hard to see.”

“But he could be hurt!” I’m shaking his shoulder, and I can’t seem to stop.

“Alia,” Travis says, and pulls me away. “Alia. Calm down. He’s probably fine. If we got out of an elevator, don’t you think your dad was able to get out of his own office?”

But I’m thinking about the woman we just saw coming down the stairs, burned terribly, and
what if Ayah is up there too hurt to move?

I see in Travis’s haunted eyes that he is remembering the same thing.

“I’ve got to go see,” I say.

“Alia …”

“He could be hurt and can’t move!” I turn and grab the knob on the stairwell door.

“Alia, no. He’d want you to get out!” Travis grabs my arm.

“It’s my father! I’m not going to be a coward and pretend like my father might not be up there needing help!”

Immediately, I realize what I’ve said, but it’s too late to take back the words. It’s always too late to take back the words. Travis looks like I have hit him, his face white, his eyes staring.

“Let me go,” I say in a softer voice, tugging away from his iron grip on my arm, and his fingers fall away, and his mouth opens but nothing comes out.

“I’ve got to go,” I say. “I’ve got to go find him.”

I open the door, and it swings shut behind me.

I take a deep breath and start up the stairs.

Alone.