All We Have Left (30 page)

It’s the middle of August when Mr. Laramore finally comes home.

The day after I found his picture in the yearbook with Travis, I knocked on his door and a neighbor came out and told me he was gone for the summer.

After getting off work, I drove the truck by his house like I’ve been doing almost every day, and this time I see a car in the driveway, lights on in the windows.

I go up to the door and knock.

“Jesse?” Mr. Laramore is dressed the same at home as he is in school, and I don’t know why I’m surprised. It’s not like jeans and high-tops on a thirty-something guy isn’t a fashion statement
anywhere.

I’d gotten a C in his Entrepreneurship class, which I was
actually pretty proud of. I’d been so screwed up with Nick, and the fallout from getting arrested, that I barely remembered the last couple of months of school.

“How are you, Jesse?” His tone is friendly, if a little guarded. Of course it is. He’s thinking about what I painted on the side of the Peace Center.

“You knew my brother Travis,” I say without preamble. “Why didn’t you tell me that you knew my brother?”

His face freezes, and then he recovers. “Let’s sit down.”

We sit on the rocking chairs on his front porch, but I keep my feet planted on the floor so the chair won’t rock. I don’t need the ground feeling any more precarious and unstable than it already does.

“I knew you were Travis’s sister,” Mr. Laramore says. “Of course I did. I still think about him all the time: whether he’d have a family, if we would have gone to Little League games together, barbecued in my backyard. He wanted to be a music teacher, and maybe we would have hung out together in the teachers’ lounge. Yes, I think about him, but I didn’t see any reason to bring up something that was so painful for your family. For
all
of us.”

“You could have at least said, ‘Hey, Jesse, I knew your brother,’” I say quietly. “I wish people would stop acting like Travis dying in the towers is the only thing important about him.”

Mr. Laramore looks at me for a moment. “Hey, Jesse,” he says softly. “I knew your brother.”

“Thank you.” I swallow and trace my fingers along the wood grain of the chair’s armrest. “You were his friend, right? What can you tell me about him?”

He leans his head against the back of the rocking chair. “We kind of lost touch after high school. I left to go to Syracuse, and Travis got into Columbia, which surprised no one because he was sharp. I knew he dropped out before the end of the school year and moved home, but I didn’t see him until I returned for the summer. We tried hanging out a couple of times, but it just didn’t work out. He’d changed so much after what happened with your grandfather.”

“With my grandfather?” I ask. “What happened?”

Mr. Laramore doesn’t answer, just rocks on the creaking porch boards like he’s some freaking old lady.

“
What happened with Gramps?
” I say.

He sighs. “Your grandfather and Travis were mugged. Travis ran, and your grandfather was badly hurt.”

I shake my head mutely. I don’t want to hear this. Not about my brother.

“Not many people knew, but Travis couldn’t forgive himself for not doing more to help his—your—grandfather. They never caught the guys who did it. By the time I really talked to him about what happened, he was hanging around Topher and his bunch of lowlifes, and he’d already gotten into some trouble. A bunch of fights, some minor larceny. I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t like his new friends, and I don’t think he really wanted to hang around me anymore.

“That’s why I was surprised when he showed up at my house the night before he died. I was home from school for a long weekend, visiting my girlfriend, and your grandfather had just died. Your parents brought him here to a nursing home after the mugging, and he hung on for a while, but it was inevitable. Travis was blaming himself, saying it was his fault. He was so angry that his dad was burying his grandfather’s ashes in town, rather than taking him back to New York City. Travis said his grandfather had lived his whole life in the city, and he’d want to be buried there, where he’d been the happiest. I tried talking him down, but he was a mess. Your grandfather’s memorial service was the next day, and Travis was all hyped up.”

“Did he say anything about going to the towers on the day of Gramps’s memorial service? That was on 9/11, right?” I ask, and the words seem to vibrate in the warm summer night air.

“He was talking crazy. You’ve got to understand. But he did say … he did say he’d like to take some of your grandfather’s ashes to the city.”

My mind is spinning, trying to figure all of this out. “So that’s why he was there? He took my grandfather’s ashes to the city? But why didn’t you ever
tell
someone?”

He’s quiet for a long time. “The easy answer is no one asked. The harder one is … I couldn’t bring myself to talk to your parents. I should have been a better friend to Travis, and I wasn’t. Hell, I should have gone
with
him if he felt
like that was something he needed to do. Maybe things would have turned out differently. But I didn’t. And I can’t change that.”

Friends are sometimes the only thing that keep us from plunging into the abyss. But you have to reach for them, and they have to be there on the side of the cliff reaching out to you too. I think of Emi, Teeny, and Myra, and squeeze my eyes shut because I almost fell all the way.

“But why,” I say slowly, “did Travis go to the World Trade Center? With the ashes?”

Mr. Laramore is surprised. “That’s where your grandfather worked, all the way up to when … when he got hurt. Your grandfather helped build the towers, then he worked there as some kind of maintenance guy for like thirty years. Travis said it was the place your grandfather liked best in the entire world.”

I’m charging up the stairs like I have Lia-strength propelling me. I was so tired before, but my exhaustion seems to have vanished, because all I can think of is my father upstairs, hurt, unable to move. My feet feel light, and I don’t even notice as people press out of my way, murmuring in confusion as I push past without bothering to say excuse me.

“Alia! Alia!” I hear someone behind me calling my name.

At first I don’t stop. I
hear
it, but I really don’t. I’m too focused on getting up, up, up as fast as I can.

But eventually I realize that I am panting hard, and that I have a major stitch in my side. I’m in good shape, but I know I need to pace myself or I’m never going to reach where I need to go.

I stop in the corner of a stairwell, gasping, as people continue to walk down past me, though there aren’t nearly as many people as there were earlier.

They’re getting out.

A few people ask me if I’m okay, and someone else pours water over my head as they pass. I must look bad.

I hear someone calling my name again. I turn, my hand on the rail, and peer down the stairs. My heart surges as I see Travis coming up behind me, his face determined.

“Holy crap, I didn’t think you’d ever slow down. What are you, a professional stair climber?” he gasps as he reaches me.

“I run,” I say, though I’m breathing hard too.

He nods, leaning over and putting his hands on his knees as he tries to catch his breath.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“What does it look like?”

I smile at him, feeling grateful and overwhelmed. “You don’t even know me. Why would you come with me?”

“I didn’t want to, believe me,” he pants, “but I’m so tired of regretting the things I didn’t do.”

I wait with him as he gets his wind back, leaning against the railing because my thighs are trembling and my heart is pounding.

Travis looks up at me. “I have his ashes,” he says.

“What?” I ask, confused and desperate to continue my race back up the stairs.

“My grandfather’s ashes. He would have wanted to be
here. I wanted to throw his ashes from the roof and they never would have let me do it from the observation deck of the other tower. I had Gramps’s ID card, and it still worked, so I just walked right in with the rest of the people who work here.” He’s still breathing hard, and he concentrates on that for a moment. “I waited in the sky lobby until I saw a maintenance guy. I hoped he would have the electronic swipe card to the roof. But—”

“I stopped you,” I say in realization. “You weren’t trying to steal that guy’s wallet. You wanted his swipe card.”

“After you left, I hoped that I would find someone else, but then a security guard got suspicious and made me leave. I never made it to the roof. Even with a card, security officers watch on a camera and have to buzz you through the door. I brought Gramps’s uniform shirt”—he gestures to his shirt, and I realize that somewhere along the line he has stripped off the baggy jersey and is wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt with “McLaurin” embroidered across the pocket—“and I was hoping they’d just buzz me through. It was stupid, but …”

“No,” I say. “It’s not stupid. It’s beautiful. I’m sorry you weren’t able to do it.”

We both try to regain our breath, but I’m itching to go and I turn back to the stairs.

“Alia,” he says.

He’s one step below me, with his messy hair and mismatched eyes.

“I couldn’t let you go by yourself,” he says. “We started this together, we’ll finish it together.”

“Thank you,” I say, and take his hand.

Together, we turn to go up the stairs.

Adam and I talk about everything.
What was your first pet’s name? What was your favorite cartoon when you were a kid? If you could go anywhere not all touristy and obvious, where would you go?
It’s like we are devouring each other, story by story, and this need to know
everything
feels voracious and almost desperate, like we are kissing with our words and can’t get enough.

His dad is still asking around about a Muslim girl named Alia who was in the towers on 9/11, and after talking to Mr. Laramore yesterday, I can’t help but feel we are getting closer to finding out what happened to Travis that day. Alia still remains elusive, however. I can’t find anything about her on the Internet, and I’d even e-mailed Anne Jonna again to ask if she could put out word on her survivor network, but so far I’ve heard nothing back.

I can’t help but remember what Julia said, that she thought Alia and Travis would have stayed together. And as much as I want to believe that
someone
must have known Alia was in the towers that day, the reality is that if Travis had not been found with his wallet, or not left a message, my parents would never have known he was there.

Adam and I have been down at the river, listening to the frogs sing and talking in the safety of the shadowy darkness. Now he pulls his new car into a parking space down the street from my apartment. The car isn’t really new, far from it, but he paid for it himself with the money he earned working this summer. He starts college in a couple of weeks, and I ache thinking about him being gone, though he’ll only be a few hours away.

We’re holding hands as he walks me back toward my apartment, the street full of tourists finding restaurants and bars. So far, we’ve not done more than hold hands, though the electricity between us sizzles.

“So, at least I know
why
Travis was there,” I say as my building comes into view. We stop by a streetlight, far enough away so that no one in the apartment over the shop can see us. As much as we’ve been together over the past month, I’ve been careful not to let my dad ever see us. And, I’ve noticed, Adam isn’t exactly inviting me back to his house either. It makes me want to laugh, or weep, or hit something.

“That’s what you wanted to know, right?” Adam says. “Why your brother was in the towers?”

“Yes,” I say slowly. “But now I want to know all of it. How
did he meet Alia? What happened to her? What happened to
him
? The more I’ve discovered the more I want to know.”

He laughs, a small huff of breath. “That’s life, right?” He reaches for a strand of my hair and rolls it between his fingers.