All We Have Left (34 page)

We continue to an overlook of a cavernous hall. Adam and I stop to read the display in front of us. The massive wall to our left is a surviving retaining wall from the original World Trade Center, which held back the Hudson River as the towers fell. In the middle of the hall stands a tall, rusting column covered with painted numbers and letters, mementos and posters.

“It’s the last column they removed from the original Twin Towers site,” Adam says.

I nod, thinking about how hard it must have been to let that final piece go so they could build something new.

We continue down the ramp, going deeper. I start to breathe too fast, because while I can hang onto the side of a
cliff with nothing but air and sky around me, I feel crushed under the weight of all this concrete and steel.

Missing persons posters are projected in light onto a dark wall, gradually fading in and out. Thousands of these posters plastered Lower Manhattan after the towers went down. In the confusion of the first couple of days, people held out hope that their missing loved ones were walking the street dazed, or had been taken to a hospital. But the hospitals were mostly empty, and the people on the posters were dead. So few of the missing were ever found alive. As the days passed, the posters fluttered on walls, lampposts, and subway entrances, a cry of desperate yearning and misplaced hope.

I search for one with Alia’s name on it, but there isn’t one.

Adam grabs my hand and we continue on, but I’m thinking:
Where is the poster Anne e-mailed me about?

At the bottom of the ramp, we reach the Survivors’ Stairs, part of one of the sprawling World Trade Center’s many staircases. Hundreds of people had used these stairs as an escape route, and it had somehow survived the towers falling.

“Do you think we’re going to find the poster?” I ask Adam as we stand at the top of the stairs. “Do you think we’ll ever know what happened to them?”

The screeching, tearing, thundering noise gets louder, and as we watch, the other tower slowly begins to drop, the floors at the top pancaking onto the ones below them, the top of the building disappearing into smoke. Then, all of a sudden, the entire building just falls, rushing past our window with a horrendous roar.

The building trembles, and a great cloud explodes toward us, dark and boiling.

“Get down,” Travis yells. “Get down!”

He pushes me to the floor and draws my face into his chest as the smoke engulfs us. Every breath hurts, and I close my eyes and pray as hard as I ever have in my life.

The other tower fell, it fell straight down like a waterfall of concrete and steel, and, oh God, please help me, because is this one going to fall too?

Travis tightens his arms around me, shielding me as parts of the ceiling fall. It doesn’t feel like it will ever end, and I hold on to him with all my strength.

Eventually the terrible roaring, clanking noises subside, and Travis unwinds his arms. I sit up, coughing and spitting. The smoke has begun to clear, and I can make out the corner of the desk, and then the chair, and then bookcases farther away as the smoke continues to spiral out the window. I rub my eyes with the palms of my hands, and Travis coughs, his forehead on his knees.

“No, no, no, no, no,” I keep saying, but I’m not sure if I’m saying it out loud or if it’s in my head. I feel numb, and somehow unattached from myself, as if my mind has floated free like a balloon.

The smoke above us swirls slowly out the broken windows. We are hundreds of feet in the air, and as much as I wish I could just fly out the window, I’m not Lia, I’m not a superhero, and the only way I’m going to survive is to get up and walk down hundreds of steps.

“Gramps always used to say that they would never fall,” Travis says, but he’s not really talking to me.

He starts crawling across the floor, pulling me with him. He is leaving tracks of blood on the floor, and when I glance down at my hands, I see my palms are speckled with glass. I don’t feel any pain.

“We need to get out,” Travis says. “If the other tower fell, this one could too.”

I crawl faster, trying to keep my head below the smoke, but it’s still so thick that I have to stop every couple of seconds to cough. Travis reaches up to a desk and grabs a vase. He yanks out the flowers and, before I can protest, puts a hand to my hijab.

“What—? No!” I grab the ends of the scarf and clutch it to my head.

“You need to use it to wrap around your face so you can breathe,” he says hoarsely.

I shake my head back and forth, tears spilling down my cheeks.

It seems like forever ago that I put it on, even though it was only a few hours ago. I’d give anything to go back to earlier this morning before planes started crashing into towers, and entire buildings dropped out of the sky.

Without speaking, Travis lets go of the scarf and dumps the water at the bottom of the vase over the front of my shirt.

“Pull it up over your face, then,” he says, his voice husky with smoke. “Come on. We’re going to get out of here alive, okay? We’re going to make it.”

We go down the modern-day stairs beside the chipped and crumbled Survivors’ Stairs. What did it look like before? I imagine Travis and Alia on a similar staircase, deep within the World Trade Center, their hands sliding down the railing as they flee the smoke and the flames.

At the bottom, we wander through a vast hall, looking at the “impact steel,” bent unimaginably when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower. In just a little over an hour and a half it would all be over. I wonder what Travis and Alia were thinking. I wonder what they thought had happened. Because how could you ever imagine the truth?

No one could.

An elevator motor, as big as a small car, sits near a crumpled fire truck.

“It’s amazing anything at all survived,” Adam says, his voice quiet.

Inside the memorial exhibition, the sight of the thousands of faces on the wall, the faces of people who died on this very spot, freezes me.

“I can’t do this,” I say in a small voice.

I know Travis’s picture is probably there. Is it the same picture that has shown up in every article since he died? But that’s not the Travis I’m searching for, the eighteen-year-old boy with a cocky grin, an entire lifetime stretching before him. I’m looking for the Travis who was here that day, desperate and scared, whose remaining lifetime was measured in minutes.

I’m looking for a girl named Alia.

Outside the exhibit, I try calling Anne Jonna again, but get the same recording that she would be out of town until Monday. I wish I’d thought to ask her earlier where she saw the missing persons poster of Alia in this huge, echoing museum, but it’s too late now.

“Come on,” Adam says, tugging me over a small bridge toward the glass doors of the historical exhibit.

We wind through the exhibits, following a timeline outlining the terrible events of that day, passing artifacts found in the rubble: baseball tickets, shoes, wallets, eyeglasses, an old-fashioned Rolodex; a wheel of a plane; an in-flight magazine from one of the doomed flights. We hear voices of people from answering machines leaving their last messages, and pass a secluded room with photos of people jumping or
falling from the top floors of the buildings. We pause in front of a fireman’s hat, battered but still recognizable. There is a pay phone from the observation deck of the south tower, a bike rack with bikes like faithful steeds still waiting for their owners to come back.

Inside a glass case is part of a store, shirts hanging on racks, a sign reading $29.99. It looks like any other store display, except everything is covered in a thick layer of dust and the people who worked here, shopped here, left and never returned.

So many things, and while they are just things, they belonged to people who had lived and breathed and loved. They are tangible symbols of the innocent people who were caught up in a day of horror and fear. How twisted is the world when your shoe could become part of a museum exhibit?

I go faster and faster, searching for some trace of Alia, of Travis.

I crawl after Travis.

It’s hard to see where we’re going, and as we get farther away from the window, it gets harder to breathe. We can hear the fire crackling now, and see a dull orange glow as we make our way slowly toward the stairwell door. My hands slip and slide across cards from a broken Rolodex, and a picture taken at Disney World—of a girl probably eight years old and smiling happily—is smoldering.

“I forgot her purse,” Travis says and stops, shaking his head and coughing.

“You can’t go back,” I say, and a moment later he keeps crawling.

Please God, please get me out of this
, I say over and over in my head.

As we get closer to the reception desk, part of the ceiling and wall right in front of us crashes to the floor.

“Run!” Travis says, leaping to his feet and grabbing my hand.

We run to the stairwell door, and when Travis slams the door open, I see that the entire stairwell is covered with dust. Inches of it cake the floor and walls, and float lazily in the air.

Travis starts down the stairs, and I follow.

I want to go up, to find Ayah, but I understand now that he would want me to go down.

To get out.

To stay alive.

There’s no one in the stairwells as we race down the stairs, sometimes skipping three or four steps at a time. Our feet slip and slide in the dust, and the constant turning on the landings makes me dizzy. My hand is sliding down the railing so fast that my palm burns. We are both coughing, but Travis is almost choking, and I realize that while I have my shirt pulled up around my mouth, Travis’s grandfather’s shirt is too small for him, and he’s having trouble keeping it over his mouth.

“Wait,” I say. “
Wait
.”

Travis stops in a landing beside an abandoned coil of fire hose and two fire extinguishers. I wonder if we are all alone in the exhausted, dying tower.

I realize Travis is crying.

“I lost them,” he says.