All We Have Left (20 page)

Conversation with Dad officially over, but at least it didn’t end with him screaming.

I hurry past him and throw my bag in my room, and then continue down the hall to Hank’s old room. Mom turned it into an office, and it’s full of bookcases and a desk covered with fourth-grade schoolbooks and old tests. I head for the closet, which is jammed full of stuff Hank left when he went away and never came back.

Underneath his ice hockey equipment, I see the clear Tupperware container with a blue top, like the one Mom used to put cupcakes in to send with me to school on my birthday. I pull it out and set it on her desk. I glance guiltily at the closed door, half expecting to see Dad there, and then dig my fingers underneath the plastic lid. It comes loose with a pop. The plastic is old and fragile, and a piece of it breaks off in my fingers.

Inside is an answering machine.

The dark is so heavy and thick that I feel it weighing on me as I sink to the floor. I slide back against the wall, feeling the metal of the railing against my head, and the cool smoothness of the wall through the back of my shirt. Somehow I’m convinced that Travis has disappeared and it’s just me in all this blackness. It feels hard to pull air into my lungs, and I start breathing in short, quick gasps.

“Travis?” I ask, panting.

“Yeah, don’t move.”

I hear him rustling around, but I can’t seem to slow down my breathing. I’m getting light-headed.

“Alia? Just calm down, okay?” I hear his voice, but it seems like it’s coming from every direction out of the darkness.

Suddenly, there’s a scraping sound. Once, twice, and then I see a flare of light.

Travis holds up the lighter so I can see his face. The smoke lazes around the flame, muffling the brightness of the light. Just a few minutes ago the smoke was looping around the top of the car, but now it is circling down closer to us, like a hungry animal biting at the tender place at the back of my throat.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s get back to work on the door.”

“We’ve
got
to get out of here,” I say.

“That’s the plan,” he says grimly.

Travis’s face is eerily lit by the flame of the lighter as he pulls on the doors. This time, they slide open almost easily.

“What the hell?” Travis says. “The power going out must have unlocked it. There should be another door—”

He holds up the lighter so we can peer through the doors at what’s beyond.

A white, blank wall.

“We’re stuck between floors,” Travis says bleakly. Then he curses, and the lighter goes out.

“Man! It’s burning my fingers.” His voice is muffled by the press of darkness.

“Let me have it. Let me have it!” I reach over toward him, patting with my hands until I find his stomach. He tenses, and I jerk my hands away, thankful that he can’t see my burning cheeks.

“Here.” He reaches out until he finds my hands, and clasps them between his own, dropping the lighter into my palm.

It’s hot to the touch, and it takes me a try or two to get it lit.

“Now what?” I ask, eyeing the white wall revealed by the open elevator doors.

Travis suddenly reaches back and punches it. A small dent appears, and white powder poofs out.

“Ouch!” He holds his knuckles. “It’s drywall.” He coughs. The smoke is getting thicker, and it’s harder to breathe.

Travis sits on the floor, ducking his head away from the smoke filling the top of the elevator, and uses his knife to cut a square in the drywall. When he pries it out with his fingers, there’s another sheet behind the first.

Cursing, Travis starts punching it, but it’s awkward from a sitting position. He stands and starts kicking, but immediately begins choking from the smoke.

I look over at my lunch bag and crawl toward it. I grab the Coke, unscrew the top, and pour some of the liquid on a napkin. I hand it up to Travis.

“Try breathing through this.”

Without speaking, he takes the napkin and presses it to his nose and mouth. He goes back to kicking at the wall, and big holes appear. He drops to the ground again, and uses the knife to pry out another piece.

Still another layer of drywall.

“Dammit!” Travis cries.

I take the napkin from him and wet it again, and he presses it to his face as he stands up and starts kicking. He’s
angry, furious, and the piece of drywall disintegrates under his flying feet.

“Okay, okay!” I cry. “Stop!”

He collapses to the floor, coughing. I pick up the knife from the floor and start cutting through the remaining wall, awkward with the lighter in my left hand.

“Oh, no,” I moan when I’ve removed the last piece.

Because behind it is a layer of white tiles.

Travis is still coughing, curled up on the floor. I pick up the soda and douse the front of my shirt. Taking a deep breath, my head close to the floor, I stand up and pull my shirt over my mouth and nose, feeling the stickiness of the soda on my lips. I begin kicking at the tile, crying out as my toes slam into the wall.

I hear a cracking noise, and suddenly there’s a flash of faint light and a shatter of falling tile. I drop down to the floor, gasping for breath, and push my face close to the hole.

“It’s a bathroom,” I gasp. Except for the dimness of the emergency lights, everything looks so normal: clean tile, sinks, toilets. I half expect someone to be washing their hands or fixing their panty hose.

But there’s nobody there. I can still hear alarms going off, quieter here in the open.

I withdraw back into the dark, smoky elevator.

“Get up,” I tell Travis. “You can’t give up—we’re almost there.”

I push my face to the hole and take several deep breaths
before standing up and kicking again. For a moment, I am in Lia’s world, and I can see the scene:

Girl in charcoal gray shadows, the white glow of her scarf the only contrast, her foot in the process of hitting the wall as large chunks of tile fly into the bathroom beyond and explode onto the floor.

I redouble my efforts, because
I can do this, I have to do this
, and suddenly Travis is yelling hoarsely from where he still lies on the floor.

“Alia! That’s it. That’s enough!”

I’d been in a sort of frenzy, and it takes me a moment to understand what he’s saying. I drop to the floor.

“Go,” Travis says. “Go, go, go!”

I squirm through the ragged hole, barely noticing as broken tiles scrape my shoulders and hips before I drop onto the white tile floor.

A moment later, Travis follows me.

He’s covered with white dust from head to toe, and for some reason I laugh.

“You should see yourself,” I say.

“Right back atchoo,” he retorts and smiles. “That’s what my brother Hank used to say when he was little. I’d tease him, and he’d say, ‘Right back atchoo.’”

“How old is he now?” I ask.

“Sixteen. And I have a baby sister. Jesse. She’s a pain, but, man, she loves her some Travis.”

I smile at the big-brotherly combination of affection and exasperation in his voice.

“Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath. “What now?”

“Let’s go find out what the hell is going on.”

“I need to call my parents,” I say. “They must be worried about me.”

We turn toward the door, but it suddenly occurs to me that my parents have no idea I’m here.

I stare at the answering machine, feeling a deep pit of awful in my stomach. I get up and go back into the closet, searching for another Tupperware container, but there isn’t one. I’m not sure what I was expecting from Hank, but it wasn’t this.

Hank is so much older than me that he always seemed more like an uncle than a brother. He went away to college when I was just four, choosing a college halfway across the country instead of the one right here in town. Mainly I remember him coming to visit, though I have a few memories from before he left. He gave me a pickle, told me it was a cookie, and I believed him. He used to let me ride on his shoulders, and we would gallop around the apartment, him yelling “duck!” every time we approached a doorway.
The last time I saw him, he gave me an awkward hug and said in my ear, “Don’t let them get you down, Jess, okay?”

I will always be his baby sister, and he’s trying to help me in his own way.

I unplug Mom’s printer and plug the answering machine into the wall. When I turn around, I see that there is a red light blinking.

A message.

All of a sudden, I can’t breathe.

Do I want to listen to this?
Yes
and
no
ricochet off each other in my head.

I press the Play button, and hear a guy’s voice, scared, but trying not to sound like it.

“Hello? … there? I’m … World Trade Center. Hello? Anyone there?”

I realize with a cold, knifing certainty that this is my brother Travis’s voice. I don’t remember having heard it before, but who else could it be?

“Hello?”

“Listen … bad. I don’t know …
” There’s a lot of static, and Travis’s voice is jumbled and unclear. Then, “
… I … you, Mom, and Hank and Jesse and, and … Dad, I know you … okay?
”

I shiver as he says my name. I might not remember him, but to Travis I was a cute and cuddly toddler he had already learned to love.

There’s a long pause, and then I hear a girl’s voice in the background, crying as she speaks.

“Tell them … mother! Tell … Ayah … find him … love … so much! Tell …”

Travis’s voice again, “
That’s … with me
,” and the message ends.

As soon as we push through the doors into the hallway, we can smell smoke again. The hallway is empty, and a few ceiling tiles lie on the floor. I can see daylight out a window, and it seems so strange that the sky would still be blue, that the sun is still shining, that the world outside is rolling along like it always does.

“Where is everybody?”

The buildings are usually filled with people, coursing and humming through the corridors and lobbies and elevators. I’ve listened to summer concerts on the plaza, ice-skated in the winter, visited my father in his offices numerous times, and there are
always
people.

“Let’s see if we can find someone.” Travis sets off purposefully down the hall.

“We need to find a phone,” I say, hurrying to keep up with him.

We run down the hall, jumping over some debris on the floor, and stop in front of the doors to the first offices we find. Even though emergency strobe lights are pulsing and alarms are going off, even though we know something is wrong, it still feels weird to just bust into the office.

Travis puts his hand on the door handle. I guess we are both half expecting to find people behind the door, working away at their desks, and we will back out with apologetic smiles, whispering, “Sorry, our mistake.” Actually, I close my eyes for a moment, praying that’s what we’ll find.
Please God, if it is your will, make everything go back to the way it was this morning.
How could everything go wrong so quickly?

“There’s so many people here that they gave the buildings their own ZIP code,” Travis says, and I know he’s wondering like I am where all the people are.