All We Have Left (36 page)

When I get upstairs, the apartment is dark and quiet. I think that I was wrong, that he’s not here, and my courage begins to fade.

“Dad?” I call, and my voice echoes.

“Jesse?” I hear movement in the back, and a moment later he comes out, freshly showered and shaved, a towel around his neck. He’s shaved off his beard, and he looks younger, more vulnerable.

I stand by the counter, and a lifetime of hurt and pain and unsaid words swirls between us.

I take a deep breath. “I’m tired of living my life scared that you’re going to stop loving me. I did things, and I regret them, but I was just too afraid to say the things I needed to say. I can’t live like that anymore, keeping everything locked up inside. I’m in love with Adam, and I really don’t know where that’s going to take me, but I’m your daughter and it shouldn’t matter. You should love me just the way I am.”

He stands there for a long moment.

“I do,” he says finally, and his voice cracks. He clears his throat. “I do love you, Jesse. I’m sorry that you ever doubted that.”

His eyes are glistening, and I realize that he’s crying, he’s crying for
me
, and this is how a waterfall thaws, one small drop at a time, until the whole thing tumbles to life again.

“I can’t live my life as small as possible anymore,” I say.

“I don’t want you to,” he says, and he scrubs his eyes with the end of the towel.

We stand on opposite sides of the room, and there’s not going to be an emotional reunion, me sobbing in my father’s arms, because that’s not who either one of us is, but I think, maybe, there’s hope.

The reunion with my brother is rocky, but good. Hank isn’t ready to forgive Dad completely either, but we’re all trying, and in the end I suppose that’s all we can do. You can forgive, but it’s impossible to forget, and the trick is how to live with that.

The apartment over the shop has been filled with my nephew’s ringing laughter and the big, warm lightness of my mother’s smiles. My father has not said much, but he sits and watches his grandson with eyes that are happy and sad, and when Joshua climbed into his lap, he held him tight and pressed a scratchy kiss to his forehead.

Hank and his family are staying in my old room, and my mother and I go back to her apartment at night and make hot chocolate and watch her sappy reruns.

“I’m proud of you, Jesse,” she says a few days after Hank arrives.

“For what?” I ask, looking at her in surprise.

“For being you.”

She goes to bed, and I pull up a search engine and scroll through the hundreds of stories of people who were there the day the towers fell. So many different perspectives on the same day.

While Adam and I were in the museum, we saw a wall made up of 2,983 squares painted every shade of blue. It’s supposed to represent how people remember the color of the September sky the morning the towers fell. No shade is the same, but they make a perfect montage of color. Every person has a unique experience to add to that day, building a wall of memory that will never fall down.

I google “Alia Susanto 9/11” as I have many times over the past weeks, more out of habit than anything, because it’s hard to stop searching.

There’s something new at the top of the page, and I stare in disbelief before clicking on the link.

It’s a recent news article entitled “Muslim Graphic Novelist Tackles the Difficult Subject of 9/11 as 15th Anniversary Approaches.”

Beside the article is the cover of a comic book, a hellish vision of the towers burning as the second plane hits, and in the forefront is a girl in traditional Muslim garb. It appears that she is flying, and lightning bolts shoot from her fingertips.

On her head is a white scarf covered with swirling red and green flowers.

Parking is hard to find in the Brooklyn neighborhood, but I eventually find a spot and walk up to the building with a bright green awning shading the front steps. It’s a cloudy September morning, and people are on their way to work and school, oblivious to me as I stand staring up at the building and wondering what I’m going to find inside.

I had texted Adam at school when I found Alia’s scarf on the cover of a comic book, and the name of the woman who wrote it.

Adam called his father, and by the next day his father had an address for me.

I ring the buzzer, and a woman’s voice answers and buzzes me up.

She wanted to see me, Adam’s father had said. She wanted to see me as soon as possible.

Upstairs the door opens before I get there.

A woman stands there, dark curly hair bouncing around her pretty face. She looks solemn, but when she sees me, she lights up.

“You look just like him,” she says, and pulls me in for a hug as if it’s the most natural thing in the whole world.

“I thought you were dead,” I say to Alia Peterson.

That’s why I couldn’t find her. The girl in the towers with my brother had become a woman with a different name and a different life.

I follow her into the high-ceilinged apartment, full of light and color and a bin of kids’ toys in the corner.

“This was my parents’ apartment, but they moved back to California to be near my nenek when she was dying.” She sits on the couch, wrapping her arms around her knees, and nods for me to sit. “John and I were married by then, and there was no question that we wanted it.”

“You weren’t easy to find,” I say.

“I’m so glad you did,” she says simply.

There’s a silence, but not uncomfortable, and I feel like she is drinking me whole with her wide, depthless eyes. After a moment she nods, and smiles.

“I’ve always thought of you as a baby. I don’t know why you never grew up in my head,” she says.

I reach into my purse and pull out the scarf, yellowed and faded, and hold it out to her.

She doesn’t take it, and then she does, bringing it to her
face and closing her eyes. She sits for a long time with her eyes shut, and I wonder what she’s thinking about.

Finally she opens her eyes.

“Can you tell me about Travis?” I ask. “I want to know everything.”

She sits, and her gaze, while still on me, is not seeing me anymore.

“I’ll start at the beginning,” she says. “That’s where you always have to start to really understand.”

She leans her head back against the couch and begins.

“I wake that morning thinking about what to wear, the taste of candied dreams lingering even after I open my eyes …”

Travis is lying on top of me, and I pray with him as the wind whips at us and the banging sound gets louder, picking up speed.

“Nooooooo!” I scream as the wind tears me out of Travis’s arms.

The blast of air sweeps past all that was and never will be again. Gone is the endless view from the Windows on the World, and the 198 elevators that raced up and down like zippers. Gone are the people settling into a workday, the computers and Rolodexes, the pictures of smiling kids, wives, and husbands, the cardboard box prayer mats in the 106th-floor stairwell. Gone are the thousands upon thousands of pulse beats that made up the heart of the towers. All of it is being swept away in a few terrible seconds,
wiped away in a rush of wind and a cascade of concrete and steel.

I reach out my hands toward Travis, and he lunges at me with both arms, but a cloud of dust and smoke comes rushing down the stairwell at us, and
I’m flying through the air …

“That was the last time I saw him,” I say to Travis’s sister, with her wide blue eyes wet with tears. The angle of the sun has changed while I’ve talked, and thick golden light full of swirling dust motes falls on the side of her face. I study her, trying to imprint her face in my mind so I can draw it later.

So young.
She’s so young, but then, so was I. In a way, we were all so young when we woke up that September morning.

“I don’t think I could have done all that stuff you guys did,” Jesse says. “I would have run out as fast as I could.”

“You never know,” I say. “You never know until it happens.”

“So what happened then? How did you make it out? There weren’t a whole lot of people who survived inside when the towers fell. It must have been a miracle.”

“I used to get mad when people said that,” I say, and smile slightly at that long-ago Alia, self-righteous and hurting. “I had no idea how, or
why
, I made it out, and so many other people didn’t.”

People called it a miracle, but they never did again when I screamed that why weren’t there miracles for
all of them
? For all those people who died?

Why wasn’t there a miracle for Travis?

“When I woke up, the sky was the first thing I saw. I was coughing, and these waves of smoke kept billowing around me, but as I lay there, the smoke would clear for a moment and I could see the blue sky. I was on top of a smoking heap of rubble, and the tower around me was gone.” Despite everything that happened, that memory is the one I revisit the most often. The blue sky shining over all that destruction.

“Wait,” Jesse says. “How? How could you have survived?”

I shake my head, because only God knows how and why. There is no explanation. It took years before I could accept that simple fact.

“I don’t remember a lot about what happened after that. I remember bits and pieces, scrambling down a mountain of rubble, full of tall spikes of metal, and fire. I was limping because my knee hurt, every
bit
of me hurt. I—I don’t know how I got down from there. The next thing I remember, I was in a wasteland and nothing looked right. Smoke and dust were everywhere, and I waded through dust that came up almost to my knees, and I coughed up black stuff that tasted like death. I almost ran into a crumpled fire truck before I saw it. I reached a street, but I was so disoriented, I didn’t even know what street it was. I saw a few people, just ghosts that moved slow and dazed in the smoke.”

It’s hard to explain to this girl who was barely alive when all this happened what my memories of that day are like. Some are rock hard and crystal clear, but some are ephemeral and
slip out of my grasp every time I reach for them. The doctors said it was because I suffered a concussion, and they were so dismissive that I never told anyone the rest of it. That I felt someone beside me as I clambered through contorted metal beams and smoking rubble to get out. The sensation was so strong that I could almost feel a hand in mine, but when I looked no one was there.