Eight years ago today, everything changed. What follows is an essay I wrote a few weeks afterward, with additions six months and a year later. I chose not to add more to it -- how much has happened since then! The names have been changed.
A long-ago dream
September 11, 2001
It’s 9:02 am. The phone rings. It’s my husband calling from the hospital to tell me that he’s heard a rumor that a plane has hit the World Trade Center. Would I check it out? I go into the playroom and Channel 13, on which Pete is watching the beginning of DragonTales, is experiencing technical difficulty. I say, "Oh, shit..." and turn to Channel 2. There, in living color, is the image of the World Trade Center, one tower burning. As I’m watching, I see an explosion -- a fireball -- at the other tower, and hear a "boom" out the open window. Although I don’t know it at the time, it’s the second plane. I say "Oh, my God," and both Petey, who’s watching with me, and Mike, still on the other end of the phone, ask, "What’s happening?" I explain to Pete that there’s a fire at the World Trade Center, and the Channel 2 feed goes dead. Channel 4 is fine for a few seconds and then goes dead. I check, but there’s nothing but snow on every channel. The antenna for all the local stations is on top of the now-burning World Trade Center. I turn off the television. I tell Mike that it’s true, and that there was an explosion at the other tower. I tell him to call me if he hears anything and that I love him. We hang up and I take Petey and Henry downstairs.
I get Petey breakfast and I go outside while he’s eating. It’s a gorgeous late summer day, a perfectly blue cloudless sky but for a plume of black, black smoke headed southeast across Brooklyn. I tell several people walking by that a plane hit the Trade Center and to look up, and they don’t believe me, or look confused. I suggest that they not get on the subway because they probably won’t get to their destination anytime soon, but they all say they’re going to try anyway. Ah, New Yorkers. We don’t yet know that the world has changed forever.
I talk to my neighbor, Carlos, who says he can’t believe he has to go to Manhattan, because he has plane tickets in his desk drawer for a conference he’s flying to the next day. I tell him he may not be flying anywhere (the conference was cancelled later that day, and every airport in the country was closed as well). Bernie, my neighbor on the other side, tells me that he was on the roof when it happened and he saw the whole thing. Saw the whole thing? Oh, my God. Rachel. Rachel’s downtown.
I go back inside. I call Billy’s school. The answering machine picks up. I call Rachel. She’s okay and watching everything from her window. She and her colleagues have decided not to evacuate because they’re afraid that the Brooklyn Bridge is the next target. So they wait, watching from 25 stories up. I call my brother to make sure that he wasn’t downtown at a meeting. I call my other sister to make sure her husband wasn’t downtown either.
I call my friends down the block. They come over. I can’t be alone by this point, because I feel like I’m losing my mind. They bring their baby, Sammy, and iced coffee. We take turns going upstairs to see if there’s any television. Channel 2 somehow starts broadcasting. While John’s upstairs watching, the first tower collapses. Now I’m freaking. All I can think about is getting Billy home. How am I going to do it? Wear 21-pound Henry in the front carrier and push Petey in the stroller nearly two miles there and two miles back? Wendy calls and says she’s going to get the kids.
The second tower implodes. I call Rachel to see what’s happening. She says they all watched the collapse, and now they’re not allowed to leave the building because it’s too dangerous to breathe all the dust and smoke. She also tells me that she can’t dial out, so I tell her I’ll call her periodically to check on her. I begin to worry more about her, given her asthma. The unbelievable stress and the air quality make me think she’ll be in the hospital before the day is over. Somehow, she’s not. Maybe it’s the adrenaline.
After sitting with Sarah and John for a while, I decide to go to the video store with Pete, since there clearly won’t be any television for a day or two, since we don’t have cable. Once we get to Flatbush Avenue, the scene is apocalyptic. The avenue has been closed off to all but emergency traffic, and there’s an unending stream of refugees, people in business attire walking up the hill in a daze, some of whom are covered in dust. They’ve all walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to get home. The smell of smoke is weirdly strong; the fire could be just around the corner.
As we’re crossing the street, something makes me turn around to look back, and I see Wendy with Billy, her son and two other kids. They’re wearing dust masks on their faces and t-shirts on their heads. We run back across, and as I start to hug Billy, Wendy says they almost certainly have asbestos on their clothes and she’s taking the kids to her house so that they can all shower and have their clothes washed. Billy asks me why I’m crying, and I say, "I’m just happy to see you, that’s all." They leave. Later that day, I find out that they got the dust masks from NYPD in front of the school, that there’s debris blowing all over Court Street and into the school, that the sixth graders saw the whole thing from their window. Three weeks later, I find out that Billy saw the fire from the window at school, where his class was in the gym on the fourth floor.
Petey and I go to the video store and it’s closed, of course. We get coco bread from Christie’s, and wine and vodka from the liquor store, and go home. We’ve been out for no more than a half-hour and Petey says, "Something is tickling my nose." My eyes and nose have begun to sting as well. The smoke is directly above us.
We get home. John and Sarah leave, and my brother-in-law calls. He’s been in class most of the day, and hasn’t heard much since morning. I tell him about the towers collapsing and he starts yelling. Since the bridges between Brooklyn and Manhattan are closed, I tell him to come over after school and stay with us for the night.
A friend and her two kids come over for a playdate. We all play quietly, too quietly, on the floor in the parlor, the shutters closed to help keep out the smoke and the smell. After wrestling with a puzzle for a while, Caleb says he’s tired and wants to go home. We realize that there’s no energy in the room at all. Karen and I are completely wasted, and the kids feel it. We go downstairs and set up Pete and Caleb with markers and paper, and that helps. I call Rachel and speak with the receptionist at her office, who says calmly and normally, "She’s left for the day." As I’m beginning to ask her why she hasn’t left for the day, she hangs up. I check in with Mike. He’s seeing very few patients.
After Karen and her kids leave, Petey, Henry and I go get Billy at Wendy’s. The air smells terrible. Once my brother-in-law gets to our house, things settle down a bit. We talk, hang out with the kids, sit silently in disbelief, try to eat something, put the kids to bed. Mike finally gets home, at 9:00 pm. It only takes him about an hour and a half to walk, because the crowds are gone.
He tells us that just a few people came up from downtown to be treated. They had stinging eyes and noses, and were coughing. He treated one of the firefighters pulled out of the rubble. He tells us they waited all day and no one came. He tells us it was like that everywhere. No one came.
As we go to bed, we know that thousands of people are dead, but we have no idea how many. We don’t know how many children have been orphaned, or traumatized, or whose schools have been evacuated. We don’t yet know that there are nearly 350 firefighters missing, including 35 from the four firehouses within a mile of our house, and that half of Squad 1 is gone. We haven’t yet heard the stories of flying bodies, of body parts landing, of a firefighter crushed to death by a falling body. We don’t know about the jet engine landing on the corner of Church and Murray Streets, down the block from NYPIRG. We can’t imagine the devastation, and that six weeks later, ten weeks later, the fire would still be burning.
We do know that our family is safe, that our loved ones are alive, that we are among the lucky ones.
We do know that everything is different.
8pm September 11, 2001
The plume at sunset, from my front yard
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And now it’s six months later.
2900 people are dead. Over a thousand babies were born without fathers. I still can’t believe the big hole in the skyline, which we see every night from Petey’s window. It all seems like a nightmare, and that one day I’ll wake up and it won’t be true. But it is.
This week has been very hard. I feel much sadder now than I did the first week. Then I was running on adrenaline. I didn’t eat for three days, and started feeding Henry solid food because I wasn’t making enough milk for him. I was filled with fear; I was sure we were going to die. There was a thunderstorm two nights later, and all the women I knew in New York City – including me – thought bombs were dropping. There was no commercial airplane traffic for several days, so when I heard airplane noise I knew it was a military plane. When planes started flying again, the sound seemed too loud.
I was happy not to live near 7th Avenue in Park Slope, because that would have meant much more explaining to the kids about what had happened. Squad 1 lost 12 men, and there were "missing" signs and Squad 1 and other firehouse benefit fund signs and photos and poems in virtually every window. When I finally went to the avenue three days later to buy fish for dinner, it was horrible. It was another gorgeous day, about 5:30pm, and half the people on the street were just walking around, talking, looking normal. The other half were shell-shocked, crying, dazed, stunned. When I saw my first window sign, I started crying.
Nothing felt anything approximating normal for many weeks. Even now, life here feels different. I watch airplanes. I watch firetrucks and police cars and ambulances. Loud noises scare me. The slightest thing makes me weepy.
The rescue and recovery work has continued 24/7 since that day. The workers are now excavating the south lobby, where many people died. Today when Petey and I were walking home from school, there were three firetrucks and two chief’s cars outside Squad 1, and Union Street was blocked off. I wonder how many firefighters were found.
Everyone I know has their stories, and some are truly horrifying. I still can’t believe what Rachel saw, and how well she’s doing. The view from her window has changed completely. Before September 11th, she couldn’t see the World Financial Center; now she has a picture on her window to block it out. The sphere that was in the plaza of the World Trade Center has been installed as a temporary memorial in Battery Park, just downstairs from her office. And she’s two thousand feet away from the towers of light memorial. She can’t escape it. I worry about her.
I also worry about my kids. How do you act normal so that they don’t feel the strangeness all around? How do you reassure them that they’re safe when you don’t believe it yourself?
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A year later:
As I was walking down the next block the day before the anniversary, I saw in a courtyard a circle of candles, each with a name and a photograph on it. One of the candles in front had Lisa Ehrlich’s photograph on it. I stopped and stared, then started crying. I had worked with Lisa at my most recent job, and the woman who had put out the candles had worked with her at Aon, which lost hundreds of people that day.
On September 11th, I went to school to be with Billy at 8:48am, since the school was observing the anniversary in each classroom. Since we weren’t together during the actual event, I wanted to be with him during the commemoration. He sat in my lap and was very quiet.. When I went to Pete’s room, they were discussing peace and what it means to them. He was fine.
I went to visit Rachel with Henry and as we were watching the Concert for New York, which she had playing in her office all day, I started sobbing.
Life here is different. I was in a card store a while ago and saw a series of beautiful cards showing black and white photographs of the Trade Center and other Manhattan landmarks. I looked on the back to see who published them and saw the inscription, "same great city, different you." It’s too true.
I wonder what it would be like to live somewhere else, but I don’t want to move. I love New York. This is my home. And going away won’t change what happened that day, and the way I feel. So I’m waiting. Waiting to feel better and waiting to see whether this war will start next week or next month. I try not to get too angry or too sad, but it doesn’t always work. In the meantime, I watch my beautiful children grow, and I go day to day, like everyone else.
September 11, 2002
Ghosts, from my back yard