Nine, Ten: Part 4

Will knew he would have to ride by Claire’s house on his way to school, which was most likely the reason he veered his bike to the side and took a little rest, hoping that by the time he got back on, she would be long gone.

His dad would come home one afternoon after a really long, long haul gig, and he’d wonder what all the hubbub was about.

Neither one of them heard the discordant sound of a jet engine coming near until it roared right above their heads.

They both looked up to see a plane flying on its side, so near, so close to the tops of the trees, that later both Will and Claire would mention being able to see the metal rivets on the wings.

Flight 93, with thirty-seven passengers and seven crew members on board, had left Newark forty minutes late because of runway congestion.

That gap of time might have allowed friends and family on the ground, who had been watching the horrifying news from New York and Washington, DC, to warn those on the plane of what was most likely, though unfathomably, about to happen.

It sent a plume of dark smoke up into the sky, charcoal black into the robin’s-egg blue of the once most perfect day.

At the far end, by the library office, a couple of boys were balling up paper and lobbing it over onto other boys’ heads, then ducking down and laughing.

Naheed was scanning the room for Eliza, but she began to notice the teachers standing around the outside of the circle of students, their expressions solemn.

The principal was standing at the front of the room, and one of the custodians was wheeling a podium across the floor.

“I am sure you are all wondering why we are having this unexpected assembly today. This is an unprecedented event, so there is really no, well, precedent for this. I mean to say, it is up to every school district to decide for themselves how to handle the events that have occurred.”

Movements and the rustle of clothing, the tapping of feet, the ambient whispering, suddenly stopped.

There were the others: the conspiracy theorists, the morbidly curious, the wannabes, and the just plain crazy.

But there was nothing.
No answers. No closure. Nothing to take away.

They left stuffed animals, notes, ribbons, pieces of clothing, books, flowers, Bibles, flattened pennies, poems, photographs, jewelry, tiny trinkets.

For a while Will’s sisters set up camp on their front lawn just to give directions to all the visitors who inevitably made a wrong turn or two.

They took turns sitting there for weeks, until the grass under their chair turned brown, until even they got overwhelmed by all the people, the endless stream of lost, brokenhearted, patriotic, curious people. So much pain it wore a path in the streets and across everyone’s hearts, threatening to obliterate everything else.

And this, the one-year anniversary, only promised to bring more interlopers.

It was an opportune time, Will’s mother had decided, for the family to get out of town, far from Somerset County, away from the crowds that had taken over Shanksville.

With each recorded memento of grief, Will’s mother found hope and Will’s family began to heal.

The city became a giant scrapbook, a living, breathing, weeping album of the missing; every telephone pole, the side of every building, every tree, had become a collage of faces, an entreaty to understand, to share, and to find answers and mourn.

Naheed and her family were making the pilgrimage as well, all the way from Columbus, Ohio, even though there had been days this past year when they had been afraid to leave their house.

People always talk about the weather when they don’t have anything else to talk about, when the conversation is light, or feels stilted, or someone is just too peaceful, lazy, or preoccupied to think about anything more taxing.

But after that day the weather, and the way people remembered it, became something more; something potentially more deceptive, and yet something much more meaningful, more fragile and rare, and even more beautiful.

Wednesday, September 11, 2002, was sunny but not as clear, and the wind blew unrelentingly across Manhattan.

The warm air blew persistently, as if trying to drive away the sunshine.

Above, the flags snapped like whips, and the crooning of the wind harmonized with the steady sound of human crying.

Naheed and her family had as much in common with Islamic extremists as, well, nothing.

There had been community rallies and outcries against the violence, but that hadn’t changed anything.

People were rude and unfriendly here, even if he hadn’t experienced any of that himself, except that the man at the information booth at Penn Station had been pretty gruff.