All We Have Left: Chapters 38–60

How can words have this effect on me, like I jumped into a lake so icy that it burns and makes me feel heady and alive?

A woman in front of us is praying and working rosary beads, and their tiny clicking somehow feels reassuring.

And then the building careened back the other way. All I could do was hang on.

It’s like we are devouring each other, story by story, and this need to know everything feels voracious and almost desperate, like we are kissing with our words and can’t get enough.

Alia still remains elusive, however. I can’t find anything about her on the Internet, and I’d even e-mailed Anne Jonna again to ask if she could put out word on her survivor network, but so far I’ve heard nothing back.

I jump, still reeling from the e-mail Anne just sent me about the missing persons poster.

But all of a sudden I can’t breathe, and I lean forward with my hands on my knees and Travis is saying, Breathe, Alia, breathe. I try to, but I catch another lungful of acrid, burning air, and my vision starts to go black at the edges.

“You’re bleeding!” I exclaim, seeing the rivulet of blood running down his face from a cut in his forehead.

You really don’t think about your parents loving each other. Those big displays of love like you see in the movies are hidden, maybe behind closed doors, or maybe just so buried under the minutia of life that they even forget.

I go to the spindly desk where she keeps her laptop and carry it over to the coffee table.

I’m feeling a sense of urgency that is out of proportion to the solemnity of the museum, and Adam follows me without complaint as I head toward the stairs instead of taking the slow escalator filled with chattering people.

The exhibit begins with a series of overlapping panels showing how people reacted to the news of planes run amok in the skies: people staring upward, people crying, pointing, their expressions scared, angry, confused.

We follow the ramps deeper into the basement of the old towers, listening to the ghostly voices jumbled together in fear and confusion as the tragedy unfolds, their faces silent and horror- stricken.

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.

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.

My brother was a kid who liked to play music with his friends. And Alia. She looks my age, small and feisty with a happy smile.

We end up in a corner of the landing, and I hear a screeching sound, like a million banshees, and the winds get stronger as the building comes rushing down at us.

“Tonight,” I say, feeling a frisson of happiness. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen Hank in almost four years, and he’s bringing Deka and Joshua.

There were thousands of remains that were never identified; they rest now in a repository inside the 9/11 Museum.

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.

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.

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 used to get mad when people said that,” I say, and smile slightly at that long-ago Alia, self-righteous and hurting.

I reached a street, but I was so disoriented, I didn’t even know what street it was.

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.

In fact, all I felt was the unity and accord of my bewildered city. It became my city after that, even though when I moved here I didn’t want to stay.

Time passed, dragging a trowel across my memories, leveling out the pain and horror, pulling radiant nuggets of grace to the surface: the people in the stairwell who were able to put aside their fear and make room for the injured, who offered a kind word when someone faltered, and helped a stranger.

It was meeting the eyes of a random person in the weeks after the towers fell, the phoenix of fierce solidarity that rose from the ashes of that day.

Eventually, though, things went back to some semblance of normality.

As I flip through the pages, I see Alia has drawn my brother with eloquent, sure strokes: the strong edge of his clenched jaw, his slightly mismatched eyes.