Chapter 4 Eloise #2
Molly takes Adie from my arms and follows my gaze to the mosaic wall. “Well,” she says, “I think you have a party to plan.”
It is, admittedly, a small celebration—-with me, Molly, Adie, Jesse, and Adam.
True to Navajo form, I host it at my apartment.
By now, I’ve bought a few throw pillows and two framed prints that make the space look less temporary.
I make a cheese plate and a charcuterie board.
I hang a banner that I’ve painted on an old sheet: we love you, adie!
Maybe it is the size of the gathering, maybe it is how easily the conversation flows—-but it doesn’t really feel like a party. It feels like . . . family.
Nobody mentions Evie. As far as I know, no one has heard from her since the day she left.
When Adam and Jesse are deeply engaged in a discussion about whether the Bruins actually have a chance at the Stanley Cup this year or if the team is still rebuilding after their flurry of trades, I ask Molly if I can get her opinion on something.
She follows me into the tiny bedroom and sits down on the mattress. “Is this about clothing? Because I should warn you my fashion sense is utterly lacking.”
I sit down on the bed, too. “This isn’t about clothing. It’s about . . . a trip I was hoping you could take with me. I was thinking maybe this weekend, before you start back to work full--time.” I take a deep breath. “I’d like to go to New York City.”
Molly reaches for my hand. “I would very much like to go with you to New York City,” she says. “You do realize I come with an accessory attached?”
I smile at that. “Bring her. Bring Jesse.”
As if I’ve conjured him, Jesse pokes his head through the door. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says, “but my daughter is yawning and I need to get her home for bath and bed.”
Molly stands. She puts her hand on Jesse’s arm and says, “I’ll talk to him about this weekend.”
I follow them into the living room, where Adam is clearing plates and wineglasses. “Oh, you don’t have to do that!”
“My pleasure,” he says.
Molly and Jesse say their goodbyes, but to my surprise, Adam doesn’t leave with them. “Might as well get the dishes done,” he says. “That way you don’t wake up to a mess.”
A smile twitches at my lips. “I used to say that to you.”
“Oh, I remember. I also remember how badly you wanted a portable dishwasher instead of having to do it by hand.”
“I still don’t have a dishwasher,” I point out.
“Well, tonight you do,” Adam says.
He walks into the kitchen and runs the water in the sink. Soaping up a sponge, he scrubs at the plates, rinses them, and sets them one by one in the drying rack. I take up the position to his left, using a clean dishcloth to dry each plate and slip it back into the cabinet.
It is a dance we once performed hundreds of times.
“So,” I say, clearing my throat. “How have you been?”
His hands still for a moment. “You ever hear of a void ab initio?”
My eyes fly to him, scanning his face and his form for visible illness. “Is it . . . treatable?”
Adam bursts out laughing. “It’s not a disease. And I hadn’t heard of it, either, until last week. It’s the legal way a court says your marriage was never valid from the get--go.”
I hug a clean, dry plate to my chest. “I see.”
“I wanted to make an honest start.”
I nod, distracting myself by putting the plate away. But the stack has gotten high enough in the cabinet that I can’t easily reach and I find myself on my tiptoes, straining.
“I’ve got it,” Adam says. One of his hands comes to rest on the counter and the other reaches easily for the plate, placing it gently on top of the others. His body surrounds me, and I turn with a too--bright smile, stepping out of the circle of his arms.
“Thank you,” I tell him. “I can finish the rest on my own.”
He nods, putting another step between us. “Thanks for inviting me.” He starts to leave, then hesitates. “Ellie, the real reason I wanted to stick around is because I have two things to ask you.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “Okay . . .”
“The first is to forgive me.” The words gust from him. “I should have been the one trying to get you help, back then.”
“It was a long time ago,” I say quietly. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault, either,” Adam replies.
My knees almost give way at those words. Back then, I had been so certain that I was weak, lacking, not fit to be a mother.
“I’m sorry,” Adam says again, his eyes damp. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
“I know. I am, too.”
We are standing on a precipice. I want to reach out to comfort him. I want him to reach out to comfort me.
Instead, I clear my throat. “What’s the other thing you want to ask?”
The smile that unfurls on Adam’s face is a sail catching the wind. “If I can take my wife out sometime on a date.”
Heat rises in my cheeks; I press my hands to them. Surely you can’t blush at fifty.
“Yes,” I reply, “I’d love that.”
The first things you encounter when you enter the 9/11 Memorial and Museum are the tridents—-the massive columns that wrapped around the base of each of the Twin Towers.
Molly and I can see two of them rise—-seventy feet high—-as we take the escalator down from the atrium into the exhibition. It feels like descending into Hell.
She takes my hand. “Are you sure?” she asks softly.
We have tickets for an early--morning tour, held daily before the museum is officially open. When I told Molly I wanted to come here she arranged it. “I’m sure,” I vow.
The museum is built on the actual footprint of the Twin Towers and is completely underground.
There are three parts—-the Historical Exhibition, the Memorial Hall, and the Foundation Hall.
To enter the exhibition, you pass down a ramp, bombarded by voices—-witnesses recounting that day, both people who watched it happen in person and those who viewed it on television.
Everybody was so silent . . . We saw the plane hit .
. . I tried calling my wife . . . The words are in English, French, Chinese.
Video screens rotate images—-of people praying, sobbing; of the fireball tearing through the North Tower; of first responders crawling through rubble. I feel Molly’s hand squeeze mine.
It is eerily quiet as we meet our guide, a young woman in a blue vest who introduces herself as Tipper. In addition to me and Molly, there are two German tourists, and a man who asks if he is allowed to video.
We left Jesse watching the baby at the hotel, and arrived through the Oculus, the gorgeous new train station near the World Trade Center, which makes you feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale.
For that reason, maybe, I still feel disconnected.
It would have been jarring to walk through City Hall Park, to remember where I’d been standing when I saw the world burn.
Tipper leads us to a photograph. “The Twin Towers, in this picture, are distinguishable from the rest of the skyline. That’s because when they were completed, in 1973, they were the tallest buildings in the world.”
She leads us into the Foundation Hall, which contains remnants of the original World Trade Center.
“To the left is what’s known as the slurry wall,” Tipper explains.
“It was placed here when the World Trade Center was built to hold back water from the Hudson River. When the towers collapsed, the wall began to strain under immense pressure—-but it held. Which meant that the foundation, seventy feet deep, didn’t fill with groundwater and flood all of Lower Manhattan. ”
I feel Molly suck in a tight breath at that; she is an expert, after all, on mitigating disasters.
Tipper moves us to the center of the Foundation Hall.
“This beam is called the Last Column, because it was the final piece of debris to be removed from Ground Zero. It was one of forty--seven structural inner--core columns of the South Tower. It’s no longer in its original space, but it was incredibly important, because despite the South Tower collapsing around it, this column stayed firm in the bedrock—-and rescue and recovery workers used it to support a temporary haul rope that moved debris from the site. ”
I crane my neck, trying to see the top of the beam. Dr. Kumon’s office was in the South Tower.
We pass more rusted beams that were the direct point of impact for Flight 11 on the North Tower.
The plane struck between floors 93 and 99; this girder spanned floors 96 to 99.
Tipper points out the Survivors’ Stairs—-once connecting the World Trade Center Plaza to Vesey Street, with an overhang that usually protected people from weather but on 9/11 shielded them from falling debris.