Chapter 4 Eloise #3
Then the guide leads us to a fire engine—-dented and bruised, its ladders twisted.
“This fire truck was one of over two hundred that responded that morning,” Tipper says.
“It belonged to Ladder Company Three and was led by Captain Patrick John Brown. Brown was a Vietnam War vet, a marathon runner, one of the most highly decorated officers in the New York City Fire Department. His plans for that day? Simple. To take his men up into the North Tower to save as many people as possible. Eleven members of Ladder Company Three had gotten up to the thirty--fifth floor when Captain Brown decided to radio back down to Fire Control Center to give them an update. But he wasn’t getting through—-too many other firefighters were using their radios, too many floors of concrete were between him and the control center.
So he took the functioning landline office phone beside him and called 911 to let them know his plans.
He ended the call by saying, ‘Truck Three, and we’re still going up.
All right? Thank you.’ That thank you was heard at 9:21 a.m. At 10:28, when the building collapsed, all eleven members of that company were still inside.
” She falls silent for a moment. “Keep in mind, that’s only eleven of the 343 active--duty firefighters who were killed that day—-441 first responders total, across thirty different agencies.
It’s the largest number of rescue and recovery personnel lost responding to a single crisis in American history. ”
I remember the sound then. The thumps of bodies striking pavement. The silence that gave way to chaos as sirens screamed into the base of Manhattan. The rumble, like a dragon awakening, from the cake--tier collapse of 110 floors into a cloud of ash and dust and panic.
I start shaking, and Molly wraps her arm around me. “I’ve got you,” she murmurs.
I struggle to breathe, my lungs pinched by smoke and memories.
Molly leads us toward a wall made up of thousands of small squares of blue. In the middle, metal letters spell out: no day shall erase you from the memory of time.—-virgil
“We can leave,” Molly says. “If this is too hard.”
I shake my head. In a strange way, I need to bear witness, because I averted my eyes that day. I ran.
In a few moments, Tipper and the others have caught up to us. “Behind this wall is a facility owned by the office of the Chief Medical Examiner,” Tipper says. “About forty percent of families have not yet received identified remains of their loved one.”
“Francisco Cubero,” Molly says, and I turn to her with a question in my eyes. “My friend Tabs lost her father, a security guard in the South Tower. Her family . . . they’re still waiting.”
“Francisco Cubero,” I repeat, breathing life into that man once more.
Tipper gestures to the art installation, the blue wall.
“This quote was forged by a blacksmith artist, Tom Joyce, out of steel remnants from the World Trade Center. The blue wall surrounding it is a separate art piece. There are 2,983 blue squares on the wall—-which is the number of people killed on 9/11 and in the earlier, 1993 bombing. You’ll notice there are many different shades of blue on this wall.
But what might not be so evident at first is that every shade is unique.
No two squares are alike, because no two people who were killed were alike.
Spencer Finch, the artist, named the piece Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning. ”
The group shuffles along, but Molly and I remain for a moment. “The sky was blue like the center of a flame,” I tell her.
She squeezes my hand. “2,982,” she corrects.
Memorial Hall swallows us whole. From floor to ceiling are backlit photographs of the victims. The subjects vary in age from two and a half to eighty--five.
They represent more than ninety countries.
There are men in suits, women in hijabs, employees in uniform.
In computerized kiosks are more detailed profiles of some of the dead—-family home videos of them playing with a dog or tossing a baseball, singing karaoke, walking down a church aisle.
There are recorded testimonials, too, from family and friends and spouses and colleagues: Next year would have been our fiftieth anniversary.
He moved here not speaking a word of English.
I was six years old when my dad didn’t come home from work.
I find myself arrested by the artifacts on view—-particularly the recovered property in all its gnarly, battered pride.
A CD player that makes me wonder which trader listened to it on the train home at night.
A beaded clutch too fancy for a workday—-had its owner been going to Windows on the World, or had she had a hot date the night before and never changed?
ID cards that couldn’t be used to match remains.
Keys to houses they would never come home to; cars they would never drive again. A wristwatch, frozen at 10:01 a.m.
Molly turns the corner while I remain staring at a pair of earrings, so delicate it seems impossible they would have survived. Then I hear her voice. “Mom, come here.”
I find her crouched down, silhouetted against one of the panels of portraits. She points.
There. Second from the bottom.
My hair is blond, not brown. My face has no wrinkles. I am smiling and my cheeks are flushed. There is a streak of blue paint on my chin.
A braid with a red ribbon in it snakes over my shoulder.
The photograph was from a year before I got pregnant. We had just moved to New York, and Evie was helping me paint the apartment. There were boxes everywhere, and in one, she found a camera with one photo left in the roll. Cheese, she yelled, and I turned, the flash blinding me.
The film had begun to automatically rewind, the way it did in old cameras.
I touch my finger to the photograph, to my chin, as if I can wipe away that stripe of paint. But of course, I can’t.
A photo is a moment in time. You can’t tell what happened seconds before.
You certainly can’t tell what happened years later.
I didn’t know the people who died on 9/11.
But others knew me; collectively, they grieved for us, for the loss of innocence and security, for the violent rip of rose--colored glasses from their faces.
Because as much as we want the world to be good, it isn’t.
It is hard and spiky and unrelenting. Terrible things happen to people who don’t deserve them; good things come to those who do wrong.
But.
There will also always be helpers. There will be solidarity. There will be a slow climb back to solid ground.