I'll admit it: I was a few minutes late to work that morning. Walking across the parking lot to my office building, I stared up at the sky, which was bright blue, cloudless and still. It was a perfect late summer day. I wished I'd called out sick that day. It was just too beautiful to be cooped up inside.
I entered one of the elevators with another woman who had a cell phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder. She was listening intently to whomever was on the other end of the line, occasionally inserting a gasp or a murmured "Oh my god." I rolled my eyes.
I had just sat down at my desk and taken my telephone off the auto-answer setting when it rang. The caller ID displayed my parents' phone number.
"Lori? Are you at work? Have you turned on the television?" My mother was so breathless I could hardly understand her.
I responded, "Of course I'm at work--you just called me here! Slow down. What are you talking about?"
"A plane hit the World Trade Center...I'm watching it now on Good Morning America...oh my god, it's terrible!" she babbled. I assumed she meant a small prop plane. Hmmm. There must have been some kind of awful accident, which was a shame...but hey, life goes on.
She kept me on the phone for over ten minutes, giving me a play-by-play of what was happening. I kept trying to log on to MSNBC or CNN to see it for myself, but those sites were totally locked up.
Finally, around 9 a.m., I told her that I'd call her back in a minute. Our friend Phil lived and worked in Manhattan, and I figured I'd call him to see what was up. But before I had a chance to even dial his number, I heard a scream from one of the sales rep's offices at the far end of our suite.
Another plane--a jet--had hit the second tower. Immediately, all business ceased in the office. We gathered around the radio of a senior sales rep and listened to the news broadcast. Two or three of my coworkers kept whispering the same word, over and over again: terrorism. It must be.
I glanced over at my friend Christina, who was pale and visibly shaken, moreso than the rest of us. I approached her and asked her if she was okay.
Her eyes were glassy as she answered, "My mother might be in one of the towers this morning."
"What? Does she work there?" I asked, grabbing her hand.
Christina nodded. "Kind of. My mother lives in New York. She has her own dry cleaning delivery service and she has a lot of clients at the World Trade Center. I know that she's supposed to be there this morning--she stops there every morning to pick up and drop off people's clothes."
"Have you been able to get a hold of her?"
"No," she whispered. "All the lines are busy. I just can't get through to her cell phone." Her lower lip trembled and a single tear wound its way down her cheek.
Closing my eyes, I tried desperately to envision Christina's mother, a woman I'd never met before, alive and well and safe. When I opened my eyes, Christina was back at her desk, crumpled over like a forlorn ragdoll.
I returned to my desk and decided to call Phil. Of course, the entire telephone system was down in New York. I thought about my best friend, who was scheduled to fly home from a business trip in Orlando that morning.
I spent the next thirty minutes watching live webcasts on MSNBC and CNN and talking to Brian on the phone. We'd just gotten engaged ten days ago. The entire situation seemed unreal. Then the latest breaking news appeared on my monitor: the Pentagon was on fire. The White House was being evacuated. The Washington Mall was on fire. The stock exchange was closed. Airports around the country were shutting down. This must be the end of the world, I thought.
My phone rang again. It was my friend who was in Orlando for a business trip. She told me that she and her coworkers were going to rent a car and drive home to Philadelphia, since the airports were shut down.
I trotted back to the sales rep's office to listen to KYW. By this point, speculation was flying around the room. Were we at war now? With whom? Was this another act of domestic terrorism, like the Oklahoma City bombing?
Shortly after that, we watched in horror as the first tower, and then the second tower, collapsed. The vice president of our office announced that we were free to go home for the remainder of the day and be with our families.
I looked over at Christina and my heart ached for her. She had no family to go home to--her father had died within the last year, and she still had not heard from her mother. I walked over to her desk and asked her what she planned to do. She replied that she was not going to leave the office until she got a hold of her mother.
"I'll stay with you," I volunteered. I couldn't leave her alone in an empty office, waiting to hear about her mother's fate. Everyone else left as Christina and I sat together at her desk, watching the chaos unfold on CNN's website. Another plane was reported down in a field in Pennsylvania. Other than Christina's occasional shaky breaths, we passed an hour in silence.
Shortly before noon, Christina's telephone rang. Her eyes widened, but she made no move to answer it. Taking a deep breath, I grabbed the receiver and picked it up, not even daring to say hello.
I was greeted by a torrent of frantic, jumbled English and Greek. It was Christina's mother. She had been delivering dry cleaning to a client in the second tower when the first plane hit. She told me that everyone thought it was either a bomb or an earthquake. The floor that she was on began evacuating almost immediately, and it was a damn good thing. Ten minutes later, the second plane hit her building, and she would have been trapped on the floors above the plane had she not started down the stairs just then.
She passed many people in the stairwell who could not continue. She tried to encourage people to keep going, but they simply refused and sat down. They were too tired or too out of shape to do it. Sprinklers were spraying water all over the place, drenching everyone. Then the building lost power.
In all, she climbed down sixty-some flights of stairs, and spent over an hour getting out of the building and onto the street. Once outside, she watched as people began jumping out of windows from the ninetieth floor (or higher!) of the towers. She decided to head home on foot, and was standing mid-span on the Brooklyn Bridge when the first tower collapsed.
I handed the telephone to Christina, who spoke to her mother for a few minutes before being disconnected. I stayed with Christina for another half-hour, just to make sure she was okay to drive herself back to her apartment. Then I went home.
For the rest of my life, I know that I will no longer be able to look at a perfect late summer/early autumn sky without thinking about all the death and the horror that took place that day.
Labels: bad news, family, friends, life events, memories, scary, work, writing
In My Head
