The Girl He Used to Know(74)
On the walls, people are putting up pieces of paper with pictures of their loved ones and their names and details. Janice made one for Jonathan with her computer using a photo I brought, and we tack it up with pushpins we take from a box on the floor. There are so many pictures, and I feel compelled to look at each one and read the information.
Someone lays a hand on my arm, and I flinch. “I’m sorry,” she says. The middle-aged woman wears a name tag that says Eileen. “I’m a grief counselor if you’d like to talk.”
“I don’t need a grief counselor,” I say, because I don’t. “That’s for people whose loved ones have died.”
She pats my arm again and drifts toward a sobbing couple standing a few feet to my right.
A man steps up to the podium near the front of the room. “Please, if you haven’t filled out a missing-person report, you need to do that now.”
The crowd murmurs their assent, but then angry voices overpower them. “Why isn’t the company trying harder to rescue the survivors?” a woman yells from somewhere in the middle. “Bring in experts. People trained to comb through the rubble.”
“We are a financial services company. We are not in the business of search and rescue,” the man says.
“But the company has considerable financial assets at their disposal. Why aren’t they using them to help the people who made all this money for the company?”
The crowd erupts into shouting and the man leaves the podium. No one knows what to do after that, including Janice and me, so we do the only thing we can.
We pray, we talk, and we listen, and for as beneficial as that is, I can’t help but feel that we’re wasting precious time.
42
Annika
SEPTEMBER 15, 2001
We return to the ballroom at the hotel early the next morning, because we don’t know where else to go. Shortly after ten, as Janice and I sip Styrofoam cups of lukewarm tea, a man steps up to the podium and introduces himself as the head of the company. Then he announces that they’re no longer looking for survivors. Four days after the attack, hopes are waning that anyone else will be pulled from the rubble alive, but hearing someone say it out loud causes a swift and heartbreaking reaction from the crowd. The keening sobs and cries of despair drown out whatever the man is still trying to say. Janice puts her arm around me and holds me upright, as if she’s afraid my knees will buckle, but they don’t, because I don’t believe what this man is saying. It may be true for some employees, but not Jonathan.
“Annika,” she says.
“He was in the stairwell,” I argue. “Jonathan said he would go down and he was in the process of doing that when we got cut off. Based on the time the towers fell, he would have had time to reach the lobby, go outside, and get clear of them. Brad got out, and he didn’t even head down with Jonathan. He stayed behind and he still got out!” I’m shouting and crying.
A man lays his hand on my arm, and I whirl around with so much force that he takes a quick step back. “I’m sorry, but who did you say you were looking for?”
“My boyfriend Jonathan.”
“My son and a man named Jonathan helped my son’s coworker, who was having a panic attack in the stairwell.”
“Do you know what floor that was on?” Janice asks.
“Fifty-two.”
“I don’t know what floor my boyfriend was on, but I’m sure it was lower than that.”
“My son was too, but according to some of the people they were with, he and this Jonathan went back up.”
“Have you been able to find your son?” I ask, my voice trembling with fear.
The man’s eyes fill with tears. “No.”
And there it is. The reason Jonathan never called and we can’t find him is because he’s buried in the smoldering rubble of the South Tower.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Janice squeezes the man’s hand and puts her arm around my shoulders.
We leave the ballroom and sit on a bench outside the door where it’s quieter. Janice has given up. I know this because she does not tell me what our next step should be. She has suggested everything she thinks we can do, and now with this devastating news, there is nothing left. She can’t return to this hotel with me forever. She has a child to take care of. Mourning of her own to do for the friends she lost in the attacks. I have never felt so hopeless in my life.
Janice’s phone rings. She answers and says, “No. We’re still at the hotel.” She listens to the caller for another minute. “I think that would be really great.” Then she hands the phone to me.
“Hello?” I say.
“Stay where you are,” my brother says. “I’m on my way to meet you.”
43
Annika
Janice goes home and Will finds me in the hallway near the ballroom and leads me outside. I blink against the sunlight and inhale, but the air is a bit cleaner and we don’t need our masks yet. The posters of missing people are everywhere. They’re stapled to lampposts, taped to railings and windows. The ones that have come unmoored from their surfaces litter the street and blow away in bursts of wind. I try to avoid stepping on the pictures of the faces as Will and I make our way downtown on foot. There are people carrying candles, unlit for now but destined for tonight’s new wave of vigils.