The Lies That Bind(39)

    “She’s my mom,” the boy confirms, his hands shaking, his eyes wide with terror. “She works at the World Trade Center. I can’t reach her.”

“Where’s your father?” I blurt out, hoping that he has one. That he isn’t all alone out here.

“He’s checking the hospitals,” the boy says.

Jake pulls out his notepad, opens it, and asks questions. The boy tells us his name is Dylan. He’s seventeen. His mother is a paralegal. She works on the seventieth floor of the South Tower. At this point, he starts to cry. Jasmine and I both put an arm around him, as Jake takes down the boy’s name and phone number.

We keep moving, encountering more Dylans—people frantic and searching. We go to three hospitals, two blood banks, four churches. We gather names, take notes, and write stories in our heads. All the while, I check my cellphone—which still isn’t getting a signal—and pray.

Around four o’clock, we walk back uptown, stopping at Mustang Harry’s, a bar on Seventh Avenue between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth. The place is packed, but nobody is speaking. Every television is turned to CNN. Jake orders us beers and we find a place to stand, leaning against a wall, watching the replays of those planes filled with people, now gone. Flight attendants and pilots and business travelers and people headed out on vacation or to visit loved ones. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children and husbands and wives. All of them gone.

    At some point, we decide it’s all too much to bear, let alone watch, and we leave the bar, each of us heading home to our respective computers. We have work to do. Stories to write. Answering machines to check. Calls to make. I need to call my mother and Scottie as I know they’ve been trying to reach me. I also want to check on Matthew—who fortunately works in Midtown. Most of all, I need to talk to Grant. By now he must have tried to contact me.

When I walk in my door, I see seven new messages on my answering machine. Surely one of them is from him. I hit play, and listen to my mother, then my sister, then my brother, then Scottie, then a close friend from college, then my mother again. With one message to go, I hold my breath, waiting, praying.

I hear Matthew’s voice: Cecily. Are you there? Please call me as soon as you get this. I just want to make sure you’re okay….I’m home now—they evacuated the MetLife Building….God…I can’t believe this is happening. Please call me and let me know you’re okay….And Cecily? I love you…so much.

I call everyone back, in the order they called me, telling them that I’m okay. That I love them.

Then, for the first time all day, I let myself really break down and cry.



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Day turns to night as I keep trying Grant. To no avail. There is no new news, though I learn new things, listening to foreign policy experts talk about al-Qaeda, a militant Sunni Islamist multinational organization founded in 1988 by men named Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, both of whom look so harmless in their flowing white robes. How could they, from their rocky caves in Afghanistan, have masterminded this disaster? It doesn’t make sense. It still doesn’t seem real. I try to write. I pray. I doze in twenty-or thirty-minute increments. I forget to eat, and then finally remember and walk to the diner and order a burger and fries that I can’t make myself eat, only to return home and listen to more messages that are not from Grant. My panic builds.

    Somehow, with the help of Jasmine and Scottie, I manage to hold on to a sliver of hope, playing our collective excuses back on a loop. His cellphone is broken or lost—and he never memorized my number to call from a landline. He went to his mountain house just after he left my apartment early this morning, and doesn’t have cell service or an Internet connection or a television; maybe he doesn’t even know what happened. He lost a close friend in the towers, and is too filled with grief to do anything, including contact me. He has spiraled into depression, something we are all experiencing to various degrees, but his is even more crippling due to his brother’s situation. He’s injured in a hospital somewhere. He’s buried alive in the rubble, waiting to be saved. He will be saved.

But with every passing hour, it becomes harder to suppress another explanation. The one that I can’t and won’t say aloud, and my friends won’t say, either. At least not to my face. They are thinking it, though. I hear it in the tentative way they ask if I’ve heard from him—as if I could possibly forget to tell them that I had. I hear it in their wavering reassurances that they are sure the call will come. I tell myself the same. Any minute he will call with a breathless, crazy story. Any minute now he will knock on my door and give me one of his huge, tight hugs.



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The next day, I go in to work both because I have to and because it’s better than waiting by the phone. It’s chaos at the office, but quiet, sickening chaos. Jake, Jasmine, and I turn in all of our little snippets, as we are told to keep at it, to “focus on the flyers and the faces.” I make a list of all the hospitals, and visit them one by one, both tackling my assignment and looking for Grant. Somehow I remain in a state of denial, even as I discover that nobody—nobody—is finding their loved ones.

    Another night falls. Questions swirl. Can people survive in rubble for more than thirty-six hours? That is the one they keep asking on the news. Meanwhile, my editor assigns Jasmine and me the candlelight vigil in Washington Square Park. We go as reporters, taking notes and photographs, but we are also there as grieving New Yorkers—Americans—joining in prayer and song and solidarity. Everywhere we look there are makeshift memorials—bouquets of flowers; burning candles and incense; chalk messages on the street and sidewalks; and endless placards with names and faces of the still missing. They are affixed to street signs and lampposts and construction fencing and the base of the statue of George Washington and the iconic stone arch itself. Some are elaborate posters with color photographs and long, poetic tributes; others are children’s crayon drawings with scrawled messages to Mommy or Daddy; still others are bare-bones xeroxed flyers. The scene is as haunting and devastating as a hundred funerals in one public square, yet it is also one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Even as my heart breaks, it overflows with faith in God and the inherent goodness of humanity. Love will win, I tell myself. I will find Grant, I tell myself.