United We Stand (2 page)

I gave him a questioning look. “Like what?”

He didn’t answer right away. “I was thinking about medical costs, maybe even funeral expenses. We can only hope that’s not the case.”

We could hope. I just didn’t know if that hope was realistic. Tens of thousands of people had been injured,
and thousands killed. Some of them
could
have been from my father’s office.

“They might also need to see counselors,” my mother added.

“Counselors for what?” I asked.

“People who have gone through tragedy, through difficult or dangerous situations, can suffer from the after-effects,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” I told her. “If you survived, you survived.”

“It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder,” she explained. “I learned about it when I was training as a social worker, and they were talking about it on CNN this morning. They said this is going to affect not just the people who were in the towers and their families, but people everywhere across the country, even around the world.”

“Now I’m really confused. People who weren’t even there are going to suffer from this post-traumatic whatever stress thing?”

“Stress disorder. People will have anxiety attacks, will become depressed, have sleep problems … I certainly couldn’t sleep last night,” my mother said.

“Yeah, but you had a reason. You were watching Dad because of the concussion. Besides, you’d spent the day thinking that we were dead—we
were
there.”

“Your mother is right,” my father said. “This is going to have an effect on people everywhere. And more than that, it’s going to change everything.”

Maybe my thinking was still a bit fuzzy, but I wasn’t getting it.

“This is something that’s going to be a turning point in history,” my father went on. “Everybody will remember where they were and what they were doing at the moment they heard about the attack.”

“I know where
I
was,” I said. “I was right there.”

“Yes, but everybody who watched it on television will feel like they were there too. And what happened will have an impact that we can’t even imagine yet,” my father said.

“This country has been changed,” my mother said. “We don’t know what those changes are going to be yet, but nothing will be the same.”

“Wait … I know that man,” my father said. He was pointing to a television in the corner of the room. With the sound turned down I hadn’t even noticed it was on, but I recognized the man on the screen.

A CNN reporter was interviewing a man from the engineering firm just down the hall, on the same floor as my father’s office. I didn’t even know his name, but I was amazed at how happy I was to see that he was alive. I looked around desperately for the remote, but it was nowhere to be seen, so I rushed over to the set and turned the sound up manually.

“Can you describe the trip down the stairs?” the female reporter asked him.

“At first it was sort of like a fire drill at school. Everybody was just joking around … It was light, you know, playful,” he said. “You have to remember, at
that point, we didn’t know much about what had happened in the other building—all we knew was that it had been hit by a plane. And our building hadn’t been hit yet.”

“And after the second plane did hit your building?”

“To tell you the truth, at first we still didn’t know exactly what had happened,” he said. “Not really. But we hadn’t made it very far down the stairs, and we knew we were probably only three or four floors below the point of impact by then. We felt it. A couple of people were knocked over, and then we felt the whole building shake, and the lights went out and the sprinklers came on and some of the panels fell off the wall. It wasn’t a school fire drill any more.”

“And you are an engineer,” the reporter said.

“Yes, a structural engineer. My firm designs buildings, bridges, parking structures. We know about how to put a building up,” he said.

“Or what it might take to bring one down,” the reporter said.

“That too. When the building reacted to the impact and started to really sway, I had a pretty good idea that something major had happened. And then when I smelled the fuel it was pretty clear that it was another plane.”

“That must have been terrifying.”

“That’s the strangest part. It wasn’t terrifying because it was just so … so … unreal.”

“I can only imagine. And what was it like going down after that?”

“It suddenly got much more crowded, but it was really, really orderly. People were friendly, offering encouragement, helping other people.”

“We’ve heard the same from other witnesses. It was as though this terrible event somehow brought out the very best in people.”

“I guess the fact that nobody knew what was about to happen helped. If people had known how close we were to the collapse of the building, then panic would have set in, I think.”

“As a structural engineer, you must have considered that possibility.”

He shook his head. “As a structural engineer I didn’t think there was a
chance
of it happening. Those buildings were
made
to sustain an airplane crash. I just assumed that the worst had passed. The plane had hit the tower and the building had absorbed the force. I thought it was simply a case of containing the fire. That was all.”

“I guess perhaps ignorance was bliss.”

“That’s the strangest thing,” he said. “My girlfriend was watching TV in her office uptown, and she knew more than we knew. People halfway around the world who were watching on TV knew more about what was happening than those of us in the building. I didn’t know anything about the plane that hit the Pentagon, or about the fourth plane that was brought down in Pennsylvania.”

My father and I hadn’t heard about the other planes either, of course—not until we were being treated, stitched up, in the mobile hospital.

“Were there any people in your office who didn’t … didn’t make it?” the reporter asked.

“No. Everybody got out. We stayed as a group all the way out and onto the street. We were two blocks away by the time the South Tower collapsed. We were so incredibly fortunate that we left when we did.”

The reporter turned toward the camera. “There were very few people above the floors where the impact occurred who survived. Mr. Johnston’s—”

“Please, call me Dennis,” the man said, and smiled.

“Certainly. Dennis’s office was located on the eighty- fifth floor, and his survival was based on the fact that he made the decision to evacuate immediately after the first plane hit the North Tower.”

“It really wasn’t our decision,” he said. “We left only because of the fire warden on our floor.”

I turned to my dad. “That’s you!”

He smiled and nodded.

“I don’t even know his name,” Mr. Johnston said. “I think it was John … John something.”

“Fuller,” I said to the TV.

“My hero,” my mother said, and she reached out and grabbed my father’s hand.

“Nothing heroic. I was just doing what a fire warden is supposed to do.”

I thought back to how I’d wanted to leave right away, get out of the building, but my father had
insisted on both making sure that all the employees from his office left and trying to get everybody from the entire floor to evacuate. The first place we’d gone to was the office where Mr. Johnston—Dennis—worked. He and the other staff had listened, closed up the offices, and left right away. Thank goodness they’d made it down before the second plane hit.

One of the other offices had not been so cooperative or friendly. My father had tried to convince the employees, tried ordering them to leave, but they had just refused. And then, when that stupid announcement came over the P.A. telling people not to evacuate, to go back to their offices, there was no chance of their listening to him any more. The boss there—some snotty little guy in a rumpled suit—ordered them back to work and pretty well tossed us out of their office. They went back to their phones and computers, trying to close another deal, make some more money. They were probably all dead now. That thought sent a shiver down my spine. They were all gone because they wouldn’t listen to my father, and that guy on the TV and all his co- workers were alive because they did. What an unbelievable thought.

“That fire warden is the reason I’m alive,” Mr. Johnston continued, “the reason
all
of us in our office are alive. I’d like to meet him, shake his hand, and thank him for what he did.” He suddenly looked sad. “But I don’t know if he … if he … He was still there on the floor when we left.”

“And you don’t know if he made it.”

Mr. Johnston shook his head slowly. He looked as though he was on the verge of tears.

The reporter turned once again to face the camera. “So John
something
, the fire warden on the eighty- fifth floor, is one of the hundreds of unknown heroes who saved lives. This is one of the themes we have heard continually—people risking their lives to save others, putting the lives of total strangers above their own safety. So, John, if you’re out there and you hear this report, would you please call in? We all want to hear from you. We
all
want to know that you made it out. Now back to our main desk.”

The scene shifted to two anchormen sitting behind a big desk. My father had found the remote, and he muted the sound.

“Are you going to call?” my mother asked.

He gave her a questioning look.

“You should at least let them know your name.”

“Nobody needs to know my name.”

“Don’t you think Dennis Johnston would like to know your name, would like to know you’re alive? Wouldn’t that be reassuring, comforting for him?” my mother said.

“I guess you’re right. I’ll call when I have time, later today.”

“Do you want me to call for you?” my mother asked.

“I’d appreciate that.”

The scene on the TV shifted to the site of the World Trade Center, or what was left of it.

“Wow,” I gasped. “It’s just so hard to believe.” “It is,” my father agreed. “It’s like a war zone.” The scene was of twisted metal, a few columns still standing, and the latticework facing of one of the buildings standing ten stories high. But most of what the Twin Towers had been was flattened to the ground in a gigantic pile that seemed to go on forever. Smoke was rising from a dozen spots across the rubble, and the whole area seemed to be in a fog or mist. Obviously there were still fires burning beneath the surface.

I tried to picture where we’d been when the first tower had fallen, but I didn’t think we had the right angle, or maybe it had all been covered with debris when the second tower fell.

Surrounding the debris from the fallen towers were those buildings that were still standing, barely. They had gaping holes, entire sides ripped open, crumpled floors, and they had the strange appearance of having almost melted … dripping down, distorted, angles all wrong, like they were made of plastic that had been left too close to a fire.

Moving throughout the pile, like little ants, were people. Some were obviously police or firefighters, all in uniform, but others wore construction helmets and were removing the rubble. They were all probably searching for survivors. But looking at the scene, like that, I wondered how anybody could have survived.

“And we walked right through it,” I said out loud.

“We were so close that we couldn’t really see it. At least not like this,” my father said.

“And on the TV was the only way I could see it,” my mother said. “Just staring at the set, not knowing if you were alive or …”

She started to cry again, and both my father and I put our arms around her.

“I … I was so helpless … And I called and called, but I couldn’t get through to you on your cellphone …”

“All the cell towers were overwhelmed with people trying to make calls,” my father explained. “And the stairwells were dead reception zones, I think.”

“I was just calling and calling,” she sobbed. “And then when the building collapsed and I still couldn’t get you …” She started to shake and sob even louder.

My mother was what my father called “a worrier.” She always worried when my father was late and hadn’t called us, so he always tried to call. With me, it was even worse. She always wanted to know exactly where I was and who I was with. And, of course, being a teenager, I was always trying to be sure she
didn’t
know where I was or who I was with. Generally, though, I did let her know at least a version of the truth. That just made life easier for everybody.

“The important thing is that we’re all right,” my father said. “We’re right here.”

“But you could have been killed,” she sobbed.

“But we weren’t.”

“I know … I know … Thank God. I just stared at the TV and prayed.”

“I’m just glad you didn’t have to go through it alone,” my father said.

My aunt—my mother’s sister—and some of the neighbors had been with her. They’d still been here when we’d finally got home, just before eleven. We were greeted with cheers and tears, practically mobbed. Some of these people had been our neighbors for years, but I’d never even talked to them except to maybe say hello, or we’d wave at each other when we drove past. Strange how, suddenly, they were acting like family.

“You know, I think it was harder watching than it would have been to have actually been there,” my mother said.

My eyes opened wide in shock and met my father’s gaze. He shrugged, and his eyes pleaded with me not to say anything. After what we’d gone through, how could she even
think
that it had been worse for her?

“I know that sounds awful … insensitive,” my mother said. “But I would rather have been there with you two, knowing that you were alive, than been here without you.”

That opened my eyes again. I
did
understand. At least we knew.

“We called as soon as we could,” my father said. “We just couldn’t call right away.”

We’d left the building just before it collapsed. We were showered with debris, knocked off our feet, and practically suffocated in the cloud of dust that over-whelmed everything and blotted out the sun. That was maybe the scariest part of the whole day. Scary because I’d thought we were finally safe. Scary because my father wasn’t with me at the very moment the
tower collapsed, and for a few short seconds—half a minute maybe—I’d thought he was dead. Maybe I could understand what my mother had gone through. And for her it wasn’t a few short seconds. It was hours.