We All Fall Down (12 page)

“Yeah, sure, I can do that,” I said.

I started down, looking back over my shoulder at my father. Her arms were wrapped around his neck and her little head peeked out from beside his head, but the rest of her was completely blocked by my father’s body. He was a tall man, and big. Funny, as I’d grown it seemed that he wasn’t nearly as big as I once thought he was. When I was little he was like a giant. I remembered when he used to carry me around on his back like he was carrying this woman … this woman … what was her name?

I turned around. “I’m Will,” I said in a loud voice, pointing at myself. “And that is my father, John.”

She nodded. “John and Vill,” she said. Vill was close enough.

“Ting.”

“Your name is Ting?” I asked, and she nodded.

“Hello, Ting,” my father said. “It’s good for me to know the name of the person I’m carrying.”

The stairs were clean and bright and the air was clear and fresh. Not only wasn’t there any smoke, there wasn’t even any hint—no smell, no fumes, nothing. There was still some water coming down the stairs but it was just a stream, not the flood that had been pouring down higher up.

We rounded another landing, then another and another. My father seemed to be moving effortlessly. Ting was tiny, and we were heading down, but still, how long could he keep this up? He had to be starting to get tired, and if he got tired that would mean that he’d be more likely to stumble or fall. I looked back with renewed awareness. I didn’t know if I could catch them—there had to be close to three hundred and fifty pounds between them—but I was going to try my best.

I hit another landing, floor sixty-seven. In just a few minutes we had come down eight flights.

“You okay?” I asked my father as he reached the landing.

“I’m good for a little while longer.”

His face was red and peppered with sweat. As I watched, Ting reached down with her sleeve and wiped his forehead.

“Thank you,” my father said.

“Welcome.”

“How are you doing up there?” my father asked. “Are you okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good, then let’s keep going,” he said.

“You sure you don’t want to stop for a while?” I asked.

“Stopping means having to start again. As long as I keep going, I figure gravity will keep me moving in the right direction.”

“You know, I could carry her for a while,” I suggested.

“You?”

“Why not me? I’m almost as big as you and my knees are a whole lot better,” I snapped.

“You won’t get any argument from me on that. Let me go a few more floors, take a break, and then we’ll talk about it.”

I reached the next landing and went to turn the corner. But there was no corner to turn … the stairs just ended! There was a door leading off to the sixty-sixth floor but only a solid concrete wall where the stairs down should have been!

I didn’t wait to say anything to my father. There was a door and no stairs, and what if that door was locked or jammed or blocked somehow? Slowly I walked over and put my hand against it. Cool … cold. Whatever was behind the door wasn’t on fire. I knew that, but I had to check. I pushed against the bar. The door opened effortlessly. Stretching before me was a hallway. It had a concrete floor and was well lit. At the end was a gray metal door, just like the one I’d just opened. Was
it
locked?

“Stay right here!” I ordered my father. “And hold the door open!”

I raced down the hall. Sometimes doors opened from one direction but not the other. I didn’t want to somehow get trapped between the two. I jumped into the next door and practically merged into it as my weight and force propelled me into the unmoving metal. It didn’t budge, it was locked! This was it. We were trapped and … I looked down. It was a
pull
door, not a
push
. I grabbed the handle, depressed the latch and the door opened. I felt like an idiot. An idiot with a sore shoulder, but an idiot who could still move forward, who was still alive.

“It’s okay, you can come,” I yelled back at my father, holding the door for him.

My father’s head was slightly bowed. He looked as though he was laboring more than he had on the way down the stairs. It must have been like he’d said—on the steps, going down, he’d had gravity working with him. Ting ducked her head slightly to get through the doorframe.

We were standing in a large, carpeted corridor. Again, well lit, and completely deserted. It was as if we were the only people in the whole building, but I knew that wasn’t true. The people at this level must have all evacuated. There had to be a mass of bodies below, the stairwells jammed with a crush of people trying to get out. In some ways it would have been good to run into somebody, but I knew it was really better this way. As long as that line kept moving in front of us we were clear
to keep moving forward—or, more to the point, down and out.

“Look, elevators!” I exclaimed. I stopped directly in front of the middle of a bank of four. “I just wish we could take these down.”

“You
wish?” my father said, gesturing over his shoulder at Ting.

The scene was so funny that I couldn’t help myself and I started to laugh. It was bizarre, unreal, to be standing there laughing, but it felt good.

I stopped myself when I looked down and realized that the carpeting was all discolored in front of two of the elevators, and there was a strange smell … a burning smell. And there was something on the floor directly in front of me, a large piece of metal. It looked like … it was, the door of one of the elevators!

I took a few steps forward. The entire door of one of the elevators was completely blown off, leaving a big, gaping black hole in its place.

“It must have shot down the elevator shafts,” my father said.

“What did?”

“A fireball. That’s the only thing that could blow off a metal door. And you can see where it burned the carpet and shot across the lobby. Look at the wall.”

Right across from the elevators the wall was scorched and the paint was burned away.

My father swung Ting around, gently placed her on her one good foot and helped her settle to the floor.

“It came through that elevator shaft,” my father said.

One of the doors was open a few inches and the shiny metal was brown, scorched around the open edges.

“The jet fuel would have gone to the lowest point, down the shafts, and when it was ignited it would have exploded down those same spots. Anybody in the elevators, anybody standing by an open door would have been—” He stopped.

My mind filled in the rest of the words. They would have been burned to death, incinerated.

I edged away from the opening between the two doors. It was open only a few inches, obviously not enough for me to get through—to
fall
through—but enough to let a deadly stream of fire spew through. Just as bad, it was also open enough to allow my imagination to fit through.

I thought of both the death drop down the black shaft and, more vividly, the searing flames fueled by the jet fuel, flashing out of the shaft and incinerating anything,
anybody
in its path. I stepped past quickly.

That left only the shaft that was completely open. I moved as far away as possible, my shoulder pressed against the far wall. The door was in three pieces, lying on the floor. The wall was
scorched from the fire and dented from the force of the door smashing against it. I moved past, not even looking at the hole. My legs felt wobbly. Here I’d been thinking that we were safe, more than a dozen floors removed from the fire, but we weren’t. Not here and not now.

Carefully, my father, carrying Ting, moved past the elevator shafts. He stopped just beyond them. Gently he lowered her from his back to the ground.

“There are more stairs, right?” I asked.

“This is a transfer floor,” my father said.

“What does that mean?”

“The stairs in this building don’t continue all the way straight down. They stop at certain floors, take a jog over and then continue. It’s a fire precaution built in by the architects so that smoke can’t simply travel all the way up the shaft as if it were a chimney.”

“I guess it’s good that they did
something
safe,” I said, surprised that I was suddenly feeling so angry.

“They did everything they were supposed to do. Nobody could have imagined this happening. It’s beyond belief, beyond comprehension. Listen, we’d better get moving again.”

My father offered Ting a hand, helping her to her feet. She held her injured leg up so just the very tip of her toe was on the ground. I knew that leg must have hurt, but she wasn’t complaining.

“Let me take her,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure I want to and sure that I can.”

I squatted down in front of her and my father helped her climb on to my back. She wrapped her arms around my neck and I twisted my arms back to support her, locking my fingers together. She was light.

“The stairs are this way.” My father led us down another corridor to an exit sign. He opened the door, holding it for me, and then rushed ahead so that he was below us on the stairs. I wasn’t planning on falling but it was good to have him there just in case I did.

I concentrated on the steps. I couldn’t afford to misstep or stumble. Ting didn’t need another knock in the head. Besides, what would happen if I got hurt? It wasn’t like my father could carry both of us. Actually, it would have been twice as hard to carry me as it was to carry Ting because I probably outweighed her by eighty pounds.

“You okay?” my father asked.

“Doing okay,” I said, trying to control my breath so it wouldn’t sound like I was straining. “This is just like football practice.”

My father laughed. “I remember that drill from when I played, carrying a teammate across the field.”

“We do it the
length
of the field,” I said, “and we do it as a race. One guy carries the other one way, and then they switch horse for rider and come
back the other way. Last pair have to do forty push-ups, next to last thirty-five, the next team twenty-five and so on. Only the winners are off the hook.”

“That’s incentive to move fast.”

“There are all sorts of incentives to move fast,” I said, stating the obvious.

We kept making landings, turning, making floors, turning, heading down. I freed up one hand sometimes to hold on to the railing. It had only been four floors but I was starting to feel it in my lungs and in my legs. I wanted to stop but I didn’t. My father had carried her nine floors without stopping. I had to do at least nine … no, I had to do at least
ten
floors before I stopped.

My father pulled out his cellphone. I’d forgotten about trying to reach Mom. He punched in the numbers and held it up to his ear.

“Is it ringing?” I asked.

“Nothing, just that fast sort of busy sound you get when you can’t get a signal through,” he said. “Either the walls of the stairwell are blocking it or there are just so many people trying to phone out that the network is overwhelmed. She must know that the plane hit this building below my floor. Your mother must be just frantic.”

I’d been so worried about what was happening with us that I hadn’t really thought about what my mother was going through. She got all panicky when I was twenty minutes late for curfew or my
father wasn’t on the right train. She always worried so much when my father had to fly away on business. She said she didn’t trust planes. That was stupid. It was safer to travel by plane than it was by car. Most days. Not today. Not in those two planes.

What would it have been like for those passengers? Would they even have known what was happening? Would they have had any idea that they were about to die? At least it would have been quick. Instant. Not like those people who were trapped by the fire. I could only hope that they’d all be saved, just scared and worried until rescue came. It was better to be worried and alive than oblivious and dead.

“I just pray your mother isn’t alone. I hope her sister is there, that she has somebody,” my father said.

“Keep on trying to call her.” I was finding it tough to find the breath to talk and walk.

“I think the stairwells are cellphone-dead areas. Maybe we should stop and go onto one of the—”

“I don’t think we should stop,” I said.

“Don’t worry. We’re safe now.” My father sounded supremely confident, almost smug. That tone of his normally just irritated me, mostly because usually he
was
right. This time I just hoped he was.

“I thought we were safe until I saw how the fire traveled down that elevator shaft,” I said.

“I’m sure we’re safe now.”

“We’re not stopping,” I snapped.

“We’re not?” my father asked.

“No. We’re going to keep going.” That wasn’t a suggestion that I was making or something we could debate and decide on. I was going to keep moving whether he liked it or not, whether he agreed or not. I expected my father to say something, to argue—he was used to being the one giving the orders—but I guess he wasn’t in the mood for a fight.

“Your mother’s always worried when there’s nothing to worry about. I guess now she has a reason,” my father said.

“But you said you think we’re safe here,” I said, controlling my breath so I wasn’t panting.

“Yes, but she doesn’t know that we’re here. As far as she’s concerned we’re still up there, trapped, or worse.”

He was right. She would be having a complete meltdown by now.

“I keep trying to remember what the last thing I said to your mother was this morning, before I left.”

“I don’t understand,” I grunted.

“I just can’t remember what I said. I can’t remember if I told her I loved her or said something nice. I don’t remember if I was so busy reading the paper that I didn’t pay attention to her over breakfast.”

“I don’t know what you talked about over breakfast, but I do know you told her you loved her.”

“I did? You remember me saying that?” he asked, sounding relieved.

“I don’t remember you saying it. I just know that you
always
say it.”

He looked back over his shoulder and smiled. “You’re right, I do.”