We All Fall Down (13 page)

He always said it to me, too. I usually just grunted or mumbled goodbye. And I couldn’t remember what
I’d
said to Mom. It probably wasn’t even a word. I’d been half asleep and not in a great mood to begin with because I didn’t want to be awake, never mind heading out the door. When I saw her tonight I’d say something, for sure.

“I just want to get out of the building. We can call Mom when we get out,” I said. I took a deep breath. “If we keep moving at this pace we can be out in twenty or thirty minutes.”

“You’re moving pretty fast,” my father said. “Faster than I was going.”

“A lot faster,” I said.

“Sounds like a challenge.”

“Not a challenge, just a fact.”

I made the turn to floor fifty-four. That was twelve floors. Three more than my father had managed. I was feeling it even more in my legs and my lungs. It was as if Ting had got heavier with each floor. I didn’t know how many more floors I
could do. My foot slipped and I stumbled forward, hitting the wall. I grabbed the railing with my free hand and my father reached up and grabbed me with both hands, stopping me before I could tumble down the stairs.

“Thanks,” I gasped.

“I think it’s time to trade. I’m feeling rested,” my father said. He helped Ting off my back. “You lead and I’ll carry.”

As long as we were moving I didn’t care who was doing what. I could take over again in ten or eleven floors.

“I can take over any time now,” I said.

My father had Ting on his back. I was a little worried about him. His face seemed to be getting redder with each floor, and he’d carried her down eleven floors. That was only one less than I’d carried her for. I knew that it was stupid for me to keep track, but I couldn’t help it.

“I’ll stop … at the next floor,” he said.

Obviously I wasn’t the only one who had been counting.

My father kept moving, and stopped only when we reached the forty-second floor. He slumped down and I helped Ting get off his back. She
sagged and I eased her on to the stairs. She hadn’t been responding much over the last ten minutes. Her stare was fixed and blank and her body was limp. I wondered if her head injury was more serious than we’d thought. That was even more reason to hurry. I went around in front of Ting so I could pick her up.

“Can you help get her onto my back?” I asked my father.

“Just a minute,” my father said. “Let me catch my breath.” He was bent over. He did look tired.

“Do you know why I wanted to go one more floor?” he asked.

I knew. It didn’t matter, though. Maybe he’d carried her as many floors but I’d done mine faster, I was sure.

“We just passed the halfway mark. Forty-two is less than half of eighty-five, where we started.”

I hadn’t expected that answer. “That’s great.”

“Fadder,” Ting said, pointing at my dad.

“What?” I asked.

“Fadder.” She pointed at him again. Then she pointed at me. “Boy … son.”

“Oh, yeah, I understand. He’s my
father
and I’m his
son.”

She nodded enthusiastically. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a wallet. What was she doing? Was she trying to pay us? She pulled out a picture and handed it to me. It was two little girls, wearing matching pink, frilly dresses, their
hair in the same braids with identical dark eyes staring out at me. They looked like twins. They couldn’t have been more than four or five years old.

“Mudder,” Ting said, and touched her hand to her chest.

“Oh, these are your daughters.”

She smiled broadly and nodded. “Daughters. Mei-zhen,” she said, pointing to one of the girls, “and Ming-zhu,” she said as she pointed to the other.

“You have two beautiful girls,” my father said. “They’ll be very happy to see their mother tonight.”

I was struck with a strange thought. If we hadn’t heard her call out, if we hadn’t found her, then they wouldn’t be seeing her tonight. Who knows what would have happened? The fire might have spread, or the roof might have caved in, or something else might have fallen on her. Thank goodness we’d come by.

Then I thought about how I’d wanted to just leave her in the stairwell, how she’d felt like a burden or baggage or, at best, like an unspoken challenge, a competition between me and my father to see who could cart her the farthest.

She was none of those things. She was a real person with at least two other real people—tiny little girls with dark eyes and big smiles—waiting for her at home. They would be happy to see her
tonight, they would rush up and throw their arms around her, probably like they did every night when she got home from work. They were so little that it was possible they wouldn’t even be aware what was happening or how it might affect their mother and them.

Then I thought about what Mom must be going through, and I flashed forward to how relieved she’d be when she finally heard from us. We had to get down and let her know. She was probably going crazy trying to reach us on my dad’s cellphone, not understanding that we were unreachable because we were in the stairwell, not unreachable because … because …

How many other people were trying to make calls, either out of the building or in? How many people were trying to get confirmation, or reassurance? How many people would never connect again? How many people would never be coming home again? I stopped myself. I couldn’t think about that. Not now. Not yet. I felt an ache in my chest thinking about what had happened, wondering how many lives had ended, or been altered forever. All I wanted to do was be home, standing there with my mother, all of us safe.

“Did you hear that?” my father asked.

“Hear what?” I asked, snapping out of my thoughts.

“Maybe I was just hearing things but it sounded like—”

“Voices,” I said, cutting him off. I thought that I’d just heard them too. “I think I hear somebody.” I listened more closely. I really
wanted
to hear somebody, really
wanted
to see somebody. After traveling over forty floors and finding only Ting, it was starting to feel as if we were the only three people left in the world.

“I think the voices are coming from down below,” my father said. “Let’s get going and see if we can find them.”

I handed Ting her picture and she slipped it back into the wallet.

My father helped Ting get onto my back. She seemed light. Maybe it was because I was rested, or because I was buoyed by the hint of other people being around. Or maybe it was just the challenge of the chase, trying to capture the voices below us.

My father went down the stairs two at a time and I made double time to try to keep up. We practically sprinted down the first two flights. In our rush I couldn’t hear anything except the pounding of our feet. We reached the fortieth-floor landing and my father stopped. I skidded in beside him. The voices were there, and they were louder!

“Hello!” my father yelled out down the stairs.

“Hello!” a man’s voice answered back. “Where are you?”

“We’re on the fortieth floor … in the stairwell!”

“We’re on the thirty-eighth floor!” the voice called back. “We’re coming up!”

Coming up? My father and I exchanged a look of concern. Why would anybody be coming up? They should be heading down … unless the way down was blocked. I knew my father was thinking the exact same thing.

My father motioned for me to follow and we headed down the stairs. We reached the first landing and then around the corner and down to the thirty-ninth floor. Now I could clearly hear voices and the sound of feet moving up toward us. There was more than one person.

A man—a fireman—appeared on the stairs! He was in full gear and he had an oxygen tank strapped to his back. I felt so incredibly relieved—no,
thrilled—to
see him! Another fireman rounded the corner and then a third and a fourth and a fifth. It was like a whole gang of firefighters … no, that wasn’t the right word … a whole
company
was here to rescue us!

“Are you three all right?” the first fireman asked.

“We’re fine,” my father said. “Now that we’ve found you we’re
better
than fine.”

“Except for Ting,” I added. “Her leg is hurt.” I gently slipped her off my back to show her leg. She stood gingerly, balanced on her good leg, with me holding her so she wouldn’t fall down. I helped her take a seat on the stairs.

“Stein and Galloway, you stay with me,” the fireman in charge said to two of the others, “everybody else keep climbing.”

Two of the men moved to the side of the stairwell to let the others pass. They were all dressed in full gear—big, black rubber boots, helmets, oxygen tanks—and carrying equipment. There were seven of them, and as they passed I could see that some were straining under the load. They were puffing and huffing and sweat was pouring down their faces.

The first fireman bent down and looked at Ting’s leg. “How did it happen?” he asked Ting. His voice was strained.

“She doesn’t speak much English,” my father explained. “She was injured by a falling cabinet, but I’m more worried about her head. She has a pretty big gash. I think she was hit by a falling piece of ductwork.”

The fireman carefully moved the bandana to the side. The other two firemen slumped down to the floor. They were all working to catch their breath, and they were red and sweaty … but why shouldn’t they be? They’d climbed up almost forty stories while carrying full equipment! They looked exhausted, and they were still less than halfway to the fire. What shape would any of them be when they finally got there?

A loud burst of static came from a radio clipped to the jacket of one of the firemen. I
didn’t really understand what the person on the other end was saying.

“That cut is pretty bad. She needs to be treated,” the fireman said. “There are ambulances waiting below.”

“Have a lot of people been hurt?” I asked.

“There have been many casualties, but it’s being handled. Can you two continue to take her down?” he asked my father.

“You mean you’re not going to take care of her?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We’re going up, not down. We have to keep moving toward the people at the top, toward the fire. Either she has to wait here for paramedics to arrive or you have to take her down. Can you at least take her down until you find a paramedic?”

“We’re not leaving her behind,” my father said firmly.

“We’ll get her all the way to the lobby if we have to,” I said.

“That’s thirty-nine floors.”

“We can do it. We’ve been taking turns carrying her and we’ve already brought her down over forty floors,” my father said.

“Forty floors? Where exactly did you three come from?”

“We found Ting on the seventy-fifth floor,” my father said. “But we came down from the eighty-fifth floor, my office. That was where we
were when the plane hit.”

“That means you were
above
the point of impact.” It sounded as though the fireman couldn’t believe his ears.

My father nodded. “We were a few floors above. It looked like it was worst around the seventy-eighth floor to the eightieth floor.”

“But you got past those floors.”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“Do you know if anybody else came through that way?”

“We don’t know. We just know that nobody came down with us. Before we tried to head down we saw people going
up
in Stairwell B. Those people said that the stairwell going down was blocked. There was smoke and heat, but the way we came down, in Stairwell A, it was passable. At least it was when we went through.”

“But this is Stairwell C,” the fireman said.

“We were in A until we came to the transfer hall on the sixty-sixth floor and then we just took the first stairs we could find from there,” my father explained.

“And it’s just the three of you?” the fireman asked. “Have you seen anybody else?”

“We haven’t been checking the floors on the way down but we haven’t seen or heard anybody, other than Ting, since we left our floor.”

“And what about the rest of the people who were on your floor, what happened to them?”

“I’m the fire warden on eighty-five. When the first plane hit I ordered my office to evacuate and I went to the other offices on the floor to order them out.”

“You got the whole floor cleared?”

“I’m so sorry. I couldn’t get one office to leave. They were still there when the second plane hit.”

“And then?”

“They joined other people from the lower floors who were climbing away from the fire. They were all going to the top.”

“Maybe they found another way down,” I said. “We were thinking that maybe they could have been taken off by helicopters.”

“There have been no air evacs. There’s too much smoke to put down. People are only getting down if we can get up and get them down,” he said.

“Can you get word to the people at the top and let them know it was possible to get down the way we did?” my father said.

“They’ll radio down to the command post and then they’ll pass on the information. You three go slowly, take your time and get out safely.”

“Thanks … we will,” my father said. “We were wondering, is it clear all the way down?”

“No worries. The stairs are open and clear. You’ll only run into a few stragglers still getting down. People moved pretty quickly, very orderly,” the fireman said. “It was like a gigantic school fire
drill. I was impressed by how well people handled it. The only ones still on the stairs are those who are physically challenged … old or overweight or disabled.”

“Plus a few people who refused to leave at first,” one of the other firemen added.

“Can you believe that?” the third fireman asked. “The building has been hit by an airplane, it’s on fire, and some people want to stay hunched over their computer terminals working.”

“You know what they call a guy who isn’t smart enough to leave a burning building?” one of the firemen asked.

“They call him a fireman,” the second said, and they all started to laugh.

“We gotta get going.” The two firemen struggled under the weight of their equipment and got to their feet.

“Take it carefully, slow and easy,” one of them said to us.