against the shelves. I hold the torch as she whips the journal out from the elastic of her shimmery stretch pants. Sky’s pajamas put all my outfits to shame.
“We finish this tonight,” Sky says as she cracks open the journal. I lean the grip of the torch against my knee and the journal comes alive, firelight breathing into the old words. And for the first time since she woke me up, we’re on the same page.
“Without a doubt.”
We pick up with Mom and her sister-in-law, Mary, walking through the tunnels.
But before we reached Grand Central, we felt a rip, a jolt so powerful it seemed like the world’s carpet was being pulled out from under us. I leaned against the raised subway platform and pulled Sky close to me. She started wailing, like she was being tortured in the dark.
“We need to get out of here,” a woman dressed far too nicely for the subway on a Saturday implored, once the earth had stopped trembling. “Now.”
I could feel a new undercurrent to our group, a collective, breathless panic. We all started scrambling, throwing elbows and grunts as we moved towards freedom. The teenager from our train, Bronwyn, started sobbing behind me, moaning that she wasn’t ready to die.
Mary dropped her voice an octave, even as the murmurs and the cries began to bubble and rise around us. “Whatever happens,” she said to me, “we stick together, okay?”
Her voice was shaking, and it scared the shit out of me.
“Mary—”
“Just promise me,” she said.
I told her of course.
The crowd began clambering its way up the stairs to the terminal. The lighters were extinguished by the rush, and then we were blind, a thicket of hands pawing our way through the dark. We jumped one by one over the turnstiles into the station. But there was no sunlight to greet us. Instead we combed through a thick, dusty fog. We heard brittle rounds of machine guns, the barking of foreign tongues. Wails.
We were lost, lab rats in a maze of fog, and I wanted to scream, just sit down and scream, I was so panicked. But instead I clutched Sky and prayed. For her, for her dad. Where was Tom? Was he safe? Were he and Robert at the studio, or were they somewhere underground?
I felt a hand on my waist, and Mary was at my side. “Everyone back to the subways,” she told us. “Now!”
Mary herded us back down the stairs, to the hungry, empty belly of the city. We descended the stairs carefully, and by that point, Sky was shrieking. Hungry, tired, sitting in her own filth. I promised her I would get her home. But maybe I was full of shit. Maybe the world was falling apart.
“Wait a minute.” Sky yanks the book from me and then leans over it so close, it’s like she’s trying to hear it whisper. “Wails . . . foreign tongues. Machine guns.” She looks at me, her eyes wide and spooky under the torchlight. “Do you realize what this is?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
She starts flipping Mom’s journal pages so fast, the ink starts to blur together. “This isn’t . . . some slice-of-life journal about Mom before the attacks.” Sky’s words are practically tripping over one another, they’re so excited to come out. “This is the story of the attacks. It’s happening right here, in these pages. Maybe all the secrets, all the missing links . . . about Mom . . . and Dad . . . even me and you, they could be in here. Phee, this could explain everything.”
I peer over the journal and think about all we don’t know. All the times Sky would ask about Mom’s life Before, or even After, and Mom’s face would just cloud over.
I don’t want to tell Sky that it feels like spying, like we’ve broken Mom open and are just dumping all her secrets out.
’Cause right now, I’m having trouble breathing.
Right now, the idea of figuring out what happened to Mom, to our family, is so huge and heavy, it almost knocks me over.
“Everything we don’t know about our family could be in there?”
“More
“We finish this tonight,” Sky says as she cracks open the journal. I lean the grip of the torch against my knee and the journal comes alive, firelight breathing into the old words. And for the first time since she woke me up, we’re on the same page.
“Without a doubt.”
We pick up with Mom and her sister-in-law, Mary, walking through the tunnels.
But before we reached Grand Central, we felt a rip, a jolt so powerful it seemed like the world’s carpet was being pulled out from under us. I leaned against the raised subway platform and pulled Sky close to me. She started wailing, like she was being tortured in the dark.
“We need to get out of here,” a woman dressed far too nicely for the subway on a Saturday implored, once the earth had stopped trembling. “Now.”
I could feel a new undercurrent to our group, a collective, breathless panic. We all started scrambling, throwing elbows and grunts as we moved towards freedom. The teenager from our train, Bronwyn, started sobbing behind me, moaning that she wasn’t ready to die.
Mary dropped her voice an octave, even as the murmurs and the cries began to bubble and rise around us. “Whatever happens,” she said to me, “we stick together, okay?”
Her voice was shaking, and it scared the shit out of me.
“Mary—”
“Just promise me,” she said.
I told her of course.
The crowd began clambering its way up the stairs to the terminal. The lighters were extinguished by the rush, and then we were blind, a thicket of hands pawing our way through the dark. We jumped one by one over the turnstiles into the station. But there was no sunlight to greet us. Instead we combed through a thick, dusty fog. We heard brittle rounds of machine guns, the barking of foreign tongues. Wails.
We were lost, lab rats in a maze of fog, and I wanted to scream, just sit down and scream, I was so panicked. But instead I clutched Sky and prayed. For her, for her dad. Where was Tom? Was he safe? Were he and Robert at the studio, or were they somewhere underground?
I felt a hand on my waist, and Mary was at my side. “Everyone back to the subways,” she told us. “Now!”
Mary herded us back down the stairs, to the hungry, empty belly of the city. We descended the stairs carefully, and by that point, Sky was shrieking. Hungry, tired, sitting in her own filth. I promised her I would get her home. But maybe I was full of shit. Maybe the world was falling apart.
“Wait a minute.” Sky yanks the book from me and then leans over it so close, it’s like she’s trying to hear it whisper. “Wails . . . foreign tongues. Machine guns.” She looks at me, her eyes wide and spooky under the torchlight. “Do you realize what this is?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
She starts flipping Mom’s journal pages so fast, the ink starts to blur together. “This isn’t . . . some slice-of-life journal about Mom before the attacks.” Sky’s words are practically tripping over one another, they’re so excited to come out. “This is the story of the attacks. It’s happening right here, in these pages. Maybe all the secrets, all the missing links . . . about Mom . . . and Dad . . . even me and you, they could be in here. Phee, this could explain everything.”
I peer over the journal and think about all we don’t know. All the times Sky would ask about Mom’s life Before, or even After, and Mom’s face would just cloud over.
I don’t want to tell Sky that it feels like spying, like we’ve broken Mom open and are just dumping all her secrets out.
’Cause right now, I’m having trouble breathing.
Right now, the idea of figuring out what happened to Mom, to our family, is so huge and heavy, it almost knocks me over.
“Everything we don’t know about our family could be in there?”
“More
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