Ashes of Fiery Weather (42 page)

The meals stopped coming because their mother told the wives, Thank you, but we're fine. We have to get back to normal. We have to be alone in the house. About a week after she said that, Aidan, peering in the refrigerator, said, “We're running out of rations.”

Eileen brought the two of them to Key Food. “Get whatever you guys think you need.”

Aidan tossed in a package of Oreos. Maggie put in Vienna Fingers. Eileen said nothing. Later, they unpacked the grocery bags together, laughing. Reese's peanut butter cups. Hershey bars. Cap'n Crunch. Entenmann's chocolate doughnuts.

“Dad would kill her,” Aidan said, and Maggie agreed.

Their grandmother had forgotten their names, and possibly how to speak altogether.

When Norah began cooking again, it was deep into summer, and you could tell she was having a baby. She made the meals they'd always had when their father worked a night tour. That is, hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, English muffin pizzas with French fries or Tater Tots. For a long time, dinner tasted like he would be home in the morning.

Then, strangely, not long after Rose was born, when their mother was even more tired, she began baking chicken and making meatloaf, dumping frozen peas or corn niblets into pots of boiling water, adding dashes of salt. She set Maggie to work peeling potatoes, and boiled or mashed them herself. She made them sit at the kitchen table and poured glasses of milk. Even though they were drinking milk every night again, they never ran out. They had full plates of food but no father. Soon, a highchair was in his place at the table.

Back inside the church basement, Maggie sat at the table by herself. Her brothers were sitting with all the other kids on the floor, waiting for Santa to pick up their gifts and call their names. Brendan could go up by himself. Aidan would take Rose. She had a present too. It was in front of her, still wrapped. A book, Maggie could tell.

She also could not explain, not to anyone, that time had grown confusing. The summer after her father died, she sometimes woke up on Saturday mornings certain she heard him whistling in the backyard. She ran to the mirror to see how old she was.

Rose's name was called, and Aidan picked her up and set her on Santa's lap. Their mother stepped forward with the camera. She would be the only mother to do so. The Christmas music got suddenly loud. Maggie knew that the men who'd tried to save her father were present. She tried to tell by their faces which ones had been working that day, but they looked very much the same, serious and angry, as they watched Rose get her present.

Aidan lifted her down and then hoisted her up again. She looked huge in his arms. Maggie felt every fireman in the room shift toward them. But Rose was content. Rose didn't know any better. Aidan lowered her to the floor and she started picking at the wrapping paper. For the past month, Maggie had heard people say again and again that it didn't seem possible that Rose could be turning one already.

Rose and the fire were separate events entirely, yet sometimes Rose appeared in Maggie's memories of the months right after the fire. The baby's nighttime crying was all of their crying. It confused Maggie, how her father had died and then Rose had come, as though one could not be here with the other.

CHAPTER SIX

September 11, 2001

THE MOON WAS EDGELESS,
with air like fog but a fog just solid enough to breathe. The moon was on fire. The moon was filled with firefighters wandering its rocky surface. Eileen knocked herself in the head a few times to make sure her helmet was still in place. She'd lost it briefly in the dark. A man handed her a bottle of water. She rinsed out her mouth and splashed some of the water in her burning eyes.

She was off the rocks and in a street—what she thought was a street. There were more people. A lot of them, in this uniform or that, were simply standing still, staring.

A hand seized her by the forearm. Hard enough to hurt through her turnout coat. She looked to her left and saw Thomas Grady. He was gray from head to toe.

He put his face close to hers. “Lieutenant!”

Eileen blinked hard. “What?”

“Get in the ambulance. They'll take you to the hospital.”

Eileen jerked her arm back. “I've gotta find my guys.”

“You're not gonna find them if you're blind. You need your eyes rinsed out and you need that cut looked at. Four, five stitches, I figure.”

She'd been aware of the pain in her head but had been afraid to touch it, and then she forgot about it.

“We were starting the climb,” Eileen said, and as she spoke she was remembering. Words, her own voice, making it real. “The windows blew out—”

“That was the first tower going down. Listen—”

“I don't know if they got out before it fell.”

Chief Grady took her arm again and dragged her to the ambulance. She tried to pull away from him but his grip was too tight.

“There's no time—”

“The second tower went down almost an hour ago.”

She stopped struggling and stared at him.

He let go of her and an EMT, built like a football player, leaned out of the ambulance and hauled her inside.

Chief Grady said, “Make sure they check her for a concussion. I'd love to fill your bus, but I say get these two out of here now.”

Eileen sat hard on the stretcher beside a young fireman—a kid—whose hand was wrapped in a filthy, bloody cloth.

“He just did the same thing to me,” he said.

The EMT started to pull the doors shut.

“Wait a minute!” Chief Grady shouted. “Eileen!”

The EMT opened the doors and Eileen leaned forward.

“You seen any of my boys?” he called.

She shook her head. Chief Grady pivoted and walked off.

The EMT slammed the doors again and banged on the roof. The ambulance started moving.

The kid said, “Father Judge got killed.”

She and the kid, whose name was Ray, ended up in the empty ER together on adjoining stretchers. They didn't pull the curtain between them.

Eileen refused to put on a hospital gown. “I'm going right back,” she told a nurse. “You've got ten minutes to do what you've got to do.”

Ray refused too.

She did let the nurse put in an IV, to rehydrate.

Eileen's phone had a signal here, and she called Madd's cell. Since he left her a little over a year ago, she'd spoken to him only when absolutely necessary, preferring email to the sound of his voice. No answer. Then his house phone. Half hysterical, his girlfriend told her that Madd had headed in after the first tower went down. She
had
reached him after the second collapse; he was alive. Eileen said to let him know Quinn would be at her mother's.

Then Eileen called Delia and got her answering machine. Frustrated, she left instructions: Get Quinn from school and bring her to the house. Keep her with you. Madd is okay. I don't know when I'll be back.

Eileen called the school. The secretary was crying so hard she could barely get the name of the school out. Then the principal was on the line. Crisp, authoritative, calm.

“Delia picked Quinn up about ten minutes ago,” Sister Ann Marie said.

“How is she?”

“Calm, with effort. Delia told her that she was sure you would call as soon as you could. I”—the nun's voice broke—“we'll be praying for all of you.”

Eileen hung up, grateful that she'd been adopted by a woman with a level head.

She tried Norah. No answer. Irish Dreams. No answer. Aidan, Eileen knew, was not working until later in the week. He was down Breezy Point doing carpentry work. His friend owned the business.

Eileen had no doubt Aidan had jumped in his car the second the first tower was hit, but no way would he have gotten to his firehouse in Brooklyn to get his gear, and then into the city, before the buildings fell.

An older woman wearing a badge that said
VOLUNTEER
brought her and Ray bottles of water and granola bars. Eileen opened the water and drank half of it. She stuck the food in her back pocket.

One nurse flushed her eyes out and another did Ray's. They got a doctor each too.

“Do you know what hit you?” Eileen's doctor asked.

“A big building,” she answered.

The doctor wanted her to have a
CAT
scan. She told him she was fine; she'd been dehydrated. Now that she knew her daughter was being taken care of, her impatience to start searching was becoming unbearable.

Ray's doctor stitched up his hand and told him to use it as little as possible. He said he'd do his best.

Eileen's forehead was stitched by a plastic surgeon who'd been at his apartment on the Upper East Side and rushed downtown to volunteer. The hospital cleared the ER, ready for the waves of the injured.

“Nobody's coming,” he said.

“Nobody will be,” Eileen said, “until we start pulling the survivors out.”

He paused in his work, and then resumed silently. When he was done, he stepped back, satisfied.

“You won't even have much of a scar.”

“Do I look like a fucking beauty queen?” she said.

“You look perfect,” he said.

Eileen jumped off the gurney.

“You're going back, right?” she said to Ray.

“Jesus yeah,” Ray said. “My mom says my dad was at MetroTech when he heard, and he ran in over the bridge. He's got to be looking for me.”

To earn a ride back, she and Ray helped a couple of EMTs finish piling supplies into ambulances: bandages, antiseptic, masks, rubber gloves, syringes, IV bags. Then they jumped in, along with the woman who'd given them the water.

Eileen's cell phone rang. It took her a minute to get to it.

Norah's accent always thickened when she was angry or upset, and now Eileen could barely understand her. She finally realized Norah was saying over and over, “Are firemen dead? Are firemen dead?”

Eileen got her to slow down and then learned that Aidan had worked last night after all. He'd made a mutual with somebody who needed Saturday off. He never said no to overtime. His company had been sent after the first tower was hit, and before the second. He'd gone in with the day tour even though he was off duty.

The thought Eileen had been pushing away came at her like the black cloud had. Hundreds would have been climbing toward the fire.

Are firemen dead?

Hundreds.

Hundreds of firefighters are dead.

Eileen wasn't sure if she said this to Norah, or if it was her silence that told, but Norah wailed.

Norah, who'd only looked at her in bewilderment when Eileen told her that Sean was gone. Eileen jerked the phone away from her ear. Ray and the volunteer stared at it.

“Aunt Eileen? Aunt Eileen?”

Eileen put the phone back to her ear. “Rose? Rosie?”

“Aidan's not dead,” Rose said calmly.

“He was still at the firehouse when they got called. His lieutenant wouldn't let him go, because he was off duty, but Aidan jumped on when the guy wasn't looking. He rode like that into the city, hanging on to the back of the truck. Him and some other guy.”

“Jesus Christ!” Eileen said.

“They got jammed in traffic and he jumped off and came to my school. He, like, blew by Orlando, the security guard. But who's going to stop Aidan, right? He gets the secretary to look up my schedule and he found me in my classroom and pulled me out. We stopped in the principal's office and she told him they were trying to decide whether or not to evacuate, what was safer, do they wait for the parents and all. I guess some channels were saying something exploded in the first building and hit the second one. Aidan's all, ‘It was another plane, the city's under attack, and get the fuck out of here.' Kids were starting to leave anyway. Aidan told me to go home. Walk over the bridge. Don't get on the subway. We left, and then coming up the block was Justin.”

“Who the hell is Justin?”

“Nathaniel's nephew Justin! He goes to Stuyvesant. He hadn't gotten to school yet. He got off the subway and heard people on the street talking. He was coming to look for me. Aidan tells him to stay with me or he'll feed him his own nose.”

Right, Justin. Eileen had met him plenty of times. A shy, brilliant boy who'd been in love with Rose since they were thirteen. Rose was polite about it.

“You listened to Aidan and just got out of there?”

“Yes!” Rose said.

As though she always did what Aidan, what anybody, told her to.

“Justin was all, ‘I need my nose.' He's here with us now. So is Nathaniel.”

Eileen touched the bandage on her forehead. “This was before they went down?”

“Yes,” Rose said. “Me and Justin were on the bridge when the first one fell. Then we watched the other go down from the promenade.”

The promenade in Brooklyn Heights, from which Manhattan looked close enough to touch. Eileen gripped the phone so hard her hand hurt, picturing the two teenagers beside each other. Tall, gangly Justin, and Rose, who barely reached his shoulder. She tried to work out the timeline. If Aidan pulled her out of school right after the second plane hit, and they watched the first tower go down from the bridge, then Rose was not accounting for a hell of a lot of time. She and Justin had probably gone to get a closer look. Or Rose had, and Justin followed. And Justin, who had his uncle's common sense in abundance, got her to get the hell out of there.

It also meant that Aidan was only blocks away on foot before the first collapse. He'd been there. Eileen bent at the waist.

Norah came back on the line. “Find him, Eileen. You have to find him. Find him!”

She was gone again, and Rose was back.

“Aidan's not dead. I promise, he's not,” she said. “It's Noelle who's dead.” Rose's voice broke.

Eileen's head ached. Refusing any pain medication may have been a mistake. She tried to think. Noelle worked for some Irish theater. Eileen had no idea where it was.