Ashes of Fiery Weather (43 page)

“She had a meeting with a guy, a banker or something, who was thinking of giving them a big donation. She wanted him to come see the theater and all but he was too busy, so he set up a breakfast meeting with her. He worked in one of the towers. Declan can't get her on her cell and keeps calling here. Aunt Aoife too.”

Declan, Noelle's fiancé.

“Cell phones are fucked up, Rosie. She probably can't get through. Tell your mother to call the hospitals.”

Even as she said it, she knew Norah would not be able to do it. She thought of the echoing ER they'd just left.

“Never mind your mother. Gran is on her way there with Quinn. Tell her to do it. Tell her to answer the phone whenever it rings. Can you do that for me?”

“I saw her on the bridge,” Rose whispered. “For a second. She appeared and then disappeared. They do that.”

“Who does that?”

“The dead.”

“For fuck's sake, don't say that to her mother. Or your mother.”

“Yeah, Maggie told me that too.”

“You talked to Maggie? She's okay?” Eileen asked, though Maggie was more than safely out of it, in Galway.

“I told her to come home! Brendan's driving back from L.A. with a bunch of friends from the movie he was in. Did Mom tell you that he got a part? He has some lines. It's going to take him days to get here. Mom's freaking out. ‘I want Maggie! She has to come home!' I can't—I can't—” Rose started crying.

“Rose, listen, sit tight. Tell your mother I'm on my way back down there to look for Aidan.”

After Eileen hung up, the volunteer pulled rosary beads out of her pocket.

“The Sorrowful Mysteries. We're going to skip right to that today.”

She began to recite the Our Father. Ray, beside Eileen, moved his lips to the prayers.

Eileen leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Firefighters stretched in lines, passing buckets from hand to hand. They lifted chunks of concrete. They shouted names and company numbers. They climbed the piles of debris and jumped down into voids that were clearly unstable enough to collapse at any time.

They shouted:

“Hello! Hello! F-D-N-Y!”

“If you can hear me, say something!”

“Hello! Hello!”

Eileen found Aidan's company mustering in front of their smashed rig. They had not seen any of the men who'd left the firehouse this morning. They were organizing a search. She found the Glory Devlins, grouped together doing the same thing. They had not found anybody either, or the rig. None of them were guys whom Eileen had been with this morning. None had been in the collapses. Eileen was the first one they'd found who had been there. The captain bombarded her with questions. Where had they been sent? Whom had she been with? What equipment did they have?

“Now we at least know where they were,” Nevins said. “North Tower.”

“Yeah? And where was it?” Petrie said.

He was the biggest wiseass in the firehouse, a hard honor to win, but now he was serious. This morning, where had that 110-story-tall building been standing?

Eileen and the other Glory Devlins began walking. She scanned the landscape constantly for her nephew and asked every firefighter in shouting distance if they'd seen him. Aidan O'Reilly? There were a lot of body parts, some so gray they were almost indistinguishable from debris. A glint of light caught a silver ring, and they paused to look at a hand that had only the ring finger and thumb.

“What are they doing about this?” Rogers asked. “On the way down here, I saw half a leg on the roof of a car.”

Nobody knew. They left it.

“Aidan O'Reilly, you seen him?”

Finally, a lieutenant who'd been in the academy with Sean paused and frowned. “Yeah, I might of. Over that way.” He pointed.

“When?” Eileen asked. “Where?”

He shrugged. “I guess an hour ago. He was walking that way.”

The relief made her actually grin. “You see him again, tell him his aunt is looking for him and that he'd better call his mother.”

The lieutenant responded with a ghost of a smile. “Will do.”

She considered trying to find a radio or leaving the site to find a phone but decided she'd wait until she'd seen Aidan herself before letting Norah know he was okay.

Eileen stayed with the Glory Devlins. Near their best estimate of where the North Tower had been, they spread out, calling, digging and climbing small mountains of debris that shifted beneath them. They ducked under steel beams so scalding hot they would burn flesh to the bone if touched. They had no tools. The tools were with the guys who were missing, or in the rig, and they had no idea where that might be either.

A man came by passing out white paper masks. Eileen took one and put it in her pocket. They might come across a survivor who needed it.

Her phone had no service. Aidan, she figured, had sought out a landline somewhere by now. He'd know better than most what his mother was going through.

Late in the afternoon, a shout went up that 7 World Trade was going down. Everybody on the wreckage ran for it. Eileen and a group of other firefighters stopped on a street corner and stood beside a fire truck. Nobody spoke. On any other day, a forty-seven-story building's collapse would be a huge job.

Once the building was down, they had to wait for the all-clear before climbing back on the debris. The firefighters she was with sat on the curb. Eileen started wandering, up one block and down another. She didn't bother looking at the street signs to see where she was.

She saw a deli and tried the door. It was open, and empty. There was an inch of ash on the floor. A cup of coffee and a doughnut sat on the counter, also covered in ash. She walked to the back. The stockroom, and yes, a black wall phone.

She dialed Norah's number. It was almost six o'clock.

Delia answered on the first ring.

“Eileen! Where are you? Are you all right?”

“I'm down here. I'm fine,” she said. “Aidan? He called, right? And Norah's niece?”

Delia's silence answered the question.

Eileen didn't try to find her men. She circled the site, asking every single firefighter she passed if they'd seen Aidan O'Reilly. Tall, light brown hair. Blue eyes. She got nos and head shakes. For the totally blank looks, she added, “Sean O'Reilly's son.” The younger guys said, “Who?” But if the firefighter was older, he said no, he had not seen Sean's son.

There were a lot of men looking for their sons. There were sons looking for their dads. Guys looking for their brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews and cousins.

They (whoever “they” was; no one knew who, as in what city agency, was running the operation) brought in big lights, like from a movie set, which made jagged shadows creep up the edges of the debris. Beyond the lights, it was dark.

Eileen decided to find out who was in charge of figuring out who was dead, who was missing, who was alive, and see if Aidan was on an official list.

The wreckage was beginning to rise and fall in front of her eyes. All day, she had eaten only the granola bars given to her by the woman in the hospital. When she came upon another bucket brigade, she gave them a wide berth, not wanting to be called on to relieve somebody.

A firefighter turned and looked at her, then abruptly walked away. She saw the back of his turnout coat.
O'REILLY
. He disappeared down a slope.

The bucket brigade knitted itself together, simply closing the space where he had been standing.

Eileen broke into a run, tripping over rocks and God knows what else. She passed the line of working firefighters and stopped. He was less than a foot away, sitting on a slab of concrete, his back to her.

“Sean!” she called. “
Sean! 
”

He turned. “What?”

Norah. Eileen would not, after all, have to crush the same person twice. She tried to control her breathing as she approached him. He put his back to her again as she neared.

She stopped beside him. “You're okay?”

Aidan looked up at her bleakly.

“Where's your helmet?” she asked.

“I lost it in the second collapse. Is Rose dead?”

“Rose? No,” Eileen said. “She's been home since this afternoon.”

The relief on his face made him look like a child.

“I went to her school and pulled her out. I told her to go straight home.”

“Which is what she did,” Eileen said.

He stared at her as though trying to see if she was lying. “She never listens to me.”

“Yeah, well, Nathaniel's Justin does.”

“I got down here and they told me at the command center that the guys had been sent into Tower Two, so I went to find them. There were all these people coming down from the upper floors. Burned. Bleeding. An EMT who didn't have a stretcher or anything asked me to carry a woman out. The building went down when I was on my way back. After that, all I could think was what if Rose ignored me and came down here for a better look? I kept trying to imagine telling Mom that I sent my little sister out into a terrorist attack.”

“You didn't know the buildings were going to fall.”

“I should have left her in school, safe with her teachers,” Aidan said.

Yes, that was exactly what he should have done. But there was no point in saying it.

“What the fuck do you think your mother was thinking all day with no word from
you?
” It came out angrier than she'd meant it to.

“Early on, I tried to call,” he said defensively. “Nobody's phone was working. Then I found our guys who just got here. We started digging. Six guys are missing. Six! We still haven't found them.”

“Ours either,” Eileen said.

He gazed around the site and said, “They're dead, aren't they?”

“Yeah.”

“All of them.”

“All of them, yeah.”

Aidan leaned forward, hands on his knees. Eileen remembered Noelle. But she didn't want to tell him when they were standing on the debris. When they were on the ground, she'd let him know that his cousin was missing.

“Up. Let's go.”

“I'm not going home yet.”

“You think I am?” Eileen said. “We have to find somebody with a working phone or somebody who can radio either your firehouse or mine. Get someone to call your mother.”

Aidan nodded and got to his feet. They began to walk.

Eileen never mentioned how she called him by his father's name. He never mentioned that he answered.

December 1960

Eileen and Sean stood on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Sterling Place in the crowd of onlookers. The tail of the plane was sticking up at an angle.
UNITED
, it said. The street was filled with debris from both the destroyed plane and the buildings it hit on the way down.

The freezing air smelled of smoke.

Eileen thought the street looked like pictures of London during World War II in her history textbook. Sean bounced on the balls of his feet. Eileen knew how badly he wanted to get closer, but the street was blocked off. They'd all heard the roar of the plane's descent.

Eileen's class had been doing math. Sean had been studying geography. Sean told her he'd just been asked to name the capital of Alaska when they heard the terrific roar from the sky. His teacher, a nun, had screamed, “Under your desks!” Eileen's teacher, who was not a nun, covered her ears and ran to the window. Then, not long after, sirens started wailing. Fire trucks. Ambulances. On and on. Within the hour, the principal announced over the loudspeaker that a plane had crashed in Park Slope. She asked them to say a prayer for the passengers.

Some mothers had come to school to take their kids home. Eileen knew their mother, as a teacher herself, would not be able to. Her workday didn't end at three p.m. During the Christmas season, she worked Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, from four to eight, at the A&S on Fulton Street. Today was Friday. Eileen and Sean were supposed to go straight home, keep the doors locked, not answer the doorbell. They were supposed to call Nathaniel at the store if they needed anything while she was gone. In an emergency, dial 911. Do not call the firehouse directly. They might not be in.

The empty house never bothered Sean. Eileen, though, fifteen minutes before their mother was expected home, began sneaking peeks out the window when Sean wasn't looking. She would not have been able to explain to him the enormity of her relief when she spied the slender figure coming slowly up the block.

But today, when they met by the schoolyard gate at three, Sean said he was going to get a look at the crash. Their neighborhood was between Park Slope and Windsor Terrace. No way the Glory Devlins hadn't responded. She could come with him or go home. She said she'd go with him, and he grinned.

They stood at the front of a small crowd, mostly other kids, some from this neighborhood and a few from Holy Rosary, who'd also walked or biked over.

Eileen held her coat collar closed with one gloved hand because she'd forgotten her scarf. The other hand was in her pocket. It had snowed this morning, enough to dust the ground. Nathaniel's store, right across the street, was closed, so they couldn't go in there to warm up. Eileen supposed this was one of those days when Nathaniel didn't go to work. Usually he was open until six o'clock.

“The fires are out,” Sean said. “The smoke's white. If it were black, that'd be bad.”

“There are body parts all over the street.”

Eileen turned to see John Maddox push past Ally Coen to stand behind her and Sean.

Ally regained his balance and stepped farther back. John was Sean's age, thirteen, but they weren't in the same class. He called Eileen Howdy Doody because of her red hair. Sean had fought him more than once. John always lost, but he was so dumb that he never seemed to remember this. Or so dumb that he thought he'd win the next one.