Refugees (10 page)

Most days the routine attracted quite a crowd, but this morning everyone seemed lazy and distracted. Indian summer infused the senses. The day was a sunlit seventy degrees, the kind of air that made Dawn think of apples, school binders, and summer's last swim. It also didn't help that Jude looked too darn middle-class with his silk shirt and new denims to pass for a panhandler. Dawn warned him not to wear the fancy outfits. She had on her ripped tiedye and patched jeans. The last thing they wanted to do was advertise that they had a bit of cash and a roof over their heads.

Besides, that roof was iffy at best. Ever since the ill-fated jam session Pax had developed a seriously superior attitude toward Dawn. Not to mention that Sander's hot looks and musical expertise still made her nervous. But what really panicked her was that it was only a matter of time before Edith and Tom figured out where Dawn and Jude were. And when they found out, they'd tell Victor.

Dawn was playing the last stanza of the Telemann when
kongg!—
something like a sonic boom shuddered through the street. She bit her tongue in a reflexive startle. Her eardrums felt as if they'd imploded. The blast trembled window glass and ricocheted off brick walls. “What was that?” asked Dawn as the crowd suddenly dispersed.

“Who knows?” Jude replied, snatching up the hat and
stuffing the cash in his pockets. They paused on the pavement to listen for more booms. Dawn noticed that traffic seemed to tangle and pedestrians were starting to dash around on the sidewalks.

“People are acting weird,” said Dawn. “What do you think happened? Where did that noise came from?”

“Dunno. Maybe a semi crashed down on Fifth.” They'd walked this area, boning up on street names.

“Must've been severe.” She pulled apart the flute's three sections and placed them in her case. “Let's check it out.” People started to shout and scatter up the street. “What the hell's going on?” Dawn asked Jude as they hurried along Sixth Avenue and turned east on Fourteenth Street toward Fifth.

“It could be a drug bust,” Jude replied as two police cars sped past, their roof lights spinning red.

As they walked past jeans and electronics stores, street vendors and a Starbucks, workers began to spill from offices onto sidewalks. More sirens shrilled. “This is way too huge for a drug bust,” Dawn remarked.

“Someone must have gotten murdered,” said Jude.

“Well, it sure stinks.” An odor like charcoal starter began to sour the air.

At the corner of Fourteenth and Fifth a lady was ranting, “It hit! It hit!” She pointed southward into the sky. An old woman at the bus stop stared downtown too, mumbling, “Omigod, omigod, omigod!”

Dawn and Jude looked up to where the lady was pointing. “Jude, a building's on fire.” Smoke billowed from behind a brick apartment building.

“Where?” he asked, craning his neck.

“Wait.” Dawn shifted her gaze to the left, past the brick
building. “One of the World Trade Center towers is on fire!”

“No way.” Then Jude saw it too—a cord of furious black unwinding into the robin's-egg blue sky.

Everyone was shouting and talking at once, crisscrossing paths and skittering like ants. Traffic jammed to a standstill. All eyes focused on the twin towers.

“Come on!” Dawn started to jog, and Jude followed. They made a break down Fifth, past a bowling alley, a deli, a Citibank branch, and a bookstore. Dawn ran steadily downtown, as if by running toward the towers, the image would become less bizarre, controllable somehow. Surely firefighters would have it under control before long. Finally she stopped at the corner of Fifth and Eleventh Street. She and Jude stood with a large crowd, watching the tower burn.

“Did the pilot fly into the tower by accident or on purpose?” a kid asked a traffic cop.

“Honey, I don't know,” she answered. “If it was an accident, it was
some
accident.” She began to mutter what sounded like a prayer.

“You think a pilot hit the building on purpose?” Jude's voice cracked. “You've got to be psychotic to fly a plane smack into a building.”

The cop shook her head. “Honey, you ain't kidding.”

“It looks like it took out a huge section,” Dawn said. She shuddered. How many people would that mean, and what about the floors above?

“This is too awful,” Jude said quietly.

They started walking again. Ambulances and fire engines blared. Their wail warped into audio trails as the rescue cars raced past. A couple in a Subaru clung to each
other. College kids huddled in front of the arch by Washington Square Park. Other groups of stunned people hovered by the opened doors of vehicles parked in the middle of sidewalks. Crowds moved in a steady stream. Their faces were drawn and fearful. Dawn overheard bits of conversation.

“Those people won't make it out.”

“Doesn't Larry work near the top of the tower?” A heavy man in a blue suit asked the woman next to him.

“Yes. What floor's he on?”

“Hundred and something.” The man fumbled for his cell phone and dialed. “Can't get through. I'm getting a strange busy signal. Much too fast.”

“The cell phone antennas were on one of those towers,” cried the gray-suited lady.

“Yes. Some of them,” the man replied grimly. He redialed. Everyone who had a cell phone was dialing, but it looked like hardly anyone was getting through.

Jude nudged Dawn. “Hey, that guy got through.” A man walking past was weeping and yelling into his cell at the same time.

“I should call my parents,” Jude murmured.

Time seemed to warp. It seemed prolonged, excruciating. Seconds ticked by. Dawn thought of Louise in the desert. “Stop burning,” she begged under her breath.

“My husband works in the north tower,” a woman sobbed as she limped up the middle of the street with one high heel off and her nose streaming. “My husband!”

I've got to help her,
thought Dawn, but she felt useless. She wished she could run after the woman, give her something to stop her pain. “My sneakers,” blurted Dawn, and she started to remove them.

“Huh?” Jude turned to her, confused.

“I'm going to give—” Dawn started to explain, but when she held up her sneakers she saw another person already handing the woman shoes. Jude nodded silently.

Apartment windows were flung open. Someone cranked a car radio to full volume. “One of the World Trade Center towers has been hit. It is unclear whether this is an accident or the work of terrorists,” said the radio announcer.

“Terrorists!” Dawn looked again to the towers, craning her neck to see them through the smoke. She spotted a silver object. “Jude,” she shouted, her breath coming in stabs, “look at that plane.” She shook his arm. “Another plane's flying too close!”

“Oh, God, I see it,” Jude whispered as they watched another jet streak in from the west. It careened straight into the second tower and tore a parking-lot-sized gash into the building's wall. What remained of the wall burst into orange fireballs. “The tower's exploding!” Jude yelled. He grabbed Dawn's arm and shook it. “Who's doing this?” he cried. “Did you see that plane just fly into that fucking tower?” Jude yelled hysterically. “Is this some kind of war?”

“War. This isn't real, it can't be,” murmured Dawn. Jude's spindly fingers on her arm kept her from screaming, from hurrying to Sander's, grabbing her flute, and running up to the George Washington Bridge and clear out of Manhattan.

They were many blocks away, but they could still smell the acrid reek of burning fuel and plastic. It stung Dawn's nostrils. People covered their mouths with scarves and jackets. A construction worker passed out painter's masks. An old man was hacking.

“No accident,” Dawn murmured. Horror vibrated to her core. She imagined the passengers as the jet made contact
with the wall. The workers must've been at their desks, switching on their monitors, sipping their first coffee, she thought. All those networked computers were melting into plastic soup. People must have been trapped in those boiling rooms with no air. There was no way they could have escaped below a floor of solid fire.

The vision was like some sicko movie poster—Satan takes Manhattan. Hell is here. The last image of the plane wouldn't leave Dawn's mind. It was stuck on replay:
crash—
rewind
—crash—
rewind
—crash.
She felt blistered and dizzy, and Jude was coming in and out of her awareness. Then, abruptly, she felt like a voyeur—the most lurid, revolting kind of lowlife scum, to stand there and gawk. If this was war, the island would close up. If it was war, the city could be bombed.
It can't happen here,
she thought, and then, with a curdling terror, she realized that yes, it certainly could.

“I've got to get out of here,” Jude said, as if he'd read her mind. “I need to go back to my brother's.” She nodded.

A slow rumble seemed to rise from the ground, like a train careening off the tracks or a torpid thunderclap.

Jude grasped Dawn's shoulders. He pressed his face into her neck and sobbed. “I need to go home.”

Dawn thought numbly,
What do I do?
“We'll be OK,” she said softly, and put her arms around him in a timid embrace. He pressed in further as Dawn focused in on one of the towers' latticed columns. Like a sky-high accordion, and with a low and dreadful rumble, it folded down on itself, floor after floor after floor.

Jude had his head on her shoulder for a longtime afterward and Dawn felt him shaking. When he raised himself, his eyes were red. She felt yellowed, brittle, torn like a damaged
piece of music parchment. They stood there, mute, for what seemed like forever. Other people stood motionless, as if the whole city had frozen in place.

Jude broke the silence. “I've got to get out of here. Let's go.” She nodded. On the way back they noticed lines snaking out of delis. People emerged with armfuls of bottled water, bags full of cereal boxes. It reminded Dawn of those faded black-and-white photos of the Depression, when throngs of the hungry waited in lines for handouts.

“Should we get some milk?” she asked. “The stores may close.”

“Yeah, we'd better,” Jude muttered.

It was a challenge to find a deli with any basic foods left. It was almost noon when they took their place at the end of a line that stretched out onto the pavement.

“The second tower has fallen. Again, the second tower has fallen!” the grocery radio blared while they were inside and waiting to pay. All the customers became silent, listening. “A third plane has hit the Pentagon,” the announcer continued, “and a fourth plane has crashed in Pennsylvania, possibly en route to the White House. Officials are following active leads—that the tragedies might be the work of terrorists, like those who bombed the Navy ship USS
Cole
last year. It's too early to say definitively.” Dawn and Jude were too stunned to utter a word. The order of the world seemed fatally skewed. Bread, milk, and some cans of beans were concrete things—objects to count on. They paid for two loaves of bread, milk, and a bag full of canned food.

Back outside on St. Marks, the air was thick with soot. Dawn's throat throbbed. Military-looking jets streaked by overhead, their deafening rumble offering a flimsy illusion of safety.

They were almost back at Sander's apartment when
Jude started pleading with Dawn. “Let's hitchhike home. It's dangerous here. What if they bomb Manhattan? My parents will be so worried. What if—”

“No one knows who did this,” she reasoned. “Whoever they are, they're probably done, but if they're not, what's to say that Manhattan will be the only place hit? San Francisco could be next.” Dawn had considered leaving, but just for a moment. Now she needed to say something— anything—to keep Jude in New York. She didn't want to be alone.

They trudged up the stairwell and flung open the door. Jude wearily stumbled into the bedroom, hurled himself into his sleeping bag, and passed out.

Dawn dumped the food in the fridge, cans and all. She paused in Sander's bedroom doorway. He was still asleep. She gazed at his hair, spread out like a sheaf of golden wheat, and took a few steps into the room. An urge swelled in her to crawl under Sander's blanket, but instead she returned to the living room, flopped down on the shaggy rug, and stared into space. A thousand horrible images filled her mind. At the same time Dawn thought of her birth mother, Laurel Sweet, the blond mystery, then of plain, brown-shoed Louise. Would it matter to either of them if she died today?

I
t had been hours since she'd left the apartment. Dawn wandered the streets. As she paced to the West Village, then back east, the scene at Sander's played in her memory. He had woken up, and in fumbling words she had described the disaster to him. They had sat on the rug, and she'd wavered between panic and an overwhelming urge to jump into his lap like a kid. His breath had smelled of warm milk, and his eyes had been hazel pools of warmth. Her ribs had moved in and out like those of a cornered mouse.

“You're safe now. Stop trembling,” he had whispered.

She had felt like such a nerdy baby, suddenly missing her school and her room and how pure the sun had been last week as it played along the Pacific. Tears pricked her eyes, but her clenched muscles held them in place.