All We Have Left (22 page)

She shakes her head. I sit on her bed as she turns the machine over in her hands, mutters to herself something that sounds like, “Where’s the outgoing jack?
Really?
” and then she goes to a shelf over her computer and starts rummaging through neatly labeled boxes.

“Ha!” she says, pulling out a small rectangular device.

“What is that?” I stare at it curiously.

“It’s a voice recorder. I used it in school before I got my phone and could record lectures on that.”

Of course she did. In the fifth grade. I sigh, happy to be back in Emi’s crazy-simple world.

She pops the cassette from the answering machine into the voice recorder and runs a wire from it to her computer. She’s just sitting down at her desk when Teeny and Myra come in. They stop when they see me.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Teeny says, yanking her dark hair over her shoulder with a small fist. “Slumming with the minorities, Jesse?”

Myra just glances at me, and then starts typing furiously on her phone, maybe “What to say to your ex-friend when you just wish she’d go the hell away.”

“I’m sorry,” I say to all of them. “I know what I did was terrible, but you know I’m not like that. Okay, maybe I
was
like that, but it was the worst feeling ever. I don’t hate anybody. I screwed up royally. I made a stupid, terrible decision. But we’ve been friends for a long time, and I hope that if you screwed up as majorly as I did, that I’d at least give you one more chance.”

They stare at me in surprise.

“Holy heck,
chica
, what got into you?” Teeny says. “Your time in the slammer turn you into a woman?”

“Oh shut up,” I say grumpily.

“Why didn’t you just talk to us?” Myra asks. “Why didn’t you tell us what was going on?”

“Somehow I thought I couldn’t,” I say.

“We would’ve knocked some sense into you. Or tied you up. Something,” Teeny says. “You know how many people tell me I need to go back to Mexico? Like that makes any freaking sense. I was
born
here, and my mom is Guatemalan, but some people aren’t the sharpest crayons in the box. So what you did … it hurt.”

I nod, and fix my gaze on the bedspread. “I’m sorry,” I say softly. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”

“One more thing,” Teeny says, and there’s something in her voice that makes me look up. “I just think you should know that you might be vanilla-white with a pedigree from the freaking Mayflower, but you still can’t dance.”

I look at all of them, my gorgeous friends with hearts open as they smile at me, and know I should have realized that true friendship is big enough to leave room for mistakes. Things might not be completely straight between us but they are infinitely better than they were.

“Okay, I’ve got it,” Emi says, turning back to the computer. “I downloaded some free software that’s supposed to help us clean up the recording. We’ll see.” Her fingers fly over the keyboard.

“What’s going on?” Teeny asks.

I explain, and Myra says, “Wow, that’s sad, and cool, all at the same time.”

Teeny curls up on the bed beside me. “So, let’s hear it.”

Emi types furiously, and we can see graphs on her screen
with lines going up and down. “I’m going to try to reduce the background noise,” she says as Travis’s first words play over and over again.

Hello? … there? I’m … World Trade Center.

Hello? Is … there? I’m … World Trade Center.

Hello? Is … there? I’m in … World Trade Center.

Each time it gets clearer.

“You’re a genius,” I exclaim.

“I know. My mother had me tested,” Emi says, and her mouth quirks.

“See if you can hear what he says at the end. When he says the girl’s name.”

Emi nods and turns back to the computer. We sit in silence as she continues to work.

“Okay,” she says finally. “Let’s see what we have.”

She hits the button, and Travis’s voice fills the air from her powerful speakers.

It’s still static-y and fuzzy, still missing a lot of words, but when we get to the end, when Travis says, “
That’s … with me
,” this time we can make out the name.

Alia.

That’s Alia with me.

My brother was in the towers with a girl named Alia.

“What was she doing in the towers with your brother?” Teeny asks.

“I don’t even know why Travis was in the towers,” I say.

Myra has been busy on her phone, and she looks up. “If I’m spelling it right, ‘Alia’ means sublime, lofty, or exalted. Whatever the heck that means. And get this, the name is either Jewish or Muslim.”

We stare at her in surprise.

“You’ve never talked about your brother before,” Emi says slowly. “You told me when we were kids that he died on 9/11, but you didn’t seem to want to talk about it, so I never asked any questions.”

“Why now?” Teeny asks. “What makes you decide to talk about your brother Travis after all these years?”

“It’s hard to explain,” I say honestly, because how do I explain the barbed wire around my heart that trapped everything in and kept them out? “Everything is so messed up with my family, and it has been for a long time, but it’s like I never even noticed, because I didn’t know anything different. Travis is dead, but I’m still alive, though my parents don’t seem to
get
that. Now they’re getting a divorce, or something, and … somehow I feel like if I figure out what happened to Travis, maybe it’ll help. I know, it’s stupid.” I twirl my hair and stare determinedly at a wall because I can’t meet their eyes.

There’s a long silence, and when I finally glance up, the three of them are exchanging a look they all seem to understand.

“As long as you don’t go batcrap crazy again, we’ll help you,” Teeny says. “We want to forgive you, we really do. But what you did was some pretty serious stuff.”

“I missed you guys,” I say quietly. “I missed you guys so much.”

“I prayed that you would come back to us,” Teeny says matter-of-factly. She doesn’t make a big deal about religion, but the thought of Teeny-prayers coming my way makes me smile, makes me feel stronger.

“Just talk to us when things start going sideways, okay?” Myra says.

“We’re here,” Emi says simply.

I turn my head so they can’t see my tears, but then they pile on for a group hug, and somehow we’re all crying, even Emi.

When we finally unwind, Teeny says, “Speaking of batcrap crazy … What about your dad? Does he know you’ve gone all Nancy Drew on your brother?”

“No,” I say. “I’m pretty sure if he found out what I was doing, he wouldn’t speak to me again. Ever.”

At this point, I am the only person in our family that Dad is speaking to.

I wonder how long that will last.

We run into more people in the stairwell, and most people seem calm, one lady even joking that she should have worn her running shoes. It’s hot though, and the rank, dirty-smelling smoke burns the back of my throat. I pull my shirt over my nose again, and wish I’d thought to bring the half-full bottle of Coke still back in the elevator. I am so thirsty.

Just one sip, one swallow of Coke.

Travis is checking stairwell doors as we pass, and many of them are locked, though a few open. He lets them swing shut, and nods to himself.

A woman ahead of us is having some sort of panic attack. She stops in the middle of the stairs, just crying, and saying, “I can’t go any farther.
I just can’t.
”

Her friends are urging her along, while people squeeze by
on her left and continue their downward trudge, some with their hands on the shoulders of the people in front of them. The woman in front of me pats the crying lady on the arm as she passes and says, “It gonna be all right, okay, honey? Just keep goin’.”

I like that, her patting the stranger. It feels right, like something Lia would do, though Lia would have whisked us all to safety by now.

I touch the crying lady’s shoulder as we pass, whispering, “It’ll be all right.”

Because it
will.
It has to be.

Behind me, I hear people murmuring the same words as they pass the woman. I look up before we turn the next corner, and she is moving again, her face pale and determined.

No one seems to know what is going on, though a few people are talking about a small plane hitting the tower.

“And, really, wasn’t it bound to happen?” a woman behind us says. “The towers are so much bigger than everything else around.” She sounds like the fact that the towers are so tall reflects on her, like they do the whole city proud by their sheer, unabashed size.

Someone cries, “Move over, move over!” and we squish to the right of the staircase. A man comes down with another man, and he’s hurt and bleeding.

I stare in dismay, realizing suddenly that whatever is wrong, is
really, really wrong.

“Stop using your cell phone!” a woman in front of us yells
at a guy stopped in the stairwell with his phone pressed to his ear.

“What’s your problem?” he asks. “It’s not even working.”

“Maybe the cell phone signals are what’s detonating the bombs,” the woman says, her voice high and shrill. “You could be setting them off right now.”

“Oh, come on,” someone else says. “Calm down. I’d kill to find a working cell phone so I can call my husband. The first phone we find working, I’m buying stock in
that
company.”

Travis is impatient, stepping around people if they slow too much in front of him, but he always checks to make sure I am still behind him.

We continue walking down, dizzy with the reversals of direction each time we reach a landing. Ten steps to a landing, turn, another ten steps. Over and over again.

I’m already getting tired, and we still have such a long, long way to go. In Lia’s world, she goes to the mosque to recharge her superhero energy when she starts to run low, and always comes out stronger and braver after she prays. I think about how I felt when I prayed
Fajr
on the rooftop this morning, the great arc of the blue sky overhead, and it calms me, gives me strength.

Legs aching, thighs trembling, I keep walking.

“What do you do when you’re not pickpocketing and saving damsels in distress from elevators?” I ask Travis.

He huffs out an impatient breath.

“By now you should know me well enough to know I
don’t do good with silence,” I tell him snappishly. “So talk to me.”

He sort of smiles, and I think again how cute he is with his too-long hair and distinctive eyes.

“I like to play the saxophone,” he says. “My grandfather taught me, and I used to be in a band with my buddies. Greg and Graydon. We called ourselves the Do-Gooders, and we used to do a few gigs around town. The name was kind of a joke.”

“Really?” I’m all wide-eyed innocence.

“Really,” he says, and throws me a quick grin.

“Is that what you want to do?” I ask. “Play in a band?”

He’s quiet for a moment. “I haven’t played for a while,” he says. “We were never good enough to do anything but play at the local bars anyway. I thought … I thought it would be pretty cool to teach kids to love music, the way my gramps did for me. My mom’s a teacher, and I see what she does for her kids, and how much she loves it.”

“Is that what you’re going to school for?”

He laughs shortly, but not like anything is funny. “No, I’m not in college,” he says. “I did go for almost a year, but I quit. Since then, I’ve just been hanging out.” There’s more, a lot more, but he won’t meet my eyes, and for some reason I remember how sad and upset he looked in the elevator just before it fell.

“What about you? What do you want to do when you grow up?” He’s changing the subject from himself, and I let him.

“A rodeo clown,” I say immediately, because it’s what I
always say for the shock value. “I want to dress up in funny clothes, wear lots of makeup, and dodge bulls.”

Travis manages to smile. “Sounds about right. Isn’t that what everyone does?”

“No, seriously, what I
really
want to do is write comic books,” I say, kind of surprising myself, because it’s not something I talk about with anyone but my closest friends. “But I can’t do that, so I don’t know. My parents want me to be something with a bunch of letters after my name.”

“Why can’t you write comic books?” He acts like it’s a serious question.

“Come on. Who actually does that?”

“Somebody does. Why not you?”

I shake my head. “It just sounds like something a little kid would want to do, like be a ballerina, or a princess.”

He shrugs. “Sounds like you’re too scared to go after something you really want.”

We stop talking after that, but I think about what he said.

Am I scared? Is that why I don’t take my dream to write comic books seriously? And how can my parents take it seriously if, deep inside me,
I
don’t?

A lady in front of us is going slower and slower, her heavy purse drooped down to the crook between her arm and her elbow, almost pulling her over.

“Ma’am?” Travis says. “Are you okay?”

I can tell he’s edgy, but his voice is polite.

“I’m just so tired,” she whispers.