Panic in Pittsburgh (4 page)

Travis felt an impact. Something hard against his back, punching against his helmet.

He saw the boards racing at him.

He could not turn, could not avoid what was coming, could not soften the blow.

He drove headfirst into the boards.

And then there was nothing but black.

Nothing.

They were trying to kill him.

They were using lights as weapons, stabbing him right through his eyeballs if he opened his eyelids so much as a crack. He wished they were sewn tight. He wished he could keep them still, but the sheer effort of clamping his eyelids shut caused them to shake and flutter and pop open – no matter how hard he fought to prevent it.

The light sent pain shooting through his skull. It was as if tiny hand grenades were going off inside
his brain, his skull bouncing the shock waves around in his head like the walls of a pinball machine.

He tried to sit up. He felt the room spinning. He felt sick –
seasick
sick, just like that time his Uncle Simon took the family sailing on the Great Lakes and they hit heavy swells an hour away from shore. It had been the worst feeling Travis had ever known: a gut-wrenching, disoriented feeling that, his uncle joked, was “a thousand times worse than death.”

He lay back and the nausea passed. He kept his eyelids shut as tight as the lids on the jars of strawberry jam his grandmother put up each summer, and the pain in his head slowly went away.

What is wrong with me? Travis asked himself.

What happened?

“You have suffered a concussion.”

The room was still dark, but not entirely dark. Travis half-opened his eyes. A man he did not know was sitting on the bed. He had a stethoscope
hanging over his left shoulder. Travis presumed he was a doctor. Standing behind him was Mr. D, and behind Mr. D was Muck.

“The good news is you have no other damage,” the doctor continued. “But no more hockey for you for a while, young man. Mr. Dillinger will make sure that you’re a hundred percent recovered before you return to play. You’ll have to be cleared by your doctor back home before you get back on skates.”

Travis tried to speak but could not. He cleared his throat and tried again. “W-w-what happened?”

The doctor was already packing up his stuff. Mr. D came and sat in the spot where the doctor had been. He moved so carefully he settled on the bed as softly as a butterfly on a flower.

“You got coldcocked, Trav,” Mr. D began. “Actually, both of you did, but the big winger on the River Rats didn’t hit the boards like you did. But he still went down hard, I can tell you that.” Mr. D suppressed a small chuckle, almost as though he was proud of Travis for holding his own in the on-ice collision.

Muck jumped in, speaking very quietly, as if he knew loud noise could be as painful to Travis as sharp
light. “You cut across to get back on your wing just as he was cutting left to try and catch Sarah. You turned as you neared the boards in case Nish was looking to pass to you. Both of you had blind spots. He wasn’t trying to hit you or anything – it just happened.”

“They took you off on a stretcher,” Mr. D added. “So you can thank your lucky stars there were top-notch medical people there.”

“I don’t remember anything.”

Mr. D seemed surprised. “You were alert when they put you in the ambulance. They took you to the hospital for X-rays and kept you overnight for observation. Standard procedure. You don’t remember?”

The doctor paused, putting away his stethoscope. “Short-term memory loss,” he said, more to Muck and Mr. D than to Travis. “It’s not at all uncommon. Has your team done baseline testing?”

“Yes,” Mr. D said. “We do it each year at the first practice.”

“Good, then your doctors back home will have something to measure his recovery by. He should be fine. Just keep him quiet and comfortable until
you’re heading home. Have someone check on him every hour or so. He’ll just want to rest and sleep. No
TV
, no reading, no loud noises.”

“That eliminates Nish,” Mr. D chuckled. “We’ve moved your roommates out, Trav, so you’ll have this place all to yourself. Muck and I have keys, so we’ll be able to check on you without disturbing you.”

Travis was wondering how much of his memory had gone when, suddenly, part of it jumped back. The Owls had been up 1–0 when he went down.

“Who won?” he asked.

“You guys did,” Muck answered. “Some goof-ball defenseman who wants me to call him the Iceman put it away in overtime: 5–4 for the Owls.”

“Your clothes are in the dresser there, Trav,” said Mr. D. “But one of the drawers is full of candy bars. They yours, too?”

Nish’s stash. The Iceman’s power bars. A chance to get back at Nish.

“Yeah,” Travis fibbed. “Leave ’em, please.”

“Okay.”

Travis started to giggle at his little trick while Muck and Mr. D followed the doctor out into the hall. As the three men talked quietly outside, sharp light poured in through the open door and directly into Travis’s eyes.

The pain was excruciating. He felt tears flood his eyes.

Then the door closed and all was dark again.

Travis would enjoy this, Sarah thought, as the yellow school bus carrying the Screech Owls joined the convoy of yellow school buses heading south of Pittsburgh toward a small town called Shanksville.

She was sitting with Sam, and while Sam dozed off in the heat of the bus, Sarah stared out at the bare trees with their light covering of snow.

She had much to think about. She was worried about Travis, now into his second day of almost total
isolation in his hotel room. She knew from reports from Mr. Dillinger that Travis was eating fine and resting well, that the doctor had been back to see him and was satisfied with his progress, that Travis was able to tolerate some light in the room and had even tried a half hour of television. He had wanted to watch a hockey game – the Penguins against the Washington Capitals – but the speed of the game and the quick cuts from camera to camera brought back the seasick feeling and he’d had to turn it off.

How awful, she thought. Unable to watch television. Unable to read. Unable to walk around outside. Just hours and hours of lying in a dark room waiting for your brain to get better.

But what could anyone have done to prevent it? Sarah knew about concussions in hockey. Every player did. Sidney Crosby’s concussion, which had kept him from playing for most of a year, had made everyone see the dangers of head shots. For the most part – with tougher rules, more education – they were gone from minor hockey, but accidents could never be eliminated. Hockey was a fast game played on hard surfaces. Travis was lucky he hadn’t been
hurt far worse. It could have been a broken neck, and still it would have been an accident – no one’s fault.

The Owls had continued in the tournament, winning a close game against a team from Philadelphia and then coasting to victory over the Little Devils, a peewee team from New Jersey that modeled their team colors and crest on the
NHL
’s Devils. The Little Devils weren’t nearly the match Philadelphia’s Peewee Phantoms had been. In fact, if it hadn’t been for one lucky bounce, the Phantoms might have beaten the Owls.

After the win over the Little Devils, Sarah and Sam had come out of the Owls’ dressing room to find the River Rats player who had hit Travis waiting outside with his coach. The coach give the big kid a nudge on the back, sending him toward the girls.

The player looked like he was about to cry. He was twisting his hands together as if washing them. He seemed unable to look them in the eye. He stopped, fumbling for words.

“You’re his center, right?” the big kid said to Sarah.

“Travis’s? Yeah.”

“How is he?”

“He’ll be okay. He’s just not allowed to play for a while.”

“Can you give him this for me, please?” the kid asked, nervously handing over a folded note.

Sarah took it. She smiled at the big, fumbling kid. “Sure. Be glad to.”

She knew she shouldn’t have, but later, when she found herself alone in the lobby of their hotel, she couldn’t resist taking the note from her pocket and reading it quickly.

Almost in tears, Sarah tucked the note back into her pocket. When she saw Mr. Dillinger, she handed it over and asked him to give it to Travis when he next checked on the injured player. She hoped Travis was able to read. She knew he’d like hearing that he was not only a good player but a tough one.

There was light snow on the roads as the buses wound their way through the hilly countryside near Shanksville. The players were being brought to a field in what seemed like the middle of nowhere.

But it was definitely not nowhere. It was where United Airlines Flight 93 had crashed on September 11, 2001.

If Sarah hadn’t known better, she’d have thought Muck had set this up. The Screech Owls’ coach was always going on about history and the importance of remembering.

But this had nothing to do with Muck. The organizers of the Peewee Winter Classic had come up with this one all on their own. There were plenty of things to see in Pittsburgh – the children’s museum, the science center, the Andy Warhol Museum – but they chose the field near
Shanksville where Flight 93 had crashed on 9/11.

The buses pulled into a freshly plowed parking lot, and slowly and quietly the various teams climbed down from their rides and gathered in small groups along the side. Sarah saw that the Pittsburgh River Rats had been on the bus directly behind theirs, and she made sure to catch Billy Chester’s eye and give him a smile and a thumbs-up. He seemed relieved and smiled shyly back and waved.

A cold wind was blowing across the field. It picked up tiny wisps of snow like ghostly lassos and sent them whirling. But no one felt cold. And if they shivered, it wasn’t because of the wind.

Sarah thought she was going to lose her breath as she walked along the memorial wall, a long line of ghostly white marble slabs with nothing on them but name after name after name. It had nothing to do with exertion; it was seeing all the names of those who had died and realizing they were real people who could never have imagined the horror awaiting them when their early morning flight took off from Newark, New Jersey.

A guide gave them a short talk on what had happened. Shortly after takeoff on a flight to San Francisco, the plane had been hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists using razor-sharp box cutters as weapons. Some of the passengers had cell phones and were using them to call home. That’s how they learned they were not alone in whatever was happening. Two other hijacked planes had already slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City. A third plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. From the route taken by the hijackers of Flight 93, the authorities could tell that this plane was targeting either the White House or the United States Capitol.

The terrorists’ plan was astonishing, both in its simplicity and in its intended goal. Using simple weapons, the men had easily taken over four regular flights. Each group of terrorists had one or two trained pilots among them who would take over the controls. Two planes would destroy the twin towers of the World Trade Center, symbol of the financial power of the United States of America. One plane would hit the military center of America,
the Pentagon. And the fourth plane, Flight 93, was to strike at the very heart of the American political system and might have killed the president of the United States.

There were forty passengers and crew on Flight 93. When they realized what was happening in New York City and Washington, they knew that the hijackers were on a suicide mission and vowed that their plane would not be used the same way. They voted among themselves and decided to rush the cockpit, regardless of the consequences. They would bring the plane down themselves if need be.

This moment, the guide said, marked a turning point in the war against terrorism. It was the moment when ordinary people – people who could be your own neighbors, or your teachers, or your relatives – decided to fight back.

Todd Beamer, one of the passengers who decided to storm the cockpit, had been on the phone to a dispatcher on the ground. The last thing the dispatcher heard him say was addressed to the others around him: “Are you guys ready? Okay, let’s roll.”

“Let’s roll,”
the guide repeated, pausing.

He did not repeat it again. He did not need to.

Sarah felt Sam’s hand groping for hers. She took Sam’s hand and held it tight, but no matter how hard she tried to stop it from happening, tears squeezed through her eyelids.

Travis thought he was losing his memory. Or perhaps he just had nothing to remember. It was starting to confuse him, scare him.