Friday. The traffic would be awful. And she had her car in long-term parking. The Triboro Bridge would be backed up. And the rain would make it worse.
She got her black rolly down from the overhead bin and waited in the aisle to get off the plane.
“Thank you for flying Virgin Atlantic,” they said by way of goodbye.
The walk to Passport Control went on forever. The specter of having to drive over the bridge haunted her. Suppose she got stuck in traffic in the middle of the bridge with her heart beating out of control. She would have to get off. She would have to. This started back in October of 2001, returning from Washington on a Sunday night — at dusk on a misty evening, driving along, sipping the latte she had picked up at the rest stop. The bottoms of her feet had gotten sweaty when suddenly there was the Delaware Memorial Bridge — the double span sticking up above some light fog. It would have looked pretty, if it hadn’t frozen her heart. She couldn’t drive up there.
She had moved behind a blue Volkswagen Passat in the middle lane and hung onto the steering wheel for dear life. She had stayed behind that car and couldn’t look left or right until they got through the toll on the other side. Heart still pounding, she had pulled over at the first opportunity. It was almost an hour before she could get back on the road.
A few months later, she had gotten lost trying to get back to Manhattan from Newark without driving on the Pulaski Skyway. Worse and worse. Two weeks ago, she had driven down through New Jersey and gone through the Lincoln Tunnel and back up to the Bronx, just to avoid the George Washington Bridge. So ashamed, she hadn’t even told her sister. But when she finally mentioned it to Roger, who was hardly a close friend, he immediately asked, “Did this start after 9/11?” The idea had shocked her.
“Go to line twenty-seven.” The short, sharp-faced African-American woman at Passport Control jabbed a finger in the direction of a booth.
The officer’s face was round and kind, but he looked at her with hard, searching eyes. She handed him her passport. He scanned it and watched the screen, then handed it back with a perfunctory, “Welcome home.”
The baggage was slow. The rain, she guessed. The Hasidic guy stood near her, waiting. The rainy weather made her knee worse. She tried to keep her weight off it.
On 9/11 she had been down in Soho, getting physical therapy. She hadn’t gone to the office that morning. A lot of people weren’t at work for odd reasons. They were late. They called in sick. She had heard a lot of stories like this. A woman who went to pick up her new eyeglasses and never got up there. A guy from Jersey whose little girl had cried and said, “Daddy, don’t go.” The father had stopped so long comforting his kid, he missed his train. The kid had saved her father.
Her knee had saved her. By rights she should have been on the ninety-seventh floor.
After her therapy appointment, while icing her knee, she felt the gym go quiet. They were all staring at the burning skyscraper on the TV, asking each other, “Which building?” “What kind of plane?”
Her office would be flooded with light. On such a sunny day, the intensity of the light always made her giddy. Working up there made you feel important, even if all you did was put numbers into spreadsheets all day. Gerry and Margaret, sitting at their desks, would be silhouetted against the windows on a day like this. Like ghosts. Only black. Only they couldn’t be sitting. Not with this going on in the other tower.
She stood, gazing at the burning building, completely silent, feeling guilty that she was thinking about how much it would hurt her knee to be walking down all those stairs with them. The second plane hit. “Terrorists,” was all she said. She went and put on her clothes.
She had a portable radio in her gym bag. Only one station was broadcasting. One tense male voice.
On her way out, she glanced over at the knot of people gathered in front of the big TV near the treadmills and Stair-Masters. Radio to her ear, she left without looking at the screen.
Out on Broadway, the air was acrid with smoke and stung her throat. People streamed up the sidewalks. Ambulances and firetrucks careened south toward the towers. An EMT vehicle with the words Valley Stream Rescue Squad on its side went screaming by. How the hell could they have gotten here so fast?
A crowd gathered around her. “What are they saying?” A short guy in a snug gray suit pointed to the radio. She held it out to him. The battery was weak and the street so noisy that he had to put his finger in his opposite ear to hear it. Two big African-American women with tears streaming down their faces stopped and asked for news. She just shrugged and gestured to the guy holding her radio.
One of them was sobbing uncontrollably. “They are jumping out of the top floors.”
They couldn’t be. No one would do that. Gerry wouldn’t do that. Harry Ardini wouldn’t do that. She looked at the other woman, who just nodded and pulled her friend away, up Broadway.
She pictured the wide expanse of her office. The fichus tree next to her chair burning. The light from it shining in the frame on her desk. Her sister’s picture smiling through the bright red reflected flames.
The guy handed the radio back to her. She put it to her ear and started walking north with the herd.
The voice on the radio was suddenly hysterical. “We’re losing it! We’re losing it! OMIGOD!”
She turned and looked down Broadway. Her building was collapsing. Boom! Boom! Boom! Like one of those structures in a demolition movie. A huge cloud of thick gray dust rushed toward them up the street. She turned again and ran. Past the church with the pealing bells. The sexton had thought to do that. As if he were in some medieval village that had the plague.
She had walked all the way to Riverdale that day. Over the Henry Hudson Bridge. Her knee never recovered, had not stopped hurting since. She never returned to physical therapy. Just the thought of physical therapy brought back that picture in the papers the next day. The guy falling though the air. Head down. The familiar building behind him. She had looked and looked at that picture. Sometimes she was sure it was Harry. Other days, it didn’t look like his hair.
The buzzer on the luggage carousel sounded and the metal belt started to move. Bags moved down the slope onto the belt in front of her. The Hasidic guy peered at a huge black one, frowned, and then let it pass. It came around again. Blood dripped from a small opening where the zippers met at the top. Bright and shining, it pooled onto the metal of the conveyor. She breathed in to scream as it went by. She held her breath. People would call her a hysteric. Seeing blood all the time, knowing that if she had jumped that day her body would have liquefied. That’s what they said. That a body hitting the ground from such a height just liquefies. The bottoms of her feet were sweating. Just like driving over a bridge.
Her bag came tumbling down the slope. She saw the green ribbons on the zipper. Not red. Not blood. She grabbed her bag, turned in her card at Customs, and dragged it to the nearest restroom. She couldn’t drive over the bridge. She just couldn’t.
In the handicapped stall, she sat on the toilet and laid the big bag down. Inside was her toiletries kit, with all that stuff you can’t carry with you on a plane anymore.
She unzipped it and pulled out a pink disposable razor. She wedged it under the toilet paper dispenser and pressed hard. It bent but would not break. She put her foot against it too and finally it popped with a loud metallic crack.
“Are you okay in there?” a voice from another stall called.
“Fine,” she said.
She retrieved the razor blade from the floor and held it carefully between her thumb and forefinger. This is better, she thought. She could stop the pictures in her head of Harry liquefying on the sidewalk. She could finally do what she was supposed to have done. She cut along the blue veins on her wrists. She held out her arms and let the blood drip on the green ribbons, running them red, like the blood in baggage claim.