Page 16 of The Castaways
Her phone rang. Delilah. Phoebe let it go. She could not talk to Delilah.
She counted floors down from the top. They flashed back to Tom Brokaw.
“Show the building!” she screamed. No one on TV could hear her.
Another channel,CNN, showed the towers smoking, blazing. This channel showed people hanging out their windows. Hanging out their windows so far up? What if they fell? They were waiting for the helicopters to come. Where were the helicopters? Was the National Guard going to send in helicopters for the people who were trapped above the flames? Phoebe had seen it countless times in the movies. This was the United States. The government, the military, the people in fucking charge would use their expensive, cutting-edge technology to rescue the people hanging from their windows.
“Send the helicopters!” she screamed. Where were the fucking helicopters?
At some point it hit her. This was real. Reed was in that building, he was clinging to that office window—the very same window that for years had afforded him what he called the billion-dollar view—because the temperature inside, they said, was three thousand degrees. Was that correct? Was there even such a thing as three thousand degrees?
Phoebe was on her knees. She was freezing, shivering, convulsing. The TV showed people jumping. Jumping from the hundred and first floor? Was there a team of firemen on the ground holding one of those inflatable parachutes that would catch these people, that would make their landing marshmallow-soft?
No. The TV said the jumpers most likely would suffer a heart attack on the way down. They were dead on arrival. They splattered like a watermelon falling off the back of the farm truck. The jumpers had so much velocity, the TV said, that they were killing bystanders at the bottom.
At that moment, or a moment later, Reed jumped.
Phoebe felt it. She, too, was falling.
In high school, in the French class that Phoebe and Reed detested, both of them barely hanging on to a B minus, their teacher showed a film calledThe Corsican Brothers. About twins who felt each other’s pain. One breaks his arm, the other screams. Reed and Phoebe developed a Corsican Brother shtick for a while—Reed would bump his shin, Phoebe would howl.
You’re a regular vaudeville act,their father said.
Was there a spiritual connection between them? Did they feel each other’s pain? Sometimes people asked this. (Just as people always asked if they were fraternal or identical. Hello! World’s dumbest question!)
No,they said.
And yet there was something.
A few years earlier, Reed had gone skiing in Telluride with Cantor clients and something went wrong on one of the runs. There was an avalanche of sorts, leaving Reed buried to his waist, unable to move or even reach his cell phone, for ninety minutes. Phoebe, who was on Paradise Island in the Bahamas with Addison, felt her feet go numb. She could not feel her feet, not even when she grabbed her toes or walked over the scorching tiles around the swimming pool.
Something’s wrong with Reed,she said. She called him, and his cell phone rang and rang. She made Addison go to the concierge desk to track down the number of the mountain in Telluride.
Later, when Reed was nursing his frostbite, wrapped in blankets in front of the lodge fire with a hot toddy, they laughed over the phone and said, “Corsican Brothers.”
So, yes, there was something.
But never anything as powerful as the feeling that overcame Phoebe at that moment on September 11. She had leaped out into the billion-dollar view. She was floating. And then there was a rush, friction like she was being sucked through a tunnel. The air was devouring her. She tried to fight back but couldn’t move her arms. Her arms were pinned to her side, and then suddenly her arms were over her head, she was upside down, she was going off the high dive at the Whitefish Bay pool club, she was going to hit any second, break the surface with a resounding splash, and have a strawberry back from the impact. But there was no impact. She was still falling, keening, the air ripped her hair out, her teeth out, she was blind, she was deaf. There was so much air, she couldn’t breathe. The wind ripped her up. It rubbed against her like flint and she ignited. She burst into flame, like a star.
Reed was gone. And so was she.
She did not cry. She curled up on the sofa and shivered. The phone rang. At first she checked the display in case it was Reed, in case he had decided in a rush of fraternity-brother camaraderie to go downstairs with Ernie and Jake to watch from the ground, but it was everyone else calling. Delilah again. Ellen Paige. The Chief. Andrea. Tess. Phoebe’s mother. Ellen Paige. And finally Addison. She did not answer. These people left messages on her machine. She sensed concern (the Chief), she sensed hysteria (Ellen Paige, her mother), but she could not hear anything clearly. She was deaf from the wind in her ears.
She couldn’t watch the TV anymore, but she couldn’t stop watching. The plane hit the building; it pushed right through it like a poison dart through the wall of a straw hut. She thought of people jumping. It was jump or melt, and Reed, whose life had been just as blessed as Phoebe’s until this very morning, would have weighed two impossible options and decided to jump. Would his red cape work? He chose to believe it would—for Domino’s sake, Ellen Paige’s sake, their mother’s sake, Phoebe’s sake.
Freebird. Sweet Reedy Bird.
I’ll call you back when the dust settles here.
When the dust settles.
On TV, the buildings collapsed like a house of cards.
By the time Addison got home, sunburned and smelling strongly of fish, Phoebe had vomited all over their seventeen-thousand-dollar silk Oriental rug, hand-knotted in Tehran, and she had wet herself. Her gym shorts were soaked. She didn’t care. Nothing mattered anymore, not even when Addison gasped and said, “Jesus, Phoebe!” And she realized that she had not wet herself. She was sitting in a pool of her own blood.
It was now eight years later, and everyone had healed and moved on. Phoebe’s parents had started a scholarship at Reed and Phoebe’s high school in Reed’s name. It was a large scholarship with elaborate requirements, and they spent many of their postretirement hours administering it.
Keeps me busy,Phoebe’s father said.
