Throwback, p.7
Throwback, page 7
“So she wasn’t in your apartment that morning?” Corey asked. “You two were . . . ?”
“We were fighting, Corey,” Papou said. “I can’t even remember why. She was no longer living there with me. I don’t know where she was that morning. Probably with some friend—but she had hundreds of friends. Don’t stay up too late with the notes. Leave the house around six fifteen. The trains will be empty. Take the C to Fulton. Don’t forget the token.”
“What do I do when I get there?” Corey asked. “Just squeeze the token and think of nine-eleven?”
Papou sighed. “It’s not an exact science. But it helps to know where you want to go. In the spiral notebook I think there’s a photo of your grandmother near one of the towers. Take that, too. If you can, go to the same spot as the photo. Block out everything else. Don’t be nervous. It doesn’t work if you’re too nervous. And clutch tightly to that token. Do you need me to come with you? I can, you know. But I won’t be much good. Unfortunately, this will work best if you do it alone.”
“Yeah,” said Corey uncertainly. “Okay.”
“If you don’t get it right, come home. Be sure you have some change in your pocket from now. Metal! Coins! You can always try again another time.”
“I’ll be all right.” Corey smiled. “Hey. I bet she’s awesome.”
“The fig doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Papou said.
“You mean apple,” Corey corrected him.
“I mean fig. There are no apples in Greece.” Papou chuckled. When he spoke again, his voice was thicker and softer. “I love you, Corey. I will be praying. Stay safe.”
Corey’s eyes blinked open at 4:15 a.m.
It was too quiet. He needed the rumble of traffic on Ninety-Fifth Street. The world felt fake without it.
Sliding out of bed, he went to the desk and turned on his lamp. Papou’s notebook stood open. He flipped through the pages and tried to make sense of it.
Most of it was lists: INTERESTS, HOBBIES, FAVORITE RESTAURANTS, CONTACTS, MEMBERSHIPS. There were lots of photos of her, from her childhood all the way up to 2001. Pictures of their honeymoon in Mexico. A photo of her doing a crazy exaggerated ballet pose in front of one of the World Trade Towers.
That last one was the photo Papou wanted him to take. As Corey set it aside, he smiled at the image. She looked taller than Papou. Her hair was thick, dark, and tightly pulled back. In other images, when she let her hair down, it exploded outward like a storm cloud. She had an intense, no-nonsense look but also a huge grin. The last photo was dated August 2001. Her hair was half-gray. She and Papou were with friends in a restaurant, and neither of them looked happy.
That was the last one. After the photos was a section marked DOWNLOADS, where Papou had pasted some printouts from websites. Corey unfolded the first one and read the header:
SAINT NICHOLAS
GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH
155 Cedar Street, New York, NY (original address)
Erected 1832, consecrated as a church 1922, destroyed 2001 in World Trade Tower collapse, rebuilt as a National Shrine.
LIST OF ORIGINAL FOUNDERS
Corey scanned the founders list, which was full of unpronounceable Greek names. But Papou had circled one:
E. HARVOULAKIS, 127 LIBERTY STREET
So old Evanthis—his grandmother’s grandfather—had been one of the people who established the church. That was cool. Your grandmother adored him, Papou had said. We would go to the address where he grew up, the downtown corner where he ran a fruit stand.
At this hour, Papou was asleep. Also, his phone was most likely off. But Corey sent him a text anyway:
was her papou still alive in 2001? would she have gone to his place? or the spot where he lived?
you said she liked to remember him. was there anything special about that day that had anything to do with him? a bday or something? it might be a clue to where she went . . . just saying . . .
He sent the message and glanced at the printout again. Across the bottom of the page was a footer:
JOIN OUR CONGREGATION!
SUNDAY WORSHIP • SUNDAY SCHOOL BAPTISM • NAME DAY • FUNERAL SERVICES
Corey sat bolt upright. He thought about all the great parties he’d had as a kid—parties that made Leila and his other friends jealous. For the Greeks, name days were more important than birthdays. Like February 10, which was the big celebration for anyone with the name Charalambos—which was Corey’s official Greek first name.
What about Evanthis?
Corey quickly did a search on “Evanthis Name Day.” Right away he found a list of Greek Name Days that was enormous, over multiple pages. He clicked on “E” and scrolled down.
When he found what he needed, he had to take a deep, deep breath.
EVANTHIS...................SEPTEMBER 11
12
I am entering stegosaurus. btw, I think I know where she might have gone. <3 u!!!
As he left the C train at the Fulton Street subway station, Corey sent the text to Papou. The old man would know what it meant.
If you had to go back in time, this seemed like the right place to start. The station was called the Oculus and looked like some kind of movie superhero lair. Its floor was the size of a football field, with walls of curved white metal crossbeams that arched upward like giant ribs. At the top the ribs met at a thin glass ceiling, like a spine. When he first saw this as a little kid, he felt like he’d been swallowed up by a stegosaurus.
Corey rode the escalator to an exit marked the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Outside, a crowd had begun to form even though it wasn’t even 7 a.m. The glass skyscrapers blazed in the morning sun. It was much hotter than usual for an early November morning and already he had broken a sweat. From the outside, the Oculus looked less like a dinosaur than a giant white hair clip. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the old photo of his grandmother in front of the World Trade tower. Her face was slightly blurry, her head thrown back in laughter, as if Papou had just told a joke.
If you can, go to the same spot as the photo, Papou had said. Block out everything else. Don’t be nervous. It doesn’t work if you’re too nervous. And clutch tightly to that token.
How could he know what the “same spot” was? Everything from 2001 was gone—destroyed, and then rebuilt into something completely different looking. As he reached for his phone again, a tiny girl with curly red hair thrust a drippy rainbow-colored ice cream cone practically into his face.
Corey sprang back. “Gaaah!”
“You want this?” she asked. “I hate it.”
“No!” Corey squeaked. “I mean, no thanks, I don’t!”
The girl seemed offended. She stuck out her tongue and let the cone drop at his feet. He was vaguely aware of her mom pulling her away and apologizing.
Don’t be nervous. It doesn’t work if you’re too nervous.
Corey took three deep cleansing breaths. He told himself to chill. Now he noticed a small crowd heading toward the black marble wall that surrounded one of the two giant reflecting pools. The pools were supposed to represent the footprints of the two towers. His grandmother had worked in one of the towers. So there was a logical place to start.
He made his way over, breathing in . . . breathing out. . . .
Just an ordinary day . . . traveling into the past, la-la-la . . . to the worst domestic attack in US history . . .
From around the pool’s entire square perimeter, water cascaded gently down into the deep, shadowy pit. He tried not to think of what had been there. The mangled mass of offices, restaurants, bathrooms, computers, paper, water coolers, carpets, paintings, phones. Three thousand human beings, who had done nothing more than show up for work on a clear, gorgeous day.
Breathe in . . . breathe out . . .
Corey held up the photo and tried not to think of all that. In the image’s background, behind his grandmother, were a couple of tan brick Art Deco buildings. Had they survived?
Yes. They were still there. Across the vast plaza, over the heads of the tourists. The same wall of windows looked down on the scene. As if nothing had ever happened. He tried to tune out the crowd. He still wasn’t sure how this worked. The only other times he’d time-hopped were accidents. He’d never tried to do it on purpose. Did you have to be in exactly the same place? Like, be in the footsteps of the photographer?
“Is that your mommy?”
The little girl, now without an ice cream cone, was staring up at his photo and pointing to his dead yiayia’s smiling face. A few steps beyond, her parents were looking at their phones, arguing about how to get to the South Street Ferry.
“It’s my grandma,” Corey said. “But a long time ago.”
“Is she dead?” the girl asked.
“How did you know?”
The girl shrugged. “People died here. My mom and dad knew somebody, too. That’s why everybody comes. Can I see?” As Corey crouched to show her the photo, the girl smiled. “She’s pretty.”
“Was,” Corey said.
“You can see her again, you know.” The girl cast a quick glance toward her parents, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “When my doggy died? Fluffy? I cried so much. I took his picture to bed with me. I looked at it and looked at it and pretended he was alive. I told him how much I missed him. ‘I miss you I miss you I miss you. . . .’ I was holding his collar, too. It still smelled like him. And then . . .” She thrust out her arms as if to say TA-DA! “There he was! He licked me and everything! Then I had to come back.”
Now she had Corey’s attention. “Come back? From where?”
“From when he was alive, silly. I think it was like last June. ’Cause when I saw Fluffy, I saw me, too. I was in bed wearing Pete the Cat pj’s. And I stopped liking Pete the Cat in June.”
“Wait. You saw yourself in bed?” Corey said.
Before the girl could respond, her mom lunged toward her and took her hand. “I’m soooo so sorry!” she said to Corey with a nervous laugh. “Maddie likes to talk. She has such an active imagination. Let’s say goodbye now, sweetie! Mommy and Daddy are going!”
Maddie heaved her shoulders wearily. But as she turned to go, she called back over her shoulder. “Remember, talk to her. Say how much you miss her!”
Corey waved back to her with his free hand. He was shaking.
Active imagination. Right.
She was like him. Did she understand?
How many were there?
Corey had to block it out. He had a job to do. He held up the photo again, using it as a guide, lining up the angle. Trying to guess where his grandmother had been standing. Wandering left and right.
From behind, someone banged into him. “Oh. Sorry,” Corey said.
A man in a sleek suit sneered at him. “Tourist.”
Corey ignored the comment. Wandering was not good when you were among New Yorkers, who liked to walk very fast in very straight lines. But you couldn’t walk fast if you didn’t know where to go. And now the voices were clamoring all around him:
“Excuse me. . . .”
“Whoa, traffic jam . . .”
“Keep it moving, bud. . . .”
“This isn’t Iowa. . . .”
He blocked out the nastier remarks. He didn’t care. All he saw right then was his grandmother’s face. The kindness in her eyes leaped out of the photo.
Talk to her. Say how much you miss her. . . .
The little girl’s words seemed silly, but he took a deep breath and said, “Hi. Um, yeah, so this is your grandson? Corey?”
A guy with slicked-back hair bumped into him from the left, nearly knocking the photo from his hand. “Dude, can you please move to the curb?”
A street sweeper was barreling down the block, brushing up clouds of dust in the gutter. Corey edged toward the curb, out of the flow of foot traffic but a few feet from the street sweeper’s path. “Okay, I know this is ridiculous because you’re just a photo,” he continued, “and I never even met you. But I just wanted to say, I miss you. I know all about you and I miss you so much. But most of all . . . Papou misses you, too. Every day. More than anything in the world . . .”
His eyes were moist now. The throng of people became a blur, the voices fading to a murmur—until someone knocked into him from behind. Again.
The photo flew from his hand and drifted to the ground, where it landed in the gutter. The street sweeper was only a few feet away. He saw Corey and jammed on his brakes.
All Corey saw was the massive, filthy, rotating brush. And the image.
Her eyes.
He reached out to grab the photo. He felt the spray of water and debris on his back. Heard the raucous clang of a horn.
He scrambled for the curb and felt the pressure of bristles on his back. Pulling him down, taking him to the street. Behind him someone shrieked.
And everything went white.
13
He woke up screaming.
Leaning over him was a guy with thick glasses. He was wearing a blue jacket, baggy pleated pants, and a lanyard with a plastic ID card labeled “Clifton Swank.” “Hey, yo, kid,” he said in a thick New York accent. “You okay?”
Corey sat bolt upright. The sweeper was gone. It had missed him. It had missed a lot of garbage, too. Pages of newspapers were swirling in the air like dancing ghosts. He breathed in a gulp of air and shivered.
“It got cooler,” Corey said. “How long was I unconscious?”
“I don’t know, I just got here,” Swank said. “I can’t believe people just left you in the gutter. Welcome to New York, huh? Your parents around?”
“No,” Corey said, rubbing his eyes.
“Sit still, my friend. Let me call nine-one-one. . . .”
Before Corey could reply, a sheet of newspaper whapped him in the face. As he peeled it off, he couldn’t help noticing the headline:
PARENTS INCREASINGLY ALLOW HIGH SCHOOL CHILDREN
TO OWN MOBILE TELEPHONES, CITING SAFETY CONCERNS
“What the—?” His eyes darted to the top of the page.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
Corey’s blood was pumping so hard he thought his heart would spring right out of his mouth and splat into the street. “So . . .” He had to gulp to keep from choking. “It’s . . . it’s nine-eleven?”
“Nine-one-one, three digits that save lives!” Clifton Swank was punching buttons on a flip phone the size of a shoe. “The medics will take care of you.”
Over Swank’s head loomed a steel-and-glass tower. Its sides formed a perfect square, sheathed with vertical bands of steel, rising perfectly straight—no setback, no extra design. It was as if Jack’s beans, instead of sprouting a stalk, had somehow caused a giant metal cage to stretch upward into the clouds.
“I. Don’t. Believe this . . .” Corey glanced back toward the Oculus, but it was gone. So was the Memorial. In its place was a windswept cement plaza. And across the plaza was the other tower, absolutely identical, bouncing the sunlight into Corey’s eyes.
He was there.
He’d made it.
Shielding his brow, he rose slowly. He had looked at a million images of the towers, but actually seeing them made him feel dizzy. It wasn’t their beauty, exactly. They were plain and a little dull looking. But they stood like trees in a vast field, and that’s what made them different from anything in the city. They weren’t wedged into a thicket of buildings and narrow streets, like every other skyscraper. You saw them head to toe. It made them seem taller. Impossibly tall. Proud. Pure.
And they were about to disappear forever.
Corey sprang to his feet and looked at his phone. 8:03.
“Heyyyy, nice device . . . ,” Swank said, looking away from his phone to stare at Corey’s.
“Uh, I have to go,” Corey said, shoving the phone into his pocket. “Do you know where 155 Cedar Street is?”
“Head down Washington Street, turn . . . left, I think? . . . on Cedar. That way.” Swank pointed downtown. “Seriously, though, kid, you’re not going anywhere just yet. We have a few minutes before the EMTs get here. So while we’re waiting . . . y’know, I’m involved in a tech startup. I’d love to see that mobile phone—”
“My phone?” Corey whirled to face the guy.
“Whoa . . . dude . . . ,” Swank said, backing away. “Touchy . . .”
“Okay, sorry. Didn’t mean to yell. But listen to me, and listen close. Promise me you won’t think I’m crazy?”
Swank shrugged. “Sure.”
“Forget about my phone. And forget about the EMTs. They will be having a long day. Go home—now! Call everyone you know who works down here, and tell them to go home, too. In forty minutes, three thousand people are going to die.”
“Wait, what?” Swank said.
“The first plane hits at eight forty-six, the second at nine oh three. By the end of the day the Twin Towers are gone. Do you understand—gone. As in, piles of smoking steel.”
“Uh-huh. Right.” Swank held up his hand and made a V sign. “How many fingers do you see?”
“Just listen to me—we don’t have time!”
By now, two other strangers had stopped to listen. Corey turned away and sprinted across the plaza. He could hear Swank calling out behind him.
An ambulance was making its way up Church Street. It was probably the one Swank had called for him. Corey ducked behind a mail truck parked at the curb. Quickly he unfolded a sheet he’d taken from Papou’s notebook.
MARIA FLETCHER 9/11/01 SCHEDULE
5:45 a.m. Probable wake-up time. Would not tell me who she stayed with. Most likely Amy on Prospect Park West, Sarah on East 73rd, Lauren on Bethune St. She liked to go for a morning run before leaving for work.
