story463.xml

story463.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-04-24

I was at work talking with friends. Someone's husband called her and told her about a plane hitting one of the towers. We found a radio and listened as the second plane hit.

My husband works at the same company I do, but he always gets to work much later than I. He wasn't at work yet. I went outside to look for him, but I was afraid if I went in one direction he'd arrive from the other. I had no idea what subway lines he generally took to get from our apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. I started a slow panic. Where was he?

I'm disabled, so I was sitting in front of my work building in my battery-powered scooter. There were people everywhere, and traffic was at a standstill. Not much honking. Where was my husband?

I went back upstairs to sit with people and listen to the radio. The first tower fell. One young woman at work started to shake uncontrollably. She had a friend who worked at the Trade Center. My husband still was not at work. I happened to pass my office door and heard the phone in my office ringing. I grabbed it. It was my mother-in-law trying to reach my husband. I almost shouted at her that he wasn't here yet and that I had to go. I went back outside, where the fear was palable. I went back in. The second tower fell. I leaned to look out a window of our building, looking south. I saw the plume. My husband still wasn't here.

Then, he was at the end of the hall, sweating, breathing hard. I hobbled toward him as fast as I could. We hugged. "What the fuck happened?" he said. He'd been on the subway the entire time, probably just entering the first subway station when the first plane hit. He'd transferred at Fulton Street. Very close to the Towers. He said there were cops all over telling people they could not go above ground. What was going on? By the time my husband came above ground, at Fifth Avenue, he could tell something was wrong. People huddled in doorways, crying into their cell phones. It was too quiet. Worried about me, he ran to work.

Now we had to get home. We waited until around 2:30. I hadn't charged the batteries on my scooter for a few nights, so I probably did not have enough juice to get to the Brooklyn Bridge and over it, but I had enough if we could just get a ride down to the bridge. I could then scoot over the bridge while my husband walked beside me.

No way. There was not a taxi nor a car service to be had. A friend who lives in Chelsea had given me her phone number if we found ourselves stranded, but we both wanted to get home. We went up to Grand Central station, which is accessible, and took the elevator down to the shuttle to Times Square. But there was all this construction at the Times Square station, so we were forced to take the shuttle back to Grand Central. A police captain at the Times Square station told us that if we saw any cops at the Fifth Avenue station, which we had to get to, we should tell them that he told the cops to help us. I wish I could remember his name.

We went back to Grand Central and scooted over to Fifth Avenue. Two police officers carried my scooter down two sets of stairs at the subway entrance. I used my cane and held on to the bannister and hobbled down to the scooter. My husband and I went to another set of stairs which led to the platform. I got off my scooter, my husband took the scooter apart (it comes apart into five pieces), ran it down the stairs piece by piece, I hobbled down the stairs, he put the scooter back together. We did this same thing at wherever we transferred. We finally arrived at Jay Street in Brooklyn, not far from our apartment. My husband had to take the scooter apart and run it up the first set of stairs. At the second and last (and double) set of stairs, two unrelated people helped him and me. The trip had taken 3 1/2 hours.

Above ground the smell of burning and the grit of ash and papers on the ground. I kept saying "There must have been a fire somewhere." My husband said "it's the World Trade Center." I shut up, trying not to cry, and we went home. I made myself a huge scotch on the rocks, called my father in St. Louis (miraculously got through on the second try), and told him to tell everyone else my husband and I were safe and at home. Then we watched Guiliani. My husband's father finally got through to us by phone about 4 hours later. He'd been hitting redial for 4 hours.