Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

She called Reed back. It was five after nine.

“Hey, Twist,” he said. His voice was calm, but in the background Phoebe could hear shouting, which seemed more frenzied than the usual Cantor shouting. “You would not believe what is happening here. Have you seen the news?”

“Sort of,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Well, I just threw up in my trash can,” he said. “Because I tell you what, people are dead over in that other building. You should see the smoke. It stinks, even in here.”

“What are they… are they saying anything?”

“We’re supposed to sit tight. Some of the guys-Ernie, Jake, you know-they want to go to the ground to watch, but there’s debris falling. It’s safer, I think, to stay put.”

“You think?”

“That’s what…”

“What?” Phoebe said. She couldn’t hear.

“I’ll call you back when the dust settles, okay? I love you. I’m going to be fine, I promise.”

“Okay,” Phoebe said.

“I have to call Ellen Paige. She’s at play group with Domino, but when she hears about this, she’s going to freak.”

“Okay. I love you,” Phoebe said.

“Hey,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Me?” Phoebe said. “I feel fine.”

There was a noise. Honestly, it sounded like a lion roaring, or a wave crashing over her head. The line went dead. Phoebe nearly sideswiped the mailman, who was filling boxes on Old South Road.

She watched footage of the plane hitting the second tower on Addison’s sixty-inch plasma TV, in the closed-up, air-conditioned, professionally decorated comfort of her own home. Outside, the day shimmered. Nantucket was as tranquil and lovely as it had ever been. Phoebe turned her stare outside, in a daze. According to Tom Brokaw, America was under attack. Phoebe waited for the planes to come screaming over the ocean. Nothing. A monarch butterfly settled momentarily on the picnic table, then flew away.

On the TV a plane hit the second tower, which was Tower One. Again and again. Phoebe was riveted. Show it again! She was counting floors and dialing Reed from her landline.

“Pick up!” she screamed into the phone. No one was around, no one could hear her. Their neighbors on both sides had left after Labor Day.

Her call went to Reed’s voicemail. “Call me!” she screamed.

It looked like the plane had hit the second tower, Tower One, about two thirds of the way up. Definitely lower than the hundred and first floor. Were there a hundred and five floors or a hundred and ten? She couldn’t remember.

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 called The 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.