“Niece!” My uncle crossed the room in a few wide strides, lifted me off the floor, and spun me before setting me down. Felt like something my daddy would have done, should have done, except that neither of us seemed able to bridge the six years of near-silence that lay heavy between us. My anger subsided in my uncle’s embrace. He smelled like him, his brother. I took a deep whiff of sandalwood, cigarettes, and shoe polish.
“Looking just like your daddy. Look at them long spider legs. And you dark as night, girl,” he said.
I blushed.
“And what the hell is wrong with that?” Auntie August rested the shotgun against the front door.
Uncle Bird raised his hands in capitulation. “Not a damn thing. The girl is beautiful. It is well known that North women can stop traffic. Speaking of, you wouldn’t believe the traffic out of Virginia. Nothing I ever seen before. Standstill. Hell, our drive took us all day, all night.
“Now, Meer.” My uncle turned to face Mama. “I know you and my brother got, um, words need saying. That’s fine. But a cup of coffee? Slice of one of your pies? What you say?”
Mama refused to brew Daddy any coffee, so Auntie August put on a pot. Mama’s silent rage was understandable. She had raised us for six years without any help from him. Three Christmases back, she had opened an envelope filled with five one-hundred-dollar bills and sent it right back to him with a note that read, “Our sorrow is priceless.”
I, too, was stalwart in my contempt. All of us now seated at the kitchen booth, I held my mug and sipped my coffee, never taking a raised eyebrow off Daddy, seated across from me. As a girl, I had loved him more than I loved drawing. At fifteen, I realized he had brought us nothing but pain. And recently he had scared Mya near to death so that the girl wouldn’t move for three days. In my brewing antipathy, I had figured that if the planes fell, it was somehow his fault.
Mama’s arms never left their crossed position. Her eyes were daggers. She sat next to me at our round table and glared at Daddy. Uncle Bird and Auntie August were busy brewing coffee and chain-smoking by the stove.
Silence grew around us, heavy with my mother’s and my unspoken accusations. It was a wonder how Mya stayed asleep with all the earlier commotion in the parlor. It was the first the girl had slept in some days, so Mama had decided not to wake her.
Mya had been near comatose those three days. Days before, when she had refused to move, I took the television that usually sat on top of the microwave, unplugged it, brought it into the quilting room, and put on her favorite show. Mya was just a small brown face in a cocoon of blankets. She did not rouse when I maneuvered the television set so it rested in her eyesight. Even Sailor Moon’s opening theme song did not rouse her.
Uncle Bird was the only person who seemed at ease. He played house. Cigarette in his mouth, he served Mama a cup of hot coffee, asked if she wanted any cream.
“She takes hers black, lot of sugar,” Daddy said quickly, sounding grateful to have something to say. The intimacy of his voice unsettled me.
Then Mama did something so heroic. She reached across the Formica kitchen table, took a long cigarette from August’s pack, lit it, and exhaled a plume of smoke in Daddy’s face.
Daddy showed a hint of surprise, but not shock. I believe he could remember the power my mama had over him. He opened his hands in forgiveness, but said nothing.
In that long moment, I truly believed that my parents, in some past time, would have crossed the Sahara for each other. Arms outstretched, seeking each other out before water.
“You”—Daddy pointed to Mama, then to me—“you were the first thing I came for. When I saw that wall of fire…” His voice caught. He looked away from us. Gathering himself, he cleared his throat.
He started to tell his story haltingly. Said how the burning bodies were what would stay with him. That and the initial sound of the plane’s engine careening toward the building. He said that he and Bird and Mazz had run to one wall, their fatigues and service shirts bandaged over their hands and mouths, so the fire wouldn’t burn them and the smoke wouldn’t choke them as they pulled people out of the burning rubble. Folk were covered in soot. Head to foot. Others, simply on fire. Screaming into melting concrete.
We were quiet, listening. Mama’s arms were no longer folded—she was taking sips of her coffee—but she seemed determined to look unaffected by the hell Daddy was describing. I tried to mirror her.
In a rush, Daddy explained that he had tried calling us, but my aunt had been right: The phone lines were down. For three days the phones did not work. He couldn’t catch a flight. Every airport in America was closed. So, he hopped into that black Mustang of his and drove.
Daddy took a deep breath then and began again, speaking more slowly this time. We were all looking at him, but he was looking only at Mama. That and the desperation in his voice, the way it sounded almost like a plea, gave me the impression he was offering up this story to her as both explanation and apology for something else altogether.
He told us he’d been smoking a Kool with Uncle Bird and Uncle Mazz outside the southwestern corner of the Pentagon. Uncle Bird had flown down from Chicago to see his big brother make lieutenant colonel. The ceremony was scheduled for the morning of the eleventh.
Daddy said he’d been looking at the yellow underbellies of the leaves on an oak in the Pentagon’s entrance when they heard a low roar. Approaching. Mechanical. Growing louder. The three of them had scanned the parking lot for a truck, but they only saw a handful of latecomers and a wide sea of parked cars.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Daddy described seeing the cigarette drop from his brother’s mouth. He’d followed Uncle Bird’s eyes, and that’s when he’d seen it.
The Boeing 757 barreled straight toward them. Low. Lower than he’d ever seen a plane except at an airport. Bird or Mazz had shouted, but the sound of the engine was so loud now, it drowned out whatever they’d said.
Daddy said that though it was irrational, he’d been certain the plane would stop. That it would turn at the last moment, or pull up, fly past the building where he and Mazz and Bird and twenty-five thousand other military personnel and civilians worked alongside one another.
But the plane did not stop. It angled itself farther toward the innards of the building and flew straight into the western side of the Pentagon.
The kitchen was quiet except for the sound of Daddy’s voice, low and steady. Eyes still on Mama. She put her cigarette out on the ashtray and took a sip of coffee. But I could see the muscles in her neck were tensed.
The anger I had felt for years at my father was what I had had instead of him. It was all I had of him. So, I carried it with me always, like a rose quartz in my palm. And it was slowly disappearing, my quartz. Growing tiny. I was hardly feeling the rough edges of it anymore. I realized, as time passed in the kitchen, the grandfather clock in the parlor having sung its swan song three times now, that love was wearing me down. Love, like a tide, just washing over and over that piece of rock. And I believed that only God—and maybe Miss Dawn—could change a tide.
Daddy went on. He said the three of them had been knocked off their feet by the impact, but that the first thing they did was to grope around in the smoke and dust to find each other. Mazz and Daddy found each other at nearly the same time—their Marine training making them uniquely suited for the aftermath of the world exploding—then searched frantically for Bird, who had been thrown farther but was okay.