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.
Almost as soon as they found Uncle Bird, they started hearing faint, urgent sounds through the ringing in their ears. The screech of metal; stone breaking. Screams of people trapped inside the building. The fierce roar of fire engulfing both plane and building, peppered with the noise of metal snapping, stone falling.
That’s when they realized that people were running out of the building and that those people were burning. Daddy said he could smell it—charred hair and seared flesh.
I saw Daddy wipe his eyes with the back of his hand, whereas I had just let mine flow, the taste of my tears turning my coffee salty. We had started weeping at the same time some hours before. How similar we were…I was his daughter whether I wanted to be or not.
He took a sip of his coffee, and I realized his hands were shaking slightly. He looked more exhausted now than he had when he first walked in.
Early dawn light made the kitchen glow a pale blue. It had taken the length of the night to tell his story. I heard birds outside start to sing.
I looked at Mama. Her arms were crossed tightly in front of her again.
Uncle Bird passed a lit cigarette to Auntie August, who accepted. They had stood like that the entire time, their shoulders touching lightly.
Daddy cleared his throat. “I said ‘oo-rah’ and ran toward the broken wall, the one people were running out from. We all did. But there was nothing we could do. The heat alone. The heat from it. I. I can’t. There aren’t words. It was so hot. And the people. The people were on fire, Meer.” He pounded a fist on the kitchen table, and it made me jump.
“It was just like that night in that barbershop.” I didn’t know what he was talking about; my mother’s face remained impassive. “Meer, the nights we fought. That one Easter night. Or the night of the Marine Corps Ball. The hospital…” he said when my mother stayed silent, turning to me for the first time since he’d begun his story.