All We Have Left

by Wendy Mills

I try to smile, but my mouth does a weird twisty thing, so I gaze around instead. His room is a mess, but the walls and ceiling are covered with an elaborate, shadowy mural, full of people and blood and a horse with wings. “Wow,” I say. “Did you do this?”

“So, Alia, when are we going to see the next installment of Lia? I’m jonesing for my favorite Muslim American superhero,” Kaitlin says, trying to cheer me up. “Just because you don’t get to go to the NYU program doesn’t mean you have to give up on Lia,” Tanjia says. “Your fans are not patient. You left us hanging with Lia’s mom stuck in the Arctic ice and Lia trying to decide whether she was going to rescue her or save the world from the Evil Mad Doctor,” Kaitlin says encouragingly. “She’s still deciding,” I say, thinking of the crumpled-up pieces of paper covered with sketches piled in my trash can.

“Your brother’s dead, huh?” he says after he pulls out onto the road. People ask about Travis sometimes, usually around 9/11 when the yearly article about him in the local paper comes out, but it’s always with a note of awe, as if somehow having a brother who died on 9/11 makes me special.

Tucker. Craig Tucker. Three or four years ago Craig Tucker came home from Afghanistan with only one leg. I remember now that Dave’s his brother. He and I share something then, a brother who makes us memorable for all the wrong reasons.

A black-and-white cop car cruises by, and slows near us. I hold my breath, and Nick runs his hand up my back and into my hair. He pulls my head over and gives me a casual kiss, but it’s enough to make sparks shudder through me. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Still watching?” he says out of the corner of his mouth to Dave. “Nah, he’s gone,” Dave says, glancing over his shoulder. Nick doesn’t let me go though, and I snuggle close to his side as we walk up the steep sidewalk. I see Hailey’s face, and for a moment I feel sorry for her. Then Nick pulls me in for another kiss, and this one is longer. My head is swimming when he lets me go and keeps walking. “Where are we going to hit next?” he says.

After we moved, I began hanging around Carla Sanchez and her girls, and Mama and I went from not fighting, ever, to having these epic blowouts that blew up the walls of our apartment.

The first pages are the news articles that our local paper does every year on the anniversary of 9/11. They all say the same thing, that Travis was eighteen when he died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, that he was a recent graduate of our town’s high school, and that he played in a popular local band. There’s not much else, because as far as I know my parents never talk to the reporter when she calls every year. The articles always show the same sly-eyed graduation photo of Travis in a tux, like it is the only picture ever taken of him. No one in my family ever says much about Travis. Hank used to talk about him some, before he decided to drop an arsenal of bombshells all over Christmas three years ago, and the resulting Dad-sized explosion blasted him out of our lives for good. But he only talked about Travis as a big brother, funny stories like the time Travis chased Hank so high up a tree they had to call the fire department to get him down, or how they used to play football with me when I was a little kid, and I was the football. But he never said a word about what happened to Travis on 9/11.

I’m still trying to formulate the perfect words that will make Ayah listen, to make him understand, as I change at Chambers Street for the local #1/9 and get out one stop later at the Cortlandt Street station. I climb the narrow brick staircase and enter the light modern hall above. People are hurrying in all directions, and I sidestep a woman carrying a green-and-white Krispy Kreme Doughnuts box, and go through glass doors past a sign reading 1 World Trade Center. The lobby is white marble, soaring windows, glass and metal. I stop next to a potted plant, feeling small all of a sudden as people hurry past me, their voices crisscrossing across the echoing space. I scratch my head, because my hijab is itchy. A guy in a suit standing on the balcony ringing the second floor points at me, and for a minute I think it’s because of my scarf, but then he starts smiling and waving and a woman behind me calls, “I’ll be right there.” Feeling silly, I bypass the line of employees swiping their ID cards at the turnstiles, and hurry over to the security line. The line moves in fits and starts, but thankfully, there aren’t a whole lot of visitors this time of morning. When it’s my turn, I give the guy in a blue blazer my school ID and best smile, and with some sweet-talking, he hands over a visitor pass card. Then I go to stand with a crowd of people waiting for an express elevator to take me up to my father’s offices, high up in the north tower.

“You just missed him, honey,” he says with his mouth full, a smudge of cream cheese on his chin. “He was in earlier, but he left to go vote, and then he’s got a training seminar across town. Bagel?” He offers me an American Café bag. “They’re kosher, halal, for you.” I shake my head. “No, thank you.”

My stomach turns, and before I can help myself, I think: It was Muslims who hijacked those planes and drove them into the towers of the World Trade Center and killed all those people. It was Muslims who killed my brother. “See?” Dave says. “Can you believe this crap? My brother got his leg blown off over there, and they want to open up a freaking peace center?”

All the hot, blinding anger that has fueled me since I found my dad with Travis’s album is gone, and all I feel is empty and alone. All I feel is nothing.

He offers me his hand, and we shake awkwardly across our knees and legs. “I’m Travis,” he says.

Sabeen shoves her brother’s arm playfully, and I recognize him, of course I do, and my bones dissolve, my heart collapses in on itself, because I didn’t know. I didn’t know. His laughing gaze falls on me, and his face freezes, the dimple disappearing, and his sky-blue eyes turn cold.

“I don’t remember her—she died when I was a baby. But Gramps told me he wanted her to see the towers while they were still building them. He was like that, kind of impulsive and brave and romantic. He bribed a security guard to let them in and they took a construction elevator up and walked around. He said it was like standing in a giant Tinkertoy, because all you could see was the steel skeleton. He told my grandmother, ‘These are the bare bones of one of the greatest buildings in the world. It’s just being born, but it’ll be here a thousand years, I bet.’ He loved talking about the towers. He had so many stories, and when I was a kid I would just sit and listen.” “I wish he were here,” I say. “It sounds like he would know what to do.” “I wish he were here too,” Travis says, still rubbing the back of his neck. “But he died five days ago.”

“When you grow up Muslim, hell, different in any way, you get real good at reading people. You can tell the good ones, who might not end up liking you—sure, who likes everyone they meet?—but they’re not going to hate you because you’re Muslim, or black, or gay, or, I don’t know, a blue Smurf. And then there are the other kind, the ones who feel better about themselves when they have someone to hate.”