Very early Friday morning, long before dawn, Amber was back at her desk. The girls were sleeping, she hoped. Her routine was to call the city hospitals and emergency rooms searching for someone not yet identified, to see if a voice might pick up the line instead of the automated bots. She hoped that someone would take the information, deliver the miracle that she thought was slowly slipping away — To hear the doctor or nurse rush back, semi out of breath yet ecstatic, and to exclaim, Yes, Yes he’s here. He fits that description. He answers to that name. He’s yours. He’s alive. He’s found.
Getting someone to answer the phone was nearly impossible no matter how many times she dialed yet she did. She understood the equation — That she was one of the many thousands making those calls, in desperation, from living rooms and kitchens, offices, and basements without any geographical constraints.
I had known Amber for just a few months having worked in New York for a while we were commuters on the same train until we realized that we worked in the same building on adjacent floors. She was around 30 but looked older for her age. She carried a jute bag on her shoulders, her hair tied in a loose ponytail. I had met her husband and played with her girls at times, but did not know that she had lost a brother during the 9/11 attacks.
Today’s the first time I had visited her house, a small brownstone in Queen’s. It was sparse yet warm, everything neatly in place, a lamp casting lights and shadows just around me. Her husband Jack is still at work and the kids are playing outside as she keeps a watchful eye on them from the window. I am sitting across the chair from her having just finished a glass of diet coke and a sandwich that she had made in the kitchen.
She starts to tell me how she even began to call late especially around the hours on either side of midnight and all through the dawn. She would call from the room downstairs so as not to disturb the girls and to let Jack find any traces that he could. It was nearly four days since the attacks.
She stood up from her desk chair to stretch and walk around the room for a few paces, to get away from the monotonous buzz of the receiver, to gather some energy for the next call.
That’s when she felt him in the room.
“His presence”, she said.
It was more than a vision. There was an energy there, a vital field reaching out to her. She wanted to turn around from the desk and look behind her, towards the dark left corner of the room, but she couldn’t. To turn and look would be, in her mind, a lack of faith in him — A betrayal. The house was otherwise still and the lights were dim. She’d had visions before. This was different. It was not a clear sight, it was a connection, a communication.
“I just knew it was Brad”, she said. “I knew”.
She didn’t hesitate or startle. She said she spoke directly to the space in front of her.
“Brad,” she said his name. She waited, but not long. She wanted to acknowledge him. She said the first words that came from inside her.
“Thank you”… She wanted him to know what this gave her, what that moment contained. She had the phone message he’d left, she could hear the voice and perhaps already knew how she would play it in her head, to hold the sound of him near. The feeling in the room now was different, a force more than a sound.
“If you can do that,” she said, referring to the energy and the feeling, to the connection, “I know you ‘re okay, but you’re not here anymore.”
It was around 3 AM. She continued to look straight ahead, as she kept her back turned to the presence.
“It’s time to go now Brad”, she said.
She stood for several long moments as the presence receded from the room, leaving her alone in the silence of the house, the hair at the back of her neck standing in rapt attention.
She had made a decision, a silent step.
Looking at the phone, she took a step forward and closed the directory from which she was dialing, and turned away.
“That’s when I gave up looking”, she said to me, her eyes dark hollows behind the dimly lit lamp on that summer evening.
“Because I knew at that moment that he was gone…”
