Everyone has a 9/11 story. This is mine.

An excerpt from my memoir, on the 23rd anniversary of that day.

The memorial lights from the Brooklyn waterfront, 2024 ©Deborah Copaken

Last night, as the sun set, my partner and I biked home to Brooklyn along the Hudson River bike bath from a CaringKind Walk kickoff party in midtown. (He’s the co-chair of this year’s walk on October 19th to raise money for an organization that was critical to both him and his wife after her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.) It being the day before September 11th, with the same brilliant blue sky and perfect temperature, I couldn’t help but be transported back to that day twenty-three years ago, when I biked down the same path with my then four-year-old daughter in a baby seat, choking on smoke, weeping, and trying to reach Contact, my photo agency, to hand over a roll of color negative film I’d taken from our roof as the towers fell.

As we neared the World Trade Center area, I could feel my eyes watering yet again, but not from smoke. I’d just seen Tom Pescherine, mentioned below, at a wedding last weekend. He lost his brother Mike in the towers. His son Max and wife Maria were at the wedding, too. As was my daughter, now 27, who recalled spending the evening of 9/11 at the Pescherine’s apartment, not eating the brownies we’d brought and waiting, in vain, for Mike to come home to his pregnant wife.

Anyway, when my love and I reached the Brooklyn waterfront last night, both feeling a distinct sense of deja vu, we stopped to stare at the memorial lights for a brief moment, and I snapped the photo above. Then we went home to watch the debate between a mentally unstable madman, bent on destroying American democracy and women’s rights, and the decent woman for whom I will be voting. Those of you who’ve read Ladyparts, my memoir, will find the excerpt below familiar. Those of you who haven’t, this is my gift to you: 9/11, as I experienced it. And RIP to the neighborhood father in this story who watched my daughter that day while I fetched my son. He died last month from cancer.

9/11/2001 ©Deborah Copaken

That clear blue morning, deflecting questions from my then four-year-old, her still-baby thighs gripping my hip as we watched, from the roof, solid mass disintegrate into twin plumes—“Are they going to fly a plane into our building next?” (No, I promise, that’s not going to happen…); “Where’s Daddy?” (I’m sure he’s on his way back home right now…); “What’s going to happen to the kids?” (Which kids?); “The kids of the people in the fire?”—I felt fresh tremors of my own family’s implosion. As much as I was horrified at the thought of my children’s father not making it home from his office across the street from that pyre of steel and charred flesh, a small, shame-filled part of me wondered what a passive reprieve from our conflict and pain would feel like.

Phones were jammed. Transportation had shut down. So for those first chaotic hours after the planes hit, I had no word from him. Emails, on the other hand, were landing in my inbox faster than I could respond, many of them too painful to process. Ted Hennessy, a friend from college, was a passenger on one of the planes. Carlton Valvo, father of Dante, a second grader in my son’s school, was trapped in the tower. Mike Pescherine, uncle of Max, my son’s best friend, was trapped there as well. Yes, I replied to Tom and Maria, Max’s parents. I’d come by with the kids and food later that night to hold vigil. Maybe Mike would make it out of the rubble, who knew? That was the magical thinking we still had in those first hours. That a person might survive a fire followed by a hundred-floor plunge. We’d all had dinner together just a few weeks earlier. Between the main course and dessert, Mike had proudly announced that his wife Lyn was pregnant with their first child.

I slammed shut my computer. It was too much. The smoke had now wafted uptown, into our apartment. It smelled acrid, toxic. I closed the windows before strapping my daughter into a baby seat on the back of my bike to hand-deliver the film I’d shot of the burning towers to my photo agent, who’d put out an SOS for whatever images any of us in New York might have snapped that morning.

Riding downtown on the Hudson River bike path, against an amoeba flow of the vacant-faced heading uptown on foot, felt like being back at war, so familiar was the march and scope of human trauma moving step-by-step together, away from the violence, backlit against smoke. I wanted to stop and shoot off a few frames of this, but my daughter had fallen asleep in the baby seat, clutching my camera bag, and the bike would have toppled over had I left her alone to climb a tree to get the shot. Instead, the image would lodge itself in my memory such that I have not been able to ride down the Hudson River bike path since without seeing those dust-covered ghosts.

“Oh, gosh. I’m sorry. I forgot you have a toddler,” whispered my agent, Jeffrey, when I pushed the bike and napping child out of the elevator and asked him to hold it upright as I fumbled in the bag for the film. I apologized for not being able to head farther downtown into the heart of the chaos. I still had to fetch my son. His first grade teacher had suggested we not pick them up until the end of the day, to give them some semblance of normalcy, but now I was having second thoughts.

I hopped on the bike and pedaled as fast as I could back uptown, away from what would turn out to be lethal air. But what to do with the four-year-old, still asleep in her baby seat? My son’s school was too far from our home for her to walk; I’d given away her stroller; our usual babysitter was trapped across the river in Brooklyn; the city was on lockdown, with all subway, taxi, car, and bus travel forbidden; and I could fit only one child on the bike at a time. It felt like one of those brain teasers in which the farmer has a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain but can take only one item across the river at a time.

“Where is he?” I said out loud, pedaling past the Intrepid, one of my husband’s favorite museums, tears falling hard as the reverberations of overhead fighter jets rattled my rib cage. What I meant was Where is my husband at this exact moment in time? Is he dead? Is he alive? but also Where is he always?

In the spring of 1995, two weeks before our first child’s due date, he’d insisted we visit the Intrepid, a former World War II aircraft carrier docked in the Hudson River. The ship had survived five kamikaze attacksand one torpedo strike. I, on the other hand, could barely survive its steep, narrow staircase. Halfway up, bent over in pain and winded from the pressure of womb upon lungs, I stopped. “I can’t make it,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Go on without me. I’ll wait for you on a bench downstairs.”

“No!” said my husband, visibly upset. “You promised!” He loved war museums. I’d found this endearing, at first, his love of history, armaments, and though I would not necessarily choose to visit a war museum during my downtime, I went along with it in every city we visited because that’s what marriage is about, I thought. Compromise.

Trapped between Memorial Day weekend tourists, not wanting to make a scene, I kept climbing up the stairs until I reached the top, where I was promptly left sitting on the floor. (There were no benches, or at least none I could immediately locate.) I thought about heading back down the stairs to sit by the water, on an actual bench, on a beautiful Sunday in May, but I figured my husband would take a quick look around and then come back to find me. Instead, he toured the ship on his own for what felt like forever while I sat on the floor waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Where is he? I wondered. Portable cellphones were still three years away. The Braxton-Hicks contractions grew more and more intense with each passing minute. Or were those real contractions? (They were real.)

“Where were you?” I said, choking back tears, when he finally returned.

“What? I was visiting the museum,” he said.

Two hours later, in Rockefeller Park, a downtown landfill in the shadow of the Twin Towers, my water broke.

Now, six years later, back home from the photo agency, I unstrapped my sleeping daughter from the bike, put her down for a nap, and tried to reach someone to watch her while I fetched my son. But the phone lines were still jammed. And while the many parenting books on my shelves had excellent tips on sleep training, hiding vegetables in sauces, and dealing with toddler tantrums, none of them had any advice on dealing with school pickup during a terrorist attack.

Then, a reprieve: A neighborhood father showed up, in person, asking if I needed any help. I thanked him, left him in my apartment with my sleeping toddler, and immediately jumped on my husband’s bike, which was equipped with a tagalong for an older child. I pedaled east across Manhattan with R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World” ricocheting through my head, an unending earworm. New York City, absent its cars and people, unfurled in ominous silence between sirens, sparkling beneath cerulean skies. I felt guilty for noticing and appreciating this.

“You’re late,” said my son, his bottom lip quivering, when I finally fell to my knees and hugged him. It was just after lunch, but he was nevertheless one of the last first graders to be picked up. I guess all the other parents decided not to wait until the end of the school day either.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said, choking back my own tears. “I got here as fast as I could.”

“Max’s uncle is in the building. And Dante’s daddy.”

“I know. I heard. It’s terrible.” I held him as he crumbled.

“Is Daddy okay?” He’d just visited his father’s office at 5 World Trade Center the previous week. They’d gone all the way up to the Windows on the World to check out the view.

“Daddy’s fine,” I said, leaving out the part about not having heard from him for several hours. Cellphone towers had been jammed since the attack, so it was understandable, but why hadn’t he called our landline from his office or from a payphone*, just to let us know he was okay? Men and women dying in buildings, in harrowing voicemails made public, had figured out ways to call their spouses and kids to say, “I love you.” It had now been five hours since he left for work.

No. No. Stop catastrophizing, I chastised myself. He’s fine. He’s just being him.

A year into our relationship, in a busy train station in Milan, I’d left my husband—then boyfriend—alone for five minutes while I fetched us two bottles of water. When I returned to the spot where I’d left him, he was gone. He stayed gone—this was also in the pre-cellphone era—for over an hour, not understanding my tears and fury when I finally found him. “Where have you been?” I’d said. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

“Exploring,” he said, hurt and confused by my anger.

So much of what I loved about this man was his guilelessness: his intense curiosity, his childlike awe and innocence, which could sometimes manifest as a kind of accidental ignorance. Ignorance, however, need not be willful for it to be destructive.

My son and I exited his school as yet another rumble of fighter jets zoomed above. We looked up. What was happening in the sky? Were more planes trying to crash into more buildings? “How do you know Daddy’s fine?” said my son.

“I just do,” I said, fairly confident of my statement at the time, but then, upon our return home, a new question had hit my inbox, from multiple correspondents: Did I know whether or not my husband had gone to the breakfast at the Windows on the World?

What breakfast at the Windows on the World? I looked it up. My heart sank.

The ill-fated breakfast had been organized by the eerily named Risk Waters Group for delegates in the financial sector working in tech. My husband, at the time, was in the financial sector, working in tech. Had he been invited to that breakfast? We hardly ever discussed our day-to-day professional minutiae. Or really anything for that matter. I did my writing, he did whatever he spent his day doing, maybe we’d speak for five minutes at the end of the day, after I’d fed, bathed, and read to the kids, loaded the dishwasher, folded the laundry, signed the permission slips, and sorted plastic figurines from Lego bricks from wayward spirals of pasta before sitting down to sneak in another hour or two of writing. I’d given up asking where he was or begging him to come home in time for dinner. By that point, it seemed easier to go to bed at 10 p.m. than to stay up late for his arrival and ignite yet another argument about the imbalance in our domestic duties, the strain it was putting on my career, or how lonely I felt in our marriage.

All this to say, I had every reason to believe he was there at that breakfast at the Windows on the World and every reason to believe he was not. And also every reason to believe he could have been somewhere else entirely. Exploring.

Should I make a missing person sign? The next day, the city would be choked with them, as if everyone in New York had had the exact same thought at the exact same moment, printing photos of their loved ones under “Missing!” and “Have you seen my daddy?” and “Last seen at 7 A.M., please call Juanita with any information.”

No, I thought. Stop panicking. He’s just being him. A month into our courtship, back in Paris in 1990, I’d arrived at the appointed time to the brasserie he’d picked for our date. Fifteen minutes dripped by. Then twenty. Then forty-five. I asked the maître d’, several times, if anyone had called for me. “Non,” I was told, with increasing pity and annoyance.

So much for that relationship, I thought, stomping home, too angry to cry. But then I walked in, and my phone rang. “Please,” he begged, full of remorse. Please try to understand: His French wasn’t good enough to explain that he’d been held up at work. Plus he didn’t have the number of the restaurant.

“You didn’t have…the number? Why didn’t you look it up on the Minitel?” The Minitel was France’s internet before the internet, a little box of magic France Télécom provided with your phone service. You could talk to strangers on it. Sext before sexting was even a verb. Find any phone number in France.

“I was stuck in a meeting,” he said. He offered to cook me dinner the next night in recompense. At first I said no. Then, believing everyone deserves a second chance, I changed my mind.

Years later, I would read that Maya Angelou quote—“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”—and think back to that choice. But I’d said yes to his home-cooked penance, which was delicious, and then the next morning, when he left for work, he accidentally locked me inside his apartment. He apologized profusely for that, too—I’d had to cancel an important meeting with the photo editor of Géo—and now here we were: him, AWOL once again, but presumably making his way home from a terrorist attack; me, hunkering down with our children, pretending everything was okay.

When he finally walked in the door, several hours after the attack, I wept. As despairing as I was about the state of our marital dyad, no part of me would have wanted my young children, now smothering him with kisses, to have been deprived of their father. In fact, it was at that moment that I doubled down on my commitment to fix whatever was broken.

The next day, September 12, 2001, was our eighth wedding anniversary. But between the thousands of missing faces staring out from those hand-lettered flyers; the armed National Guards on every corner; the deaths of friends and community members; the implosion, with the towers, of my husband’s job; and the fact that our dinner reservation was now located across from a still-smoldering mass grave, it didn’t seem right to start sifting through our marital dirt in search of the salvageable.