I STEPPED OUTSIDE THE dark editing suite into the crisp sunshine. After a cold night, the last vestige of an African winter, it was a beautifully clear, breezy day. Standing against a bare wall to catch the sun, I warmed my hands, then punched our home phone number into a borrowed cell phone, hoping to reach Nad and Kimber.
The phone rang and rang. No reply. They must be out in the park, I thought. While I’d been away in Windhoek for the past few weeks working on the edit of our latest film, The Chase, about game capture in Namibia, Nad was home in Etosha doing double duty at work and with Kimber.
After a few more minutes of soaking in the sun, I walked back into the edit suite, opening the door and letting pale light cast a shadow across the computer screen. Josef Nyberg, a bright, talented Swedish film editor, looked up and asked, “How’s Nad?”
“Don’t know. There was no answer. I’ll try again later.”
“Come and take a look at this sequence.”
I sat down beside Josef, who had stopped cutting film and started drumming his pencil to the soulful African rhythms of Erykah Badu. Rapid shots of giraffe, eland, black rhinos, ropes, trucks, helicopters, and men set to a background of vibrant music filled the edit suite. The pace was quick, the atmosphere fun. Just then, the door to the suite abruptly slid open.
“A plane just hit the Twin Towers in New York!” The man breathlessly speaking was someone I’d passed in the halls at the editing studio, nodded to, but didn’t know.
“What?” I was completely disoriented. Music, airplanes, rhinos, buildings. “What are you talking about?”
“I heard it on the radio just now, on my way back to the office. I don’t know anything more.” Then he was off, running down the hall.
“No, that is crazy.” Josef shook his head. “I’m sure he misunderstood.” Josef turned back to the editing machine.
For a few moments I thumbed through index cards, trying to concentrate on the right order of shots for the scene we were about to cut. But I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I kept thinking of a plane, the Twin Towers. New York. Sara and her family. No. It wasn’t possible. But still.
“Josef, I’ll be back in a sec. I’m just going to go check the Internet.”
I walked into the office next door and logged on to CNN.com. The connection was slow, too slow. When Sara was nervous her toes curled, but I’d always run my hands through my hair over and over again. Waiting for the connection to work, I felt like I was pulling my hair out of my head. Then, slowly, in bits and bytes, an image began to appear. Light gray blocks at the bottom of the screen, blue to the left, and a mass of black, white, and dark gray in the middle. A building. The sky. An explosion. I fell back into a chair and tried logging on to other web pages, but the screen was frozen on the image of a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Ginger, come on. It’s impossible to get any work done. Let’s go back to the house.” It was Paul van Schalkwyk, our dear friend whose offices we were using and who, with his gracious wife, Rieth, and lively young teenagers, Henri and Nina, had opened up their home to Josef and me while we worked on the film. “Rieth and I were there a couple of years ago.” He shook his head, thinking back, and continued, “We had drinks at the top. It was the best bar in the world.”
“Oh, Paul. This isn’t happening.” I turned to face him and then nearly turned away at the sight of pain and concern on his face.
“Have you heard from Sara?” he asked gently, and then I remembered that Paul and Rieth had stayed in Sara’s apartment a few years earlier when she’d been in Australia. They’d gotten to know her not only through my stories, but through the photographs on the piano, the art on her walls, and by feeding her big cat, Jagger.
“No,” I replied, involuntarily rubbing my arms as they were suddenly, inexplicably freezing cold. “I haven’t heard a thing.”
I walked in a daze back to the edit suite to get my keys. Josef was standing by the door, my pocketbook in hand. He hugged me and led me down the hall. Now he too knew it was true. That a plane had hit one of the towers that defined the Manhattan skyline, a symbol of power, of beauty, and of a country I loved. But it was so much more than that.
Those towers were full of people, chief executives, secretaries and clerks, cleaners, accountants and lawyers. No longer defined by their jobs, they were simply husbands who had kissed their wives good-bye that morning, mothers who had dropped their children off at day care with a hug, sons, daughters, friends, all with families who loved them and who were now desperately, horribly scared.
WE SAT IN stunned silence in Paul’s den watching as horrific images ran across the screen. CNN, BBC, Sky News, it was the only story. Josef rubbed my shoulders, Paul tried to smile. My Swedish editor, my Namibian friend, a mini United Nations, and we all knew the world would never be the same.
A phone rang in the background. “Ginger”—Paul spoke quietly into the phone before passing it to me—“it’s for you. It’s Nad.”
In a half whisper, half shock of disbelief, the first thing he said was “Can you believe it?”
“No, it’s impossible. But how are you? How’s Kimber? And how did you find out?” We didn’t have satellite television, so we only got the news once a day at 8 P.M.., Namibian time, and it was only three o’clock.
“We were just walking home from the Institute and Piet called to us to come quickly to his house. He had the TV on, and even though they kept showing those horrible images over and over, none of us could believe what we were seeing.”
“Did Kimber watch the news?” I asked. “Does he understand?” I thought of my son, just three years old, such a light, joyful child, of him and his father walking hand in hand down the road at Okaukuejo. Zebras braying in the background, the warm sun on their faces. Then I thought of explosions and chaos, the thousands of innocent people trapped in airplanes and skyscrapers with no way out. In a wave of sadness that threatened to engulf me, I thought of Maggie and Zan, my dear niece and nephew in the States, of sweet Sophie, and especially of Kimber, wondering, like parents everywhere, what kind of a world our children would inherit.
“Kimber seems to think it’s a movie,” Nad said, breaking my thoughts, “but then when he really listens, there’s such urgency in the newsreaders’ voices that he gets confused. He’s also worried about you. He’s afraid you might be there.”
I just wanted to hold him, but all I could do was reassure him over the phone. “Let me talk to him, please.”
Nad pulled away from the phone. I heard a toy drop and the patter of feet getting louder before the sweetest little voice said, “Hi, Mommy.”
“Hi, my lovebug. Are you having fun with Daddy?”
“Yeah. This morning we went to see a big truck that had flipped right over.”
“That’s exciting. Maybe you can show me when I get home. Remember, just three more sleeps and I’ll be there.”
“Goody!”
“I love you, darlin’.”
“Okay, bye, Mommy.” The receiver hit the ground and he was gone.
Nad picked it up, stopping the clanging, and said under his breath, “Don’t worry, he’s fine, but what about Sara? Have you heard anything from her and Andrew and Sophie?”
“I’m not sure where they are. I can’t get through to an international line. But I’ll let you know as soon as I reach them.”
I hung up the phone, praying that they hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A few minutes later I picked up the phone again. “Paul, do you mind if I try one more time?”
On TV, the towers were beginning to crumble.
“You must.”
“SARA?™
“Oh, Gin. It’s you.”
“Are you okay? Andrew, Sophie, are they okay?”
“We only just got back from Australia. It feels like a jet-lagged nightmare, but it’s not. It’s true.”
“So you weren’t anywhere near downtown?”
“No, thank God. Sophie and I were at home and Andrew’s office is in midtown. All we hear is the noise, the sirens, the jets. And…wait a minute?” I heard a door slide open. “I’m going outside on the terrace. I don’t want Sophie to hear me.”
The background noise on the phone changed. I heard wind, horns, sirens, the same noises Sara was hearing.
“Oh, Gin. I looked out the window and thought I must be mistaken, but I’m not. It’s ash, white ash, floating across the city. Her voice broke and then she continued, “It’s falling onto our terrace. Oh God. It’s everywhere.”
I pictured Sara’s terrace on the eighteenth floor with its long view down Third Avenue. It had been the scene of so much laughter and so many late-night confessions, and now Sara was standing there outside, alone in a mist of ash.
“Gin, what are you guys hearing over there? Do you know about the plane hitting the Pentagon?”
“We’ve heard that horrible news and sketchy information about a plane crash in Pennsylvania.”
“There is so much speculation, and so much fear, Gin. I can’t begin to tell you.”
But I knew if only from afar that a city that pulsed with life had been hushed by tragedy. A country that I loved had been savagely attacked and I wanted to be there, to hold the ones I loved, and to share the fear and the pain and the anger.
“Sara, please be careful.”
“I will, but I must go. I need to call work.”
“Give Soph a big hug for me, and Sara, we love you all so much.”
“We love you, too, Gin.”
After I hung up the phone I said a silent prayer for Sara and her family, for my family, and every other family affected by the events of that tragic day. I shivered again, a wave of pain hitting my core, and I wondered if there would be more attacks, and if the madness that started that day at 8:46 A.M. in America would ever truly be over.