Chapter 1 - Free

So you are thinking: "If your book was really good then it would have been published the traditional way, you would have found someone to publish it for you."  Perhaps you are correct, perhaps you are not, but there is really only one way for you to know for sure.  The only way to really know if my book is good or not is to read it.  But since I understand you may not want to pay for something you think is crummy, I'll open a window to help you better decide if you to read it.  Below you can read my first chapter.  If you hate it, well  you have lost nothing in taking a peek.  If you like it, then please stop by amazon and order the rest.

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The Sunset Swans
Copyright 2013 by Elizabeth Jaeger

Chapter 1

Dylan always told me, “The only things you can really count on in life are books and a good fishing pole.  Although sometimes even a good fishing pole can let you down.  “But you,” he would add, “you’re different because you have me.”  And it was true.  No matter what, I always had my brother.  He was the only person in my life I could completely count on, the only person who was constantly there for me - at least until he turned eighteen.  That’s when things changed and it was no longer enough for him to protect me.  He felt the need to protect the entire country instead.

            I was nine when the attack on the World Trade Center occurred.  Dylan was seventeen.  We were both supposed to be in school, but I was sick, and as always, Dylan was the one who stayed home to take care of me.  Dylan noticed the smoke first.  He was in the kitchen making pancakes, my favorite breakfast, while I was sitting in bed reading the book he had given me only a week earlier.  It wasn’t an easy book to read.  There were many words I had trouble with, but Dylan promised that when breakfast was over we would read it together.  Almost every night I read to him, and he would help me trudge through the vocabulary I had difficulty with.  Even though I was in fourth grade, he only let me read books that the middle school kids were reading.  When I would complain that they were too hard, he’d tell me that I’d never get any better if I didn’t push myself.  And when I’d object, declaring that it was too difficult, he’d prove me wrong by holding my hand and guiding me through each individual word.

            “Chloe!”  I heard his voice bellow through the bedroom wall as he ran into the living room.  The bowl he had been mixing the batter in fell to floor.  He kicked it accidentally, and it slid across the kitchen floor, crashing into one of the cabinets. It didn’t sound as if he bothered to pick it up.  By the time it crashed, his footsteps had already carried him to the window in our living room, the one which overlooked both the Hudson River and the World Trade Center. 

            “Chloe,” his voice broke, but before it did, it was louder than I was used to – much louder.  And there was something in it I didn’t recognize, something I had never before detected in it.  It almost sounded as if he was scared, but Dylan, my Dylan, wasn’t afraid of anything.

            “Chloe,” he was struggling to speak but he managed to spit out the words he needed to say.  “Turn on the television.”  And that’s when I knew something was dreadfully wrong.  Dylan didn’t watch T.V.  He hated it, and in nine years, I had never once seen him watch it.

            Though my entire body ached to move, I couldn’t disobey my brother.  Forcing my legs over the side of my bed, I climbed down the ladder to do as I had been told.  Turning the television on I went to stand beside Dylan and that’s when I saw it – the second plane exploding into Tower I.  I didn’t have to ask him what was wrong.  I didn’t even need to ask him why he sounded scared.  Looking down at me, he put his hands on my shoulders, squeezing them as if they were the oranges he had been squeezing only seconds before to make me orange juice.  He often stood behind me when we were together, but I had never known him to squeeze so tightly.  Usually, I just felt the slight pressure of his fingertips, but I suppose that morning even he needed something more than a book or a fishing pole to hold on to.

            I knew what Dylan was thinking at that very moment, because I was thinking the same thing.  “We should call.”

My throat was as dry as if someone had been trying to stuff me with cotton, and my words were garbled as if they couldn’t quite wiggle their way through the folds of cotton that completely enveloped my tongue.

            “I’ll do it.”  He spoke the words, but made no effort to follow through.  Again, without having to ask, I knew why.  What if he called and she didn’t answer?

            Leaving him where he was, I ducked under his hands and retrieved the phone.  When I handed it to him, it felt as if the room suddenly spun upside down and as if the floor abruptly dropped out from under us.  I was falling, spinning and silently screaming. I tried to grab hold of something solid but my fingers kept slipping off everything they touched.  Faintly, I could hear the television behind me but the words sounded far away, and despite my every effort, I couldn’t understand a single word.  I was trying desperately to hear what was happening but my mind could focus on only one thing.  Then Dylan reached down and pulled me up into his arms.  One of the towers had collapsed into a pile of rubble and human suffering, and all either of us could think about was Mom and whether or not she had been able to get out.

            Dylan called – again and again – but all the lines in the city seemed to be jammed.  Every time he pressed the redial button he got a busy signal.  He even tried to call our father, but neither his cell phone nor his work phone rang.  For what seemed like hours, I sat on Dylan’s lap with his arms wrapped tightly around me as we watched the television and waited for news of our mother.  He cried as he held me, tears streaming down his face, but despite everything - despite the attack, the uncertainly of our mother’s safety – he somehow made me feel safe.

            Neither of us spoke.  Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t.  Fear held us mercilessly in its grasp, and like a sandbag pinioned to our chests, it rendered us motionless. Every possible scenario of what might have happened to our mother played repeatedly through each of our minds.  I hardly paid attention to the T.V. but what little I heard rendered all the “happily ever after” scenarios unrealistic.  All we could do was pray that by some miracle we would see her again.

            And we did.

            Dylan and I were lucky.  As we sat there lost and feeling as if our world was made of egg shells we heard keys rattling outside the door.  Dylan heard them first, and it was only when I felt his body stiffen that I became aware of what it was that he had been reacting to.  Neither of us moved to open the door as we might have on any other given day.  Instead, we held our breath, our lips noiselessly uttering one final prayer.

            When the door opened, I thought I had fallen asleep and had somehow slipped into a dream.  But without shutting the door behind her, she ran over to us, scooping me up into her arms and pressing her head against Dylan’s chest.  She didn’t speak.  She simply held us as if she had been the one sitting at home in fear, wondering ceaselessly whether or not she would ever see us again.

            “Is it really you?”  Snuggled up in her arms, I was the first to speak, the first to rattle the silence.

            “Yes, it’s me.”  She framed my face with her hands, pushed my hair back with her fingers and pressed her lips to my forehead, the kiss lingering longer than any of her other kisses ever had.  “I’m home.  I’m really home,” she repeated as if to dispel her own doubts. 

            “But how?”  Dylan asked, staring at her as if he and I had been visited by a ghost, an apparition conjured up by our equally desperate imaginations.  “You worked up on one of the top floors, and with the way the plane hit…how did you get out?”  It was only then that I realized how much worse his fears had been than mine.  I only knew she worked in one of the Towers.  I didn’t have a clue as to what floor she was on, nor had I been paying close enough attention to the television to know that practically everyone who worked as high up as she did failed to get out.  The whole time he had been sitting there clutching me, he had been trying to picture what our lives would be like without her. 

            “When the first tower was hit, my boss was one of the few who refused to listen when we were all instructed not to evacuate.  Without a moment of hesitation, he ordered us all to stop what we were doing.  He wouldn’t even let us pause long enough to grab anything we might want.  His main objective was to get us out as quickly as he could, and in acting as quickly as he did, in a sense, he saved all of us.”

            And that’s exactly what Dylan had wanted to do.  Sitting there on the couch, watching all the people on television crying, screaming and pleading with God, he wished that there was something he could do, something he could have done to save those who had died.  Only I didn’t know it, not at the time anyway.  Not for several months were any of us completely aware of the impact the attack had on my brother, or of the consequences it would have on the rest of us.