A child’s memories of Sept. 11: Panic, debris ‘monsters’ and fleeing to safety

Twenty-five years have passed since the windows of my family’s apartment burst in and upended the life I knew in Battery Park City.

My twin brother, Jacob, and I were just shy of 4 years old — we had already sent out invitations to our birthday party at Chelsea Piers — and were watching “Franklin” on TV in the living room when we heard a loud boom.

On the other side of the apartment, my mom was jolted awake by what she said felt like an earthquake. She ran to her window, which faced the World Trade Center’s south tower — the second to be hit but the first to fall — and saw a “raging fire.”

“It was like ‘The Towering Inferno,’” my mom told me recently, when I asked her about her recollections of that day. “It’s not like you saw fire inside. You saw the flame coming out.”

Our housekeeper was panicking, holding my 2-year-old sister, Rachel, in her diaper. My mom called the fire department and was told to stay put. She called my dad, who was at work in midtown already, and he said to listen to the fire department. My mom hopped in the shower and came out to find her three kids on the treadmill in her bedroom, peering out the window to count the emergency vehicles filing in below. Both towers had been hit, but neither had yet fallen.

My memories from that day — some of the earliest I have — are spotty.

I remember counting 14 firetrucks below; I remember looking up in that moment to see an avalanche of debris heading toward us as the south tower began to fall; and I remember my mom telling us to follow her to the kitchen as the windows crashed in and darkness flooded the apartment.

But an almost-4-year-old’s memories are different from an adult’s — a truth I have come to understand as both a blessing and a curse.

I remember being chased by monsters — what I soon understood to be dust and debris from the collapsing tower — when we followed my mom to the kitchen. I remember my mom telling Jacob and me to stay there, as she frantically ran back to the bedroom to get Rachel — who, my mom later told me, she found clutching the bed, covered in glass. And I remember Jacob turning around to follow my mom, leaving me alone in the kitchen.

For years, my nightmares told a story of me standing alone in the kitchen, facing a monster as he crashed through our window. The individual moments happened — I stood alone in the kitchen and fled the dust clouds that burst in from the windows — but when I returned to the apartment years later, I was surprised to learn no window faced the kitchen. In fact, my mom told me she led us to the kitchen precisely because there were no windows.

Some time later — what could have been two minutes or 20 minutes — my housekeeper, Donna, found the front door amid the chaos.

She scooped me up while my mom carried Jacob and Rachel, and we all joined the stampede of people in the stairwell fleeing to safety as the darkness chased us down 21 flights of stairs. I was bigger than Jacob at the time and knew my mom could not feasibly carry all three children at once, but I remember the panic that set in when Donna took me from my mom in that moment.

We got to the lobby, and a retired police officer in our building had taken charge and directed us to the boiler room. My mom, still in her towel and biker shorts, tried to breastfeed Rachel, who wasn’t hungry. She was too stunned to eat, my mom said, and was barely moving.

Someone threw my mom a T-shirt to wear and a ripped sleeve for us to dunk in water and breathe through. I remember Jacob showing us how to use it properly.

When the north tower collapsed, the ceiling in the boiler room started to crack and we relocated to the mailroom. I remember telling my mom I needed to go to the bathroom. With limited options, I remember managing with a plastic bag that a dog walker gave us.

In many ways, a spotty memory of such a tragic event has been a gift.

I don’t remember the woman next to us in the boiler room, screaming, “We’re all going to die! We’re all going to die!” I don’t remember getting to the boardwalk — after it became clear we could no longer stay in the building — only to watch families ripped apart because there was no room on the evacuation van for everyone. Men were instructed to stay behind, and my mom remembers a single father parting with his daughter, pleading with the other women to keep his little girl safe.

I remember boarding a boat as we finally left Manhattan and headed for a shelter in New Jersey, but I don’t remember wondering, as my mom does, whether the boat would survive the short trip because so many people clawed their way onto the small vessel for their shot at safety.

I don’t remember the quiet sadness my mom talks about when she turned around on the boat to see her “whole neighborhood going up in flames.”

“You’re at what you think is safety — you are at safety — and you’re just overcome with the magnitude of the loss to see your whole neighborhood — we thought the whole neighborhood was destroyed,” she told me.

In the weeks after the attack, the buildings in the area were torn apart as law enforcement searched for evidence in the wreckage. My dad and grandfather returned with a suitcase and managed to salvage some of our belongings that hadn’t been destroyed. Being on the 21st floor, we managed to avoid the looting, but our neighbors closer to the ground were not so lucky.

For a while, it was difficult to track down our friends and find out what happened to them, if they survived.

But the following month, our birthday party proceeded as planned at Chelsea Piers — which had just reopened after it was set up as a temporary morgue — and our friends gathered for one final farewell.

Few of our close friends returned to live in Battery Park City after 9/11. We initially stayed with cousins in New Jersey, before moving to a hotel near my grandparents uptown. When Jacob asked my mom if “any more buildings are going to fall on us,” my parents decided to move to Westchester County.

But every year we returned, visiting the local shops that reopened and the shopkeepers who went back to work and never forgot us when we came back to say hello. And every year, we went back to remember.