I was not supposed to be home on September 11, 2001.
I was 22, a few months out of college, reporting for a small paper in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. I was due in court to cover the start of one of the town’s first murder trials in years. At 6 a.m., I woke with a migraine, called off, and crawled back into bed.
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A few hours later, my head was still pounding. I fumbled around the bathroom vanity for Excedrin, then did what I always did when I couldn’t find something.
I called for my mother.
A brain tumor had taken her sight when I was two. Yet somehow, she could find almost anything faster than my fully-sighted father or me. He died when I was 14. By September 2001, it was just her and me.
She put the bottle in my hand and said, almost casually:
“A small private plane hit the World Trade Center. There was an explosion.”
I walked into the room where she had the TV on and sat in my father’s recliner. The North Tower was burning.
The sky behind it was impossibly blue.
“How did the pilot not see the building?” I said. “It’s a clear blue sky.”
That was the last sentence that still belonged to an accident.
Something appeared in the distance on the screen. It got bigger.
It was a plane.
I watched it fly into the South Tower.
The anchors gasped. My mother was two feet away. She heard them. She heard me. She could not see what had just happened.
I had to find the words while I was still trying to understand it myself.
We were under attack.
We stayed in front of the television through the morning and into the night. I talked until my throat hurt.
I was her eyes and I did not get to blink.
I told her people were coming down the sides of the building — not climbing, falling.
Ties. Skirts. Arms out.
A man and a woman in business suits jumped holding hands.
She covered her mouth with both hands.
“Oh my God. Oh my God.”
And the day kept getting worse.
The Pentagon. The South Tower fell. Then the North.
Then the local news station cut in: United 93 had gone down just outside Pittsburgh. The plane had flown right over the city. I wondered who downtown had looked up and seen it.
Anyone can watch the footage now. The pictures are the easy part.
What the footage cannot give you is the morning before the day had a name. The migraine. The bottle on the sink. The question about a pilot and a blue sky. The 17 minutes between the planes, when the country was still an ordinary Tuesday with a hole in it.
An entire generation can cue up Flight 175 in seconds. They never had that moment to remember.
That night, my mother and I found a restaurant that was still open late. Both Pittsburgh papers had put out late editions — almost unheard of. I grabbed a copy of each.
“This is your JFK,” she said.
We ordered food but couldn’t eat.
Later, she slept on the floor beside my bed because I was afraid to be alone. In the middle of the night, she shook me awake and asked if she could come to work with me and sit in my car all day.
By morning, the sun was up. She had the radio on and was talking to her sister. She said she would be all right until I got home.
As I left for work, a fighter jet passed over La Roche College, blocks from my home. Every FM station was carrying news. No music.
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My drive took me past Pittsburgh International Airport, where I was used to seeing airliners coming in low to land.
That morning, there were none.
When I got to Waynesburg, I had to stop being a witness and start being a reporter.
I dropped my car keys on my desk, grabbed my reporter’s pad and a pen and started walking.
I went into churches looking for people turning to prayer. Candles were burning. The pews were empty. I walked through town and to Waynesburg College, stopping people and talking to students who wondered if it could happen again tomorrow.
Eventually, I came across officers I knew working a traffic stop.
“You didn’t walk all the way out here, did you? Where’s your car?”
Back at the paper.
They offered me a ride. I thanked them but declined. They were working. I wasn’t going to give them one more thing to do.
As I walked away, I turned back.
“Stay safe.”
I wondered how many of their brothers and sisters were buried beneath the rubble in New York.
I later spent 14-and-a-half years working inside a jail and criminal court system. I learned something first responders already knew.
They do not get the finished story.
They get the 17 minutes.
The call that is still an accident until it isn’t. The scene before anyone knows how it ends. While everyone else is trying to understand what happened, someone still has to answer the call.
The story I reported that day became my first front-page byline — a milestone for any reporter.
Twenty-five years later, I remember the recliner more clearly than that front page. I remember trying to find words for a woman who could not see what the country was watching. I remember looking back at those officers.
Stay safe.
Some of the police officers, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs and dispatchers serving today were children on September 11 or had not yet been born. They inherited the images. What we owe them is the memory.
“Never forget” was never meant to be something we simply repeat every September. It was a promise to keep the feeling attached to the images — and pass it on when the images are all that remain.
First responders still do not get the finished story.
They get the 17 minutes.
Kelly Rae Robertson is a former Allegheny County pretrial investigator and newspaper reporter. She writes on public safety for Law Enforcement Today, the Daily Caller, and the Washington Times.
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