Twins!

I was finally feeling better. Josh and I drove to work together that morning and we stopped to get donuts to share with my office in celebration of my one-year anniversary at work. Truth be told, we were both feeling a little giddy over the excitement we expected to stir in my office. I shuffled through my papers, just to make sure everything was there. We second-guessed our plans, wondering if we should wait until the weekend when we were to fly back to Washington D.C. for the Jewish New Year, so that our family would be the first to know. But we were bursting with joy and couldn’t wait any longer; we decided to share our news first with the people who had become our Midwest family.

We parked in the A lot by Gilchrist Hall just as Iowa Public Radio started to run down the top news stories. It was 8:05 Central Time and the announcer made a brief mention of an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center in New York. Josh looked at me incredulously. I rolled my eyes, shook my head at the vision of some yutz and his Cessna collapsing down the side of the building ala Wile E. Coyote and thought to myself, “I bet that wasn’t part of his flight plan.”

We thought nothing of it.

When we got to my office, I walked to the conference room, opened the donut box and tacked the ultrasound to the wall. Josh stopped by my colleagues’ desks to say “hi” as he often did, reminded them that today was my one-year anniversary, and encouraged them to grab a donut. No one thought it was strange that he lingered in my office that day; he often hung around for a few minutes before he went to his own office across campus.

Sandy was first, and a moment later we heard a gasp and then “Robin!!” She came charging into my office and cried, “Twins!” and embraced us both. Within moments the rest of the office can streaming in, and Josh and I told and retold our story: how long we had struggled, how we resigned ourselves to ART, how the test the night before the doctor’s appointment made it all unnecessary, how we knew before the doctors that there would be two, and how I had spent the last five weeks praying to the porcelain god. We laughed, celebrated, and mingled, and after about 15 minutes the party started to break-up. Josh left for his own office and we all set down to work.

It was about 10 minutes later when Judy walked back in. “Robin, turn on the radio.” She said quietly. I turned to look at her. Her face had gone deathly white, and the cheerful smile she wore moments before had vanished.

“Turn on the radio.” It was all she could say, and I knew something was very, very wrong.

I went back to the computer, got online and listened to the instant stream of details. Images of horror flashed across the screen. I took it all in but none of it made sense. Pictures. Words. Yelling. Running. Flames. Smoke. Screams. Chaos. My head spun but I instinctively went searching for more news. But every damn site was just cycling through the same details of the two towers’ collapse and the same dreadful images of terrorized masses.

My stomach turned. I saw an online clip of someone leaping to his death from one of the Towers, and my heart stopped beating.

Finally, there was news of The Pentagon and an airplane crash in Pennsylvania. The world stopped breathing.

It would be a few days before all the events would come into focus. The death toll continued to climb and the devastation mounted. Media coverage was angry and the masses were incensed. New details gushed from various outlets daily and added to the collective rage and fury.

But I was a Zombie. I went through the motions at work and at home but my head was filled with fear for the world into which my children would be born. I was entering my second trimester, known as the “honeymoon phase” because my pregnant body should have adjusted to the additional blood volume and surging hormones. But instead of release, my stomach continued to clench and heave. I could feel the lights of optimism and humanity slipping from all of us.

I worried that the human race would never breathe again. And I cried that my twins would never know the world in which they were conceived.