Some mornings, Deborah Tourloukis still wakes up rubbed raw. She dreams about the World Trade Center and she scratches herself. Always the same spots. The inside of her right knee. The back of her calf. She doesn't know why she scrapes those spots. But they stay sore and bruised.
In her dream, it is dark and she is stuck and she is clawing to get out. In her sleep she reopens the old wounds.
At 8:46 a.m., exactly one year ago, the first plane hit the World Trade Center. To this day it's still not clear how many people were inside the twin towers. Some recent studies estimate as few as 10,000 - plus the firefighters, police and rescue workers who went in the buildings to help.
Roughly 2,800 died.
The rest are in a club whose enrollment will never grow.
The survivors club.
Deborah Tourloukis of Mount Holly still has her membership card. It is a day pass to the World Trade Center's north tower, marked Sept. 11, 2001.
She was on one of her regular trips to train employees at First Union Corp.'s office. At a farmers market outside the building, she bought a ham-and-cheese quiche and a loaf of banana bread to share with her co-workers.
She joked with the security guard, took the elevator to the 47th floor.
And then history happened.
In the months since, she has told her story to a line of strangers on the front porch of her childhood home.
She has told her story to a flight attendant who started to weep when he discovered who she was.
She has told her story in an empty bar because the owner wanted to hear, because he lost a son in the terror she survived.
She's 42, divorced with three grown kids. She still works her same job in accounting, although First Union has now merged with Wachovia. She never imagined a life where so many people would want to hear her story.
But with each telling she feels the story's power. The power to help others feel what it was like. The power to heal her raw places.
This morning, Wachovia will hold a Sept. 11 memorial service. Deborah put it together. She has worked extra hours, gone in on her days off, to make it right.
At one point, she thought the service might give her closure. But there is too much blocking the door.
So, instead, she has swung it open.
She tells her story.
*
Glad for the darkness
"I've got two props - my water and my tissue, " she says. "I just may cry."
She is talking to the Gaston County Extension and Community Association, which used to be a homemakers group but now discusses all sorts of issues, usually over coffee and brownies.
Deborah wears a dark suit and a Mickey Mouse American-flag pin. On the table next to her is a display case with a shard of glass and a hunk of stone. Her brother, a New York City firefighter, got the glass and stone from ground zero.
Deborah is new to public speaking. She doesn't build to dramatic pauses. She doesn't pull her words into a theme. It just spills out.
"I called my boss in Charlotte and told her I thought there was an earthquake. She said, 'Get out; a plane has hit your building.' I made a call to my daughter Demetria. She was ironing her clothing. I said, 'Demetria, a plane has hit. I don't know if I'm gonna come home.' "
But she did. She went down 46 flights of stairs and then under the building. She passed burned bodies, exhausted people who decided to stop, firefighters heading up.
The rescue workers told her to buddy up with someone. She found a co-worker, Dzavid Kahari, a Muslim.
When the south tower fell, they huddled on the floor and Dzavid covered her with his coat. A plate-glass window fell on them. Somehow, it didn't break.
They made it outside.
Two blocks from the north tower, a photographer was trying to fit the awful scene into her camera. She snapped a picture of Deborah and Dzavid as they walked by. Deborah's hair is thick with dust. Her eyes are cast in shock.
Minutes later, the north tower perished.
Five of her co-workers died. Two had been just ahead of her. One had been not far behind.
Deborah thanks God for all the smoke that day.
"The darkness was a gift, " she says. "It was hard enough to hear it as we came through the building, but it's a gift that we didn't have to see. It made it hard to breathe at the time. But I believe it made it easier for us to live today."
The women in the crowd are dabbing their eyes with paper napkins. Deborah has already had to stop three times. But she doesn't want to leave everybody sad.
"I'm from Brooklyn, and most of my family is still up in New York, " she says. "But I've been down here eight years and it's been a wonderful thing for me. Thank you so much for listening. Sharing it with other people makes it lighter."
She likes to share inspirational quotes, like this one from Mary Gardiner Brainard: I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.
She believes in it.
She also carries a flashlight in her pocketbook. And another in her car.
*
A story told over and over
Word got around the old neighborhood. Debbie's here. The one who was in the tower.
Deborah sat on the front porch of her childhood home on East 34th Street in Brooklyn. Her sister Denise owns the house now. Deborah had come to see family. Now she saw half the neighborhood, lining up down the street.
"Just about everybody there had lost someone, or knew somebody in the neighborhood that did, " she says. "It always started off with, 'How are you doing? How's North Carolina?' And then they would come in with the other questions. The ones about 9/11."
Every so often, something like that happens. Denise called after visiting a Sept. 11 exhibit at a museum on the USS Intrepid. She was looking at a strip of photos when one stopped her cold. It was the picture of Deborah and Dzavid. No one had known the picture even existed.
And so in January, Deborah found herself looking at an exhibit where she was one of the featured characters. A stranger, a visitor from France, stood next to her. "That's me, " Deborah said. And she told her story again.
She went back to New York to look for a place for her daughter's bridal shower. She stopped at a bar they had thought about. The owner's son had died at the World Trade Center. "I was there, " Deborah said. "Are you sure you want to hear this?" He was. And they cried as she told her story again.
Once in a while, someone is rude or creepy, wanting to know if she saw any severed heads. Deborah just cuts the conversation off.
But most of the questions are simple. Most of them aren't even questions. They're pleas. Tell us where you were. Tell us who you saw. Tell us what it was like.
The more she tells the story, the more she remembers. The quiche and banana bread came back to her just the other day.
It's like vacation pictures, she says. You can show them to people all you want. But it's not the same as having been there.
Not the same at all.
*
Making gradual progress
For the first couple of weeks afterward, she slept in a spare room with the TV on for company. She turned it to Nickelodeon because she knew it wouldn't show any horror movies.
She took Ambien to help her sleep, saw a doctor about the nightmares. As she talked to him, she scratched her left shoulder without even knowing it.
She can look at photos from Sept. 11, but not TV footage. She can't take the sound.
She has been back to ground zero four times - most recently, last week for a Wachovia ceremony. When she gets near, she smells the smell from that day. An acid smell. None of her friends can smell it.
And still, every day, she gets better.
She has decided not to put up with people who make her unhappy. This has led to a couple of hard conversations, one with a family member, one with a co-worker. But she came away refreshed.
She calls and tries to cheer up Dzavid, who has a hard time talking about that day. She goes home from work at a decent hour.
She will speak at the Wachovia service this morning. But there also will be a choir, and people reading poetry, and a slide show, and a toll of a bell for those who died.
All over this country, in places all over the world, people will stop for a few minutes to remember that Sept. 11 belongs to all of us, that all the stories of pain and fear and hope blend into one big story.
Everyone's story.
And tonight Deborah Tourloukis will go home, and maybe she will scratch herself raw in her sleep, and she will get up tomorrow morning and put on some skin cream and start a new day.
Her story.
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