Dianne Clark paced for more than an hour, shuffling through the backyard grass.
A minister walked beside her, speaking softly about God and hope.
She needed water.
Family, friends and unease had packed into her house after an airplane hit Brian Clark's building two hours and 12 minutes earlier. She had not been inside the house since she watched the South Tower collapse, live on television.
She walked into the kitchen, and passed the phone just as it rang.
Please.
Her hand shot out, snatching the receiver from its cradle and pushing it to her ear. Someone rushed to her side when she collapsed.
Brian Clark rarely got to work later than 7:15 a.m. An executive vice president with Euro Brokers, the Toronto native spent most of his professional life in the World Trade Center, first in Building 5, and then on the 31st floor of the North Tower. The company's move to the 84th floor of the South Tower was delayed by three weeks when, on the day they'd planned to switch buildings in 1993, someone beneath them detonated a bomb.
"In '93, we all went back to work thinking it was some kooks in the basement," Clark, 59, said. "They didn't connect it to some big international terrorist organization. Or, at least, I didn't. ... I was really kind of unaware of the magnitude of what might be coming."
When it came, Clark was sitting at his desk on the west side of the South Tower. The explosion tore through the North Tower, crossed the distance between the two buildings and thumped Clark's windows, about a thousand feet above the ground.
"My head jerked upwards because my lights buzzed."
Clark grabbed his red flashlight, whistle and red baseball cap with "WTC Fire Safety Team" embroidered in white. He began directing people to the center core of the building to wait for instructions.
Many on the north side of the tower who'd seen the violence next door sprinted for stairwells.
Within minutes, about 200 of the 250 people on the floor began their long descent. The others stayed. They watched on office televisions as financial network anchors broke into programming.
"We very quickly, just like anybody in Madrid or Hong Kong or London, saw what was going on on TV. Yes, this thing was next door to us, but on TV you're seeing the long-distance views. You're hearing people say, 'Well, rumor has it that a plane hit.' "
Clark walked to the open trading floor, staying about five yards away from the windows.
"Some people very early on began to jump," Clark said. "I would not take myself to see that. I didn't want that image, the memory."
He walked to his office to call his wife. Next he called his father in Toronto.
As he hung up the phone, the building's strobe lights flashed and a siren whooped twice, signaling an announcement over the tower's public address system: "Your attention, please. Building Two is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building Two. If you're in midst of evacuation, you may use the re-entry doors and the elevators to return to your offices. Repeat, Building Two is secure."
Clark relaxed. He walked out of his office. His friend, Robert Coll, wandered over and struck up a conversation, saying he'd been about 10 floors down when he heard the announcement.
A Boeing 767 banked around the Statue of Liberty.
"There was this double explosion, or double noise -- Boom! Boom!"
The sound was muffled, but colossal as the plane slammed into the south wall, its center of impact a few floors below. The tower twisted, and Clark's office disintegrated. The ceiling fell, the floor buckled, walls tore open, a door popped out of its frame and chalky, yellow grit suddenly filled the air.
"In a split second, everything changed."
World Trade Center 2 oscillated slowly, sickeningly, toward the Hudson River.
"During that five or six seconds, I thought, 'Oh, my gosh. We're going over.' Now, my life didn't flash before me. In a funny sort of way, I was sort of thinking, 'Brace yourself. This is going to be quite a fall.' It's ridiculous, but that's what goes through your mind."
He and Coll stared at each other, crouching to keep their balance. It felt as if the tower swayed six or eight feet, stopped, then swayed back upright.
He knew then it was an attack, though he knew nothing about hijacked airplanes. Missiles or another bomb seemed just as plausible.
Clark pulled his flashlight out of his pocket. He, Coll and the five others headed to the building's core, which housed the elevator shafts and stairwells. Clark turned left, randomly choosing the only stairwell in either tower not severed during the attack. The seven of them walked in. Two would make it out.
Three floors down, the group stopped. An obese woman and a frail-looking man were struggling up the steps. "Stop, stop! You can't go down. We just got off a floor in flames," the woman told them. "We've got to go higher and get fresh air."
They debated -- up or down -- on the landing of the 81st floor.
"Then I was distracted," Clark said. "I heard this banging and this faint voice -- it was faint, but this voice was clearly yelling."
Someone cried for help. Clark and co-worker Ron DiFrancesco left the stairwell, squeezing between a broken slab of drywall and a wrecked fire door.
"I have this clear vision of my co-workers turning around and going up the stairs," Clark said.
David Vera, a fellow fire safety volunteer and member of Euro Brokers' technology staff, pirouetted and led the way. Kevin York took one of the woman's elbows. Coll grabbed the other, saying, "Come on, lady. We're all in this together."
Clark slipped into the 81st floor. The air was darker there, the floor nearly destroyed. Beside him, DiFrancesco was overcome with smoke and turned to follow their co-workers. He would make it to the 91st floor, before deciding to go down again.
In the darkness, Clark heard a stranger saying, "Help me. I can't breathe."
He walked toward the voice: "Can you see my hand? Can you see my hand?" Clark swung the light beam around and saw it, about a yard away. He pointed the flashlight on the man trapped behind a hole in the wall.
"Hallelujah! I've been saved!" the man shouted. "One thing I gotta know: Do you know Jesus Christ?"
Clark stammered out the best response he could think of: "I go to church every Sunday."
The two started moving the debris between them. The wall itself blocked the man from getting out, so Clark stood on a pile of wreckage and peered over the top, about nine feet off the floor. "You gotta come over this wall. It's the only way out," he yelled.
The man jumped, scrambled at the wall, and fell. He leapt again. Clark grabbed his arm and pulled as the man clawed his way up.
The two tumbled backwards, landing in a heap on the floor. The man let another exhortation fly and planted a kiss on Clark's face.
"I'm Stanley," said Stanley Praimnath, an executive vice president of Fujibank.
They stood and dusted themselves off, euphoric from the rescue and talking excitedly about brotherhood. Clark noticed a puncture wound in his left palm. Stanley had one in his right. They slapped them together.
They climbed back over the debris to the stairwell. The smoke, wispy just minutes earlier, rolled upward heavily. Pushing chunks of drywall out of the way, and pausing once to watch the flames through cracks in a wall, they continued going down. They broke through the smoke at the 74th floor.
"The lights were on, the air was fresh. It was sort of this feeling of, 'Well, we made it.' "
Clark and Praimnath stopped on the 31st floor, and walked into the deserted conference room of Oppenheimer Funds Inc.
The phones worked. Clark and Praimnath called their wives.
The last Dianne Clark had heard from him, he'd told her to turn on the television. About eight minutes later, she watched his building explode. Since then, family, neighbors and church members flocked to their home.
She hung up the phone and turned, ecstatic, to tell everyone her husband made it.
The two men walked back to the stairs, and bounded down to the bottom in about 15 minutes. Richard Fern, from Clark's office, had made it out before him. Ron DiFrancesco would follow a few minutes later.
Of the 600 or so people who were at or above the plane's impact point, only those four walked out.
"Any doubts I had about my faith just evaporated. I've had no nightmares. I fall asleep quickly. It's just - I've been given a gift."
