We made our way around, quiet, talking about things, touching them. I found a room with a bed. It looked like it was made up to look like someone was in it, someone small. Were people smaller back then, or was this lump in the bed supposed to be a child? I didn’t know. I walked over and looked down. There was a little doll there, nestled in the bed. Who had put it there? It was old-time, too, with a creepy cracked face and milky eyes. Someone had left it tucked in.

There was a noise then, from another room. José grabbed some long pole from a wall and I pulled my crowbar out of my bag. We inched toward the noise, trying to make as little noise of our own as possible even though we had just been talking.

Crouched in the next room was a family. They were so skinny that I dropped my crowbar immediately. It fell to the ground with a clatter. They looked so scared.

There was a mother, a father, and a tiny little girl, no more than five. The little girl was in the mother’s arms, her face hidden in her mother’s neck, her black hair messy around her little head. It looked like it hadn’t been brushed in some time.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Home,” the man said, his voice cracking. “Home now.”

They looked so scared. They hadn’t even tried to defend themselves, even though they didn’t know who we were or what we would do.

We backed out the way we had come in.

3 We walked past the destroyed bridges and the loud crews working to rebuild them. By the time we reached the South Street Seaport, our legs were aching and our backs were tired from the heavy bags we carried. Everything was a wreck down there. There were still ships that had been tossed up onto the ground and wrecked and broken. They were lodged between buildings and down streets. We walked up to one, gaping at the big hole in the side where it had crashed, looking in at the blackness in the hull.