All We Have Left

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016

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Chapters 47-50Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 47 Summary: “Alia”

Alia is horrified when she sees a woman who has jumped from a higher level of the building in order to avoid the fires consuming the building. Travis hides her face in his chest to prevent her from seeing another person “[…] plummeting to the ground so very far below” (309). Although he does his best to protect Alia, Travis is trembling quite badly. She hugs him “fiercely” (309), but she is devastated when a phone ringing in an abandoned office is strangely silent when she picks it up.

Travis realizes that he is still carrying Julia’s bag, left behind when firefighters rushed her down the stairway due to her heart condition. He looks through it, finds her cell phone, and makes a futile effort to dial 911, but is met with a constant busy signal. The fire around them is spreading through the ceiling; nonetheless, Alia encourages him to make one more attempt at a call. He does so, and tells her that “[i]t’s ringing” (310).

Chapter 48 Summary: “Jesse”

Adam follows Jesse home in his car and leaves her father’s truck at his shop with the keys slipped under the seat. Afterwards, he brings her to the small apartment where her mother is living. Jesse notices that the time of the September 11 memorial service for Travis is circled on the wall calendar, something that her father never would have permitted in the family home. Despite this, Jesse realizes that there was a time when her mother loved her father as Jesse loves Adam now. She relates to her mother the story of Travis’s presence in the Towers on 9/11, as well as the companionship that he had from Alia in his last moments there. Jesse and her mom, overwhelmed by emotion, both weep to release their pent-up emotions. Finally, Jesse turns on the answering machine tape that her friend Emi worked on so diligently in order to clarify the last voicemail left by Travis. She plays the tape, and Jesse and her mother hear Travis’s message, “Hello? Is anyone there? I’m inside the World Trade Center” (314).

Chapter 49 Summary: “Alia”

When Travis looks deeply disappointed, Alia realizes that he has reached an answering machine. He leaves a message telling all his family members “I don’t know if we’re going to make it out…I love you, Mom, and Hank and Jesse and…Dad, I know you hate me, but I love you too, okay?” (315). As she listens to Travis’s message, Alia realizes that he must feel that the pair will not survive the burning building. She has an impulsive thought, and cries out, “Tell them to call my mother” (316). Alia is trying to get a message to the family to inform them that her father is in the burning building, and that she loves her parents “[…] so much” (316). As Travis rushes to pull her down the stairway, Alia starts to protest that she must find Ayah; however, they hear a sound “[…] like a thousand trains approaching the station and the entire building begins to tremble” (316).

Chapter 50 Summary: “Jesse”

Jesse’s mother weeps as she hears the sound of Travis’s voice on the answering machine, and hears him declaring his love for the family in his last message. Jesse sobs for her mother, Travis, Alia and herself, and thinks “I wonder what he would have become” (317); she wonders about how different the world would have been had 9/11 not occurred. When Adam picks Jesse up the following morning, her mother reminds her that both of her parents love her, although Jesse doubts that this is true in the case of her father.

Adam and Jesse travel to the 9/11 Memorial Museum, where they view photos and artifacts related to the tragedy. Jesse is aware that she has a paradoxical reaction to descending further into the depths of the underground memorial: “[…] while I can hang onto the side of a cliff with nothing but air and sky around me, I feel crushed under the weight of all this concrete and steel” (320). They view the missing persons’ posters that are projected onto a wall: images of loved ones posted by family members desperate to know the fates of missing relatives. As they view the Survivors’ Stairs, which hundreds of people used as a means of escape from the Tower, Jesse realizes that Alia’s image is not included in those projected at the Memorial.

Chapters 47-50 Analysis

Alia’s narratives are initially filled with fantastic heroic imagery of herself emulating the courageous actions that she imagines “Lia,” a comic book character of her own invention, might have performed in the face of crisis. In this latter section of the book, the tone changes considerably. Alia witnesses a woman who leaps to her death through the smashed window of the Towers rather than to face the “[…] monstrous, even unbearable” (308) inevitability of burning alive. A glimmer of hope exists when Travis finds a cell phone in the bag that he carried for Julia, the young cardiac patient rescued by the firefighters, and is able to leave a voice message on his family’s answering machine. It is this message that is clarified by the technological expertise of Emi, Jesse’s friend, and enables the family to hear his declaration of love for them, as well as the identity of his companion, Alia.

Travis, initially presented as an anti-hero when Alia believes she has witnessed him attempting to pickpocket a maintenance worker in the lobby of the Trade Center, exhibits his essential integrity of character as the book draws to a close. Despite his instinct for self-preservation, he delays his escape to assist the stricken Julia from the Towers; subsequently, he follows Alia back up the staircase when she insists on trying to find her father in his office in the event that he is injured and alone. At first meeting, he appears diffident and oppositional toward Alia. By Chapter 49, he adapts a protective, almost paternal quality toward her. As explosions surround their area of the Tower, he “[…] puts his arm around” (316) Alia while leaving the voicemail at home, and then says, “Come on […].We’re going. Now” (316).

Jesse’s narrative brings the reader up to date on the repercussions of her recovery of Travis’s last voicemail upon her mother. Although the sound of her late son’s voice evokes sobbing, Jesse’s mother is grateful to have heard him declare his love for his family and that he was accompanied by an unknown companion (Alia) at the time of the blast. This marks the change in the perception of Travis’s character on behalf of his surviving family members; he is starting to be depicted as being heroic rather than cowardly. The mystery of Alia’s identity continues as Jesse and Adam visit the 9/11 memorial and do not find her photo among the missing.

An interesting parallel is demonstrated in the lives of Jesse and Travis, siblings whose stories are separated by almost two decades. Both young people make mistakes and are publicly castigated as a result. Similarly, both develop relationships with Muslim characters (Adam and Alia) that assist in the development of their own sense of honor and uprightness.