Genelle met her future husband in Trinidad, at Carnival, in 2000. Roger McMillan was tall and had enormous hands that swallowed hers. Seven years her senior, he seemed well moored, but he was also young enough to be playful in a way that Elvis was not. Roger loved seeing Genelle in her costume, dancing up the street with the crowds, but the couple didn't immediately pledge to stay together. Roger had always been "a player," as one of his friends recently said with a mischievous grin. Genelle would sometimes put on music and cry, wondering if it would all work out with him.

Relatives say that most in her family believed that she and Roger would eventually wed, but many thought it would take a long time. For their part, the couple say they never had any real doubts. Even so, it's fair to note that much about their relationship was unresolved before Sept. 11. Today Genelle sees any uncertainty between them as a function of not having Christ at the center of their lives. "I was busy partying," she says. "I didn't want too much pressure with my relationship."

But her party-girl act showed signs of waning even before Sept. 11. Twice last year, Genelle and Roger—raised Catholic and Anglican, respectively—attended the Brooklyn Tabernacle. An 8,000-member evangelical congregation in a lavishly refurbished old cinema, the tabernacle touched Genelle with its message that if you only let him, Jesus can change your life and show you the right path. It was a narrower path, one that would require her and Roger to stop carousing, but she was intrigued. Roger was more hesitant. By the end of last summer, neither had joined the church. "You just feel so spiritual when you leave [the church], but then you get back to normal life," Genelle explains. By then she and Roger were living together at his place in Cypress Hills, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. The church frowns upon cohabiting out of wedlock—"It's fornication," Genelle says—but they weren't yet ready to marry. Instead they planned a party trip. "We had booked tickets to Miami Carnival for October," she says. "We were really, really looking forward to that."

Step down, step down, step down. It's tedious—and so not as terrifying as being upstairs, where Genelle kept fretting that the building would topple. At least climbing down is a task to focus the mind. When the group entered the stairwell a few minutes earlier, everyone was relieved that it was less smoky than expected. Now they are basically calm, not really rushing. Around the 40s, maybe a bit higher, they run into the first fire fighters. Exhausted from lugging heavy tools and hoses, the men are taking a break. Some resume the climb when Genelle's group goes by; others sit and sip water. Obviously they have not heard the fire-department order to retreat, delivered after the south tower fell. Down in the 30s, Pasquale recalls, a rescue worker says, "It's a clear run. Just keep going." Everyone seems to feel pretty good, like they are going to make it.

Now they are on the 13th floor (Pasquale believes they were actually about nine floors higher, but Genelle remembers 13), and she stops to take her shoes off. She loves shoes. It seems as if she buys a pair a week, so many that she hides them from Roger. She is wearing black leather heels today, and they hurt. It will be easier in bare feet. As Genelle is unstrapping them, she's holding Rosa's hand.

And then she hears a huge noise—Pasquale describes it as a dozen safes being tossed down the stairs. Lieut. Mickey Kross, who survived with a group of his fellow fire fighters in the lower part of stairway B that didn't collapse, recalls in Report from Ground Zero (Viking) that "there is now a sense of tremendous energy, like being on a locomotive track with a train coming at you." Something big comes through one wall at Genelle and Rosa and pushes them back. They fall, but Rosa recovers her footing. Genelle stays on the floor and starts to crawl downward. All this happens quickly, but there is time for them to separate. Rosa moves as if she is headed back up the stairs.

Genelle is jostled like a pinball and struck by debris from everywhere. As the great noise begins to subside, she is lying on her right side, and her right leg is pinned hard. Her head is now caught between something—the floor maybe?—and some concrete. Finally, it's all quiet, and it's dark, but somehow she is here. She is alive. Soon she says the first of many prayers, asking God to continue to shepherd her to safety. Not far away, a man is calling, "Help! Help!" His voice falters and disappears. She won't hear him again.

Genelle starts biting her nails as she recounts these things. She says she is fine, that last fall's spate of nightmares has ended, that she rarely has a bad day. And when she is depressed, she says, it's not about Sept. 11, but usually about some silly argument she has had with Roger. When she gets sad, she plays gospel CDs and cranks the volume. She weeps. She can sing along with one of her favorite songs, Yolanda Adams' Fragile Heart:

Now I'm standing with the news of a tragedy
Standing here with a fragile heart
See, I never shed a tear
I stayed strong for them
When everybody disappears
It's only you that keeps me strong

These words give Genelle strength; they are also eerie because even though she cries easily, Genelle didn't weep the entire time she was trapped on Sept. 11 and 12. Everybody else had disappeared, and she was alone with God. Within hours of first seeing Roger after she was rescued, Genelle told him that her survival was her calling to God, and that if they were to be together, they were going to change their lives. They couldn't live in sin. They would be going to the Brooklyn Tabernacle every week.

The couple had quarreled just before Sept. 11, and some in her family were angry with Roger for hurting Genelle; they say he wouldn't commit to her. But next to her hospital bed, Roger didn't hesitate. He said they could take the first step on the right path by getting married.

She is asking God for strength now. A couple of hours have passed, and her head is still pinned. It hurts badly. She's not sure if she can move it. "Help me, Lord," she asks. And she pulls free, painfully scraping her head but winning some ability to move it forward and back; she still can't move it laterally. Everything against her is hard. Her whole body is starting to ache. On her right side, something sharp is poking her groin. She keeps reaching for the object, trying to move it, but it's heavy concrete. Still, she persists, feeling all around the area. Her hand now brushes against something soft. She knows reflexively that it is a body, but she tries to push the thought from her mind.

It's a fireman. He's dead. That's his leg.

No! It doesn't matter. It's soft. She just wants to move the rubble and lie on the ... the corpse ... the softness, just to get some relief, just to get close to something that gives a little. A crack in the concrete above her is stingy with the light, allowing just a glare. Slowly the hours pass, and she sleeps on and off. Now the glare dims. Nightfall.

In her dreams, God is a white man. He is holding his hands out. Not to her, but to his angels. But maybe she's not dreaming; maybe she's just remembering a picture she has seen. She can't tell the difference now. She is so hungry. She fancies macaroni pie from Bake & Things, a Trinidadian restaurant in Brooklyn. Now she dreams of her mother. Her mom is talking to one of Genelle's sisters, but Genelle can't hear them. She sleeps.

When she wakes, she prays again. She feels a bit better. She will probably be found, she thinks. She prays more, and then she opens her eyes and hears voices. "I'm here!" she screams as loud as she can. "Hey! I'm right here!" A rescue worker responds, "Do you see the light?" She doesn't, so she bangs a chunk of stone against the concrete over her. The rescuers find the noise. When she reaches her left hand out through an opening, one of the workers can grab it. OH GOD, THANK YOU.

The workers have been drawn to her spot in the vast acres of destruction by a fire fighter's uniform. Civilian clothes blend with the rubble, but reflective bands in the uniforms stand out. There is a uniform just below Genelle: the soft man. It takes 20 long minutes, and then she is saved.