The Woman Who Wasn’t There (12 page)

Tania was different from anyone Linda had ever known. It wasn’t just that she was so much fun to be around or that she had conquered such adversity. Tania was Linda’s sign that God had been present on September 11, and she needed to hold onto that. When Linda was with Tania, she felt invincible. She was certain that they could walk together down Broadway, and if she jumped in front of a speeding cab, she’d be spared. The only explanation for Tania’s miraculous survival on 9/11 was that she was protected by a higher power. Sometimes Linda would touch her friend’s hair and think, “God touched this.” God or a guardian angel, whatever it was, Tania was in divine hands. So as long as she was with Tania, Linda was covered. Nothing bad was going to happen.

At the same time that Tania’s relationship with Linda was coming
into full bloom, she was growing closer to two other women from the network.

Elia Zedeño was a financial analyst for the Port Authority. A small but robust woman with short, curly black hair and cheeks that billowed when she laughed, she lived in Jersey City with her sister and their adopted son. Elia, as contemplative as she was compassionate, was always looking for the bigger meaning of things. Her life had been a series of adversities that she had proudly overcome. She was just an adolescent when her parents left Cuba for America, but she had managed to balance both cultures in a very short time. Two years out of high school, she’d landed a clerical job at the Port Authority offices in the north tower of the World Trade Center, and she’d gradually worked her way up to a management position and an office on the seventy-third floor.

The first time the terrorists struck, in 1993, she had been riding an express elevator with five other people, including an intern she’d been showing around the towers. The pair had grabbed a snack at the food court and were headed back up to the Port Authority’s offices when the bomb exploded in the basement of the north tower, sending shock waves through the lower floors. The elevator rattled, then plunged a few feet and slammed to a stop. Smoke seeped through the cracks in the doors, and everyone began to panic. Two of the men she was trapped with had attempted futilely to yank the elevator doors apart. Zedeño managed to stay composed until the woman standing next to her dropped to her knees and began to pray the Rosary. That’s when her whole body started to shake.

Things went from bad to worse when a man trapped in the next elevator banged on the walls and screamed that he was burning up. When he finally went quiet, Zedeño tried to prepare herself for the same terrible death. And then, as she turned her attention to her terrified intern, an inexplicable wave of calm washed over her, and she felt as if her soul had left her body and was hovering over the others. She was no longer a panicked passenger but an impassive observer. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when a firefighter finally came
to their rescue, prying open the elevator doors and pulling everyone inside to safety.

When the building was repaired, she returned to work in the towers, wary at first, but comforted by the astronomical odds of such a thing happening twice. On the morning of September 11, she had just logged on to her computer and was checking emails when the airliner struck, eleven floors above hers. The building lurched, and she feared it was about to topple.

“What’s happening?” she screamed.

A coworker shouted to her, “Get out of the building! Get out of the building!”

Zedeño grabbed her book and her purse but panicked and began walking in circles. Then she felt something—she would call it an intense energy deep within her—propel her forward toward the emergency stairs. She’d made it to the concourse just as the neighboring tower imploded. Scooping out handfuls of soot from her mouth, literally blinded by fear, she froze as the debris cloud rained down. A woman, someone she didn’t know, took her by the hand and led her away. She surely would have died there on the concourse, buried beneath the tons of glass and corrugated steel that had once been a tower in the sky.

Elia and Tania had gradually gotten to know each other through their work on the Survivors’ Network board. They had both joined at around the same time and were always the first to volunteer for the grunt work that no one else wanted to do. Like everyone else, Elia marveled at Tania’s ability to soldier through her own terrible misfortune by working for the greater good of the other survivors. Elia took pride in her own resilience, but Tania—well, her fortitude was unmatched.

In Elia, Tania had found a strong advocate and a woman whose determination matched her own. In Janice Cilento, she found her “New York mom.”

Janice was middle-aged and a new trauma therapist doing an internship for a program funded by Project Liberty, a social resources
group founded for the victims of 9/11. She had come to the profession late, after recognizing how therapy had helped her own life. An Italian-American from Brooklyn, she smoked and she cursed, and she oozed compassion and concern. Her first assignment in the field was counseling victims of September 11—a tall order for the most experienced clinicians in her field but especially for a newcomer just out of school. She had begun attending survivors’ meetings to offer her expertise and ended up part of the survivors’ family.

September 11 threw a lot of things off kilter, and the role of the therapist in the complex aftermath of the attack was one of them. Especially in New York, where everyone was suffering from some form of post-9/11 trauma, it wasn’t unusual for the distinction between professional and personal relationships to blur. Janice did her best to hold that line, but nonetheless she became a confidante to many in the network.

When she took a seat on the Survivors’ Network board, she developed a relationship with Tania that was more familial than any of her other contacts within the 9/11 community. Janice admired Tania for being a strong young woman who was doing a hell of a job hiding her own pain by helping everyone else, and she was fiercely protective of her. Sometimes her devotion to Tania clouded her professional objectivity. In her eyes, Tania could do no wrong. Even when she did question her behavior: for instance, when Tania poked mean fun at someone or repeated a hurtful rumor, Janice excused it as a consequence of her trauma.

Janice wasn’t Tania’s therapist, but Tania’s needs came before everyone else’s in the network—and sometimes even before Janice’s family. Every morning, the therapist sent her a text message letting her know that she was thinking of her, always signing it “Your New York mom.” When Tania wanted to have dinner, Janice took a train into the city from Long Island to share a meal with her. When Tania phoned at three in the morning because she was having a bad night and couldn’t sleep, Janice took her call and tried to calm her down. When one of Janice’s survivor clients complained about a dustup she’d had with Tania, she took Tania’s side.

Janice cared deeply for Tania. She recognized the void in her life with Dave gone and her parents so far away, and she was willing to fill the space. But there was more to the relationship than a loyal friendship. Tania, by virtue of her story, was a unique psychological study in trauma—a guinea pig, really—as the miracle survivor of an ordeal the likes of which few people had ever overcome. For Janice, an apprentice in the field of psychotherapy, studying Tania was better than any textbook could ever teach. If she could facilitate her friend’s recovery, there wasn’t anyone she couldn’t help.

In return, Tania taught Janice lessons in humanity that were inspired. And inspiring.

L
inda’s answering machine crackled with Tania’s voice. “Blondie! Call me as soon as you get this.”

Another one of Tania’s urgent phone messages. Linda had become accustomed to them. Sometimes it was just Tania being her normal impatient self. Other times she had something pressing that she needed to talk about. This was one of those times.

Linda returned Tania’s call later that day. “What’s up, T-Bone?”

Tania was breathless, frantic, and excited at the same time. She had gotten a call from Lee Ielpi of the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, she said. He told her that the inaugural walking tour of the World Trade Center site was scheduled to take place in less than a week, two days before the fourth anniversary commemorations. It was something of a historical event, with Governor George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Ielpi’s buddy, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, in attendance. Press from all over the world would be there.

“Oh my God! That’s great.”

Tania took a deep breath. Linda could hear her struggling to draw in air. Giggling and gasping at the same time, she said that Ielpi had asked if she would join him in giving the tour. He’d caught her off guard, and she’d said she would do it. Now she was having second thoughts. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do the tour—or maybe it was, she wasn’t sure—but she was panicking at the thought of it. She was seriously considering calling him back to say that she’d had a change of heart.

Linda bellowed into the phone, “Have you lost your mind? Of course you’re going to do it, and you’re going to be fabulous like
you’re fabulous at everything you do! This is such an honor, Tania. Think about what this will mean for the survivors. They could have picked a family member, but they picked one of us instead!”

Tania hemmed and hawed. She was comfortable with the idea of rubbing elbows with important people, she said. That wasn’t a worry. Her father was a diplomat in Spain before he’d retired and moved with her mother to the United States, and she had grown up in prominent social circles. And, yes, if she did participate, the exposure for the survivors would be really significant; she knew that. Who could ever again question the legitimacy of the survivors’ place in the 9/11 narrative, when one of them had taken three of the country’s most powerful politicians on a historic tour of the spot where it happened?

“So what’s the problem?” Linda squealed.

Tania’s voice rattled with uncertainty. So much was at stake, and she wasn’t sure she was ready, she said. She had told her story before, but only to small groups. This was going to be a mob scene, and she wasn’t sure she could handle it. She didn’t want to falter and fail Ielpi, or embarrass the other survivors, or herself, for that matter.

“What if something triggers me and I panic?” she asked pleadingly. “What if I forget what I’m supposed to say? And you know I don’t trust reporters. I don’t think I can do it.”

Part of Linda’s job as Tania’s friend was talking her off the ledge when she was threatening to fall apart. She had done it before during other perceived crises. She certainly could understand the pressure Tania was feeling. The docent training had been only two weeks earlier, and they had practiced the tours for each other since then, but her first official tour would be seen by the whole world. Who wouldn’t be anxious?

“Of course you’re scared, honey, but everything is going to be fine,” Linda said reassuringly. “You’ll be absolutely great. They wouldn’t have picked you if they didn’t believe in you.”

That was partially true. Tania had outperformed all of the other tour guides on her practice tour in August. She was spectacular; a natural-born storyteller. But the other reason she’d been chosen was that the Tribute Center folks needed funding and exposure. They
needed to make a big impression with the tour, and Tania’s incredible story stopped people in their tracks.

The days leading up to the tour were up and down. Tania was a wreck one minute, ebullient the next. She took the other survivors and everyone else in her path on the bumpy ride with her, calling and messaging at all hours of the day and night, sometimes looking for encouragement, other times begging for a way out.

“Are you sure I can do this?”

“Of course you can, Tania.”

“What if I start to cry?”

“Everyone will understand.”

“I’m so nervous.”

“You’re going to be great. You’re a pro.”

So it went right up until the day of the tour.

Tania arrived downtown that Friday morning dressed to the nines in a light blue linen skirt and matching suit jacket. A few of her fellow survivors were on hand to offer moral support. She had a severe case of the jitters. Her palms were clammy, and her upper lip glistened with beads of sweat. Linda and Janice promised to stay close to her. They’d be right there, they said. But Tania was overwrought. She was sorry that she’d ever agreed to give the tour, she said. And she still just might not go through with it. Couldn’t someone take her place? she asked, wringing her hands and fighting back tears.

The people from the Tribute Center did everything to reassure Tania and try to assuage her fears. They brought her bottles of water. They rubbed her shoulders. They told her how brave she was to be doing what she was doing. How important it was. Lee Ielpi was positively doting, as tutelary as an overprotective father. There was nothing to fear, he said. She was among friends, and he wasn’t going to let anything happen to her. He wouldn’t leave her side, not even for a minute.

But what about the reporters? Tania asked. What if they began bombarding her with questions she didn’t want to answer? To hell with the reporters, Ielpi said. They would have to go through him to get to her, and she didn’t have to talk to anyone she didn’t want to.

“Okay, kiddo?” he asked.

Tania, her mouth dry and her face flushed, promised to do her best. But Ielpi’s Tribute Center colleague Jennifer Adams wasn’t convinced that she was up to taking questions. At the last minute, she recruited their mutual friend Angelo to distract her and calm her down. The filmmaker was happy to oblige. He would do almost anything to protect Tania, after all she had endured. “Keep the press away from her,” Adams instructed. “This is a big deal for her, and I’m worried.”

The morning press conference to precede the tour was scheduled for ten o’clock in the former Liberty Deli at 120 Liberty Street, across from ground zero. Another casualty of the terrorist attack, it was to be rebuilt as the future home of the Tribute Visitor Center. But for now, the unfinished storefront consisted of nothing but studs, mortar, and bare wires. Reporters from all over the world arrived there with their pack mentality, jockeying for position both outside on the sidewalk and inside the building, pushing and shoving when they didn’t get the spot they wanted.