The Woman Who Wasn’t There (14 page)

“Whatever you want is okay,” he said reassuringly. “You don’t want to talk, we don’t talk.”

“Are you sure it’s okay?” Tania asked again, looking back as Janice led her away.

Janice and Tania breezed silently past the reporter. He watched with a puzzled look on his face as they disappeared.

Tania breathed a sigh of relief. But out on Liberty Street, one last TV crew was waiting. When they spotted the star survivor, they descended on her.

“What floor were you on?” the reporter barked, trying for a sound bite for the evening news.

Tania turned to Janice, who had been walking a couple of steps behind her. “Janice! Janice!” she cried, her arms flailing.

With the camera about to roll, Janice stepped between Tania and the news crew. “Can’t you see she doesn’t want to talk?” she snarled, her teeth clenched in anger. “When do you guys ever back off?”

She took Tania’s hand, and they walked off, ducking into a nearby department store.

In a press release issued later that day, Tania was quoted along with the governor, the mayor, and the former mayor. “As a volunteer guide, I am honored to be able to help visitors understand my personal experience,” she said. “By giving visitors an understanding of
the courage and bravery of our loved ones, friends, and coworkers, we keep their memories alive and are inspired by their sacrifice. The Tribute Center gives a voice to our loss and reminds us that one of the most powerful things we can do to heal one another is to listen to each other’s stories.”

That night, she composed her own account of the day and sent it, along with a video snippet from the evening news, in a blanket email to everyone in the Survivors’ Network. She was clearly exhilarated by the day. Under the subject line “Tribute Tour,” Tania wrote:

Hehe. For those who missed it, here’s a short clip about it. Notice the amount of cameras pointing at me. And notice who I’m giving the tour to: Pataki, Bloomberg, and Giuliani. Don’t ask me what I said because I was
freaking out
! Oh my God! I was totally overwhelmed, and I had to tell my story.

It was a momentous day in the legacy of the survivors, and Tania was proud that she had pulled it off. Now if she could just get through the anniversary.

T
wo days after the tour, the survivors walked into ground zero under a see-through blue sky to join in the fourth anniversary commemoration. It was their first official time there as a group and yet another milestone in a hard-fought quest for acknowledgment. Tania had snagged the invitation, and the fact that she’d once again worked her magic for the sake of the survivors wasn’t lost on anyone. She handpicked only the people with whom she was most comfortable to accompany her. Linda topped the guest list, followed by Janice, then Gerry Bogacz, Brendan Chellis, Elia Zedeño, Peter Miller, Manny Chea, and Angelo Guglielmo—and, at the last minute, Lori Mogol and Richard Zimbler, a couple who’d witnessed the attack from their apartment.

Tania had been uncharacteristically sullen and brusque before the service began. Over breakfast, she confided to Janice that she had considered skipping it to spend the day alone at the beach house in Amagansett. Anniversaries were hard for everyone, but for her they brought back not only the horrific memories of her life-and-death escape but also the void left in her life from losing Dave—a chasm so deep, she said, that it made ground zero look like a pothole. As hard as she had tried to make herself better, Tania confessed, she wasn’t closer to feeling anywhere near the same kind of happiness she had known before her world blew up, and she didn’t think she ever would.

As with the three previous anniversaries, thousands of people crowded into the World Trade Center site on that Sunday, September 11, 2005. Some of them carried photographs of lost loved ones, while others grasped tiny American flags, or single roses, or personal mementos.
Tania, wearing a white survivor’s ribbon on the left lapel of her navy jacket, clutched a handwritten letter to Dave and, in remembrance of how they met, a yellow toy taxi. Being at the site seemed to trigger her anger. As the roll call of the lost was read by brothers and sisters of the 2,749 people killed, and one woman wearing a bright pink blouse remembered, “My brother taught me to live in Technicolor,” Tania pointed accusingly at the tour busses idling at the curb and the tourists clogging the sidewalk. They all wanted to be part of this hell, she said. They wanted to belong to it somehow. Everyone did. If they only knew that what they were wishing for was something worse than death.

Her mood only deteriorated as the morning progressed.

The crowd fell silent when the bell tolled at 8:46 a.m., the time that the first hijacked jetliner crashed into the north tower. Dave’s tower. Tania stood a few feet from the others, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue and mouthing Dave’s name. When Linda tried comforting her, she shook her head furiously from side to side. No! she barked. She didn’t need coddling, especially not from someone who wasn’t even in the towers that day and couldn’t possibly understand what she was feeling. Linda had borne the brunt of Tania’s bad moods before, but Tania had never assaulted her survivor status, and she recoiled with hurt feelings. The others felt for Linda, but they huddled around Tania nevertheless, offering comfort and support with their quiet presence. Whatever Tania needed, they were willing to give her, even if it meant just staying strong for her. After all, if the anniversary was difficult for them, for her it had to be hell, and they wanted to do whatever it took to get her through it.

The next bell rang at 9:03 a.m., the moment that the second airliner hit the south tower. Tania walked over to Angelo and grabbed his hand. He looked at her and saw that her eyes were squeezed shut, as if she were trying to extrude some terrible image. He was certain that she was reliving her memories of those excruciating moments in the sky lobby. Angelo held tightly to Tania’s hand. She seemed to be in a trance, surely trying to fight off some horrific flashback. How much more could this poor woman take? he wondered. She had
worked so hard to reclaim some normalcy in her life after 9/11, but the reminders were just too many and too terrible. He wondered if she would ever be free. The others looked on, feeling impotent and frustrated that there was nothing they could say or do to make Tania feel better. Silent moments passed.

The next voice streaming over the public address system was a familiar one. “Good morning,” the speaker said. “I’m Condoleezza Rice. I am so deeply moved to hear the individual stories of brothers and sisters. To learn about the lives of those who died here. For we all know that no matter how many fall, each life tells a unique story, and that each death diminishes us all.”

Secretary of State Rice commenced by reading a poem by the nineteenth-century English poet Christina Rossetti:

For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Tania’s face flamed red with rage, and she burst into tears. She loathed the Bush White House and everyone in it. If it hadn’t been for them, she always said, there wouldn’t have been a terrorist attack. The towers would still be standing, and she wouldn’t have ugly scars on her arm and her back, and she would still have Dave.

“What is
she
doing here?” she sobbed, as Rice’s voice echoed through the open space. “Why does it have to be this way? Why did this have to happen?”

The others didn’t know what to do. They had never seen Tania that agitated. Someone patted water from a bottle on her forehead. Someone else gently rubbed her back.

Janice and Elia stepped in and, speaking quietly and reassuringly, told Tania that it was almost time to walk down to bedrock, where she could pay her respects to Dave at the memorial reflecting pool. They would all go down with her, so there was no reason to worry. But if she wanted to, they could all leave, right then, in the middle of
the service. No one would be upset. They just wanted what was best for her. No, Tania said. She didn’t want to leave. She needed to have her moment at ground zero to honor Dave, to read her letter to him and to leave the toy taxi by the side of the memorial.

By the time it was the group’s turn to journey down the long ramp to the footprint, Tania had regained her composure. The sun’s rays flooded the towers’ imprints, and the still water of the memorial shimmered like a crystal curtain. This was the place of the death of her dreams, and she walked haltingly toward it. Tania watched as others dropped colored roses into the reflecting pool and inscribed dedications on its wooden frame. A moment passed, and she pulled the letter from her pocket. The paper trembled in her hand. As the others looked on, she read aloud.

“Dear Dave. I will never stop crying for you. I can’t breathe without you. Every single day I think of you. I love you.”

When she finished, she tossed the letter into the water.

As the others walked back toward the ramp leading out of the hollow, Tania asked Angelo to stay behind with her. They were standing quietly a few feet from the pool, and she opened her purse and took out a photograph of a beautiful young couple in a tropical setting with turquoise water and palm trees.

“Look at this. This was us,” Tania said, searching Angelo’s eyes for a reaction.

The photograph showed a much thinner woman, looking lovingly at the handsome young man standing beside her. Angelo thought he understood the plight of the survivors, having seen the aftermath of the massacre with his own eyes, and maybe he did understand the others and what they were going through. But Tania’s burden was so much more. She seemed to know his thoughts as he stood there, staring at the photograph, choking back tears while searching for the right words that just wouldn’t come.

“Yes, that was me,” Tania said finally, her voice faint and unsure, her eyes searching for acceptance.

“Look what this has done to me.”

They held each other, and he wept with her.

At 12:36 p.m. the name of David
was read. Linda and Elia looked at each other knowingly. Tania had told only the people closest to her Dave’s last name. Now they looked around for her.

Tania was already gone.

A few weeks later, seemingly recovered from the trauma brought on by the anniversary, Tania remembered her husband in her own special way. In a letter to the survivors, she wrote:

Hi all,

Today would have been my 4th wedding anniversary. I usually have a private ceremony, and it’s a day that brings me closer to Dave. However, at a recent tour for the Tribute Center, I talked about how the WTC was a special place for me because Dave and I met there and got engaged at Windows on the World restaurant. I also mentioned that our wedding was going to be Oct. 12. Well, today I went to a focus group session for Tribute, and everyone there remembered and made it so special for me. I even had a card from someone from Tribute when I got home. It really touched my heart. One of the questions we were asked at the focus group was how the experience of being a Tribute docent has impacted our lives. We all said how much of a gift it was, and although it is hard at times, it really takes you a step forward in healing.

Tania

F
or many survivors, the first step to deliverance from the mental maelstrom of 9/11 was still the online forum. It was certainly Jim Jenca’s salvation. An ex-marine from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Jenca was the married father of two, the kind of a guy with a hard-boiled exterior and a mushy heart. Fiercely loyal to his country, he had joined the marines in 1980, not long after a mob of Islamic students and militants swarmed the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. He felt it was his patriotic duty. Jenca was completing his thirteenth year as a security manager for the Madison Avenue banking firm Credit Suisse First Boston when the towers were attacked.

His pager went off, and he had rushed to the site to help get his people out of the company’s branch office there. He had headed down to the World Trade Center’s underground command center but decided to turn back after discovering that he couldn’t make telephone contact with anyone there. Jenca had just left the buildings when the first tower collapsed above him. As he ran for his life, he was knocked down and trampled by others fleeing from the buildings. Three strangers risked their lives by stopping to pick him up. But in his own haste to get away, Jenca ran past an elderly woman hobbling with a cane. He had never forgiven himself for not helping her. More than four years later, he was still questioning why he, a former leatherneck, hadn’t had the guts to do for the old woman what the strangers did for him. The answer was that his inaction had nothing to do with courage. He was the victim of his own hardwired human survival instinct. Still, his survivor’s guilt was eating him alive.

After September 11, Jenca changed from a fun-loving optimist who everyone wanted to be around into a brooding man with a short fuse and recurring thoughts of suicide. He had lost friends in the towers, and he was pretty sure that the woman with the cane hadn’t made it out either. Rather than be grateful to be alive, he blamed himself for surviving. Jenca couldn’t work, and he slogged through every day, mad at the world, alienating his family and friends. He sobbed at sad television commercials, and he snapped at his kids for every little thing. Inside, he felt utterly worthless. He knew he was in trouble, but he didn’t dare admit it because marines don’t fall apart.