The Woman Who Wasn’t There (24 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said, pumping Janice’s hand, “but you’re not family, so you won’t be able to come into the meeting.”

“No problem,” Janice said. “I’m just here as her friend. To be supportive.”

The door closed behind Tania and her mother, and Janice picked up a magazine and began leafing through it. She couldn’t help but smile thinking about what Tania had just said. “I’m not a US citizen.” She had looked like a child in trouble when she made her big confession. All these weeks, the poor woman had put herself through hell because she was afraid that the
Times
would reveal she wasn’t a citizen—as if that meant anything in the context of her incredible story of courage and survival. Janice felt even more determined to help Tania understand that, in fact, she was moving forward, and that irrational fears, while debilitating and to be overcome, were an inevitable part of healing.

Two hours passed, maybe a little less. The door to Adwar’s office swung open, and the lawyer smiled warmly and invited Janice inside. Janice joined Tania and her mother at a long conference table. As she pulled up a chair, Tania looked at her with a strange gaze. “Are you mad at me?” she asked. Janice was puzzled by the question.

“Why would I be mad at you?” Tania didn’t respond.

Adwar seemed to be in a hurry and remained standing while she spoke. “You know, Tania, that it’s okay that you didn’t really work in the World Trade Center but had only been visiting when the terrorist attack happened, right?” the lawyer asked. “And you know that no one will hold it against you that you only knew Dave for a couple of months and weren’t married to him, right?”

Janice was confused. “What the hell is this woman talking about?”

“And no one is going to hold it against you that you embellished a few things here and there. You know that, Tania, right? Everyone tells a white lie now and then.”

Tania gazed at the attorney but said nothing. She reached for a candy in a bowl on the conference table. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the crinkling of the cellophane wrapper. Janice’s brain raced with questions. Tania hadn’t actually worked in the Trade Center? She wasn’t married to Dave? Embellishing? White lies?

The enormity of what the lawyer was saying suddenly hit her like a boulder falling from the sky, and she gasped. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” she said to herself. “Tania is lying? She has been lying to all of these people for all of this time? Suddenly, everything Tania had ever told Janice was suspect. Janice even doubted the little bits of her story Tania clung to in the lawyer’s office. There wasn’t an executive job in the south tower? Was there no Dave? No storybook meeting in a New York City cab? No wedding? This can’t be.” Janice felt the blood drain from her face. The lawyer was speaking again, but her words blurred into background noise.

If Dave was a figment of Tania’s imagination, had there really been an assistant who’d lost her life in the sky lobby? Had there been a dying man who’d begged her to take his wedding ring and return it to his wife? And had Welles Remy Crowther, one of the great heroes of the September 11 tragedy, really saved Tania?

“My God,” Janice thought, “I went with her to meet that young man’s family. I sat with them at dinner in the Princeton Club and listened to her promise to send them a piece of her burned clothing because it was one of the last things their son had ever touched. I listened as they thanked her, from the bottom of their hearts, for sharing the story of their boy’s heroics, and asked her to speak at his memorial. I heard her badger Linda into delivering her speech and then watched her cry with Jeff Crowther at that memorial.”

Had Tania even been at the World Trade Center that day? Her story had been so horrific that no one had ever thought to question it. Not her new friends who had spent countless hours crying with her, not the media that had written so many accounts of her survival, and
not the politicians who lauded her for her courage. Besides, Tania said that she had been gravely injured in the attack, and she
did
have the scars on her arm.

Janice suddenly felt sick. A fist to the stomach. She was overcome with forbidding thoughts. It was too much, and she had to get away. She thanked the attorney for her time and slowly rose to her feet to leave. She felt wobbly as she walked out of the office, and she was so distracted she didn’t even realize that Tania and her mother had followed her back into the elevator. No one spoke at first. Janice wasn’t sure she could find the words even if she wanted to say something.

Then Tania piped up, “Want to go get something to eat?”

Janice was incredulous. She wanted to scream but managed to keep her composure. She needed to escape, to try to make sense of what she’d just heard. “No, I’ve got to get home,” she said.

The three women stepped out onto the busy city street, said hasty good-byes, and Janice headed for the train station. But before she had gotten too far, she heard Tania’s mother say to her, “I don’t understand. I told her not to do these things.”

Janice boarded the train back to Seaford and lost herself in a labyrinth of thoughts. She returned to conversations with Tania, sometimes at two and three in the morning, and talking to her the way a mother would a daughter until she was finally able to fall asleep. Her mind drifted to Lee Ielpi, and how he had entrusted Tania with representing his beloved son on tours of the sacred ground where Jonathan had given his life. She thought about the survivors, whose faith in humanity had been shattered but who had risked trusting again and had chosen Tania to lead them out of the abyss. She thought about Linda, dear Linda, and how she had unselfishly devoted herself to Tania at the monumental expense of helping herself.

“How could Tania have done this?” Janice asked herself. “How could she have betrayed so many people who had been through so much? And for God’s sake, why?” She had chosen the most vulnerable people and exploited them by making up a tale so terribly heartbreaking that they couldn’t do anything but trust her and care for her—care for her more than they’d cared for themselves—because her story
was the saddest of them all. Except that now she doubted it had even happened. Was all a lie?

For four years, Tania had been telling her story, and no one had questioned the validity of it until now. There had been signs along the way, little discrepancies that everyone, herself included, had been almost too willing to overlook. “Why?” she wondered as the train chugged toward Seaford. Why hadn’t she ever stopped Tania when she referred to Dave as her fiancé rather than her husband? Why hadn’t she pushed to see the house in Amagansett after Tania had made and then broken so many promises to take her there? Why had she never insisted on seeing the burned jacket? Had she wanted that badly for Tania’s story to be true?

Janice missed her stop that night. She never even heard the conductor announce the Seaford station. When she finally got home, she sat alone in the dark for hours, wondering how to break the news to Linda and the other survivors. Would they even believe her when she told them that the woman who had been there for them—who had turned herself over to them, nurturing them and rallying them and teaching them by example how to transcend their unimaginable sorrow, who had also taken as much as she had given—may never have been there at all.

J
anice hardly slept that night. She tossed and turned as the hours passed, thinking about how to tell the others what she knew. These were people who had been torn apart by tragedy and were mended only tenuously by the thread of trust they had in one another. When they learned that the most devout among them had violated that oath of faith, and so egregiously, would the thread snap?

Linda was of most concern. When she first joined the group, she was broken, and she had invested so much of her energy in Tania that she’d often neglected to take care of herself. Tania was her best friend. Her mentor. Her reason for being when there wasn’t much else. She often told people that Tania had taught her how to live with dignity. How would she possibly react when she learned that she had entrusted her heart to a woman who wasn’t there?

Janice dialed Linda’s number, and she answered on the first ring.

“Are you sitting down?” Janice asked.

“Yes,” Linda said, her voice bright and singsongy. “I’m sitting at my kitchen table, having my first cup of coffee.”

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

People in the survivors’ circle were always playing little jokes on one another, and Janice, more than most, loved pranks. Linda waited to hear more.

“Tania’s a fraud,” Janice said.

Linda giggled politely, but she didn’t think this little joke was funny. Not at all.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this,” Janice said. Linda could hear the tremor in her friend’s voice.

“Come on, Janice,” she said. “She’s not a fraud. What are you talking about?”

Janice went on to describe the scene in the lawyer’s office the day before, and how Tania had all but admitted that there had been no husband named Dave or sprawling office in the twin towers with a full staff. Listening with disbelief, Linda sank deeper and deeper in her chair. She just couldn’t get her head around what Janice was saying. She needed time to think. To decide whether she even believed what she was hearing.

When the women hung up, Linda went to her couch, where she spent the remainder of the morning staring out her living room window and feeling nothing but numbness. All of a sudden, it just made sense. All of the inconsistencies that everyone in their inner circle—Brendan and Janice and Elia and Gerry—relegated to Tania’s trauma. Sometimes she called Dave her husband. Other times, she referred to him as her fiancé. The fact that no one ever met Dave’s parents or even saw them with her at an anniversary. Her coworkers who were never around. Elvis the golden retriever. She had always said the dog was with her housekeeper, Lupe, at the beach house in Amagansett. Yet as often as she had promised to take Linda there, she had always come up with last-minute excuses. In a strange and bizarre way, it all seemed to add up to what Janice was saying. Tania was an imposter.

Meanwhile, Janice dialed Dunlap at the
Times.
For weeks, she and the others had stonewalled the reporter and vilified him to one another, when all he had been trying to do was get at the truth. He obviously had suspicions about Tania’s story, and she realized how foolish she must have seemed in her blind defense of her. At the time, she thought she was doing the right thing, protecting a lamb from being preyed upon. She owed it to Dunlap, and she owed it to the survivors, to make things right.

The reporter answered his phone.

“This is Janice Cilento,” she said. “I hate doing this, but I wanted to call you to say that I think Tania has been lying.”

“You’re doing the right thing,” he said.

The rest of the Survivors’ Network board took the news with disbelief.
Elia was at her desk at the Port Authority when the call came from Linda.

“It’s about Tania,” Linda said.

Elia began screaming and crying, bringing her coworkers to her side. Her first thought was that Tania had died.

“What is it?” she cried. “What’s happened? Did she do something to herself?”

“It’s not what you think,” Linda said. “It’s not what you think. Tania . . . Tania is a fraud.”

Elia felt nauseous. Her first inclination was to scream at Linda. How dare she say such a terrible thing? But, way down, in the place in her gut that never lied, she knew what Linda was saying was the truth. All she could do was cry.

Only Brendan Chellis breathed a sigh of relief when he heard. For months, he had kept his suspicions to himself as he watched Tania bask in her celebrity and suck the life out of his friends with her constant bids for attention. So when Richard Zimbler and Lori Mogol called, their voices grave, and said they had something to tell him about Tania, he felt like a weight had been lifted off his chest.

“I already know,” he said.

For the next few days, as the
Times
wrapped up its research, Tania’s friends took her calls, acting as if nothing had changed. They didn’t want to tip her off that the story was about to break. She had taken a short sabbatical to Spain with her mother, but Janice spoke to her every day, trying to encourage her to weigh in should a story be published. She finally agreed to a three-way conference call with Janice and
Times
investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski. The call lasted about thirty minutes, with Kovaleski asking questions and Tania skirting around them. In her reticence, she would say only that she had done nothing illegal.

The reporter finally spelled it out for her. Her lack of clarity had gone on long enough, and their story was nearing completion. They really wanted her to have her say, but time was running short. Tania promised to meet with Kovaleski when she returned from Spain. But once again, she cancelled.

On the eve of publication, Tania wrote a blanket email to her survivor friends:

As you know, the
New York Times
is going to publish an article about me. I ask all of you to please not listen to what is in the article, but reflect upon what you know of me.

On September 27, 2007, the headline on the front page of the
Times
read, “In a 9/11 Survival Tale, the Pieces Just Don’t Fit.” A photograph of Tania leading the Tribute Center tour for Pataki, Bloomberg, and Giuliani accompanied the 2,200-word account. The story quoted almost everyone on the Survivors’ Network board and deconstructed Tania’s personal history, myth by myth: The family of Dave
, the man she claimed to have married, who really did die in the north tower, had never heard of a Tania Head. Merrill Lynch had no record of an employee with her name. Nor did Harvard or Stanford have a Tania Head in its student files.