Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice (30 page)

At dawn the next morning, about a dozen city employees and volunteers pulled on rubber gloves, unfurled rolls of plastic bags, and began picking through the tattered inventory, untying the knots on the many tangled shoelaces. The only sound was the ripping of paper as careful hands tore down signs and banners. In a letter he had written to the survivors and to victims’ families, Menino had spoken of “a respectful closing,” one that would “help us all look to the future.” For Billy and Patty Campbell, who came early that morning in matching blue-and-yellow
BOSTON STRONG
T-shirts, that future felt a long way off. They remained mired in the present, trying to make it through each day, trying to understand why Krystle had been taken.
It was their first visit to the memorial. Patty put on glasses and leaned in close to read the writing on a poster; she reached out to touch a stuffed toy, a polished rock. A reporter asked her what the memorial meant to her. “It’s confusing,” she said. “I’m still in shock.” The Tsarnaevs had lived a quarter of a mile from her mother-in-law, Patty said; her sister’s son had gone to school with Dzhokhar. “I just don’t get it,” she said, her voice trailing off. Before they left, the Campbells took a string of rosary beads, one of hundreds draped by strangers on the four white crosses at the memorial’s center. Then they walked away slowly down the sidewalk, their arms wrapped around each other.

The dismantling accelerated after their departure. Workers cut away deflated balloons and sodden ribbons and started sweeping. Kevin Brown, the volunteer caretaker who had lovingly maintained the site, helped to lift the wooden crosses and load them into a truck. By 8:45
A.M.
, three hours after they had started, the pavement was bare. A city archivist hoisted a pile of brooms over his shoulder and turned to go. Behind him, the morning foot traffic easily, unthinkingly reverted to its normal pattern, flowing across the sunny pink-and-gray brick.

The road beyond

A
t first
Shana Cottone didn’t recognize the feeling. She was at a Zac Brown Band concert, at an outdoor venue south of Boston, when she started to feel sick. She figured it must be the piece of sausage she had eaten; Shana never ate sausages at concerts. She wandered away from her friends toward the restrooms. The crowd thinned as she walked, and her stomach stopped hurting. It wasn’t the sausage, she realized—it was the crowd, triggering some memory of Patriot’s Day and the marathon. It was like that now: a well of anxiety lay hidden within her, and without warning her reflexes could tap it. One night her dog started barking in the backyard, and before she knew it, Shana was creeping outside ninja-style, senses on high alert—only to find a fallen tree branch on the ground. She slept with both an air conditioner and a fan humming; still she woke up at the slightest murmur. It made her mad. The places that had once felt safe didn’t anymore.

After the marathon, to cope with the stress, she had gone back to the treatment program, the one that had helped her stop drinking. It had helped, just as it had the first time. She had taken time off from work, and used it to plant a garden in her yard. She was growing vegetables and herbs—cucumbers, basil, peppers, zucchini, eggplant—and roses in a soft peach color. The roses she chose in tribute to Roseann Sdoia, the woman whose life she had helped save on Boylston Street. They were friends now; Shana saw her often. It went back to those fateful minutes in the street: the connection she had felt to a wounded stranger, and the desperate, overwhelming need to help her. It had been an instant kinship, and she could not walk away. It was a feeling she had never had before in her role as a cop, and it was difficult to explain. “I need to see it through,” she said. “I can’t have it any other way.” In her backyard, the roses bloomed through the summer.

Shana was deeply grateful for the changes she had made in the months leading up to the marathon. If she hadn’t stopped drinking, if she had been hungover that day, would she have reacted differently? She would never know, but it convinced her there was some larger purpose in the painful reckoning that she had faced. She was grateful, too, that after the bombing she had not given in to the urge to start drinking again. It had been so tempting to seek that easy solace, at a moment when she knew no one would judge her for it. But she would have judged herself, harshly, for breaking her promise. Instead, she knew she had been tested, and she had been faithful.

A week or so before September 11, working her regular tour in East Boston, Shana responded to a call about a suspicious package on the sidewalk. Standing there waiting for the bomb squad, she fought to keep calm. Was this a dry run, preparation for a real attack planned for the upcoming anniversary? Was a would-be bomber watching them right now, taking notes on their positions, all to fine-tune some twisted plot? No one around her seemed concerned. But it turned out the suspicious object really was a bomb—a cardboard container roughly the size of a soda can, filled with explosive powder and wired with a fuse. The bomb squad X-rayed it on the scene to confirm what it was, then took it away in a blast-proof bag and detonated it at their remote test range. It seemed a case unlikely to be solved. The knowledge that the bomb had been real raised the stakes for Shana. It was one thing to be anxious and write it off as irrational. But if people really were
inside their homes making bombs
, well, what then? It had to change the way you lived. You couldn’t let your guard down ever, even for a single second. It was hard to imagine living that way and still living fully. How, for example, could she ever decide to have children in a world so fraught with hidden danger?

On the night of September 11, she attended a remembrance ceremony at John Hancock Hall, a few blocks from the finish line. The organizers, from a Boston charity, had invited Shana and other marathon first responders to be honored as part of their program. She wore her uniform and sat in the front row. It was the first time she had been singled out that way for recognition. There were a lot of speeches about heroes, a lot of talk about stepping up and making a difference. Finally, near the end of the night, somebody read Shana’s name. She stood up and turned, shyly, to face the applause.

 • • • 

H
e’d done this hundreds of times, sharing the stories of his running feats, the self-deprecating jokes about his height, and the motivational life lessons he’d picked up in staging the Boston Marathon all these years. But this address by Dave McGillivray, to a group of hospital CEOs in Boston’s Seaport District on an October afternoon, was different. “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it here,” he told them. The day before, he’d gone to the hospital to get checked out. He hadn’t been feeling quite right lately. His breathing had been off. He’d undergone a CT scan and an angiogram, which shows blood flow in arteries and veins. The news had been worse than he expected. The tests had revealed some significant blockage. He was devastated. He’d been so fit his entire life. How could this be? “I always thought I was invincible,” he told the hospital group. The room was silent as he spoke in a shaky voice. He offered sincere thanks for everything the medical community did—work that, in the past, he had known largely from afar. Now it was his well-being they were guarding, too.

All his life, McGillivray had been able to outrun almost anything. Discipline, self-assurance, a clear mind, and a willingness to put in the hard work—these were the essential ingredients to success, whether his end goal was running the Eastern Seaboard or managing an unwieldy road race for thousands. He had been a paragon of health and fitness, a promoter of active lifestyles who ran more miles than most people ever would. He left the hospital deeply chastened. Yes, he had been fit. But he hadn’t always been healthy. He hadn’t been eating right. After a long run, he might grab three or four cookies. He had fueled his famous cross-country trek with junk food. None of it, he had figured, would do much harm. “I thought I was out there burning it all up,” he said. Partly it was genetics. His father had undergone quadruple bypass surgery at age sixty-five, then lived to ninety after changing his diet and hitting the health club. But McGillivray knew this was also his own doing, and that made him feel embarrassed and frustrated. “I cheated myself,” he said.

Once the initial shock faded, he returned to the McGillivray Way, determined to apply the same zeal and same lessons of preparation and execution that had always served him so well. He began to see his diagnosis not as a sentence, but as a second chance, believing that he could beat it with the right diet, medication, and exercise. “I don’t need two warnings,” he said. He began eating red rice and other healthy foods to lower his cholesterol, finding success immediately. He joined the local YMCA and planned to start swimming and lifting weights. He sought out a trainer, a nutritionist, a masseuse, and a new bike. He got a heart rate monitor, knowing he had to limit his intensity when he ran. “It’s a whole new beginning,” he said.

The year 2013 had already been a stark reminder of the fragility of life. One minute in April, McGillivray had been ready to start down the marathon course; the next, he was racing back to Boston to see his finish line in disarray. Six months later, his personal brush with mortality was a heavy postscript. He considered his youngest children—he had a daughter who was only four—and thought about how he had to make it a while yet. There was a lot still left to see. In the immediate term, he had another Boston Marathon to plan, which, given all the security changes, all the expectations, all the sensitivities involved with the first anniversary of the bombing, was already going to be one of his biggest tests ever. He had no intention of giving it up, though. If anything, his diagnosis had made him more motivated to dive into his work and to stay busy. The race needed him, and he needed the race. He credited the one hundredth Boston Marathon, in 1996, with saving his life after his difficult divorce. He looked at the 2014 race in much the same way. “I am not even going to remotely consider pulling back on the throttle,” he said. Assuming he still had control. About six weeks after the bombing, McGillivray’s son Luke came up to him again.

“Remember I told you I didn’t want you to direct the marathon again?” the seven-year-old said.

“Yes,” McGillivray said.

“You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to direct it.”

McGillivray’s cardiologist had talked to him about stress, telling him that he was always going a mile a minute. McGillivray believed that stress lay in the eye of the beholder. For him, working hard, focusing on big problems, taking on a heavy responsibility—those things didn’t feel stressful. Even putting on the 2014 marathon, the most intense, most fraught staging of the event in its 118-year history, did not, for him, feel like a source of strain. Or at least it didn’t feel as stressful as
not
putting on the Boston Marathon, sitting on the sidelines watching it all go off without him. “I would be stressed if I was lying on a beach,” he said. “I would be so stressed that the clock is ticking and I’m not getting anything done.” His doctor, when McGillivray told him this, rolled his eyes. A lot had changed, but some things never would.

 • • • 

D
avid King hadn’t written a speech, but he wasn’t worried. He would think of something. The trauma surgeon brought his wife, Anne, with him, and their two little girls, three and six, wearing matching polka-dot party dresses. The dinner at the Ipswich Country Club, north of Boston, was a fund-raiser for families of police officers killed in the line of duty. The organizers wanted King to talk about the marathon. Four months had passed, but people were still interested, still appreciative. They wanted to thank him for what he’d done. It was unfamiliar territory for King, who saved lives all the time but was almost never celebrated for it.

The former Somerville police detective who had invited him to the dinner, Mario Oliveira, was one of the only patients with whom King had ever kept in touch. Oliveira had narrowly escaped death in a 2010 shoot-out. A bullet missed his heart by an inch; his heart stopped twice on the operating table, and both times King revived him. Afterward, the cop considered King a brother. When the surgeon was in Afghanistan, Oliveira checked on his family. When Oliveira’s second son was born, he gave him the middle name David. It had been King’s only brush with that kind of gratitude—until now. Since the marathon, the city of Boston had embraced him. It made him feel less an outsider, more a part of something. It anchored him here in a way he never expected. He was eager to run Boston in 2014, but he had also volunteered to help Dave McGillivray with medical response planning for next year. He wanted to be part of making everything go smoothly.

King and Oliveira sat together at the dinner. As the meal wound down, the event organizers stepped to the podium to talk about Sean Collier. Then they honored Richard Donohue, the transit police officer wounded in the shoot-out. Donohue leaned on a cane at the front of the room, looking embarrassed by the standing ovation. “I miss Sean every day,” he said. Collier’s brother Andrew offered words of solace. “It’s easy to focus on the evil,” he said, “but the good in people outweighs the bad.” It felt like the right way to end. The room began buzzing, on the verge of breaking up. But there was one last speaker: Dr. King. He began to talk about that week in April. A hush fell over the dining room again. He talked about his patients, about Roseann Sdoia. He described Obama’s visit to Mass General, and his own assignment from the White House in advance, to write down every patient’s story for the president. He explained how it had changed him, taking time to talk with every person who was wounded. “I realized I’d worked on these patients for days and I hardly knew them,” he said. “I realized all those little details really mattered.” He paused to collect himself, briefly overcome, and the room was silent, willing him to recover. Then he spoke of Mario, the cop he’d saved, and their lasting bond. “All of you inspire me,” he said finally. He returned to his seat and took his six-year-old into his lap.

In November, he ran the New York City Marathon. He decided to try for the same time he’d run in Boston in April—3:12—to link this race to the one that still loomed so large. He had taken two months off from running, though, to let his bad back heal, and he wasn’t sure how well he would do. He felt no anxiety, except for a single moment at the start, when a cannon boomed close by without warning, shaking the ground. Running felt great, and the race went well. He finished just two seconds off the mark, with a time of 3:11:58. One of his marathon patients, Kaitlynn Cates, who had suffered a serious leg injury but not an amputation, had come to New York to cheer him on; she was waiting at the finish line with a sign that said
GO DR. KING—MY HERO—BOSTON STRONG
. His wife was there, too, and his daughters. Before they had left Boston for New York, King’s parents had offered to take the kids so he and Anne could enjoy a weekend away by themselves. For a split second King had calculated the risk in his head: Would his children be safer staying home? Then he recognized what he was doing and shook away the thought.
Nope
, he told himself.
I’m not thinking like that.
The race would be a celebration, and his girls would be there with him.

 • • • 

“
Y
ou have to smile, babe,” Billy Campbell had told his wife, Patty, in the weeks after their daughter’s death. “You can’t be in grievance twenty-four seven. You have to start thinking about the good things.” The prescription was wise and level-headed, but it would prove hard to follow—not only for Krystle’s parents, but for her extended family and the community she had built around her. The only thing they could do was to try to push through every day. “I was very lucky to have two great kids, and one of them was taken away,” Billy said. “I believe my daughter really could have made a difference in this world, for the good. She was out to really leave a mark. She already had in a lot of people’s lives. She was special, man. She was special.” It was hard to get past how unnatural this was. Daughters weren’t supposed to die first.