The Woman Who Wasn’t There (23 page)

“Give me the reporter’s number,” she said. “I’ll call him and tell him to leave you alone.”

As Tania sat there, rocking and crying, Janice dialed the
Times
. She explained to David Dunlap that she was with Tania and that Tania was very disturbed by his calls. Dunlap said he was sorry to have upset Tania, really he was, but he just didn’t understand her reticence about answering basic questions he had. She had talked to other reporters on other anniversaries. What was so different now? The
Times
’s motive was no different than the others had been, Dunlap explained. They just wanted to write a profile of this brave, courageous survivor. The reporter’s conciliatory tone did nothing to appease Janice. All she knew was that Tania was coming unhinged, and the
Times
apparently wasn’t going away.

“You need to understand what these people go through,” Janice said. “This is too stressful. The timing is bad. What is the purpose of this?”

“Why can’t she just answer the questions?” Dunlap asked.

The telephone conversation quickly turned into a shouting match, with Janice ordering the reporter to back off and Dunlap insisting that Tania answer his questions. “I’ll make a deal with you,” Janice said finally. “If you leave her alone for now, I’ll ask her to talk to you after the anniversary, and she can answer your questions then. We just need to get her through tomorrow. Okay?”

Dunlap promised he would be back in touch.

“Fuck him,” Janice said, flipping her phone shut. “If he bothers you again, let me know.”

Tania breathed a sigh of relief. She could always count on her inner circle to protect her. What Janice didn’t know—what none of
the others at the party knew except for Tania—was that a day earlier, Dunlap had a similar conversation with Jennifer Adams, who had suggested Tania in the first place, and the focus of his story had taken a dramatic turn. Dunlap indicated that what began as an anniversary profile was turning into an investigation. Without giving away too much, the reporter explained that Tania had cancelled three in-person interviews, which seemed strange, and now she was refusing to concede answers to the most elementary questions. His preliminary reporting had turned up inconsistencies in her biography, and the discrepancies needed to be cleared up whether the
Times
published a story or not. Adams’s instinct was to try to protect Tania, and she told the
Times
to back off. She asked Dunlap to send her his questions, and she would try to get answers. He did, that same afternoon, and he had copied Tania on the email.

“Thank you so much for fielding these questions and for understanding that I mean no disrespect for Tania,” the reporter wrote. “With your help, I hope to put my concerns to rest and proceed with a profile of an extraordinary, courageous, and generous survivor. The details I’m asking here will simply fill in the background of her compelling personal narrative.”

What followed were two pages of probing questions. Dunlap had obviously done his homework.

“What was Dave’s full name?” he asked. If Tania was, for some reason, squeamish about having Dave’s last name appear in print, the reporter explained, that was an unusual request that he would have to justify to his editors and readers.

“Was Dave her husband?” Dunlap asked. There was some confusion, he said, because Tania had, at various times, to different people, referred to him as both a husband and a fiancé.

“How long had Dave worked in the World Trade Center?” he asked. “Where had she gone to school and what degree had she earned? Did she attend school under a different name?”

Dunlap inquired as to whether Tania still worked for Merrill Lynch, and asked whether her title was senior vice president for strategic alliances, “as noted on the WTCSN profile?”

“What was Tania doing in the south tower on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001?” he asked. “Also how long had she been hospitalized for her injuries and where? Is there a doctor or nurse who might attest to Tania’s remarkable resiliency?” he wondered.

Dunlap concluded by apologizing for the intrusion into Tania’s life, particularly on the eve of the anniversary. But, he explained, most of what he was looking for was basic biographical information that could be easily answered and would enhance the story he was writing.

Tania’s party broke up early that night. Angelo was out of town, but his partner, Gabriel, was there, and when he tapped Tania on the shoulder to say good night, she swung around and looked at him as if he had struck her. Then Janice, whom he had always known to be a gentle spirit, lashed out. “It’s not a good time,” she snarled.

Inside, Linda thanked the guests for coming and explained why Tania was too distraught to say good-bye. The
New York Times
was harassing her for an interview, she said. The guests were aghast. How dare they do this on the eve of the anniversary!

A heavy, gray sky promised a grim backdrop for the sixth anniversary. It was the first time the anniversary had fallen on Tuesday, the same day of the week as the attacks, and the first time the ceremony had been held away from the site where the twin towers had once stood, across the street in Zuccotti Park. Tania wasn’t going to attend, but, at the last minute, she decided to show up. She sat quietly with the other survivors, clutching a single pink rose that she had grabbed from one of the buckets of colored roses provided for the mourners. She was sulking. Every year, she had brought with her to the ceremony a toy yellow taxi in recognition of her first meeting with Dave and placed it near the reflecting pool in the footprint of the towers. This time, Elia, the survivor from Cuba who had escaped from both the 1993 and 2001 terrorist attacks, was supposed to get the car. There was a little place in Chinatown where she could buy it, and she’d promised to go there the day before. But that morning, in the Survivors’ Network offices, just before they were ready to go to the service, Elia confessed that she had forgotten. Tania looked as if she’d stabbed her in the heart.

She summoned Linda, who volunteered to try to find one. Even though it wasn’t yet eight in the morning, and most of the souvenir shops downtown had yet to open, Linda ran up and down Broadway searching for a toy yellow taxi. The best she had been able to come up with was a tiny cab dangling from a key chain. When she presented the key chain to Tania, sheepishly explaining that it was all she could find at that early hour, Tania growled and grabbed the key chain, throwing it against the wall in a fit of rage. “This is not what I wanted!” she screamed. Linda and Elia both jumped back, startled by her reaction. They feared that their leader was about to shatter, and there didn’t seem to be anything anyone could say or do to shake her out of her funk.

The ceremony began as it always did, with the unfurling of a torn American flag that had been salvaged from ground zero, and a moment of silence at precisely 8:46 a.m. when the first plane had hit. People jammed together in the drizzle, holding framed photographs and other mementos of lost loved ones. When a children’s choir finished singing the national anthem, Mayor Michael Bloomberg walked to the podium and stirred the crowd with thoughtful words.

“That day we felt isolated, but not for long and not from each other,” he said, as dignitaries such as Senator Hillary Clinton, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, and New York governor Eliot Spitzer looked on. “Six years have passed, and our place is still by your side.” The program commenced with the reading of the names of the 2,750 dead by some of the firefighters and rescuers who had helped save thousands on that day. Tears streamed down Tania’s cheeks when Dave’s name was read.

The gray sky gave way to pelting rain as hundreds of family members and survivors walked from the park, across the street to the place where the towers once stood, and down a long ramp to the reflecting pool, seven stories below ground level. Tania walked alone behind Linda, Elia, Janice, and the others in her group. Linda couldn’t help but think how destroyed her friend looked, slumped over and soaking wet, with her white blouse stuck to her and her short hair matted to her head. As people took turns dropping roses in the reflecting pool
and moving on, Tania stood still, clutching her rose to her chest. She seemed to be somewhere else. Linda wondered where.

By the end of the four-hour ceremony, the rain had slowed to a trickle. A knot of stragglers lingered as the trumpeters played “Taps.” Tania’s friends looked over at her. She looked beyond miserable. “What can I do?” Janice asked gently, walking up behind her. Tania swung around. “I can’t take this!” she cried, shoving her cell phone toward the clutch of survivors who remained. “They won’t leave me alone! The reporters! They just won’t leave me alone!” Janice stood there, stunned. She had thought that Tania was overcome with terrible memories and missing Dave. But she hadn’t even mentioned her husband. She was still worrying about the damn newspaper interview. The relentless pressure from the
Times
had obviously sent Tania into a perilous emotional spiral.

“My God, Tania,” Janice said. “You don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. If you’re feeling that they’re harassing you, why don’t you call a lawyer? This way, you’ll know what your rights are. I’ll even go with you.”

Tania’s face was red and blotchy, and her hands shook. “Leave me alone!” she shouted. “I’ll take care of this. Stop interfering! Just leave me alone.”

“We’re only trying to help you,” Linda said, trying to get Tania to calm down.

“I don’t need your help!” Tania fumed, pushing past Janice.

The others looked on, bewildered. “What’s wrong with you?” Janice cried. “I’m trying to help you. Please, just let me help you.”

“I said leave me alone!” Tania screamed. “All of you! Just leave me alone!”

And then she was gone.

As the survivors suffered through their anniversary with Tania, Angelo was sitting, of all places, in the Bob Barker Studios in Hollywood, California.

“Angelo Guglielmo! Come on down! You’re the next contestant on
The Price Is Right!
” the announcer shouted over the loudspeakers. It was a quick appearance, and as he left the soundstage with his winnings—a birdbath—his cell phone rang. Gabriel was calling.

“Angelo,” he said, “you need to come back to New York. Something is terribly wrong with Tania.”

T
ania’s friends were tiring of her frantic calls about the
Times
story. The paper was out to get her, she said, and she didn’t understand why. It was David against Goliath. One of the largest news organizations in the world was going to write lies, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She passed around copies of the questions in Dunlap’s email. What was Dave’s last name? What was she doing on the ninety-sixth floor? What was her alma mater? Did she work for Merrill Lynch? How dare he question the veracity of her story!

Her friends were puzzled.

“Tania, why are you so upset?” Elia asked after reading Dunlap’s questions. “Everything he wants to know is verifiable. Get Dave’s parents to talk to him. Dave’s friends. Have Merrill Lynch verify that you work there. There is nothing to worry about.”

Tania couldn’t be mollified. She dispatched Janice to the
Times
’s offices to appeal directly to the staff. Dunlap listened politely as Janice explained that Tania was going through hell and didn’t want them to write about her. “I don’t think it did any good,” she told Tania after she left the newspaper that day.

Linda begged Tania to let her help. “Give me some evidence that I can bring to the
Times
,” she said. “Give me the name of the firefighter that carried you out that morning. The one that you were handed off to, that carried you out and threw you under that fire truck when the tower came down, right on West Street. You told me that story a million times. He can verify your story. Give me his name so I can bring it to the
Times.
”

Tania refused.

On Friday, September 21, she called Janice to say that she had made an appointment with a lawyer. Would she please come? That afternoon, Janice took the train from her home in Seaford, Long Island, and met Tania outside the attorney’s office on the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. She was surprised to see someone else—a person she had never seen before—with her. Tania introduced the woman as her mother. An obviously well-heeled woman who was neatly groomed and wearing a conservative business suit, she seemed to be shy and spoke broken English.

Inside the office tower, the three women boarded the elevator. Tania giggled nervously.

“I have a confession to make,” she said when the elevator doors closed.

“What is it?” Janice asked.

“I’m not a US citizen.”

Janice looked at Tania, waiting for the punch line.

“Don’t you understand?” Tania asked. She suddenly seemed like the old Tania. Sweet and funny and childlike.

“Understand?” Janice asked.

The reason that she had been avoiding the
Times
and didn’t want to speak to the reporter, Tania explained, was that she wasn’t a US citizen, and she feared the newspaper would reveal that in its story. She could lose her job or, worse yet, be deported if all of her papers weren’t in order. It took a minute for what Tania had said to register, but when it did, Janice started to laugh. It suddenly all made sense. The bizarre behavior of late. The growing anxiety every time the paper called. Tania had a secret, and she was afraid of what the
Times
would do with it.

“That’s what all of this is about?” Janice cried. “That you’re not a US citizen? Oh, Tania! No one is going to care that you’re not a citizen.”

Tania took a deep breath and smiled. Her mother shook her head up and down, but she didn’t seem to understand. “No
importa,
” Tania said.

The law firm of Furgang & Adwar occupied a plush suite of offices on the twenty-eighth floor filled with mahogany furniture, marble
statuary, and paintings that looked like they belonged in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Stephanie Furgang Adwar was a high-priced entertainment attorney with offices in midtown, West Nyack, and White Plains. Janice figured she must be an acquaintance of Tania’s family. Adwar was a good-looking woman with a firm, confident handshake.