The Woman Who Wasn’t There (9 page)

Linda didn’t approach Tania that night, except to briefly introduce herself, but she did race home to scope her out online. She didn’t have to look further than the group forum archives to find what she needed to know. She was stunned to read Tania’s powerful account from the previous November about her life-and-death escape from one tower, and losing her husband in the other. A more recent post, written just before Linda had discovered the forum that spring, was heart wrenching.

“Today I got a promotion at work, and I still don’t know why,” Tania wrote. “Most of the time, my mind is miles away. I relive over and over the moments I shared with Dave, my fiancé who died in the north tower. After I heard about the promotion, I had this urge to call the store where the wedding dress I never got to wear was being stored and told them to go ahead and donate it to charity. This is a big step for me. It’s been accumulating dust for 21/2 years . . . and it’s time. Tania.”

Sitting at her home computer, trying to take it all in, Linda felt as if she couldn’t possibly attend another survivors’ meeting or even post on the forum anymore. If Tania was the definition of a survivor, how could she deign to put herself in that category? She didn’t even deserve to share the same air with her. She wrote that in an email to Tania that night, and, within minutes, Tania responded most graciously, the way that she did with others who had expressed similar sentiments. Of course she deserved to be part of the group, Tania wrote Linda. Everyone’s story was of equal importance and value. They weren’t competing for best survivor, ha-ha. No one’s experience was any more or less compelling than anyone else’s. They were all wounded souls who needed to stick together. She ended her note with “Warm regards, Tania.”

The next meeting coincided with the
Time
magazine story hitting the newsstands, and everyone was chattering about it when Linda arrived at September Space. As it turned out, Tania had been interviewed for the story after all. Accompanied by another survivor for
moral support, she had met with Ripley for coffee a few days after the last meeting. She did it, she told the others, certainly not for herself—she didn’t even like reporters much—but because she recognized an opportunity for the survivors to have a national platform. Tania was glowing. “Not bad, huh?” she said, holding up her copy.

Linda’s admiration for Tania intensified even more when she read the magazine story. Not only was it one of the very first articles to address survivors and the complex issues with which they still struggled three years after the tragedy, but this brave woman—despite all she endured and all she lost—had been instrumental in delivering the message.

Ripley wrote:

New York City is engaged in America’s first experiment with a mass-casualty disaster that has no end point. Manhattan residents say they are using more cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana since 9/11, and they remain worried about new attacks, according to research by the New York Academy of Medicine.

But as with Vietnam vets, the ability of New Yorkers to process a trauma depends largely on how close people were to the carnage.

Still, psychologists say the most overexposed—and under recognized—victims may be the nearly 20,000 New Yorkers who walked, ran, and crawled through smoke, fire, and body parts to escape the buildings. “People cannot understand. We saw things,” says Tania Head, who was injured while evacuating. “We had to make life-or-death decisions. The higher the floor, the more lonely you were. I can’t get rid of my fear that it’s going to happen again.”

The magazine story validated what survivors had felt for so long. September 11 was a national tragedy, and everyone wanted a piece of it, to connect with it in some fundamental way. It was human nature to want to be part of the “big story,” and there were few bigger in contemporary history than the fall of what Minoru Yamasaki, the
architect of the World Trade Center, once called “a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace.” How many people said things like “I was in the towers the week before the attack,” or “I knew someone who knew someone who was there that day,” or “My cousin’s brother-in-law saw the towers fall,” or “It could have been me”?

Linda sat there thinking that she would have given anything to loiter on the fringes of the disaster like most of the rest of the world. Instead she was sinking under the weight of untoward memories of that hellish morning. She—all of them—had been “overexposed” to the wretchedness of it all, and then they were expected to carry on as usual, as if they had been sitting in their living rooms somewhere in the Midwest, watching it on TV. Maybe now, people would begin to understand who the survivors were: anonymous men and women who were damaged by unimaginable trauma.

They thanked Tania for that. They stood and applauded her, and she giggled, curtsied, and took a deep bow. Linda looked at her with awe. “This woman runs the group,” she said to herself. “She’s in charge, and she has everyone spellbound. I know who I want to be friends with. I want to be in the center of things too.” But Linda’s attraction to Tania was more than just about gaining status in the group. She was inspired by Tania’s courage and resilience. After all she had suffered, she was able to put back the pieces of her life, and she was helping them to put back the pieces of theirs. Linda wanted that kind of character. She had been mired in an artificial fog for so long that she didn’t even know the real Linda anymore. “I want to be like her,” Linda told herself as she watched Tania relish the attention she was getting. “This is the life I want to live.”

Linda began looking for opportunities to connect with Tania. Her chance came when the survivors’ group took a trip to the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West for a lighthearted scavenger hunt. It would be their first social outing together, and everyone looked a little awkward. Tania seemed a little standoffish at first. Linda followed her to the coat check and tried to make small talk without much luck. Tania was wearing a Survivors’ Network T-shirt
under her coat. She was generous with her money, and she had paid to have them made for all of the board members. The coat check girl gasped when she saw it.

“You’re a World Trade Center survivor? Oh! That’s
so
cool!” she cried, gawking at Tania as if she had won an Olympic gold medal. “I wish I was.”

Linda and Tania looked at each other in disbelief and then burst out laughing.

“Oh, believe me, you don’t!” Tania replied.

To which Linda added, “Exactly! Are you out of your mind?”

Linda asked Tania to be her partner for the hunt, and Tania obliged. They spent the afternoon going through the museum, interpreting clues, bantering back and forth, and laughing until their sides ached. For the first time in as long as she could remember, Linda forgot about her pain and misery. For a few hours, she felt carefree, almost like a kid again. After 9/11, she felt like a rudderless boat adrift at sea. Now she felt moored to the other survivors. She had found a place to belong.

Linda was exhausted by the end of the day. All of the survivors were. It was late afternoon when they left the museum to go their separate ways. As everyone else scurried off, Tania and Linda lagged behind.

“I could go for a cup of coffee,” Tania said. “How ’bout you?”

“Sure!” Linda replied. “Coffee sounds good.”

And that night, both Tania and Linda knew they would be best friends.

I
n the weeks leading up to the third anniversary, the survivors began to see a different side of Tania. She was sometimes sullen and unresponsive. Days would go by, and no one would hear from her, and she didn’t respond to emails or phone calls.

What the survivors didn’t know, but Tania confided to her new friend, Richard Williams, the survivor from the Oklahoma City bombing, was that she was suffering a crushing setback. “People ask me what’s wrong, and I tell them nothing, because I just don’t want to lay it on them,” she wrote in correspondence to Williams. “In reality, everything is wrong.”

Indeed, she was feeling so anxious and out of sorts, Tania said, that her therapist had encouraged her to take an antidepressant. She didn’t know if it was the medication or recurring memories of the day of the attack, but she wasn’t sleeping, and her mood swings seemed to be beyond her control. She said that some days she felt too depleted to leave her apartment. Other times she was unexplainably euphoric and felt like jumping out of her skin. She couldn’t get relief no matter where she was. Being at Merrill Lynch’s offices in the World Financial Center, overlooking ground zero, was a nightmare. She was always waiting for a plane to hit the building. And where once she had loved to travel, now she felt panicky every time she boarded a plane for a business trip, for fear that it would be hijacked and crash.

She didn’t want to burden anyone, Tania said, but she really felt as though she couldn’t go on. “It’s like I’m damaged and will never get fixed,” she wrote to Williams. “Frankly, I don’t know how a bunch of pills is going to help me with my problems, but my therapist says that
they’ll take some of the emotional edge off so I can face my flashbacks and talk more about my experience.”

Pills certainly wouldn’t change the way the world continued to perceive the survivors, Tania complained. That was something she desperately wanted to effect. Why didn’t people want to hear what she and the other survivors had to say? she wondered. Testimony from the survivors of Nazi concentration camps was painfully graphic, as it should have been. What was different about 9/11, when scores of innocent Americans were murdered in the name of a radical political ideology? Why were the people who bore witness to this holocaust expected to swallow their anguish and be as they were before the malevolent deeds of Islamic extremists intervened in their lives?

“It seems no one cares about how much I suffered, what I saw,” Tania wrote. “How can that help people in the future? The rest of the world saw [the attack] from their TVs at home. They saw the towers burning and the people falling, but they didn’t see what was going on inside. People need to know that the 78th floor was full of bodies, burnt and ripped apart, that were their fellow Americans, fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons. That cannot simply be hidden because it is too hard to tell or show. People just have to know about it because, just like knowing what happened in the concentration camps, only by understanding the true horrors of the day can we do something to prevent it from happening again.”

Tania didn’t want anyone to suffer as she did. It hadn’t been very long ago that she was living her dream. Nothing was the same anymore. “Dave is gone, and I should have died with all those people on the 78th floor but didn’t,” she wrote Williams. “I lived, but so many things changed. Now I can’t find meaning in anything I do . . . All of this makes me mad and makes me wonder what it is that I’m doing here. Why is it that I continue to be haunted by the images of that day? I’m so tired of trying to make sense of any of this, of trying to cope with my situation. I miss Dave more every day, and I just don’t understand how it is that I’m supposed to do this without him. Just this week, I attempted to put away more of his things, but then I went and put them back. I guess I’m either not ready yet or it’s terrifying.”

As reticent as Tania had been at first to talk about Dave, now she peppered most of her conversations with mentions of him. Dave was one of those guys everybody loved, she told Linda. In so many ways, he was almost too good to be true. Of course, Dave had his quirks. He was always misplacing his keys and his wallet, he watched the movie
Braveheart
so many times that he could recite most of the lines, and he couldn’t stand to be late, not even by a minute when they were supposed to be somewhere. That caused little arguments as she rushed to get ready, and he stood there, checking his watch. But those were small things. What she had loved most about Dave—what drew her to him right from the start—she said, was that he was never afraid to show his sensitive side. She had seen him leave his volunteer shift at the soup kitchen in tears because, he said, no one should ever be hungry. And being the hopeless and silly romantic that he was, he had unabashedly serenaded her with corny love songs in places like the subway or the middle of a crowded restaurant.

Dave was always thinking of everyone else, Tania said. She had always told him he was loyal to a fault, and she loved that about him. In high school, he’d been a championship wrestler, and, until his death, he regularly returned to his New Jersey alma mater to encourage the boys on the wrestling team, even if it meant foregoing other weekend plans. When he died, the team dedicated its season to his memory, and then the school held a beautiful ceremony at which they unveiled a plaque in his name to hang permanently in the lobby. She’d been so proud to be there with his family.

How would she ever find someone else after loving Dave? Tania would ask. He never missed a birthday, and, no matter where he was, he always made sure to call his family and friends to serenade them with the birthday song. He loved kids, and they’d wanted to have three or four. Their plans were eventually to move to the West Coast, and they’d saved a substantial amount of money toward buying a vineyard in California’s Napa Valley, which they planned to name Esperanza, or “hope” in Spanish. They had a lifetime’s worth of dreams, Tania said, but not enough time to make most of them come true. Suddenly there was no future. Dave was gone.

She was so grateful that they had gone ahead and bought a beach house in Amagansett in the Hamptons and had the whole summer there before he died. Dave loved the commotion of the city, but the ocean soothed him, and his favorite pastime when they were at the beach was walking the dunes in the morning as the sun rose on the horizon. During the summer months before September 11, they usually left the city by noon on Fridays, then fought the weekend traffic on the Long Island Expressway just to be able to make it to Nick and Toni’s, their favorite East Hampton haunt, in time for dinner and the house special ricotta gnocchi. The house at the beach had so many reminders of Dave. His picture was in every room, and his softball uniform and Hawaiian shirts still hung in the bedroom closet. She felt closest to him when she was there.