The Woman Who Wasn’t There (18 page)

She ended by thanking his parents for “raising a kid with such courage.”

The air in the sanctuary was heavy with emotion. Tania’s eyes filled up, and both Linda and Janice leaned in to comfort her. Tania had told Linda that she’d read about Young, and, since only a handful of people from the sky lobby had survived, she suspected they’d crossed paths that day, but they’d never formally met. Nor had she ever met Judy Wein, who had also been in the sky lobby. She had suffered a broken arm, cracked ribs, and a punctured lung and lost her boss, who was standing right next to her. Just like Tania’s coworker, Christine. Still fragile from her experience, Wein had elected for her husband to speak for her, and his words were stirring.

“I was lucky to find my wife in a hospital that day,” he said. “She had just come out of surgery, and she could hardly speak, but she wanted to tell me what happened. She told me she was in the sky lobby when the plane crashed into the building and everybody went flying. The walls came down, and bodies were torn into parts. Nobody
knew what to do. Nobody knew where to go. Nobody was ready for what happened. Judy was watching, and waiting for the worst, when out of the darkness came a young man wearing a red bandanna. And he knew what to do. And he knew where to go. And he was ready.”

And then it was Tania’s turn. Jeff Crowther introduced her.

“Alison and I are really honored that we were able to meet, this past winter, a delightful person, a wonderful young woman, who was also trapped on the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby in the south tower,” he said, his voice cracking. “She was on that seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby, and she’s here with us, thank God.”

As the audience applauded, Linda and Tania walked to the altar. Tania stood off to the side with Jeff Crowther, who placed a hand protectively on her back, and Linda took her place at the lectern.

“Hi, I’m Linda and I’m going to ask Welles for some strength here because I’m going to be the one reading what Tania wrote, and it’s an honor to be up here because I have an incredible friend now thanks to him,” she said.

Then, reading from Tania’s script, she delivered the most rousing address of the service:

When Alison and Jeff asked me to speak today, I sat down and stared at a blank screen, and I cried, unable to find the right words to say. What exactly do you say to the family of the man who saved your life and gave his in the process? But then I thought about what Welles would do if our roles were reversed and he was asked to do this for me. This is what gave me the strength to be here today.

On September 11, I was on the ninety-sixth floor of the south tower. I waited to get on an express elevator. As we waited, United Airlines 175 headed toward the south tower. The impact was brutal, and I found myself flying through the air, and I eventually crashed against a marble wall. When I came to, my back and my arm were on fire, and all I could do was hope it would be over very soon.

A young man named Welles had also survived the impact, and he took charge. He came to me and started patting my back. At first I was angry because he was hurting me, and then I understood he was actually helping me. In a very calm voice, he told me to stay awake. To me he was a stranger, but his calm made me calm. When I turned my head toward him, I saw a red scarf over his face. I did what he told me, and I stayed awake despite the pain, smoke, and the shock.

Months after September 11, my parents read the story in
USA Today
about a man who had saved many lives in the sky lobby of the south tower. They were immediately drawn to the story when they read this man wore a bandanna. Could this be the same man that helped their daughter? Even after five years, I still carry the burden of being alive when so many others lives were taken from us—including that of my husband, Dave. I am still here, and I’m trying to find a purpose for being here.

In my family, we have a tradition at Christmas. Each year we tell the children in our family stories drawn from our lives during the past year. The story they want to hear, year after year, is the story of the man with the red bandanna, whose courage stood taller than the twin towers themselves. I like to tell them that on the day the buildings burned down, Welles stood up to the heavens. By sharing it with them year after year, I know they will never forget it, and the message will carry on to their own children, the children of tomorrow, ensuring Welles’s story will live on forever.

In many ways, I feel Welles and I keep each other alive. He took charge on September 11 and saved my life, and now I keep him alive with my memory of him. Welles, you are my hero. I live my life to make you proud.

F
or months, Tania had promised to donate her burned and bloodied Armani jacket to the new Tribute Center for a special exhibit of artifacts from September 11. The jacket was to be displayed in a custom-made glass case, between the torn and shredded turnout coat and helmet worn by Lee Ielpi’s son when he was killed, and a window from one of the airliners that was found intact on the street after the crash.

Lynn Tierney, the president of the Tribute Center, and members of her staff had concerns about all of the donated relics. There was a fine line between respectful reality and what might trigger a family member or a survivor, or seem macabre to the viewing public, and the staff was profoundly mindful of that when it chose what would or would not be exhibited when the center opened that September. Many of those discussions centered on what effect seeing that jacket every time she led a tour would have on Tania. But she had insisted that she wanted the jacket displayed, along with the dead young firefighter’s coat and the other mementos from that day. Not only could she handle it, she said, she was proud to have it there. But getting it was another story.

At first Tania said that the jacket was stored 120 miles away at her beach house near the end of Long Island, and that she would collect it the next time she was there. Weeks passed with no jacket, but no one from the Tribute Center pushed for it. Everyone was so fond of Tania, and nobody would do anything to upset her. Her ambivalence was understandable. She would get the jacket to them when she was
ready. It was Tania who usually brought up the subject of the jacket. She had different excuses for not turning it over. She forgot it. It was still at the beach house, and she hadn’t had a chance to get it yet. Her mother had it at her house in California.

Weeks turned to months, and the Tribute Center ribbon cutting was just around the corner. All of the exhibits were ready, but they still didn’t have the jacket. Someone from Tierney’s office called Tania and left a message.

Tania called Linda, who knew all about the jacket, as Tania had mentioned it a dozen times. It had been part of a blue Armani suit that she’d bought just before the attack, and it was stored in a garment bag in the house in the Hamptons, scorched and bloody. When she had mentioned wanting to donate it to the Tribute Center, Linda encouraged her. Now Tania was upset that she had ever offered to give it away. She couldn’t bring herself to see it again. “I can’t do it!” she cried. “It’s too horrible. I can’t go out there to get it. There’s blood all over it. You have to call them, Linda. You have to go there and tell them.”

Linda did as she was told, but she was upset with herself for doing yet another thing she didn’t want to do. She went to the Tribute Center and broke the news that Tania wouldn’t be donating the jacket after all. Tania wanted more than anything to continue her volunteer role as a docent and as a gallery guide, Linda said, and she feared that looking at the jacket in the exhibit hall every time she was there could set her back emotionally.

Everyone understood, of course, and the Tribute Center opened on September 6, 2006, without the jacket but with great fanfare. Angelo filmed Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg helping to cut the ribbon. Tania stood in the background, quiet and smiling. After the perfunctory speeches, the event moved inside to the center’s four galleries, where the visitors and reporters were led on a tour that took them from the building of the towers, through the day of the attack and its aftermath, to a pictorial commemoration of the dead.

The glass case that had been made for Tania’s jacket held a cell phone used by Chuck Meara, who worked for the Port Authority,
during his death-defying escape from the north tower. But a plaque engraved with a quote represented her story: “I made it from 96 to the 78th floor. Suddenly, I heard a sound like I was standing on a tarmac and hearing an engine. People started yelling, ‘Another plane!’ Then I felt the pressure, all of the air being sucked out of my lungs. Tania H.”

I
t was shortly after the Crowther memorial, during a docent tour at ground zero, that Sam Kedem met Tania. He had seen her on panels and at meetings for the Red Cross, the Tribute Center, and other 9/11-related organizations, and, of course, he had heard all about her, but they were never formally introduced.

Kedem was a trauma therapist who was in New York City on September 11 and got in on the ground floor of a free counseling program for people affected by the attack. He had planned to stay with it for a year and then return home to Miami to resume his career. But nearly six years later, he was still there, enmeshed in the floundering community. He had come in contact with hundreds of survivors during that time but had never met anyone like Tania.

The New York
Daily News
had gotten it right in a story it published on the official opening of the Tribute Center. Mike Daly, the tabloid’s crusty columnist, was at ground zero when the towers collapsed. He noticed two of his friends’ fire trucks parked nose to nose outside of the north tower, and, watching the building collapse, he knew he’d lost them. When he met Tania during a tour at ground zero, he was instantly taken with her.

“One way that Head has learned to cope with her own loss and horror is to tell her story to those who come to the Tribute Center, whose permanent exhibits opened with appropriate fanfare yesterday,” he wrote. “She stood by the entrance with a beautiful smile that is her ultimate message to everyone these five years later. To behold Head’s smile is to know the terrorists did not come even close to winning. To see that smile is also to be challenged to be as decent and positive as
this true survivor.” Tania really was an anomaly, and Kedem wanted to get to know her—perhaps glean something about the secret of her incredible resilience that could help his clients recover.

They hit it off right away as they walked from the Tribute Center to the World Financial Center and took a table at a small café in the indoor courtyard on that April day in 2007. Kedem was as easy to talk to as Tania was. He told her about his work, and she told him bits and pieces about herself. An hour or so passed, and he’d suggested they walk toward the river and talk. The courtyard had served as a temporary morgue in the days after the towers fell, and he felt uncomfortable being there. She seemed surprised by that. Walking along the Hudson, she told him about her constant struggle to close that terrible chapter in her life, and she admitted that her trauma symptoms were as frequent and as fierce as they had been right after the attack. She still wrangled with obsessive thoughts and survivor’s guilt and flashbacks, she said, and her sleep was constantly interrupted by nightmares and intrusive memories. She had bought self-help books and DVDs and spent hours reading and watching experts rally on about remedies and treatments, but nothing had helped. As they prepared to part ways, Tania proposed an idea.

“I don’t want to live in the pain anymore,” she said. “I want to move past 9/11. And I want you to help me.”

They began meeting once a week at Kedem’s office on Eighth Avenue. By their third or fourth session, he realized that Tania’s confident, happy exterior masked a deep and abiding sadness. She was suffering from as serious a case of post-traumatic stress as he had ever seen. The most mundane things triggered her. Just talking about a subway ride, or sleeping in the dark without a light, could bring on debilitating panic attacks in which she would become so hysterical and disoriented that they had to stop. Sometimes the hour was more conversational than remedial, and they talked about her travels around the world, or her lucrative career, and her connections to influential people in politics and the financial world. He’d learned a lot about her life that way. But even after their toughest encounters, she was able to pull herself together and go back to work. Sometimes he
would offer to walk her the few blocks to the World Financial Center where Merrill Lynch had offices. The Craig MacPherson mural of Rio de Janeiro on the south wall of the lobby was a favorite of his, and he’d wait for her to pass through security, to the bank of elevators, leading to the office floors, then stand and study the piece for a few minutes before walking back to work. Treating the most famous survivor felt like a privilege. He was impressed with her political and economic stature, and he believed that the community needed someone like her: a stand-proud figure who was going forward and advocating for all of the other victims. He would do whatever he could to help her deal with her trauma.

Kedem was a practitioner of exposure therapies, where the idea is to repeatedly subject patients to anxiety-provoking situations or traumatic memories for as long as it takes for the brain to learn that any perceived danger is an abstraction and not real. Thomas Stampfl pioneered the controversial practice in the 1960s as a treatment for phobias. The psychologist found that patients who were barraged with details of the situations they feared eventually lost their fear. It was used frequently by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs to treat soldiers returning from combat, and, in some circles, was considered controversial and risky because a percentage of patients suffered setbacks from reliving the traumatic event. Tania was willing to give it a try.

On April 23, in an email to her friends Richard and Lynne Williams, apologizing for cancelling a trip at the last minute to see them in Oklahoma City, she wrote excitedly about her new therapist and his ideas for treatment.