The Woman Who Wasn’t There (5 page)

“Who’s taking care of the dog, of Elvis?”

“We are.”

As her parents kept vigil at her bedside, Tania went in and out of consciousness. Each time she woke, she asked for Dave. When her parents didn’t answer, she was almost relieved. She wasn’t sure how many days passed that way, with her asking for her husband, and her parents pretending not to hear. But one day she asked for Dave and her mother didn’t turn away. She sat down beside her bed, took her hand, and slowly reviewed what was being replayed on television throughout the world:

Terrorists had flown two planes into the World Trade Center, her mother said, choosing each word as carefully as if it had the potential
of a razor-sharp knife. The towers were gone, and hundreds of people were dead or still unaccounted for. Dave was among the missing.

The tears didn’t come, not then. The ensuing weeks of burn treatment and physical therapy were agonizing for Tania. She had never suffered such excruciating pain, yet she went through the motions with the cold efficiency of a robot. The doctors had saved her arm but said that she would have only partial use of it, and the burn scars on the arm and her back would never fade completely. Tania could live with that. What she didn’t tell anyone was that nightmares about Dave and things she had witnessed on the seventy-eighth floor made her afraid to go to sleep. Most nights, she lay awake, wishing she had died in the towers.

Tania wasn’t sure what gave her the courage to keep going, except that sometimes she looked at her roommate and dared to hope for a miracle. The woman, Lauren Manning, an employee of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, had been critically burned in the north tower and was now in a medically induced coma, fighting for her life. Tania thought that Dave could be in a coma somewhere too.

The red and yellow leaves of fall had almost all dropped from the trees outside her hospital window when the doctor strode into her room one morning and said he had good news. She could go home in time to celebrate Thanksgiving with her family. Her mother jumped up and down like a child when she heard, and Tania pretended to be happy too, but the truth was that she dreaded going back to an empty apartment. For the past two months, she had convinced herself there was still hope that Dave was alive—maybe recovering in a hospital from serious injuries, or perhaps amnesia, so that even if he were able to contact her, he would have no way of knowing where she was. Once she got home, it wouldn’t be as easy to imagine him trying to find her.

For the next few months, Tania slept away the days. At night, when everyone else was sleeping, she read everything she could about September 11 and studied photographs from that day, looking for any evidence of Dave. Even her mother, who stayed in New York to help
Lupe, the housekeeper, with the cooking and cleaning and tending to Elvis, couldn’t convince her that Dave wasn’t coming home. Finally, on March 25, 2002, six months after the towers fell, someone from the New York City coroner’s office called to say that two fingerprints and a dental pattern had confirmed that Dave was dead. Tania accepted the news without shedding a tear. By then she felt completely empty and void of all feelings, happy or sad. What she knew was that she couldn’t spend another night in that apartment, with so many reminders of happiness now lost forever. Dave wasn’t coming home, there was no more pretending. She told Lupe to start packing up the place. They were leaving.

Tania took a spare two-bedroom on the eighteenth floor of the Westport in the Hell’s Kitchen section of midtown. She had taken a quick look at the building and told the broker to draw up the papers. She was ready to move in. Living on Tenth Avenue would be a stark contrast to the patrician Upper East Side, and that’s what she sought. Dave was gone, and she wanted to lock the memories of their life together away in the home they shared uptown. Her mother went back home. A year of lonely days and sleepless nights came and went.

As winter turned to spring in 2003, Tania sat at her kitchen window, staring at the budding trees along the avenue below, when she felt something stir inside her. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it was a feeling, and, for the first time in more than a year, she almost felt like living again. Could there possibly be a new life after such interminable sorrow? She wasn’t sure. But maybe it was worth trying to find out. A few days later, she was ready to make her move. She snapped open her laptop and Googled three words: “9/11 survivor help.”

S
he logged in and introduced herself to a fledgling online support group in the early morning hours of May 13, 2003. Her words were vague and restrained, like so many survivors who had only just begun to confess publicly their months of silent suffering, the reasons for their ambiguity about reverence for the dead, and their guilt over being alive. They were just beginning to feel angry for being overlooked, the forgotten victims of the worst tragedy ever to embroider American soil, so they reached out to one another in the anonymous world of the Internet because no one else, not even their families, seemed to understand their hard feelings and lingering despair. They were, after all, the lucky ones. They had survived.

“I am only just starting to feel the consequences now despite having tried so hard to put it all behind me,” she wrote in the online forum that Tuesday morning in May, twenty months after the terrorist attack. “I don’t sleep, I see and hear the images and sounds, I’m moody, my stress and anxiety have skyrocketed, and a variety of other things. For so long I pretended to be OK that it is now hard to admit this is actually happening.”

Manuel Chea sat at his kitchen table in Brooklyn, finishing his last cup of coffee before heading off to work, when he logged into the forum and saw the new post. Manny had joined the virtual support group three months earlier, and he often posted heartfelt messages about his struggles resulting from that terrible day downtown. He survived the attack, like so many had, by God’s good grace, and, late at night, when he should have been sleeping, he thrashed around in his bed, fighting off nightmares and wondering why he had been
spared when so many others died. The only things he ever came up with during those dark hours of sleeplessness were profound feelings of guilt and remorse, and recollections he wished he could forget.

September 11, 2001, had been primary election day in New York City, and Manny thought about casting his vote before going to his job at the World Trade Center. Instead he’d grabbed some breakfast at a fast-food restaurant and headed up to his office on the forty-ninth floor of the north tower, promising himself he would go to the polls that evening instead. It was eight o’clock when he sat down at his office desk. Manny knew this because he was a clock-watcher. Forty-six minutes later, he felt his building shake and tremble. What sounded to him like a sonic boom reverberated through the tower, and it swayed violently back and forth. “An earthquake,” Manny thought, grabbing his backpack and running for the stairs.

It had taken Manny an hour to make it down forty-nine flights. The stairway was crowded with people, many of whom didn’t seem to know what had happened, and he’d pushed his way past the slower ones, pausing only once to call his wife from an office on one of the low floors. The call hadn’t gone through. He had been outside the north tower for only five minutes when the neighboring tower roared and came crashing down. Manny ran until his legs wouldn’t carry him any farther, never looking back, finally making it home to Brooklyn in the late afternoon. The next day, he went back to work at a sister branch of his company on Long Island, as if nothing had ever happened. But he had never been able to get away from the regret he felt for not doing more to help his coworkers.

On the outside, Manny was his normal solid self. Inside, though, he was crumbling. At home, he was sullen and irritable. He was losing patience with his kids, and his once stable marriage felt shaky. One night Manny’s wife told him that up until September 11, they were always on the same page. Now there was a gap between them that couldn’t be filled. She called it “the 9/11 hole.”

There was no such void between Manny and his fellow survivors. The tragedy was their bond, and they were attracted to one another like paper clips to a magnet. In the months following the attack, little
attention was paid to the thousands of regular people who had made it out of the towers that morning. The focus of the massive media coverage and charitable outreach programs was first responders and families of the dead. Out of that seeming lack of empathy from the public grew a mounting sense of isolation on the part of the survivors, and many retreated into solitary cocoons of grief. For months, these vulnerable men and women quietly acquiesced to the role assigned them—that of inconsequential witnesses—until they could no longer deny their terminal misery and slowly began to seek out the only people who could understand: one another. Since Manny’s coming out, he had confessed more of his feelings and fears to his faceless online comrades than he did to his own family and friends. In turn, he was always there for the other survivors when they needed a sympathetic ear. He read the new woman’s confession with tears in his eyes.

“I think I need to talk to someone about this and tell my story, but I don’t see how I will manage to do that,” her post continued. “Going through it once was more than enough.” The brief yet provocative message was signed simply, “God Bless, Tania.”

Manny was compulsively punctual, but he didn’t care if he was late to work that morning. He knew the angst of wanting desperately to talk about what happened in the towers but feeling too afraid to remember, or too unworthy to own the incessant suffering of having lived through it. The woman named Tania was clearly in distress, and he wanted her to know that she had come to the right place, where people understood the complexities of surviving such an unfathomable tragedy, and didn’t pass judgment or assign degrees of grief. So he typed a short response to her post.

“Tania, I’m glad you joined,” he wrote. “We are a relatively small group here, but we have a very good and strong group of people. We have encouraged one another in many ways, listened to each other, and supported each other as we have expressed what we’ve felt. Share with us your story when you are able to. :-) Manuel.”

Within hours, other survivors posted words of welcome and encouragement for the newcomer.

“This group has really helped me, and I felt that this was a safe
place for me to recount my experience,” one survivor wrote. “Especially since I knew everyone here was feeling the same things I was.”

“Hi, Tania,” wrote another survivor. “I just joined the group too last night; I finally got up the courage. I feel so much like you do, like we all do, and right now I don’t think I could tell what happened to me ’cause there’s so much I don’t remember. Only bits and pieces come back sometimes. I haven’t been able to bring myself to even look at Manhattan since that day. Maybe when we both feel ready, we can help each other try.”

Brendan Chellis was one of the original members of the survivors’ group, having first posted in the forum nine months earlier, on the evening of August 19, 2002. Like many of the survivors, he had narrowly made it out of the towers. He resented being overlooked and misunderstood, and he politely complained about it in his inaugural post:

We continue to be tortured by that day, yet it seems that nobody, even the people that are supposed to help us, understand what we are going through. We have all been through something horrible. We have seen things that people going to work on a beautiful day in September aren’t supposed to see. Most of us at least one time that morning were convinced we were looking at our last seconds of life. But somehow we walked away (or more likely ran away). We watched thousands of people just like us die. Not on TV, but with our own eyes. We knew it was just a matter of chance that it was them and not us. And when other people got on with their lives, we suffered in obscurity with that day. We lived with the flashbacks, the depression, the anxiety, and especially the survivor guilt.

Since that first post, Brendan had come to terms with the fact that most people would never understand the plight of World Trade Center survivors, not without having walked in their shoes. He had done a lot of healing since his initial post the summer before, and he had helped dozens of others as they struggled with the consequences
of that day. There were hundreds and probably thousands of others who were suffering as he’d been, but they didn’t or couldn’t reach out for help.

When Brendan saw Tania’s post, he read in her words a certain despair that he recognized from his own early cries for help. He believed this was her last stab at seeing if she would ever be able to crawl out of the emotional quagmire that was drowning her, and he was determined to do what he could to help save her from herself.

“Tania,” he wrote, “welcome to the group. We have been a little quiet lately, but hopefully having a new member will get people talking a little again. This group is a great place to be. When you get a chance, take a look at the old postings. (You have a lot of catching up to do!) Hopefully you’ll see that a lot of the thoughts and emotions you have experienced (and thought you were alone with) have also been experienced by a lot of people in the group. I think that is what has been most reassuring to me. We all come from different backgrounds and went through different things on 9/11, yet we share the same emotional roller coaster since that day. It’s good to know you are not alone in your feelings.

“Someday, if you’re up for it, let us know your story. Otherwise, if you just want to share something, write it down and send it to the group. It helps as much to write things down as it does to hear from everyone else. I hope we can help you deal with some of the things you are going through.”

Brendan wondered if he would ever hear from the woman named Tania again.

T
ania did return to the forum. During May and June of 2003, she posted short, grateful messages about how much the support from the other survivors was helping her to heal. In late June she agreed to join some of the others for a visit to the World Trade Center site, but she cancelled at the last minute, calling Brendan on his cell phone to say that she was sorry, but she wasn’t ready to return there; she was still too fragile. Brendan described the visit on the forum the next day: