We All Fall Down: The True Story of the 9/11 Surfer (25 page)

Pasquale turned to Louise, who looked positively awash in emotion.

“Look, Hope! These are the men who saved your daddy. These are the men who brought him home to me the same night!” she said to the baby before holding her up for all of them to see.

“Yeah, she gets emotional, this one,” Pasquale said, smiling humbly.

The men laughed as they greeted Louise and baby Hope.

After Louise thanked them all individually and they began talking amongst themselves, Louise spotted Kathryn. They hadn’t yet met face to face, and Louise was thrilled to finally get to meet her and thank her in person.

After they said their hellos, it was time for the cameras to come on and for the media to ask their questions.

Pasquale was asked to recount the story for what felt like the millionth time, but he did so on that day with no hesitation. He could not thank the firemen enough and was happy to tell stories of their heroism, as opposed to the one he’d been asked to tell so many times—just the story of what happened to him.

After he was finished, Louise read a letter to the firemen, which finished in a tearful anecdote:
“
My grandma says that when a baby sleeps, they dream about angels. And now that I have met all of you…you are the angels I have dreamt about. Before I go to bed each night, I’ll ask Jesus to watch you through the day and through the night, until you wake in morning’s light.” She turned to face them all and said, “God bless you all!”

The media members finished up by allowing each of the firemen to say a few words before they left. As the cameras were being put away, the men who had saved Pasquale revealed one last surprise for the Buzzellis.

“Hey, we all like to cook,” Jimmy said. “I may not look like much, but—”

“He really is short, isn’t he?” John quipped, interrupting his fellow hero.

“Yeah, with that bald dome of yours, I wouldn’t be making jokes,” Jimmy fired back before going on. “Anyway, I am a hell of a cook, and we were all wondering if you would like to join us for a meal, here at the firehouse?”

“Oh, guys, you don’t have to go to all that trouble!” Louise said graciously. “You have already done so much for us—more than we could ever ask!”

“Meh, it’s no trouble at all,” Mike offered in his Brooklyn accent that made Louise feel instantly at home. “We cook for our family, and we’d like to cook for you.”

“All right,” Pasquale conceded, nodding politely in thanks, “as long as you don’t mind me cooking something for you someday. I have a secret recipe for barbecue baby back ribs!.”

“Oh yeah?” Michael asked. “You’re gonna have to let me in on that!”

And, just like that, the Buzzellis were welcomed into the family, the brotherhood that made up the New York Fire Department.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Too Many
PEOPLE

“What words could I say?

Thoughts of you with each passing day,

to do this alone, his name etched in stone…

Tell me why, God.

What’s going on in this world?

Fathers have died, God.

Please give them the strength to go on…”

~ Louise Buzzelli

(“Hope”)

Louise sat at the piano, holding baby Hope close with one hand and pecking the keys with the other. She played the same notes over and over again—one single melody. The pattern kept repeating in her mind, and she played it again and again, terrified that if she didn’t, she’d forget. She worried the tune would flee her mind and escape forever if she did not continue the repetition. It was something she knew she couldn’t lose; if it did get away from her, surely the anguish and the guilt would overwhelm her.

~ ♦ ~

“NEW LIFE, NEW HOPE”
the big block letters of the headline read. Underneath, the subheading read,
“Their husbands died on Sept. 11. Their babies were born afterward. Meet 31 brave women who are rebuilding their lives.”
While the words would naturally draw most curious readers to the story, it was the picture above those words that brought Louise to a halt. She didn’t even need to read the headline. One look at the photograph, which spanned the entire front and back cover of
PEOPLE Magazine
, all those smiling women holding their brand new babies, and she already knew what the article was about.
             

At that moment, Louise was standing in Shop Rite, at the checkout counter, with Hope in the front part of the shopping cart, surrounded by hundreds of busy shoppers, and her heart just fell into her shoes. A moment earlier, she’d been fine. She’d been going about her daily routine, trying to figure out what to do for dinner, but a glance at that magazine gave her a jolt, had her feeling an all-too-familiar pit inside. Her heart broke into a million pieces at that moment; she already knew it would never be whole again, not while those widows and their babies were out there.
My God!
she thought.
I knew they were out there, but seeing them? Those sweet faces.
She wanted to scream right there next to the candy bars and gossip rags. She wanted to fall to her knees and wail, smacking her fists against the hard linoleum, and just scream for those women.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you in line to check out?” a woman behind Louise asked.

And with that, Louise was snapped out of her reverie long enough to pay for her groceries and load them into her car. She sped all the way home, praying that Hope would remain asleep long enough for her to read the article, to devour every word of it and every name of every widow and child left behind. Hope obliged, and as soon as Louise was safely inside of her house, she sat down on the couch and absorbed every word, crying the whole time.

God, that agony! That unendurable, unbearable pain. I know, because I felt it for a few hours, but these women? They still feel it every single day.
She had known all along that they were out there, and she’d already felt a profound sadness for them, but they and their precious babies had faces now, names, and that made it all too real to the woman who, but for a miracle, could have easily been among them.

They watched those Towers fall just like I did. They saw their husbands, the fathers of those babies, die. Their men will never come home. Those daddies will never get to feel the miracle Pasquale and I felt together, holding Hope in our arms the first time. I felt that loss, that horror and helplessness for a time, but it actually happened to them. They will never see their husbands again, and what about those children?

Those babies will never meet their fathers! Oh my God! Why?! They will never get to hug their daddies! They will never get to hear their fathers read them a bedtime story or feel the warmth of his strong, safe hands holding theirs. They’ll never know Daddy’s gentle kiss on their little foreheads as he tucks them in. Those mothers now have to raise their children without their husbands. How could this happen…and why?!
             

~ ♦ ~

What the hell did I just do?
Pasquale thought as he stood with his knuckles bruised, looking at the imprint of his fist in the sheetrock.
How has it come to this? How did I get here, to this point? What the hell is wrong with me? I can’t even…God, I can’t control myself anymore.

Life had been coasting at a steady downward spiral for Pasquale since 9/11, but he’d never imagined it drag him so low. He was not sleeping well and still woke up most nights after dreaming of being trapped in that godforsaken elevator, but he’d been able to keep himself under control, for the most part. He’d even managed to recover from the nightmares without waking Louise or Hope. He’d learned to hide the growing sense of paranoia left in the wake of those horrible nightmares, and in the mornings, he’d learned to lie to Louise for her own sake: she always asked him how well he had slept, and he couldn’t bear to tell her the truth. He couldn’t bear to let her know that he was still falling apart..

But while he hid his pain, his rage from others, he
knew
he was not fine. The sheetrock he’d just demolished could attest to the fact that Pasquale Buzzelli was really only hanging by an ever-thinning thread. He had been easing back into his normal workload, not thriving but at least getting by. Everyone seemed to be adjusting well to their new workspace, and he was seemingly no different—until a relatively innocuous comment brought the rage out of him.

“Hey, Pasquale,” his supervisor greeted him. “How are your projects coming along?”

“Not too bad. I’m getting close to wrapping up a couple of them.”

“Good, good. It is really great that we have you back. Turnaround got a bit slow around here with you gone. It doesn’t help that we have to take over the workload of the others. To be honest, one of them really did not know what he was doing, and—”

A switch flipped in Pasquale as his boss droned on, and it showed on his face.

His supervisor’s eyes went wide at the look on Pasquale’s face, and he brought his hand to his mouth. “Oh God, Pasquale,” he said, sitting down and looking horrified. “I’m so sor…uh, I didn’t mean anything by…I mean, uh—”

Pasquale did not give him the chance to finish his sentence. He just stood and left the room as the rage grew inside him.
Who the hell does he think he is? Does he think he can just stand there and say shit like that about them, about the men who died that day? Goddamn it!

He closed his eyes tightly and swung his fist blindly. Nanoseconds later, he felt his fist connect with the wall in front of him. He was too angry to feel pain, so he kept swinging. The
slap
of his knuckles against the sheetrock seemed to pacify the monster raging inside of him, and he just couldn’t stop.

After a few moments of pummeling the defenseless wall, he stood still, trying to calm down, and he came to a realization:
I need help. I lie to Louise every morning, because I’m not fine—nowhere near it. I need rest, and I need a time-out. I-I need to get away from my job for a while and fix whatever the hell is wrong with me.

After suffering silently for so long, trying to deal with his problems internally and without being a burden to anyone else, Pasquale had reached his breaking point. He had become keenly aware that there was a necessary healing process, and he couldn’t get by with skipping it or taking shortcuts. It was on that day, spawned by those seemingly cold words of his boss and the realization of his own anger coming to fruition, that Pasquale made the decision to take a leave of absence from work. As much as he hated to admit it, he could not recover on his own. He could not go back to being the man he wanted to be, not without help, and he was going to get that help for his own sake as well as the sake of his family. He owed that to them, to himself, and to all those who were lost that day. He’d survived, he’d lived, and he owed it to everyone to live well.

~ ♦ ~

Louise was beside herself that evening. She couldn’t get the image of the
PEOPLE Magazine
cover out of her head. She’d spent months watching over her husband, witnessing his pain, but at the moment when she saw that magazine cover, she began to feel her own hurt for the very first time. She was not naïve about her good fortune; she knew she’d come frighteningly close to being among those women on the cover, devastated inside while having to be brave for their children on the outside. She just wanted to help them, to take away their pain, but she knew she could do nothing to bring their husbands back.

It was more than difficult to cope with all the feelings swirling around inside her. As she dealt with the internal struggles and her compassion for those who’d not been so fortunate, all the while she had to be a good daughter-in-law, a good friend, a good wife, and—most of all—a good mother. It was nearly impossible to effectively juggle so many roles while she felt such agony inside. She did not feel as if she could tell anyone else about her pain, they would not understand. She couldn’t dare tell Pasquale, for he was hurting too badly himself. She was aware that everyone expected her to feel like the luckiest woman in the world, and she did, but that did not change the pain she felt when she thought of those less-than-lucky mothers, those widows holding their fatherless little ones. She did not know where to turn, and that night she found herself sitting with Hope at the piano.

Music had always been something shared between Louise and her own mother; it was one of the things that made their relationship special. It was also something she’d given up on, for the most part, when her beloved mother had passed on, but there, that night, with her heart broken, the music soothed her soul again. There, enjoying the feel of her own little one nestled up against her, surrounded by the peaceful softness of those pale blue walls in their living room, the keys on the old, antique piano that Pasquale had restored for her beckoned to her, and Louise began to play again…

CHAPTER THIRTY

A Mother’s Prayer

“I only play it for myself, Hope, and God for the first week, her on my lap, at the piano…

but eventually, I can’t hold it in anymore…”