We All Fall Down: The True Story of the 9/11 Surfer (8 page)

Louise sat down heavily in one of their lawn chairs and took a deep breath. She hadn’t really been breathing before. She inhaled the air of their world and heard a robin far off, singing to someone as if it were just another ordinary day.

How could there be such peace here while Pasquale is dying across the river?
she asked herself.
How could all of this still exist if he’s gone and I’m…destroyed?

For a moment she hated it all. She resented everything they’d built together. This was
their
world, not that place beyond the Hudson. Here, in this place, real life—the stuff of a family’s memories—surrounded her.

How could this happen? HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?
She wanted to scream but only sat heavily where she and Pasquale always sat after swimming. They’d positioned two chairs so they could look back at the house they’d worked so hard for, the home they’d been turning ever so slowly, little by little, into the home they’d dreamt of having.

She put her hands to her hair, grabbed hunks, and pulled; she welcomed the reality of physical pain. Sobs rolled out of her over and over, so powerful they bent her in half; she did nothing to stop them. Her throat burned from her howls. When she dared close her eyes, even for a blink, pictures flashed: building, clouds, smoke, and the eerie quiet of watching. Then, when she opened her eyes again, she was back in an Eden-like setting—all of it just a cruel, mocking lie. There in that yard, and over there in that city, there wasn’t one thing real around her—nothing she could hold on to and say,
“This. This is my life. I can believe in this.”

She tried to stop her mind from being in that building with Pasquale, knowing and imagining what he’d just gone through, the death that had come from nowhere.

There was no life ahead for her—not without Pasquale. The dreams they’d dreamt had been meant for the two of them, then for the three of them.

Hope…HOPE!

Pasquale had been in love with his child already, before her birth. He’d said so in his words, written in Hope’s baby book:
“Hello, my precious little angel. This is your father, Daddy, Dad, Pop, Papa…I felt you for the first time on July 4, 2001. It was the most amazing thing I have ever experienced. I heard your heartbeat, and I saw you move…the feeling of your little hand or foot pushing against my hand and through your mother’s belly was amazing…you, your mother, and myself connected at one time, for the first time…”

…and the last,
Louise finished in her thoughts
. No father at all—not a chance to be one. All our future children—gone. TWO planes! Two planes out of a blue summer sky, both carrying death…

She didn’t dare go back to that part. She didn’t dare think of it. It wasn’t only that moment. There was so much beyond, so much before.
Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I should have known better than to love Pasquale.
In some terrible way, since childhood, she’d carried this awful thing in her:
I…bring death. Mother…Father…
If she loved anyone, they died.

There were three gone, her “magic three”—the three in her life whom she’d loved most. Everyone was just gone, as if thrown into holes in the world. On February 1, 1989, her mother, Josephine had died of cancer—a tragic day Louise had considered the worst in her nineteen years of life. Louise’s father, Harry, still depressed ten years after the loss of his wife, had died in a fire just from smoke inhalation, in 2000, just a year before the smoke came billowing out of those Towers. Again there’d been the horror of disbelief, but it had been nothing like this moment, her third loss. She knew she wouldn’t make it through this time. There was no living beyond the death of Pasquale.

She took deep breaths. When she tried to force herself through that moment in her peaceful yard, she could see only darkness, nothing but years of tragedy ahead.

All she wanted to do to avoid the growing pain, the absolute desolation, was die. She wished she had died with him.
If only I’d have been there. Maybe if I’d have gone into the city today…

She got up to go stand at the pool’s edge, next to the clear water, deeply blue like the morning sky. It would have been easy to slide into the water, as easy as falling into Pasquale’s blue eyes.

What I will do,
she told herself, as if thinking rationally,
will be to slide into the water, float to the deep end, and then simply let go.

She stared down into the tranquil chlorinated water.
It would be so easy this time to stop the pain. All I have to do is make a move, to put out one foot, and…

The baby moved inside her. With the quickening, breath-holding roll of a tiny being waiting to come into the world, her daughter protested. Then, there came another small kick from a tiny interior foot.

Overcome with the unbelievable feeling, the perfectly timed unborn intervention, Louise fell to the soft grass and hugged her arms across her baby, her Hope. That child was all she would have of him now—of her beloved Pasquale—and all Hope would have would be her.
Pasquale would want his daughter to be born. He would want us to be happy…someday.

Instead of darkness, Louise began to embrace the light around her, to embrace the new life she still carried within her.
I’ll have to sell the house, but I’ll stay here in New Jersey. It’s my home. I love it here. He loved it here. Hope will go to school, and she’ll know about her father. She’ll hear about him every day. Every day of her life, she’ll know about her father.

Joanne was out in the yard standing beside her, crying, putting her arms out to Louise. “You won’t be alone. I promise. I’ll move in. I’ll stay as long as you need me.”

CHAPTER TEN

I Never Said, “I Love You”

“Every parent is, at some time, the father of the unreturned prodigal,

with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope.”

~
John Ciardi

Antonia and her cousin drove to Jersey City, where she and Ugo lived. There was only stunned silence in the car. When they reached the house, she ran, fumbled with the lock, and threw open the door. The answering machine blinked again, again, and again, demanding attention. Still fumbling, she touched the button to retrieve her calls. She listened to her daughter-in-law’s voice, Louise’s voice—a soft, begging voice Antonia had never heard before: “Mama Buzzelli, it’s Louise. Can you call me please?”

She dialed her son’s home, and this time the phone rang.

Louise answered. That they didn’t speak the same language didn’t matter. Antonia knew what she needed to hear. “Where are you, Mama Buzzelli? Where is Papa Buzzelli?”

“Work, work, work!” Antonia spat out, needing to get beyond all of the questions to what she had to hear.

“I want you to know I spoke to Pasquale this morning.”

Her voice is too even, too controlled. What’s happened to my Patsy? Tell me he’s all right!

“He was fine when I talked to him, but I haven’t spoken to him recently. Anyway, why don’t you come over here? Bill will come down to get you. He’s on his way. Bill called Anthony to get a hold of Papa Buzzelli at work. He’s out on the site. We can’t reach him…”

Louise’s voice faded. Somehow, Antonia understood every word, but she had questions. She needed to ask, needed to know.
Is Pasquale alive?
She couldn’t ask—not Louise anyway.

She said she is coming,
Louise thought on the other end of the phone.
Yes, Pasquale’s mother is coming, either with Bill or she’ll wait for Ugo. Anthony will find a way to reach him out at the construction site in Long Valley, and his parents will come together—Antonia and Ugo.

~ ♦ ~

Ugo had left the job site as soon as he understood that planes had hit the buildings, that one of the Towers was down. He couldn’t work another minute. He headed home through terrible traffic; Route 3 was at a standstill, and both the Lincoln and the Holland tunnels were closed. No one could enter the city. People in cars around him called to each other or stared angrily over their steering wheels. He sat waiting, moving an inch at a time. He was a silent man. He understood that planes had hit the buildings where Pasquale sometimes worked, but he was sure Pasquale wouldn’t have been there.
Not today. No, Pasquale must be on his way home. That would take hours with all this traffic. Who even knows about the trains?

Ugo loved his son, but at that moment, trapped in traffic, he realized he’d never told Pasquale so.
A strong father doesn’t spoil his son. A strong father leads by example
. Those had been his mantras. There had been none of that hugging and kissing nonsense that American fathers and sons indulge in.
That isn’t the way for a man to show his feelings. Surely Pasquale knows that. Surely he understands that there has always been…love.

Ugo didn’t reach his home until 12:30.

An almost frozen Antonia stood in the doorway. “The Towers came down,” she said to him, her hands covering her mouth almost before the words came out. “Nothing left.”

He didn’t want to look at her face, for her eyes were terrible, red and burning. “Pasquale?” He hated the taste of his son’s name on his tongue in the form of a question.
Not for this.

“Louise said she talked to him—a couple times, she said. She wants us to come up right away. She’s upset. With the baby…well, we better go. She needs us.”

He nodded, agreeing they would leave.
Ah
, he told himself, looking for relief,
so it’s only Louise she’s worried about. Pasquale must have gotten out. That’s good. We’ll go be with Louise until he gets home. We’ll stay and make sure everything’s okay.

They drove in silence, the way married people can be: together, yet alone in their own respective worlds.

After a while, Antonia began to talk about Louise, how worried she was about her. She let her words dwindle away, though they went on in her head: all of that in vitro; that long process they’d gone through; the day of a special dinner; and back to Pasquale and Louise’s house, where Louise had put a little wrapped box in her hands.

~ ♦ ~

“A present?” She looked into her daughter-in-law’s eyes. “Why a present?”

“Open it, Ma,” Pasquale urged as Ugo sat nearby, paying little attention to another one of those things women do.

Antonia untied the pink ribbon, her hands shaking a little. She knew that in spite of its small packaging, it contained more than a little gift. She’d had her hopes, but it wasn’t a thing for her to say aloud, just in case she was wrong. Her whole life, she’d tried to cause as little pain as possible. Since her own mother had died when she was a child, she understood pain.

She lifted the small lid from the box. There, buried under a shield of white tissue, lay a picture of a baby. The baby lay in a field of white daisies, with a wreath of the dainty white blossoms around her head.
What a lovely little child, but…?
She looked again at Louise, who nodded.

“Louise
e incinta
,” Pasquale whispered in an awed voice toward her.

Her hands flew to her mouth. She looked to Ugo, who had tears in his eyes, and smiled broadly at her children and her husband.

That was one of the happiest days of her life—so beautiful, so perfect, the culmination of two people who truly loved each other forming a third to show that love. It was the way the world was meant to be. She thanked God again and again that her son and daughter-in-law would have what they wanted most, a child, and that she and Ugo would have a grandchild.

There’d been no other children after Pasquale. When she’d almost lost him to that dreadful lung disease, she’d promised God that Pasquale would be enough, if He chose to let the boy outlive it. She’d promised Him that she would never ask for anything ever again—that she would be content with her life…until now.

Now she prayed for Louise and the baby. She prayed for her son. With almost an apology, she told God she was only asking His help because there was nothing she could do, and she needed His blessing on Pasquale’s life…again.

~ ♦ ~

They drove toward River Vale, past the station in Westwood, where Pasquale caught the train each morning when he worked in the city. There was the parking lot, and in it was Pasquale’s car, parked as he always parked before going into New York, before catching the train for the Twin Towers.

“Look, look, Antonia!” Ugo pointed eagerly toward the car, with relief in his voice. “That’s Pasquale’s. His car. It’s here at the station. See? I told you. He’s all right. He’s home already. Nothing to worry over. Our son’s all right.” There was triumph in his voice, as if he’d proven a monumental point to himself.

But Antonia turned on him. “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded, her lips tight. “Don’t you understand? Don’t you know? He went there today. That’s why his car is still here. He went there…and now he’s gone! Don’t you understand? Our son is not all right this time! Our son is…dead.”

“No. NO!” Ugo looked hard over the wheel. “He got out. It’s the traffic. He’s just—”