Gabby Read online

  That morning began with an open house in Gabby’s office in the Longworth House Office Building. Her staffers invited everyone in their Rolodexes, and as a tribute to Gabby, almost everyone wanted to come. About three hundred people showed up—Gabby’s friends, constituents, colleagues, all sorts of people she’d met over the years in Washington. Her parents were there and so were mine.

  The open house is a nice tradition before the swearing-in ceremony, and Gabby really loved saying hello to people, thanking them if they played a role in helping get her reelected.

  “So great to see you,” she’d say, again and again, and she meant it. She’d remember names, children’s names, hometowns, and the particular issue that might be on someone’s mind.

  A guy from Raytheon, the defense contractor, stopped by. Raytheon is the biggest private employer in Tucson, and Gabby bantered with him about the new SM-6 air-defense missile. “So I hear you’re going to deliver it on time and on budget, right?” she said. She had a friendly way of putting people at ease while also letting them know she was watching things closely. She kidded with a lobbyist from the United Services Automobile Association, which insures military families. “I hope you guys are taking good care of those veterans,” she said. As the line inched forward, she saw a constituent from Arizona she’d met during the campaign. “Hey, thanks for making the trip to Washington,” she said. “So what do you need? You want someone to take you over to the White House? Maybe I can do it later in the week.”

  On days like this, watching the ease with which she hugged everyone, Gabby reminded me of Bill Clinton on the campaign stump. Like him, she had great personal skills, and an ability to look people in the eye and listen to their concerns. I know people are suspicious of politicians and their motives. And yes, Gabby wanted to be liked and to win elections. But she also completely cared about her constituents and the issues that moved or upset them. As my mother liked to say, “Gabby is pure of heart, always thinking of the betterment of everyone else.” That’s a pretty good endorsement from a mother-in-law, I’d say. Too bad we couldn’t put it on Gabby’s campaign posters.

  I don’t want to give the impression that we all thought of her as Saint Gabby. But if you had seen her that day in her office, you’d know what I mean. The line of well-wishers stretched out into the hallway, and snaked through the outer office and into Gabby’s private office. She gave each visitor her full attention. It was as if she were the bride at a wedding reception, except she was in a knit suit rather than a bridal gown.

  I stood with her for a while, like a fidgety groom, saying hello to people, but then I got bored and started wandering around the office, looking at the pictures on the walls. Gabby, on the other hand, would have stood there hugging and talking until springtime if that’s what it took to see everyone.

  Gabby’s mom, Gloria, is a great photographer as well as an artist, and she took photos of everyone passing through the office. Gabby’s staffers have since mailed a lot of those photos on to the people in them. No one realized it at the time, of course, but it was as if everyone was getting one last keepsake of themselves with Gabby as she was before her injury.

  The open house went three hours, an hour longer than scheduled, because of the mob of visitors and the attention Gabby paid to everyone. That put her behind for the rest of the day.

  Next on her agenda, she had to cast a vote for the next Speaker of the House. Because the Republicans had won the majority of seats in the 2010 elections, it didn’t really matter who Gabby voted for: the GOP’s John Boehner was going to win. But Gabby knew her vote would have ideological ramifications in her district and among her peers. That meant it wasn’t a decision she could take lightly.

  Arizona’s 8th District has more registered Republicans than Democrats, and a great many independents. Gabby, a moderate herself, had to be politically astute and constantly mindful of how non-Democrats among her constituents would view her every decision. Though she considered Nancy Pelosi to be a friend and valued party leader, she knew a vote for Nancy wouldn’t play well with the conservatives back home, many of whom had vilified Nancy when she served as Speaker. Gabby would need to make a political decision, and that meant not supporting Nancy, who had supported her throughout her congressional career.

  Gabby and her chief of staff, Pia Carusone, had spent days talking through the question of the vote for Speaker. Just thirty years old, Pia is precociously smart and terrifically wise about the inner workings of elected office. Like Gabby, she views government service as a high calling. But both of them understood that to survive in Washington, and to win elections back home, they had to accept and indulge political realities.

  None of us knew Gabby’s decision until we were sitting in the visitor’s gallery, watching her cast her vote. I think she got a kick out of keeping us in suspense. In the end, she was one of just two representatives to vote for Georgia’s John Lewis, the legendary civil rights leader. I smiled. That wasn’t even a name we’d talked about. But it was a smart way to go: Gabby had found a way to avoid controversy by using her vote to honor a man who deserved recognition.

  It continued to be a very hectic day, rushing around with my parents and Gabby’s parents in tow. Gabby and I took turns pushing her dad in his wheelchair, in and out of elevators and down the halls of Congress. Then, when late afternoon came, it was hard for me and Gabby because it was time to say goodbye.

  I needed to be back in Houston for work first thing Thursday morning. So Gabby walked me out to the street, where her operations director, Jennifer Cox, was waiting to drive me to the airport. We hugged, and I said, “I’m proud of you. Enjoy the new term.” Of course, I didn’t know that would be my last time seeing her whole and healthy. But it was sad just the same, like all of our many goodbyes.

  As that Wednesday wound down, and our parents headed for home, Gabby found herself back in her office with Pia, thinking about the weekend.

  “So what’s on the agenda when I’m in Tucson on Saturday?” she asked.

  Pia said that there was a memorial service in the early afternoon for a campaign supporter who had just died. The morning was free.

  “I have to wear a suit anyway for the memorial service,” Gabby said. “Why don’t we do a Congress on Your Corner?” Gabby had already held a couple dozen of these events in her career, and she thought they were an important part of her responsibilities. She felt constituents deserved the chance to ask her questions, to air grievances, and to meet the people on her staff who might be able to help them.

  Pia tried to dissuade her. Gabby had been going nonstop all during the 2010 campaign, and in the months since. “Why don’t you take Saturday for yourself?” Pia said. “Give yourself a break. And it might be too late to set things up, anyway.”

  “No, let’s do it,” Gabby told her. “I want to start off the new term strongly. And there’s so much going on in Washington. Let’s hear what people think of everything.”

  Normally the Congress on Your Corner events—dubbed COYCs by Gabby’s staffers—take two weeks to organize. Now here was Gabby, asking to set this one up on just two and a half days’ notice. Pia knew that it was tough to tame Gabby’s enthusiasm for encounters with constituents. COYCs were always scheduled for ninety minutes to two hours, but usually lasted four hours. That was Gabby. It was hard to stop her.

  And so Pia relented. “Let me e-mail Ron and Gabe and see if we can pull it together,” she said.

  Ron Barber had been Gabby’s district-office director since 2006. Born in England, he had retired from Arizona state government after a long career helping to run programs for people with developmental disabilities and mental illness. Now, at age sixty-five, he served as a much-appreciated voice of wisdom and experience for Gabby.

  Gabriel Zimmerman, thirty, was director of community outreach for Gabby in Tucson, and she always said he brightened the office there with his positive energy. When enraged constituents were calling on the phone, or when Gabby’s staffers felt overwhelme
d with tedious duties and wondered whether it was time to find another line of work, Gabe was like a twenty-first-century Jimmy Stewart character—tall, handsome, and filled with idealism. “We’re so lucky to have this job,” he’d say to his colleagues. “We’re lucky to serve constituents, to serve the country. Hey, we get to help people. How many jobs are there where you really get to do that? It’s great, isn’t it?”

  Rather than complain about having to quickly organize a COYC for this upcoming Saturday, upsetting his weekend plans, Gabe was enthusiastic, as usual. He promised to get on it right away. “It’ll be easy,” he said. “I can do it in my sleep. No problems.” Other staffers in Tucson also rose to action.

  Ron and Gabe huddled and came up with a location to host the event—a Safeway supermarket in northwest Tucson. They liked that spot because the surrounding neighborhoods had a diverse group of constituents. Coincidentally, this was the same location as Gabby’s first COYC event in January 2007. The two staffers began to update her policy-paper handouts for the event.

  Gabby knew she’d need to get to that memorial service on Saturday, and she liked that the Safeway wasn’t far away. In her two previous appearances at that supermarket, staffers there had been cordial and accommodating. “It’s a nice venue,” Gabby said.

  After the COYC decision was made, she went to the ceremonial swearing-in photo opportunity with John Boehner. Many Democrats declined to have their photo taken with the opposition leader—where would they display it?—but Gabby respected the office of Speaker, no matter which party held the position.

  She stood there in line with all the Republican representatives, and when it was her turn, she flashed that giant smile of hers. That photo would turn out to be the one most widely used by the media in the days immediately after the shooting.

  That Wednesday night, Gabby had dinner with Pia and Rodd McLeod, her campaign manager. They both thought she seemed slightly melancholy. Almost all the other members of Congress were celebrating the new term by having dinner with their spouses and children. But I was in Houston, as were my girls, and Gabby wasn’t yet a mother, of course. Her staffers felt a little sorry for her: She was stuck having her celebratory meal with them.

  That was the life of a hard-charging congresswoman with a high-flying husband. We’ve missed a good many moments when it would have been nice to be together.

  On Thursday, January 6, Gabby and I were very busy with our respective jobs. I had a meeting with my flight directors, and then attended a class on ammonia decontamination. Two of my crew members were going to be doing a space walk on our mission to the International Space Station, and there was a likelihood they’d be sprayed with ammonia emanating from vents in the station. We had to learn the risks of that and how to decontaminate them when they came back inside.

  Gabby was busy, too. Her day was filled with meetings about solar energy, missile systems, border security, and local economic issues. At one point, she went down to the House floor to participate in a Republican-led opening-week reading of the Constitution; she delivered lines from the First Amendment, which was a thrill for her. She began contemplating a letter she’d draft to Nancy Pelosi explaining why she hadn’t voted for her. She was also interviewed by several Arizona radio shows, asking about the new term. She had prepared her sound bites: “My top priorities this session, like last session, are border security, economic security, national security, and energy security. On each of these issues, we cannot succumb to partisan bickering. The challenges—and the cost of failure—are too great.”

  Later that day, she and eighteen cosponsors introduced legislation that would cut her own salary and the $174,000 annual salaries of her colleagues in Congress by 5 percent. Gabby, who had authored the bill, issued a press release which stated: “If approved, it would be the first time in 78 years that members of Congress have taken a pay cut.”

  Then, in the afternoon, Gabby got an OK from the Franking Commission of the Committee on House Administration, which needs to approve all mass communications from members of Congress. The commission’s approval allowed Gabby to record a script for an automated “robo call” that would go out to the phone lines of constituents selected for their zip codes. They all lived in neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Safeway that would be hosting the COYC event.

  Gabby was, as always, very cheerful as she recorded her message: “Hi, this is your congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, inviting you to a one-on-one meeting. I am hosting Congress on Your Corner this Saturday at the Safeway located at 7110 North Oracle. That’s the southeast corner of Oracle and Ina. I’ll be there with my staff from ten to eleven thirty a.m. to meet with you and answer any of your questions about what is going on in Congress. For more information, please call 881-3588. Again, this is Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and I hope to meet with you in person this Saturday!”

  The robo call went out to the homes of about twenty thousand constituents, including the residence of a very troubled young man who had attended an event with Gabby in the past. None of us, of course, could have anticipated the ramifications of Gabby’s decision to host a COYC event and to record that robo call. We couldn’t have imagined that it would be the modern-day equivalent of publishing the route of John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in 1963.

  At the time, for Gabby and her staffers, it was all in a day’s work.

  Gabby returned to Tucson on Friday evening. Her close friend Raoul Erickson picked her up at the airport, and though it was cold, they suited up and went on a ten-mile bike ride on a trail not far from Gabby’s condominium. They had dinner together, too, at one of their regular haunts, Char’s Thai on Fifth Street, where as usual, they asked for their favorite waitress, a friendly fifty-five-year-old woman named Toi.

  “Toi died today,” they were told. The news made for a somber meal. “It feels like a funeral,” Gabby said to Raoul at one point. She thought she’d end up remembering this weekend because of the unexpected death of an admired waitress.

  On Saturday morning, Gabby called me while driving her green Toyota 4Runner over to the Safeway. I was at home in Houston, and it was a quick conversation. “I’m on my way to the Congress on Your Corner,” she said. “I’ll call you when it’s over.”

  “OK, sweetie,” I answered. As always, we both said “I love you.”

  A few minutes after we’d hung up, Gabby got a text from Pam Simon, the sixty-three-year-old outreach coordinator in her Tucson office. “It’s chilly out here. Be sure to dress warm,” wrote Pam, who had already gone inside the nearby Walgreens to buy mittens.

  Gabby replied: “Too late. I’m on my way.” She was wearing a light red jacket and a black skirt.

  Five of her staffers were at the Safeway waiting for her, including Gabe, who had made good on his promise to pull off the event without a hitch. Helped by two interns, the staffers had brought several blue-cushioned folding chairs and a folding table from the office, along with an American flag, an Arizona flag, and a banner that read “Gabrielle Giffords, United States Congress.”

  At about 9:55, Gabby pulled into the parking lot, and before leaving her car, she took out her iPad and typed a message: “My 1st Congress on Your Corner starts now. Please stop by to let me know what is on your mind or tweet me later.”

  Though the Founding Fathers never tweeted, and though they never saw a woman in Congress, their idealism lived on in Gabby. As this new year began, Gabby was right where she wanted to be, on this corner, the intersection of Oracle and Ina, in her hometown of Tucson, meeting her fellow citizens to hear about their needs. Despite everything, she believed in the possibilities of elected office, and she accepted the risks embedded in the constitutional guarantees of freedom. She thought that it was her job to go out in public, to listen to people, and to help them if she could. I missed her on days like this, but I admired her. I had learned early on that I would be sharing my wife with the world.

  On this Saturday morning at Safeway, fifteen constituents, including a nine-year-old girl, were al
ready in line as Gabby made her way toward the front.

  “Nice to see you,” Gabby said. “Thanks so much for coming.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Things We Have in Common

  From the moment we met, Gabby and I were good at talking to each other frankly. We both come from families of straight shooters. Our parents, my brother, Gabby’s sister—they all say it as they see it. There’s not much tiptoeing. If you’re annoying, you hear about it. If you’re complaining, you’re reminded to quiet down; things could be worse.

  But all of us changed a little after Gabby was injured. We all saw the great pain she was in, and the awful frustration she felt, living without language. The natural impulse was to feel sorry for her, of course, to think about all she had lost. But early on, I made a decision to try hard to resist that, and I asked others to do the same. I’d warn people to leave their long faces at the door when visiting Gabby at the rehab hospital in Houston. I even posted rules, one of which was “No crying.”

  I also tried to cheer up Gabby when she was down. The woman I’d fallen in love with years earlier was the most positive person I’d ever met, and I wanted her to hold on tight to that piece of herself. To help her, I realized, I’d have to talk her through it.

  During our courtship and marriage, I’d say Gabby did 60 or 70 percent of the talking when we were together. She had a lot to say. Now I was handling 95 percent of every conversation. But rather than give her upbeat pep talks over and over, sometimes it helped if I just told her about stories in the news or about life outside the hospital. I’d also give her the details of my day, good or bad. Though words failed her, Gabby still could understand pretty much everything I said.

  One evening in early April, three months after she was injured, I got to the hospital after a couple days in Florida, where I was training for the shuttle mission. I immediately saw that Gabby was depressed. The reason: She’d been having difficulty making it to the bathroom in time after she’d gotten into bed for the night. There had been close calls.