The Woman Who Wasn’t There Read online

  Tania loved recalling the day in the early spring of 2001, when they had been together for over a year, and Dave surprised her with the marriage proposal during dinner at Windows on the World. They chose October 12 as their wedding date: the National Day of Spain. The wedding would be planned to Tania’s mother’s specifications at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, in the gilded Terrace Room, with five hundred guests and all the trimmings of a high society affair.

  A few months wasn’t much time to plan such a spectacular social splash, however, and the pressure of the task mounted with all of the decisions that had to be made. Tania and Dave, who both were exacting and obstinate, began bickering over every detail, right down to the filling in the wedding cake and the color of his morning coat. It didn’t help that Dave’s mother was always fussing about this or that. You would have thought that it was her wedding, Tania complained to a friend.

  By summer, Tania and Dave were fighting every day. Dave’s mother was making so many demands that the tension had reached a breaking point, and Tania wasn’t even sure she wanted to go through with the wedding. But her doubts dissolved when, on one particularly steamy August night, she was reminded why she had fallen for Dave in the first place. Tania had dragged herself home from work and pushed open the apartment door to find a path of rose petals inside. She followed the petal trail down the hall and into the dining room, where she found Dave, dressed in a coconut bra and a grass skirt, dancing the hula to a recording by Don Ho. On the dining room table were steaming dishes of Hawaiian food that Dave had prepared from recipes he’d found on the Internet, and two plane tickets to Hawaii for the next day.

  Tania had been to Hawaii, but never to the Grand Wailea Resort on the beach in Maui, and it was spectacular. Dave had booked a sprawling suite with panoramic views of the orchid trees and the ocean that was usually reserved for celebrities. Barbra Streisand, George Clooney, and Julia Roberts were just a few of the A-listers who had stayed there, he told Tania. She was enchanted by the place.

  It was their third day on the island when Dave announced that he had a surprise.

  “What? Another one?” Tania asked.

  “It’s just beginning,” he said.

  Dave had scheduled an afternoon in the hotel’s famous Spa Grande. After a couple’s massage, Tania was given the royal treatment. Dave had arranged for her to have a manicure and pedicure. A stylist combed her hair into a loose upsweep, and a makeup artist applied pink stain to her lips and cheeks. When she was all finished, a hotel employee appeared at the door to her changing room with a white garment bag.

  “What is this?” Tania asked.

  “Please, put it on,” the woman replied.

  Inside the bag was a simple but beautiful long white dress hanging from a satin-covered hanger. Tania slipped into it, and the garment fit as if it were made just for her.

  “Shoes?” Tania asked.

  “No, no,” the woman said. “Just your bare feet.”

  The woman motioned for Tania to follow her out of the spa. As they walked through the hotel’s ornate lobby, four brawny men dressed as ancient Hawaiian tribal warriors, carrying fiery torches, met them. They escorted Tania from the hotel to the beach, where Dave was standing by the water, in the middle of a circle of white orchids.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked. “Right here? Right now?”

  The ceremony had been magical, and, after a dinner under the stars, Tania and Dave called their families and friends to announce that they were “Mauied.” Their parents could only be mollified by assurances from the newlyweds that the “official” wedding at the Plaza would still take place on October 12 as planned.

  Standing under the stars, Tania found herself worrying about the price of such unadulterated joy. Happiness was fleeting, so how long could they possibly expect their lives to remain one long continuum of bliss?

  Watching waves lap the shoreline, she felt Dave’s hand brush her face.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking that I never want this to end,” she said.

  “It never will,” he said, deep dimples pleating his chiseled face.

  SEPTEMBER 11

  At 8:46 a.m., one hour and six minutes after pushing back from the gate at Boston Logan International Airport, American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 carrying eighty-one passengers and ten thousand gallons of fuel, and moving 470 miles an hour, plowed through the upper floors of the World Trade Center’s north tower. At the time, Tania was conducting a meeting in Merrill Lynch’s conference room on the ninety-sixth floor of the south tower. The meeting had just convened, and members of her team were grumbling about the end of summer and the finality of a merger they’d been working on for months, which meant that, regrettably, they would soon be going their separate ways. All at once, the building shook, and the lights in the conference room flickered. People outside the closed door squealed.

  “What the hell happened?” one of Tania’s colleagues asked.

  “I’ll go check it out,” another team member said.

  “No, no,” Tania insisted. “Let me go.”

  People in the office were gaping out the windows facing the neighboring skyscraper.

  “What is it?” Tania asked.

  “The north tower is on fire,” a woman said plaintively.

  The phones on the floor were ringing off the hook, but people couldn’t seem to tear themselves away from the windows to answer. Tania joined the others and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Giant balls of fire shot from a gaping hole toward the top of the breached building, and plumes of black smoke coiled around the top floors like a giant snake. People speculated about what could have caused the wreckage. Had it been another bomb, like the one detonated in the basement of the north tower eight years earlier? Maybe a small plane, or a helicopter, or a commuter flight? They were always flying too close to the towers.

  Standing there, Tania tried calling Dave but got that pulsing “circuit’s busy” sound. So she pressed her face to the glass and counted down stories from the top of the adjacent skyscraper to the ninety-eighth floor offices of Marsh & McLennan. An accumulating sense of dread swept over her as she counted down. “One hundred one, one hundred, ninety-nine . . .” Dave’s floor was burning and belching smoke. The fireball was so intense that she could feel the heat radiating from the other tower. As she stared at the gloomy scene across the way, disbelieving, powerless, wondering what to do, a chorus of horrified screams broke out among her coworkers.

  Tania didn’t grasp what was happening, not at first. Not until a colleague cried out that someone was about to jump from the north tower. She looked toward the top of the burning skyscraper and saw a man teetering on a ledge outside the Windows on the World restaurant. It had only been a few months earlier that she and Dave were there on the one hundred seventh floor, having that romantic dinner, and he dropped to one knee and proposed. “How could life have gone from that to this?” Tania wondered, watching the horrified reaction of her colleagues to the desperate man, clinging to the building, a quarter mile in the sky. One thing was certain: whatever was happening in the other tower was going to change all of their lives.

  As the number of wary spectators grew, everyone jostling for a look at the unfolding disaster, Tania struggled to keep her place at the window. She recalled reading once that the architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki, had a fear of heights and purposely designed the towers with small windows to make them feel more secure. On her first day on the job on the ninety-sixth floor, she had nevertheless suffered from a dreadful bout of vertigo and worried that she wouldn’t be able to work in the building. The sensation had only lasted a day, though, and she didn’t experience it again. Not until she saw the man on the ledge, and then she felt as if the floor beneath her were falling away.

  In a few short minutes, the black smoke swirling around the top of the north tower had gotten so dense that Tania could no longer see the man. But others had b
egun dropping from the upper floors, spiraling inelegantly against a void blue sky toward a certain and terrible death. One after the other, men and women plunged out of gaping holes and broken windows, thrashing and flailing, trying against impossible odds to hold on to what was left of their lives. At first Tania thought they were blown out of the building. But, watching closely, she could see some of them making conscious choices to die by falling rather than by fire. Defiant in the face of death, they would at least choose how to end their lives. Could one of them be Dave? One man leapt and immediately began flapping his arms, as if he were trying to fly. It was that moment, watching the poor man’s macabre attempt to save himself, that Tania decided to leave the south tower, despite the voice on the public address system insisting that their building was safe. “We have to get out of here,” Tania said to her coworkers. “Now!”

  The World Trade Center elevator system required people to take two elevators between the ground and the upper floors. Passengers rode nonstop express elevators to transfer lobbies on the forty-fourth and seventy-eighth floors, where they walked across a hallway to catch smaller elevators to the higher stories. Rather than wait for the local elevator to shuttle them down from the ninety-sixth to the seventy-eighth floor, Tania decided to walk down the eighteen flights to the sky lobby and catch an express to the ground from there. “This way!” she called over her shoulder. Only her assistant Christine had followed her to the stairs.

  The seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby was jammed with people poised between going up or down. Did they listen to their instincts and leave the building? Or heed the advice of the security officers who encouraged them to return to their offices rather than put themselves in harm’s way outside in the plaza? Tania pushed her way from the emergency stairwell into the crush of bodies, pulling Christine in behind her. The lines for the express elevators, each capable of descending to the ground in a minute, stretched from one end of the lobby to the other. Everyone was jittery, nudging and elbowing one another, trying to get closer to the front. It smelled like fear.

  Christine was trembling and near tears. There was no reason to be afraid, Tania said, trying to console her. The voice on the public address system said the south tower was safe. But even as she tried to reassure her assistant, Tania had a gnawing feeling in her stomach. What had happened in the other building? Rumors were flying, but no one knew for sure. People carrying BlackBerry phones were able to get sporadic messages from the outside and shared whatever news they had, but it wasn’t much.

  If only she knew that Dave was all right. Tania looked at her phone. No service. “Damn,” she said. The phone slipped through her clammy hands. With people standing shoulder to shoulder, there was barely room to bend down to pick it up. No one was willing to move for fear of losing his or her place in line. Was it her imagination, Tania wondered, or were the elevators taking forever?

  As cars arrived and left, some packed so tightly that the last people in were pushed out, Tania tried to stay calm. Her mind was made up. She was leaving, and panicking wouldn’t get her any closer to getting out of the building and finding Dave. The first thing that she was going to do when she finally saw him was to apologize for the dustup over his mother’s birthday present that morning.

  On the subway on the way to work, Dave had said he wanted to buy some silly tchotchke for his mom. Tania thought that they should get something nice or, at the very least, treat her to a birthday dinner at the restaurant of her choice. They were still arguing when she left him at the turnstile in the World Trade Center Plaza at seven thirty, and he headed up to his office. She had taken a few extra minutes to finish her coffee and bran muffin before going up to work a little before eight. Thirty minutes later, Dave called her, wanting to make up. He didn’t like it when they argued. “Want to grab a quick cup of coffee downstairs?” he asked. “Can’t,” she had said dismissively. “I’m just about to go into a meeting.” Had she even said good-bye?

  Elevators came and went, but the lines in the sky lobby didn’t seem to move. Tania took a deep breath through her nostrils and then exhaled slowly. It was a relaxation technique called pranayama that she had learned in her yoga class. “Focus on the breath,” the instructor had said. “Pay attention to the flow of air as it moves in and out of your body.” Purposefully, mindfully, she inhaled deeply into the pit of her stomach, up through her chest to her collarbones, and then slowly released the breath through her nose. After a few breaths, her heart seemed to settle down a bit. Tania wasn’t necessarily a religious woman, but now she prayed that Dave had gone down for coffee without her. Of course he had. Soon it would be her turn on the elevator, and she would find him down on the street, waiting for her. The time was right around nine o’clock.

  At that moment, United Airlines Flight 175 was screaming across New York Harbor. The Boeing 767, also bound from Boston to Los Angeles, carried fifty-six passengers, two pilots, and seven flight attendants. It passed the Statue of Liberty, banked hard left, and hurtled toward the south tower. Tania heard what sounded like the whine of a hundred airplanes. A woman standing near a window at the south end of the sky lobby screamed.

  “Another plane is coming! Another plane is coming!”

  At first Tania thought that the woman was just hysterical. But the sound of jet engines grew louder and more ominous. “What’s going on?” Christine cried. Tania grabbed her assistant and embraced her. “I’ll take care of you,” she said.

  Everything happened so quickly after that. The sickening scream of the jet engines as the plane advanced with impossible speed. People crying. People screaming. People dropping to their knees in prayer. There would be no escape, no safe berth, Tania thought, as the roar grew louder and meaner. “It’s coming for us,” she said to herself. “We’re all going to die right here.” The windows exploded in a million shards of glass. Tania saw the silver wing of the United jet slice through the sky lobby, shredding everything in its path. The force of the impact tore Christine from her arms. Marble walls disintegrated, and whole sections of ceiling collapsed. The building bowed sideways, and then snapped back fiercely. An elevator filled with people disappeared down a black, bottomless shaft. Tania was caught in a ferocious wave of heat. She felt as if her lungs were on fire and she couldn’t take a breath. She realized that she was flying through the air, toward the bank of elevators, where flames were shooting from the empty shafts. “Please let this be over fast,” she prayed. “I know I’m going to die. Please don’t make it hurt.”

  She awakened under a jagged slab of marble, to the stench of burning flesh. Gagging, she suddenly realized that she was smelling her own skin burning. The sky lobby, which moments before had been bustling with people, was a snarl of twisted steel, pulverized wallboard, and dangling wires. The elevator shafts glowed red, and in the dim light of the small fires seething around her, Tania could make out the bodies. The lobby was strewn with the dead and the dying. A vast canvas of grief. Rolling over to try to free herself, she realized that she was lying beside a mortally injured person. She recognized the dress on the headless torso. It was Christine.

  Tania let out a long, silent scream. “These are the very last moments of my life,” she thought. “Why does it have to end now? Why does it have to end here, like this?”

  It was getting harder to breathe. Blinded by dense smoke, she didn’t know where she was, and she didn’t know how to get out. Looking over the carnage, she recognized the remains of some of her other coworkers. They must have followed her down the stairs after all. She had led all of them to a merciless death. Her anxiety turned to despair and finally to resignation: She would never get to wear the white princess gown she had chosen for her upcoming wedding. She would never get to tell Dave she was sorry for bickering with him that morning. “It’s no use,” she thought, surrendering to the sound of her own death knell. She would die in the south tower too.

  Then, just as Tania closed her eyes, she felt someone slapping her back, causing her a nauseous kind of pain. She swun
g with her good arm. “Why are you hurting me?” she cried, by then nearly delirious. “Please stop hurting me.” Kneeling over her was a man with a red bandanna wrapped around his face. He wasn’t trying to hurt her. He was patting down her burning clothes with his jacket. The man’s eyes were kind and knowing.

  “Are you real?” Tania asked.

  “Just stay awake,” he said. “Stay awake.”

  Tania clung to the sound of his voice. “I found a stairway,” he said. “I’m going to show you the way. Can you get up? Are you able to make it to the stairs?”

  Tania wiggled her toes and then moved her legs. “I think I can,” she said. Pain coursed through her body as she slowly rose to her feet. Her right arm dangled from a thread of sinew, and she tucked it into her jacket pocket to keep it from falling off. With the man in the red bandanna supporting her, she walked over bodies and body parts.

  “I don’t think I can go on,” she said, wiping blood from her forehead.

  “Just keep moving,” he said, his voice strong and unwavering.

  Trudging forward, her attention was drawn to a sudden, slight movement in the sea of stillness. She could barely make out the form of a man in the murkiness, a man camouflaged by a knot of grisly bodies and his own terrible burns. “Wait,” Tania said, kneeling beside him. Gasping for breath, the dying man reached for her. “Please give this to my wife,” he said, dropping something hot into her hand. The gold wedding band in her palm was inscribed with a woman’s name and the word Forever. Tania wiped away tears as she stared into the man’s eyes. “I’ll find her and I’ll give it to her,” she promised, placing the ring in her pocket, but the man was already gone.