The Woman Who Wasn’t There Read online

  “The stairway is just ahead,” the man with the red bandanna said, summoning Tania forward. “We’re almost there. You can’t help him now.”

  The door to the stairs was partially blocked by debris, but there was enough room to squeeze through. The stairwell was stuffy, and smatterings of ghoulish-looking people were slowly making their way down. Panic-stricken, Tania turned to her rescuer. “I’m so scared!” she cried. “Go,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “You can do this.” Tania trusted the stranger. It wasn’t like her to give up, and she had so much to live for. She thought of the beautiful white princess wedding gown hanging in her closet at home. She had spent weeks searching for just the right dress for the formal ceremony, and it was perfect. The wedding was only a month away. Dave would be sick with worry by now. Taking a deep breath, she pressed through the doorway and began her descent.

  When she turned to look back, the man with the red bandanna was walking back into the smoke.

  A LONG WAY DOWN

  Will you stay with me, will you be my love

  Among the fields of barley

  Tania sang in a low whisper. She was certain that she would lose her mind if she stopped. As it was, her sanity was cracking. Singing her favorite Sting songs helped to muffle the ominous echoes of crashing planes and doomed coworkers that were trapped inside her head. Others in the stairwell moved forward slowly, single file, looking dazed, saying nothing. The stairs were slick with a paste of water spilling from broken pipes and powder from pulverized Sheetrock. Tania was puzzled by how orderly things seemed in the narrow passageway. They were traumatized people navigating a long, uncertain procession from hell, yet no one panicked or pushed to get ahead.

  Occasionally someone glanced at her and then quickly looked away. She must have been a sight, she thought, burned and bleeding, covered in a fine, gray dust, her tattered jacket hanging in shreds from her blackened torso. But her mangled right arm was the worst. It was still tucked into her jacket pocket, but she didn’t know how long it would stay attached. Tania was light-headed and beyond weary, with no way of knowing what was ahead of her. She had hobbled down probably only two or three stories since leaving the man with the red bandanna on the seventy-eighth floor, but it felt like fifty. Each flight seemed longer and harder than the last, and she didn’t want to think about how many more there were to go until she would finally reach the bottom. With each movement, an ungodly pain tore through her body, and she tried not to scream. So with every agonizing step, she sang.

  Oh can’t you see

  you belong to me

  Now my poor heart aches

  with every step you take

  There was a moment when she didn’t know where she was anymore. It felt as if she were drifting outside of her body. She thought, “I’m already dead!” and maybe all of the people around her were dead, too, ghostly troops marching toward some godforsaken afterlife. But then her stoic Catalan resolve kicked in and, like a thunderclap in the dead of night, snapped Tania out of her delirium. No, she wasn’t dead, and she wasn’t going to die. Not like this. Not in some grim, gray stairwell.

  Soldiering on, she thought about her family back in Spain and her upcoming wedding at the Plaza. And Dave. Her beloved Dave. What would he say if he knew she hadn’t tried her best to survive? What floor was she on, anyway? She didn’t even know. The heat in the stairway was suffocating, and with every step forward, her breath became more labored. Tania’s eyes stung, and her lungs felt as if they were burning from the inside out. Her vision blurred, and, when she winced, silvery stars darted behind her closed eyelids. The stairwell started to spin, faster and faster it went, and, all at once, she was six years old and playing with her classmates at the Opus Dei School in Barcelona. They were skipping in a circle and singing, “Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go round the mulberry bush. On a cold and frosty morning.” The sweet sound of her own childlike voice soothed her. Then everything went dark.

  When Tania came to, she was lying alone on the hard stairs. She tried moving, but her legs were lame. Was it her brain or her body getting in the way? she wondered. Somehow she had to get herself out of the building. She heard her father’s voice. “In this family, we don’t give up, we overcome,” he always said. Just then a clatter of voices wafted up from somewhere below her, and she spotted a small pack of firefighters, loaded down with heavy equipment, trudging up the steps. She held out her hand.

  “I’ve got this one,” one of them said, stooping beside her limp body and signaling the others to go ahead.

  The young New York City firefighter was breathless and dripping sweat. Kneeling over her, he spoke reassuringly. His eyes were soft and kind, but she saw him look at her dangling arm.

  “Okay, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to get you out of here. Can you put your good arm around me?”

  Tania fought to stay awake. People upstairs were dying, and they needed to be saved. “The seventy-eighth floor,” she said in a weak, shaky voice. “There are people up there who are terribly hurt.”

  “Help is on the way for them,” the firefighter said. “Now, let’s get you out of here.”

  Tania rose slowly to her knees and, with the firefighter’s help, forced herself to her feet. She was weak and wobbly, and her heart pounded out of her chest. Leaning heavily on his arm, she walked down one step, then another, and another. She could feel the building shaking and swaying. She tried to sing, but the words no longer came.

  “You’re doing great,” the firefighter said, encouraging her, willing her to go on. “We’re getting there. You can do it. Only twenty flights to go.”

  She stumbled going from one step to the next and then stopped. Twenty flights? They still had to walk down twenty flights?

  “I can’t go any farther!” she cried. “I’m sorry, but I can’t make it. I can’t make it!”

  “We’re leaving here together,” he said, his voice strong and commanding. “I’m going to carry you the rest of the way.”

  The brawny young firefighter lifted her up, and the coarseness of his jacket against her cheek was somehow comforting. Tania had always prided herself on being fiercely independent: making her own money, putting herself through Harvard, then Stanford, climbing to the top of the financial industry, which was still a man’s world. But she needed this man now. She needed him if she was going to get out of that building and survive, if she was ever going to see Dave again, and she didn’t even know the firefighter’s name. They descended the stairs slowly, strangers bonded by the fragile line between life and death—he, talking about fishing with his kids; she, saying nothing for fear that words would steal the last vestiges of air in her lungs.

  At last they reached the lobby. What had been a bright, welcoming expanse of open space was now a gray, murky cavern. Windows were broken and chandeliers smashed. Burst pipes gushed water over cracked marble walls, and empty black cavities stood where elevators had once been. The firefighter pushed through the wreckage and ran for the warped revolving doors leading outside to the World Trade Center Plaza. As he carried her through a shattered panel of glass to the outside, she heard a succession of rattling explosions. People were running and screaming. She arched her head slightly to see bodies and body parts strewn over the plaza. The explosions were the bodies of jumpers hitting the pavement. Before she had time to react, the firefighter was passing her to one of his colleagues. “Get her to an ambulance!” he barked, turning and rushing back toward the tower.

  It was only a moment or so later when a terrible sound, like steel bending and groaning, aching for release, thundered overhead. Tania heard loud snapping and cracking sounds. The second firefighter, with Tania in his arms, sprinted toward a parked ladder engine and dove beneath it, throwing his body over hers. A low rumble got louder and louder, until it sounded as if a freight train were speeding through the plaza. People were screaming that the tower was falling, and “Run! Run!” The
n a titanic crash.

  A torrent of debris rained down, covering the fire truck. She felt the firefighter put his oxygen mask over her face. They were in total darkness. Buried alive.

  When Tania opened her eyes again, she was lying under a blinding white light, surrounded by people with furrowed brows and green surgical masks.

  “Where am I?” she asked, bewildered, and trying to focus on the worried faces looking down at her.

  “I’m a doctor,” one of them said. “You’re in New York—Presbyterian Hospital. Can you tell me your name?”

  “Tania,” she replied, her throat parched and scratchy.

  “Can you tell us your last name, Tania?”

  “My name is Tania Head,” she said, struggling to speak because of the tube in her mouth and running down her throat.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” the doctor asked.

  Tania’s brain felt fuzzy. She shook her head, trying to expel the blurriness, and, just as she did, an arrow of burning pain pierced her right shoulder. Instinctively, she felt for her arm. It was still there. Then she tugged at the tube in her mouth, but a nurse gently guided her hand away, explaining that the tube was helping her to breathe.

  “Tania,” the doctor said, prodding gently, “do you remember what happened to you?”

  She didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to answer the doctor’s question about whether she knew why she was lying in a hospital, panicked and afraid, with oxygen streaming into her lungs and most of her upper body wrapped in white gauze. Closing her eyes, she wished that she could forget about everything she had seen and felt as she fought her way out of that ravaged death trap, climbing over smoldering bodies and people who were dying, to save her own life.

  But she saw and heard it all again as the doctor stood at her bedside, waiting for an answer. The burning north tower. The falling bodies. The fiery explosion when the plane plowed through the south tower right in front of her. The carnage in the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby. She saw it as clearly as if she were watching it on TV.

  “Dave!” she cried out, trying to sit up. “Does Dave know I’m here? My husband is in the north tower. I have to go back and make sure he’s all right. He’ll be looking for me. He’ll be worried. What time is it? How long have I been here?”

  Members of the medical team held her down, and she saw them glance at one another. “The date is September sixteenth,” the doctor said. “Sunday. You’ve been here since Tuesday.”

  September 16? What did he mean it was September 16? What was this doctor saying? It had only been moments ago that she was buried under the fire truck.

  “You’ve been here for nearly a week,” the doctor said. “If you give us a number for your husband, we’ll try to reach him to let him know you’re here.”

  “And my parents!” Tania cried. “My parents need to know where I am.”

  Tania’s mother and father arrived while she was sleeping. When she opened her eyes and saw them, their faces red and swollen from crying, she began to sob, deep howling sobs that echoed up and down the halls of the intensive care unit. “You must save your strength,” her mother said. “You nearly died. You’re badly burned, and your arm had to be reattached. Sweet Tania. Tu mama se encargara de ti.” Mother will take care of you.

  “Where is Dave?” Tania asked.

  “Try to sleep,” her mother said.

  “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.”

  PART 2

  2003

  A SURVIVOR EMERGES

  She 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.