I blinked.
Fire.
The apple tree was on fire.
The second plane.
It hit.
Not a tree. A tower.
The explosion.
The ball of fire.
The black smoke.
I didn’t know how much time had passed, possibly only seconds, before the trees were simply trees again. I entered the house from the back door. I didn’t stop to take off my coat. I rushed into the living room and pulled Jack into my lap. I buried my face in his hair until all I could smell, all I could feel, all I could see was him.
Chapter Eight
Questions
May 2002—Marblehead
Jack and I were in a rowboat in Boston Harbor. It was a beautiful star-filled evening. We watched the planes take off, one after another. “Look, honey, isn’t that amazing?” I said, pointing to the jet soaring overhead, backlit by the moon.
Wait. Something’s wrong! The plane wasn’t climbing high enough, fast enough. It was going to hit that apartment building!
“Turn, turn!” I shouted, but it was too late. Fire shot out of the windows. Bodies fell to the ground. Another. And another. I covered Jack’s eyes with my hands. “No, no, no!” I screamed.
What is wrong with me? I was afraid. The nightmares were coming more frequently, each more vivid than the one before. Although the details in the nightmares were slightly different—a different kind of plane, flying in a different place—the endings were always identical. I tried to get to the scene of the crash. I wanted to try to rescue people. I wanted to save them.
I never got there. Not once.
The night before, my strangled breaths had woken David. He shook my shoulder gently. “Hon, wake up, wake up,” he said. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Nothing. Just a bad dream,” I mumbled, rolling over so I faced away from him.
I didn’t want him to know the truth. He’s going to think I’m crazy. He’s going to think I can’t take care of the baby.
I had no reason to think this. David hadn’t said anything or done anything to make me doubt his support. Except. Whenever I worried out loud that there might have been something I could have done to prevent the hijackings, he quickly shut me down. “That’s ridiculous,” he’d say. “If you’d made people wait in long lines and take their shoes off to go through security, you’d have been hauled away by people in white coats.”
I’m not making it up,” I would respond heatedly. “They said it was my fault.” By “they” I meant the media accounts and the public who chimed in on talk radio and in letters to the editor. But David had a ready answer for that, too.
“At the time they were saying that, they had no understanding. They were judging it with post-9/11 information.” David’s voice was calm and logical, like it was when he presided over a trial. “They had no interest in explaining how security worked before. They were trying to sell newspapers.”
Like the newsprint itself in which I was blamed so viciously, to him it was that black and white.
Later that same morning, after the Boston Harbor dream, I lay next to Maddy, just weeks old, on our bed. David had already dropped Jack at day care and gone to work.
“You’re such a good girl,” I whispered. Already she was sleeping for long stretches. Her tiny fingers were wrapped tightly around my forefinger. I stroked her soft, dark hair and searched her face for any signs of distress.
I also hadn’t told David that whenever I saw a plane flying overhead, I immediately pictured it exploding. Breaking apart into pieces.
And I hadn’t confided in him or anyone that, sometimes, when I took a walk along the water and looked toward the Boston skyline, I saw black smoke pouring out of the top of the tallest building.
Have I hurt you somehow? I wondered silently, as I watched Maddy sleep. Was trauma or depression or whatever was wrong with me toxic to a baby in a mother’s womb? Like smoking, or eating certain kinds of fish?
Am I hurting you and Jack still?
“It’ll be okay,” I whispered, trying to reassure us both.
The days—and nights—after Maddy’s homecoming followed a similar pattern. David took Jack to day care and I stayed home to care for her. The nightmares, and my fear when I heard a plane overhead, continued. The pattern of David’s and my interactions about 9/11 continued, too.
“No one even remembers, hon, what happened in the media in Boston,” he said. “I know that hurts, but it’s true.”
He said these things out of kindness, out of love. He said them to protect me. And he said them without knowing that, each time, with each word, he left me feeling even more alone.
Late spring 2002—Brookline, Massachusetts
“You have post-traumatic stress disorder,” the grief counselor said, as straightforwardly as if she were repeating my regular order for coffee at a Starbucks counter.
“What?”
No one moment, no single nightmare had brought me here. I was sitting in a therapist’s office because a deepening sense of despair had begun to seep into each day.
Maddy was buckled into an infant car seat at my feet. David was sitting in the chair next to me.
“The term ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ is really a misnomer,” Andrea Bredbeck was explaining, as I tried to give her my full attention. “It really should be called ‘post-traumatic stress order.’” I’d been referred to Andrea, a specialist in treating trauma survivors.
“Your brain is actually trying to give order to what has happened. To make it make sense,” she said.
I had, of course, heard of PTSD as it related to Vietnam veterans. I knew the condition had something to do with soldiers reliving the horrors of battle. But how could that have anything to do with me?
Andrea’s dark, thick hair was pulled back in a messy bun. Her clothes appeared to be vintage sixties. Her glasses were perched on the end of her nose.
We couldn’t have been more different and yet in the years ahead there would be no one who understood me as completely. Or knew how to help me find my way back to myself. And even then, she knew what I long refused to accept, that “myself” had been irrevocably changed.
“Is it like alcoholism?” I asked. “Will I have it for the rest of my life?”
I continued to press for clarity.
“Is it like the flu, something I will just get over?”
After we talked for a while longer, I committed to meeting with Andrea regularly. “Can I bring the baby?” I asked.
“You can,” she answered, “but as we get into the work you may not want to.”
Andrea used the term “dissociation.” It was the first time I’d heard that my sense that I was shut down inside had a name.
“It’s the common response to trauma,” she said, “a kind of automatic defense mechanism.”
I picture myself driving into Logan. “Two planes are off the radar,” Joey had said.
Did the dissociation begin then?
Or was it in my office, seeing that moment for the first time?
The second plane.
The explosion.
The ball of fire.
The black smoke.
“Dissociation allowed you to do your job excellently,” Andrea was saying now. “But as we explore your feelings about what happened you could scream,” she added. “You could lose control.”
“No way,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. “That is not going to happen.”
I just wanted to know the answer.
“Am I guilty or innocent,” I said, rather than asked, like a declaration or a challenge. “That’s what I need to know, no matter how it turns out.”
David sounded exasperated. “She’s the only person who thinks she could have done something to stop the hijackers.”
“You can’t know
what you don’t know,” Andrea said. I didn’t understand what she meant. My frustration grew with both of them.
They didn’t get it.
What if I should have known? What then?
I didn’t tell Andrea or David. But I had already come to my own answer.
Several days earlier—Devereux Beach, Marblehead
The tide was out, and though it was May, there was no sign of the coming warmth in the brisk breeze. I dug my hands deep into the pockets of my ski coat and buried my chin in its collar. I continued the silent debate raging in my mind.
If there is a distinction between blame and responsibility, how much responsibility is mine to bear?
Can I bear it?
What if I contributed to the deaths of thousands of people?
I looked across to the horizon. I’d been raised to believe in doing penance. But no Act of Contrition could compensate for this.
The water and gray sky framed more questions.
Why didn’t I hold daily press conferences demanding the security checkpoints be fixed?
Why hadn’t I testified before Congress about that, instead of runways?
I watched a gull pecking at a mussel shell near the low-tide line, methodically breaking it open to reach the pink meat inside. Another gull flew overhead, calling out as if it were asking its own questions. In answer, the first gull picked up its food and flew away, the mussel tightly clenched in its beak. It landed farther down the beach and resumed its meal.
I resumed my self-interrogation.
I was a leader in developing customer service programs. I was a national spokesperson for the need to ease air travel delays.
But doesn’t a real leader go where others cannot see?
My steps slowed. I turned to look back at my path in the sand. I used to carry a small laminated card in my wallet with the story “Footprints” printed on it. It told of a man who questioned God after looking back at his life. He didn’t understand why he saw only one set of footprints in the sand during the most difficult times. “It was then that I carried you,” God answered.
I could see only one set of footprints behind me now. But I was not being carried. Of that I was certain.
Murderer?
Could I have done anything to stop them?
I looked again toward the horizon. I tried not to blink or look away.
The voices of people and institutions I’d relied on as I built my career, and my sense of self, said at some level it was my fault. No other airport directors at the three other airports where the hijackers boarded planes were being blamed. But those blaming me were smart people, not nameless critics, in the media, in politics, whose opinions I had tried to sway, yes, when I worked on behalf of two governors, but whose opinions I also deeply respected. Could they all be wrong? And even if I were simply an easy answer to point to, to assuage fear, could I bear being forever linked to the deaths of thousands?
If I could not hold on to what I knew deep down was true, that I was not to blame, if the volume of external voices drowned out my inner voice, there was only one answer.
I couldn’t bear to live.
***
“It’s still possible to make meaning. To find joy,” Andrea was saying, as we set our next appointment.
Make meaning? Find joy?
How?
Chapter Nine
Marianne and Anne
June 2002—Revere
The phone rang twice, three times. I was about to hang up when I heard the click of the answering machine. “You’ve reached Marianne and Anne. We’re not home right now, so please leave a message.”
“Uh, uh,” I stuttered as I tried to speak. It was Marianne’s voice. Though she had been dead for nearly nine months, Anne had left her daughter’s message on the machine.
“Uh, this is Ginny Buckingham. I don’t know if you remember me, from Logan, but I wonder if you’ll meet me for coffee?” I left my number. When I hung up, my hands were shaking.
Anne called back within a few hours. “Of course I remember you,” she said. She suggested we meet at the International House of Pancakes in Revere, near her house.
As I walked in the restaurant door, I recognized her right away.
“Hello,” she said simply as I slid into the booth seat across from her. I nodded yes to the waitress’s offer of coffee.
“Thanks for coming,” I said. I noticed she had a large heart-shaped pendant around her neck with a picture on it. “That’s Marianne,” Anne said when she saw me looking at the pendant. “Joe and George, my two sons, gave it to me.”
I didn’t know what to say, but Anne filled the silence.
“Hey, I brought you something,” she said as she handed me a small teddy bear. The stuffed animal was wearing a T-shirt with “Always In Our Hearts—Flight 175” printed on it. I squeezed the bear hard.
“And for your kids,” Anne said. She passed me a laminated certificate and letter from Sean O’Keefe, the NASA administrator. In the letter, O’Keefe noted that the space shuttle Endeavour had carried six thousand American flags to the International Space Station in December to honor the victims and heroes of September 11.
“This one’s for you,” Anne said. She handed me a small laminated memorial card with Marianne’s picture on it. I cradled it in my palm.
I’d wanted to ask Anne to bring a picture, but felt uncomfortable. I was already invading her privacy enough by asking to meet with her. Somehow, though, she knew to bring one anyway. Maybe she instinctively understood I would want to look in Marianne’s eyes. That I would want to know her. To grieve specifically for someone who had died on 9/11. To put a name and a life to my feelings of loss and guilt.
Anne and I talked easily. She, who herself had started working at Logan as a stewardess for Northeast Airlines in 1957, told me Marianne had a deep love of aviation. “Her first job was selling flowers out of a cart in Terminal D,” Anne said. “Once you work at an airport, you just can’t work anywhere else.”
Marianne’s guidance counselor at college had tried to dissuade her from pursuing an airport career. “Not for women,” he’d told her. But Marianne wasn’t dissuaded. “She became the manager at US Airways in Bangor, Maine.” Anne’s pride was evident in her twinkling blue eyes.
“Then one day, she called me and said, ‘I’m coming home.’ I asked, ‘For the weekend?’ And she said, ‘Nope, for good.’”
Marianne moved into the upstairs of Anne’s double-decker Revere home. Anne’s two sons, Joe and George, lived in another two-family house right next door. There was a shared pool in the backyard. “The MacFarlane compound,” Anne liked to joke.
Her voice grew quiet as she talked about the last time she saw her daughter. Marianne worked the early shift as a gate agent for United Airlines in Logan’s Terminal C. “I usually got up by four o’clock to take her,” Anne recalled. “Otherwise, she’d never have gotten there.”
On September 11, Marianne was working for a few hours before taking a flight out west to meet some friends for a short vacation in Las Vegas. “Marianne usually never said goodbye when I dropped her off,” Anne said. “She’d just throw an ‘I’ll see ya’ over her shoulder as she walked toward the terminal door.”
“But that day, she said, ‘Goodbye, Mom.’ I almost stopped the car to roll down my window to ask, ‘Why goodbye?’”
I pictured the scene as Anne talked. The curb, typically filled with cabs, buses, and limos jockeying for position, must have been empty at that time of day, Marianne’s “goodbye” echoing in the stillness.
“I was home when the first plane hit. George called me from down at the fire station.” Anne wasn’t looking at me now as she talked. She was staring past me, at her own memories. “He said, ‘Turn on the TV, Ma.’”
“I saw the second plane,” she said. “I didn’t know Marianne was on it.”
Anne’s voice was hypnotic. I saw what she was seeing.
The second plane.
The explosion.
The ball of fire.
The black smoke.
“I waited by the phone. Marianne would’ve called, if she could have,” Anne said. “After a while, I couldn’t sit around and wait anymore so I went to the airport.”
“As soon as I approached the ticket counter,” Anne said, “I knew.”
Anne would learn that Marianne was seated in the first row of the plane. She had helped board the other passengers first. She sat next to a coworker, J. R. Sanchez.
“I’m glad she wasn’t alone.”
Inside the plane.
Oh God.
I couldn’t think about what it was like inside the plane.
Stop.
I refocused on Anne. She was telling me about a conversation Marianne had had with a family friend, Phyllis, just weeks before 9/11. “Marianne told Phyllis that if her plane was ever hijacked, she would just close her eyes, go to sleep, and wake up in Cuba.”
That was the protocol then—before—to cooperate with, not confront, hijackers. As unlikely as it was, I could tell Anne was trying to hold on to the possibility that her daughter had done just that in the moments before she died. Closed her eyes and gone to sleep.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, tears flowing freely now down my cheeks. I mustered the courage to pose the question that haunted my dreams.
“Do you blame me for what happened?” I tried to meet Anne’s eyes as my hands squeezed the edge of the table.
Anne didn’t look away. She didn’t pause to consider her words, not even for a second.
“You’re no more to blame than Marianne is.”
You’re no more to blame than Marianne is.
“I had no idea you felt that way,” Anne added.
I tried to steady my voice.
“I know I didn’t lose anyone on September 11,” I explained. “I have my husband and two children and my health. I know it’s not comparable to what you and others lost, but on September 11, I lost myself.”
On My Watch Page 11