Anne didn’t look surprised. She didn’t even ask what I meant. She just said, directly, “So what are you going to do now?”
“Get through the one-year anniversary, write my story, try to reclaim who I am,” I answered.
“Then do it,” Anne said. “Do it in Marianne’s name.”
***
Anne’s words were not a magic elixir. They didn’t erase my pain, just as my words of condolence didn’t erase hers. But for each of us, the connection we made that day became a touchstone. A place to go to be strengthened. Comforted. Reached and understood on a journey through loss that largely was made alone.
I also came to understand, in retrospect, that I knew I was likely safe asking Anne whether she blamed me, given her response to me at Marianne’s memorial service. Was choosing her to answer my hardest question some kind of survival instinct? Did I know I needed a family member to tell me I wasn’t to blame? To hold on to that, even if it was just one family, even if others felt differently? Maybe. What I didn’t know at the time was that Anne’s certainty would help me hang on—in the most literal sense—in the hardest times yet to come.
Chapter Ten
Words
September 3, 2002—Marblehead
“Jack, get down and stay on the sidewalk, will you please?” I said, immediately wishing I hadn’t spoken so sharply. I couldn’t get Maddy’s infant car seat to unhook from the metal bars of the shopping cart. Jack kept climbing on the front of the cart, pushing it slightly backward.
“Dammit,” I said, as I finally caught the hook under the seat, moving it enough so that I could lift it before it snapped back on my finger. With Maddy’s car seat in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other, I said, “C’mon, honey,” to Jack, suddenly wearier than a trip to the grocery store was responsible for.
“Can I help?” a voice said softly over my shoulder as I put the bag down on the hood of the car. I looked up. A dark-haired, middle-aged woman who looked vaguely familiar stood there. She was already reaching for the grocery bag.
I nodded, grateful. “Yes, thanks a lot.” As I snapped Maddy’s car seat into its frame and buckled Jack into his, she started loading the rest of the bags into the back of the car.
“I’m Katie Reilly,” she said.
“Oh, right, hello,” I answered, realizing why she looked so familiar.
Katie was a bit of a character in town, standing out for driving an old white SUV that was completely covered on the outside, doors, hood, and all, with bumper stickers of all sorts. I’d long admired her quirkiness for another reason, too. A few years earlier, the navy warship USS Constitution had sailed to Marblehead Harbor from Boston to celebrate its two-hundredth anniversary. Thousands of people had come to see it. The best vantage point was from a park out on Marblehead Neck, a wealthy neighborhood of beautiful waterfront homes. Visitors to town walking to the park were greeted with signs and yellow tape on neighbors’ lawns. Keep Off the Grass, Private Property, and the like. But not at Katie Reilly’s house. The sign at the end of the driveway leading to her white oceanfront mansion read Welcome. Katie had invited hundreds of complete strangers to take advantage of her view.
Now she was standing less than a foot or so from my car, a similar inviting expression on her face.
“I’m Ginny,” I said. “Ginny Buckingham. Thanks again.”
“I know who you are, Ginny,” Katie responded. “I see you walking in the morning by the beach. I’ve wanted to say hello, ever since 9/11, but I didn’t want to interrupt you.” As she spoke, I pictured seeing a group of people each morning sitting at a picnic table at the beachfront hamburger shack, sipping coffee. I remembered catching her eye a few times.
“I read your book,” I said. Katie looked pleased. She had self-published a book after both her parents died called Nobody’s Daughter that was carried in the local bookstore.
“You know,” she said, “when I’d see you, I always felt a soft connection between us. I can’t explain it.”
I couldn’t either but I knew what she meant. I’d felt it, too.
“So, what are you doing now?” she asked.
“I’m trying to start a career as a writer,” I answered. I told her that a piece I’d written about 9/11 was going to be published that coming weekend in the Boston Globe Sunday magazine.
“It’s a chance to talk about the 9/11 experience from my perspective at Logan Airport,” I explained.
I didn’t tell her that it had taken some convincing to get the Globe to agree to run the piece. Frank Phillips, the paper’s State House Bureau chief, had broached the possibility with the magazine’s editor after I called to ask for his advice.
“I hope you’re not going to try to rewrite history,” the editor, Nick King, said when I first talked directly to him. After I submitted the first draft of the essay, King called me, clearly surprised. “I picked it up to take a glance at it and I couldn’t put it down. I read it all the way through,” he said. We then talked about the courtroom dream I’d opened the piece with. King asked, “Do you remember anything else about the dream? Were you in the dock?”
“No, no, that’s it,” I said, feeling bad about the lie. Even as I said it, I felt them. Handcuffs. In the dream I was in handcuffs, their cold metal tight on my wrists. Only the guilty were handcuffed. Only the condemned. I couldn’t bring myself to write that because I couldn’t admit to anyone, not King, not David, a horrifying reality: when I felt the most despair over 9/11, I would feel the handcuffs digging into my skin. Or sometimes, what it might feel like if I cut into my wrists myself.
“I’ll look for the article,” Katie said as I closed the trunk. We smiled at each other as she started toward the door of the store.
September 8, 2002—Marblehead
David and I fell into each other’s arms and onto the couch, laughing and crying at the same time. “Words!” he exclaimed. “Your words!”
I was thrilled and humbled when King told me he’d decided to make my essay the issue’s cover story, substituting it for a cover essay he had solicited from the famed writer Christopher Hitchens. But I had no inkling that instead of a picture or illustration, the cover would be simply words that I had written. White print on a black background. A few words in red. My long-held aspiration had been to be a professional writer. That a seasoned Globe editor thought my words, alone, were worthy of the front cover seemed an extraordinary validation, reducing David and me to tears of joy.
My words!
Then theirs.
Approximately ten days later
I held the large white envelope, hesitating before I opened it. The Globe’s masthead and return address were in the upper left corner. I knew the envelope contained copies of the letters the paper had received after the magazine’s publication. In an email, Nick King had written he would forward them to me. “Some are pretty tough,” he’d warned.
I carried the envelope into the sitting room. I tore it open and unfolded the first letter.
“Having read her words, I have come to the conclusion that while Ms. Buckingham was following all of the guidelines and rules set down by the FAA on Sept. 11, she is still ultimately responsible for the flights that left Logan on that fateful day. She has failed to come to grips with this or fully grasp the most baseline principle of leadership, being responsible for what occurs on your watch.”
The next was no better: “Ms. Buckingham should have been screaming for improved security measures prior to 9-11” at “sieve Logan.”
I opened another. “Never have I witnessed a more self-absorbed person displaying such a lack of sensitivity. Does she expect us to pray for her as well as the 3,000 souls who lost a little more than their reputations on September 11, 2001?”
My wrists.
I rubbed them and read the next letter.
“The one person who had the power but not the knowledge, training or experienc
e to somehow influence the events of 9-11 and uses it to ask for sympathy. What about the victims and their survivors?”
Murderer.
“Mama, I need help,” Jack called from the family room, where he was playing with his Batman characters and watching TV.
“Okay, I’ll be right there,” I answered, trying to keep my voice steady. I opened one more.
“She should stop whining and admit that her blind ambition contributed to the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.”
The handcuffs were cutting into me. Cutting my skin. Cutting open my wrists. Stop.
“Mama! Mama!” Jack called again. “I have a boo-boo.”
“Shh, you’ll wake the baby,” I said, hurrying into the family room while wiping my cheeks with the backs of my hands.
“Want a Band-Aid, Mama,” Jack said, as I checked and kissed the tiny, barely visible scratch on his finger.
I started to tell Jack he didn’t need a Band-Aid. But I stopped myself and got one from the cabinet. Gently, I wrapped it around his small forefinger, kissing it to seal it. I couldn’t explain to a three-year-old that sometimes a wound has to be exposed to heal. How could I? I didn’t yet understand that myself.
Over the next several days, I got more letters. Some were supportive, many were not. I smiled as I read the old-fashioned cursive written on yellow lined paper from one of the toughest neighborhood activists, who fought Massport at every turn. Alice Christopher bitterly opposed the dismantling of the blast fence at the end of Runway 22-Left, her advanced age no obstacle to her activism. “Because of the removal of the blast fence I was no fan of Virginia Buckingham,” she wrote, “but the fact of the matter is—fan or not—you are not the least bit responsible for the horrific events of 9/11. . . . History will record that you just happened to have the wrong job at the wrong time. You’re young! Be strong! Step up to the plate.”
“This quote was given to me, many years ago from a friend, when my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s,” I read in another letter. “‘Courage isn’t having the strength to go on—it’s going on when you don’t have the strength.’ You are a very courageous woman. We are proud of you.”
And this from someone who realized I would turn thirty-seven just a few days after the first 9/11 anniversary. “Happy Birthday. It wasn’t your fault.”
I picked up a sheaf of mustard-yellow paper and reread a final letter. I’d found it in my foyer on the day the Globe article was published. It was from Katie Reilly.
She wrote that my article “is from the deepest, most sensitive part of you that feels that somehow, that if you ‘confess’ . . . then perhaps you will be forgiven. I can only surmise that you will forgive yourself for the horror that two planes left your ‘house’ that morning and changed the world as we know it.”
Katie continued, “I have had friends who have had teens leave their homes late in the evening only to receive a call saying there had been a car accident, one teen injured fatally, two others critical. I had a friend who had a toddler drown in her pool at her son’s birthday party. To this day, the parents of the surviving children feel guilt because they did not lose their own child, though they are desperately grateful they did not.
“May I say to you, we forgive you. . . . Please forgive yourself.” Her letter was coming to an end, and I hugged it to my chest as I picked up the framed poem she’d also left in the foyer. It was a poem she’d written about traveling the world as seen through the eyes of her children.
I turned it over and reread the note she’d put on the back of the matting.
“Virginia, forgive yourself first, take your time—then move forward. The world will be waiting for your wisdom. Till then, bring your wisdom home . . . welcome home Virginia Buckingham, Welcome Home.”
Home.
Before the magazine article ran, the Globe had sent a photographer to my house.
“I should get a picture of that,” he’d joked when I clenched the plastic handle of Maddy’s pacifier between my teeth as I buckled her into the infant swing in the corner of the kitchen.
He looked around for a spot to set up. “I read the piece. You came through it all whole,” he said.
Whole.
I don’t remember if I responded. Maybe I nodded in assent.
Whole. Home.
No.
Not yet.
Not ever?
Stop.
Chapter Eleven
Lost
September 11, 2002—Boston College campus, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
It was the same sky. Clear blue. Just like the year before.
“Over that way,” I said to David, who turned Maddy’s stroller in the direction I pointed. We fell in with the stream of students leaving class. It was quiet, despite the growing number of people. There was no tossing of a Frisbee. No idle speculation about the weekend’s football game. Oddly, the solemnity seemed as natural as the backpacks flung casually on the students’ shoulders.
The service started at noon. It was the same time students had gathered in front of Boston College’s O’Neill Library a year earlier.
I hadn’t known where to go to mark the first anniversary of 9/11.
“Do you want to go to the Logan chapel?” David had asked when we talked about it.
“No,” I answered. I didn’t feel right going to any of the official memorials in Boston either.
I didn’t belong anywhere. I hadn’t been invited to join my former colleagues at Logan, and I feared coming face-to-face with 9/11 families at a Boston event. Nothing had eased the severity of the isolation I’d felt from the moment I was first blamed. In some ways it had worsened as the 9/11 narrative turned to reflection nearing the first anniversary. I was not a first responder, not a survivor, not a suffering family, not an everyday American pausing to mark a solemn anniversary. I was nothing. No one. Lost.
When I read in the paper a few weeks before that Boston College was holding a memorial service, I felt a wave of relief.
Boston College. The place I first embraced as a new home as a seventeen-year-old freshman. I’ll be welcome there, I thought. Safe.
Safe? The unbidden thought surprised me. Safe from what? From being blamed, I responded, answering my own question.
Now, we continued down the main driveway of middle campus. The imposing limestone walls of the old Bapst Library on our right and Gasson Hall’s tower, “the tower on the heights,” rose before us. I noticed the wheels of Maddy’s stroller crunching the fallen leaves scattered across the driveway.
September. It had always been my favorite month. But it was lost, too. Gone, its possibility as a beginning.
I’d contacted a former college classmate whose father worked for the college president’s office to ask if it would be all right to go to the BC service. After checking, he called right back. “Of course,” he said. “Do you want to park on middle campus?”
I swallowed my disappointment that this was the only offer extended. I was embarrassed that I’d hoped BC would ask me to participate in some way, an unrealistic hope that somehow leaders there would intuit I wanted—needed—some acknowledgment that 9/11 was my story, too.
As we neared the edge of the open concrete plaza in front of the library, David stopped pushing the stroller. I leaned in to straighten Maddy’s blanket as a shadow fell across her face. Father Neenan, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences when I attended BC, was peering down at her. Tall and thin, rakish and scholarly at the same time, he had always reminded me of Gregory Peck.
“You have to get through Good Friday to find Easter Sunday,” he said, looking at me and then David. He smiled down at Maddy, who was starting to stir. “She is the future. She is Easter Sunday.”
Like the blanket covering Maddy, there was a soft security offered in his words. The hope I was raised to believe in—the hope of resurrection.
I s
miled softly at him. “Thank you, Father.”
David and I found a spot to sit on the ground on the edge of the plaza. I held Maddy cradled in my lap. Students all around us, wearing flip-flops and jeans, leaned on one another. Their faces were streaked with tears, illuminated in the bright sunshine.
Almost directly in front of us, a large wall had been erected. It was covered with paper. After the service, students were invited to come forward and write a message that would be preserved as a memorial somewhere on campus.
“Do you want me to write something?” David offered.
“No, I will,” I answered. I passed Maddy carefully to him and stood. I approached the wall. A young man handed me the Sharpie marker he’d just finished with. I held it, staring at the white space. Others wrote and then passed on their markers to those waiting.
I took the cap off. I pressed the tip to the paper.
***
After the main service, we drove the mile or so to BC’s law school campus, where I had lived as a freshman. A smaller service was being held in the chapel, the place I had spent hours in alone, thinking, praying, in the middle of the day. Maddy had fallen back asleep so David stayed in the car with her. I sat in the very last row, in a corner seat against the wall.
The names.
I shrunk into the corner, trying to make myself invisible as the service proceeded. How could I be so oblivious?
I was deeply ashamed that I hadn’t focused on the twenty-two BC alumni who had been killed in the attacks. “Thomas M. Brennan, Class of ’91,” the speaker read. “John B. Cahill, Class of ’66; Kevin P. Connors, Class of ’68; Welles R. Crowther, Class of ’99; Thomas Fitzpatrick, Class of ’87.” The last name was familiar, a nice guy I hadn’t known well but would see at parties and football tailgates.
His name and the others swirled around me, encircling me. I pressed my body farther into the corner. I wanted to disappear.
On My Watch Page 12