Mostly, though, it was the numbness, the dissociation accompanying PTSD, that had allowed me to continue to function normally, and also allowed me to keep a Berlin-scale wall between the words the Herald and Globe had published and my own feelings—anger, hurt, sadness, fear—about them. I knew the coverage existed, but it was “way down there” in that distant part of myself where I kept all the horror of 9/11.
After being at the paper for a couple of months, the furtive glances from other members of the staff as they walked by my open office door, like I was an exotic animal at the zoo, ceased. I learned the secrets of the tabloid’s anachronistic word-processing system that was almost as old as me. I shared internet access at the office’s one PC with three other people, along with a printer someone had brought in from home. My battered desk stood hard against cheap wood paneling and dented metal filing cabinets. Behind me, a large, dirty window with a broken vinyl blind looked out on the crawling traffic of the Southeast Expressway—a far cry from the skyline views and plush decor of my former offices in the State House and at Logan.
Each morning, after Shelly and I picked the next day’s editorial topics, I worked the phones to get more information and perspectives from the same elected leaders I’d tangled with over politics and policy over the years. The afternoons were spent with my fingers poised on the keyboard, writing and erasing the green-glowing lettering that would represent the newspaper’s view of pressing issues. When I nailed a headline, I laughed out loud as I sent it on electronically to copy editor Neil Cote.
“Amusing yourself, are you?” Shelly called out from her adjoining office.
“Yup!” I answered happily, reveling in the singular joy of finding the perfect word or turn of phrase.
I love it here, I thought one evening, as I tucked the proofs of tomorrow’s editorial and op-ed pages in my purse. Besides the writing, the sense of being a player again at the center of city and state politics, shaping public policy, albeit on the other side of the pen, was exhilarating.
I began to believe Judge Wolf’s assessment. A complete comeback was possible.
March 2003—Marblehead
“I’ll be back in a bit,” I called to David as I slipped my feet into brown Merrell loafers and pulled my winter jacket on.
It had been eighteen months since 9/11 and I was finally drawn to the sea again—to its beauty and comforting immutability. I no longer yearned for the waves to wash over me and make me disappear.
It was cold, but not the kind of cold that made me wince. More the kind that made me want to breathe deeply, to fill my lungs with fresh sea air.
The wind whipped my hair into my face. I hesitated at the end of my street, thinking I should go back and get a hat, but the sound of crashing surf, even from here, dissuaded me from turning around. The street that led to the beach was deserted, my neighbors likely huddling in their warm houses, crackling fires and warm tea warding off the chilly mist blowing off the water. As I moved closer to the beach, I could see the waves crashing through the covered promenade where, in calmer weather, I’d sit watching Jack devour an ice-cream cone among bathers seeking shelter from the summer sun.
The beach parking lot was completely flooded, and a police car with flashing blue lights was blocking access to the causeway that ran between the harbor and open ocean, connecting that spit of land called Marblehead Neck to the mainland. It was only then that I noticed the truck with the several telltale antennas—a TV-broadcasting truck—parked on the side of the road. Then I saw who was sitting behind the wheel.
“Hey, how ya doin’?” Stanley Forman asked, with a smile, his elbow crooked out the window. “How’s the Herald treating ya?”
Before moving to Boston’s ABC affiliate as a videographer, Stanley had been a Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer at the Herald. He also happened to be David’s cousin, but I had known Stanley even before I met David since he had appeared, shouldering his camera, almost daily at the State House when I was the governor’s press secretary.
As we both watched the water wash across the road in front of us, Stanley asked how I was liking the Herald. I told him that I was settling in, loving the work, and that I liked the people in the newsroom.
He said he had heard from his contacts at the paper about the turmoil my hiring had initially caused, but he advised, “Don’t worry about it. It will pass. A newspaper staff is notoriously cranky. They’ll get over it.”
Stanley told me he’d checked in with some people he still knew in the Herald’s photo department and added, “It’s not that big a deal, except there’s this one guy, a photographer, whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. So that’s tough.”
“What?” I couldn’t hide how stunned I was. I had no idea. The photographers’ office was right across the hall from mine.
Had I walked by him every day? I thought, my mind rapidly sorting through faces I’d come to see regularly in the hallway. Did he think I was oblivious to his pain?
I forgot that I was in the middle of a conversation with Stanley as my inner conversation raged and my sense of guilt, buried in the shallowest of graves, surfaced again. Oh my God, did seeing me bring him more pain?
And then this, the question that haunted me most of all: Does he blame me?
I’d feared running into a victim’s family—in town, on the street, in a store, or even at my front door. I dreaded confronting their anger, their sorrow. Sometimes, when I’d get home late at night and I’d see a strange car parked on the street, my heart would begin to pound. I’d run to the front door as fast as I could. There was nothing rational about my fear. David would typically be right inside. If there were some stranger lurking, he’d hear me scream. But I wasn’t only afraid of a stranger. I was afraid of meeting someone whose eyes carried the haunted look of pain that I saw constantly in my dreams. I was afraid to face their belief that I had a part in putting it there.
“Hey, you okay?” Forman called after me as I mumbled “goodbye” and walked away quickly, head down, back toward my house. A chill ran down my neck. I involuntarily shivered and clutched my coat tight as the damp wind swirled. I tried to ignore the contrast of the cold touching my skin with the warm throbbing in my wrists.
***
“Matt West.” I determined that was the Herald photographer’s name by asking discreetly around the newsroom. But I still didn’t know what he looked like. I didn’t have the courage to walk into the photographers’ office and ask for him. My anxiety grew. I found myself constantly glancing up as photographers came and went from assignments. “Is that him?” “Or him?”
Some weeks later, in the early afternoon, I stood by the row of steel-gray bookshelves that lined the entrance to the city newsroom. I checked out the day’s offering of “giveaways,” typically books that had been sent in unsolicited by publishers hoping for a review. Sometimes there were promotional items like lotions or even candy or bottles of local wine, too, though those were scooped up quickly by Herald veterans who’d developed the same instincts as people who show up to yard sales before the posted hours.
I didn’t see anything special that day and stood flipping through a galley proof of a novel. I noticed one of the Herald photographers standing next to me doing the same. I smiled at him, but got no response. He’s probably just focused on finding the right book, I thought, though I could feel the tension building in my neck. Larry Katz, the Herald’s movie reviewer, walked over.
“Hi, Matt,” he said.
Was I imagining it, or did Larry glance my way and then look back at Matt? I panicked and fled to my office, ashamed I didn’t have the courage to introduce myself.
I finally confessed to Shelly how I’d been agonizing over whether to approach Matt West. She and Wayne Woodlief, a veteran political reporter, suggested I ask Joe Fitzgerald, a longtime Herald columnist, for advice. Joe had been friendly to me in the past, and Wayne said he was close to Matt.
I learned Joe had written two columns after September 11 about Matt and his father. Peter West was only fifty-four when he died. He worked as a trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, the company that had lost more than six hundred employees when American Flight 11 hit the North Tower. Peter was a free spirit, Joe wrote, a daredevil of sorts, who rode a motorcycle, parachuted out of airplanes, raced vintage cars, and sucked every bit of adventure he could out of life. “The irony,” Matt told Joe, “is that he took so many risks, but he was killed just by going into work.”
The picture accompanying Joe’s column showed a silhouette of Matt riding his father’s motorcycle. I couldn’t make out his features clearly, but it was obvious this Matt was not the one I had seen at the giveaway counter. I didn’t know much more about what he looked like, but knew with heartbreaking clarity what he’d lost.
I asked Joe to pass a message on to Matt that I’d be willing to meet with him if he wanted to but that I also didn’t want to intrude if he didn’t.
Months passed. I don’t remember Joe giving me a definitive answer about seeking out Matt. And I never gathered the courage to just walk into his office and look his grief in the eye.
Chapter Fourteen
A Duty to Warn
September 4, 2003—Boston Herald
I eyed the pile of newspapers I still had to read, five in all on a typical morning. I saved the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post for last, my two favorites. I still can’t believe I get paid to read newspapers every day, I thought, smiling as I turned to the Post’s editorial page.
I picked up the phone on the first ring.
“Ginny, it’s Joe.”
I sat up straighter. Joe Savage, a former assistant US attorney, now had a downtown law practice. Since it was expected that Massport would be named along with the other airports, airlines, and security companies in litigation brought by some 9/11 families, I had been cautioned that I might be called to give a deposition. Before I’d left Massport, I’d hired Joe to represent me.
I hadn’t heard from him in months. I leaned forward over my desk, one hand cradling my forehead, the other cradling the phone, an instinctive feeling of dread crawling up my spine.
“You’ve been sued,” he said. “You’ve been named in a wrongful death lawsuit.”
“What?”
I’d been sued? Not just the airport, but me personally?
My thoughts raced as I tried to focus on his words.
Joe related something about the plaintiff’s legal strategy and the looming deadline of the statute of limitations. I couldn’t take in what he was saying. Not a word of it.
Oh my God.
My worst fear had come true.
A family . . .
I could barely articulate the thought, even silently.
blames . . .
Oh my God.
. . . me.
I tried to conceal from Joe that I was crying. Shakily, I asked him the name of the family. “Abelman. Daren Abelman,” Joe said. “He was on Flight 11.”
Joe asked me to come to his office for a meeting in the next few days. I agreed and hung up the phone.
For a few minutes, I didn’t move.
I couldn’t move.
None of the angry letters or emails I’d received in the past two years were from people who indicated they had lost someone that day. So the “they” who blamed me after 9/11 had no real shape or identity as individuals. “They” were not left a widow or a young child without a father or mother because two airliners were hijacked from Logan Airport on my watch.
I moved slowly over to the computer, forcing one foot to take a step and then the other. I entered Daren Abelman’s name into a search field.
As I started to read, I felt enveloped in silence, as if I were inside a sealed tunnel. No air, no light, no sound. Just him.
He was seated in 9B on Flight 11, I read. A flight attendant was being attacked by a hijacker farther up the aisle. The former Israeli military officer leaped up to defend her. Another hijacker was seated behind him. In row 10.
“A passenger had his throat slashed.”
I could hear Ed Freni reporting this horrific fact on the morning of 9/11 in my office. A passenger. It was Daren Abelman. A father. A husband.
His wife is alone, I thought.
Wrongful death.
His two sons have no father.
Ed’s voice: “A passenger had his throat slashed.”
I read further that Abelman had been a very successful businessman. He and his wife seemed to have built a wonderful life. But now that life had been shattered. And his widow was asking a court of law to hold me responsible for it.
Am I? Could I have stopped them? The insistent inner voice of doubt gnawed at me. I felt a sudden, urgent, almost desperate, need to talk to Eva Abelman.
I’m not a monster, I would implore her, in my mind trying to meet her eyes. I didn’t know terrorists were going to attack us. I just didn’t know. I am a mother, too. Please forg . . .
My impassioned silent monologue stopped as suddenly as it had started. There could be no forgiveness for what happened to Daren Abelman.
And what if I am found responsible for his death?
His wrongful, horrifying death. His, and therefore the deaths of thousands of others?
I turned away from the computer screen. It was cold in the office, something I hadn’t noticed before. I reached for my coat and left, not sure where I was heading.
Outside, I hailed a cab and called Jose Juves, the Massport media director. “Jose?” I said as calmly as I could.
“Yeah, what’s up?” he answered.
I explained what had happened, my voice monotone.
“Well, you sound pretty calm, like you have it in perspective,” Jose said.
“Yes, I do.”
I didn’t. I was in complete shock.
In a conference room at the law offices of Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, Boston
Sitting in Joe Savage’s conference room sometime later, I had the sensation of observing the meeting as if I were at a great distance, like the room itself was shrouded in a thick fog. Dissociation was serving its purpose of self-preservation. Still, a phrase from the lawyers’ conversation broke through. One lawyer was describing a recent meeting with the family’s lawyer, a prominent Boston attorney, about the lawsuit. “We said to Joan, ‘Are you going to try to take her house?’” he recounted.
My house! I thought, as my heart began to pound.
Literally and figuratively, since 9/11, my house had been both a refuge and the North Star I hoped to follow back to myself. When I started at the Herald, one published report noted that I’d been in “seclusion” in my North Shore home for much of the time since leaving Logan. While that was not strictly true, it was the one place where I felt shielded, and like some semblance of the person I used to be: a mom, a loved wife. There, I hoped I could find the rest of me someday.
I did not yet understand that was not possible, that the four walls of a home, of a self, could look the same on the outside while the inside was completely gutted.
The lawyers indicated that Massport’s policy of indemnification, which assumed the legal liability of its employees, would protect my personal assets. Yet, I could tell they were truly surprised that I had been named individually as a defendant. Most of the lawyers’ back-and-forth was trying to divine the legal strategy behind the move. “Not even the CEOs of the airlines or the security companies have been named,” someone noted. Someone else offered a theory that naming individuals at Massport allowed some greater leverage down the road to secure a settlement.
“They’re suggesting she had a ‘duty to warn,’” Joe Savage said, as if “she”—me—wasn’t sitting right there. “That she failed to warn the public about security weaknesses at Logan,” he continued.
“
Duty to warn.”
Those three words were an immediate and powerful fertilizer for the seeds of doubt I carried in my conscience. One of my strongest skills had been my ability to draw media attention to an issue, to leverage that attention with policymakers, and to bring change. It’s what I had done with great success as two governors’ chief of staff. It’s what I had done to advance the new runway project at Logan.
Yet, on the issue of problems with airport security checkpoints, I hadn’t done this. There were reasons why I didn’t. Legitimate reasons. The checkpoints were the responsibility of the airlines. They were regulated by the FAA. Security responsibility before 9/11 was clearly divided, and airport operators were not responsible for checkpoints. The airlines’ trade group had balked at my simply trying to improve customer service; they would never have stood for overstepping on the checkpoints. But in the aftermath of the hijackings—in the aftermath of being sued—this sounded like a justification even to me, like an excuse for something that was inexcusable. I had a duty, they said. Did I?
Chapter Fifteen
The Rising
September 6, 2003—Fenway Park, Boston
David and I approached the gate to Boston’s Fenway Park. Our solemn demeanor was in stark contrast with that of the excited concertgoers around us. “Are you okay?” David asked, squeezing my hand.
On My Watch Page 14