On My Watch

by Virginia Buckingham

  When I had first heard the Greenwood song at the airport memorial service in the Delta hangar, its words felt like permission to finally cry, to grieve like other Americans, away from the TV cameras and the questions about whether I would resign and what grave mistakes Logan had made that allowed the hijackings. But now it was simply a reminder that that moment, standing arm in arm with airport and airline colleagues, may have been the last time I didn’t feel alone.

  As soon as the first notes of the song played from the chapel sound system, the music abruptly stopped. Father Richard played with the dials on the equipment for a minute before concluding he couldn’t get it to work. I closed my eyes briefly in grateful acknowledgment of the reprieve.

  When the service ended, the attendees exchanged muted goodbyes.

  As I turned to walk down the aisle toward the door, a voice piped up from a back pew. It was a voice I was starting to know well.

  “I want to say something,” the diminutive woman said loudly, instantly commanding the attention of everyone still standing around in the chapel.

  Anne MacFarlane stepped forward down the aisle.

  I had told Anne I was coming to the service and asked her to come, too, but I never expected she would. She had gone on extended medical leave from her own job at Logan after Marianne’s death.

  “Listen,” she said firmly, as if she were gently scolding her own children, “I want all of you to go home, take off those dark clothes, and have a party.” Then looking right at me, she added, “That’s what Marianne would have wanted.”

  Her words themselves seemed to gently illuminate the chapel, as people moved toward Anne and hugged her. I shook my head in wonder. In trademark Anne fashion, she was reaching out and comforting us instead of accepting the comfort that was hers.

  I walked down the aisle and stopped to give Anne a warm hug. “Thank you so much for coming,” I said. I then turned to say hello to Father Richard, who was standing nearby. For a moment he didn’t recognize me, which I attributed to some recent weight loss.

  “Oh Ginny,” he said, “you look terrific. How do you feel?”

  “Scared,” I answered, looking him straight in the eye. He was clearly surprised by what must have seemed like an odd response.

  “Scared? Scared of what?”

  “Of getting through 9/11,” I answered.

  “We already have,” he said.

  I hadn’t. I would keep trying.

  I promised.

  Part III

  Chapter Seventeen

  “They Found Marianne”

  November 5, 2003—Downtown Boston

  WBZ-TV reported live that I was testifying before the 9/11 Commission investigators. I didn’t find out until later that someone had tipped them off. I didn’t see any media in the lobby of my attorney’s firm on Oliver Street in downtown Boston. I pressed the button for the elevator. You can do this, Virginia, I silently encouraged myself.

  When I had learned weeks earlier that I would be questioned, I was as grateful as I was anxious. The panel had been authorized by Congress to investigate how the attacks had been planned and executed. I wanted to help them in their work. I wanted to answer their questions if I could. I wanted to tell them what security issues I felt were not being addressed, even now. Yet, I also knew, whatever their findings, theirs would be the definitive word on whether lapses in airport security had allowed the attacks.

  Their judgment would be my judgment day. They would determine whether Logan Airport, and therefore I, as its leader, was to blame.

  As I rode up in the elevator, I mentally reviewed the questions the lawyers said I might be asked. In meeting after meeting they had grilled me, carefully, without suggesting the correct answer, on time frames for the events at Logan before and after 9/11 and on the context within which I’d made certain decisions. I nodded, taking in what they said, but knowing all the while I had a different objective for the outcome of the interview.

  I wanted to be exonerated.

  “You shouldn’t look at this as a chance to be exonerated,” one of the lawyers cautioned me during a prep session, as if reading my mind. “Just answer the questions they ask you.”

  The elevator doors opened and I stepped onto a marble-floored hallway. A secretary pointed me toward a nondescript conference room, and Joe Savage, my lawyer, greeted me and gestured to the seat at the head of the table. I glanced out the window at the rooftop of a neighboring building as the Commission’s staff assistant—“Lisa Sullivan” it said on the business card she handed to me—set up the audiotape equipment. Joe and Chris Moore, the attorney from a large Boston firm that Massport had retained, sat on one side of the table, directly across from the two 9/11 Commission investigators. Sullivan gave me a slight smile as she turned on the recorder. The small kindness calmed me, as if she were saying, I have a name. I know you do, too. You are not just a subject of our inquiry, simply a voice to be recorded, but a person. Her acknowledgment, whether real or imagined, strengthened my resolve, and I looked now directly at the investigators.

  The two, John Raidt and Bill Johnstone, were part of Team Seven, the 9/11 Commission’s aviation and transportation security subteam, they explained. Raidt noted they had the security clearances necessary to discuss classified information. My attorney nodded and agreed that if I had any classified information to share, I would indicate it to them.

  As the lawyers and investigators conferred, I looked around the conference room. The walls, the tables, even the other people seemed to have faded to an even more nondescript shade of gray. Except for the investigators and me. We stood out in vivid color. As if we were superimposed on the bleak background. As if we were the only ones in the room.

  I shifted in my seat, keeping my hands in my lap.

  The interview would be conducted in three parts, Raidt explained. First, it would focus on security prior to 9/11. Then their questions would turn to the day of the attacks itself, he said.

  The second plane.

  The ball of fire.

  The black smoke.

  Stay here, Ginny, I admonished myself, recognizing the familiar feeling of leaving my own body in response to stress. Unlike descriptions I’d read of people in near-death experiences hovering over themselves in an operating room, the “leaving” caused by the dissociative aspect of PTSD was more like having your essential humanness—your personality, your humor, your love, your sadness, most of all your sadness—removed from your body so that all that was left was a shell, looking to the casual observer like a regular person, but unconnected to anyone, including itself. Did my dissociation project some sort of mask, I wondered later, making me, in the investigators’ eyes, seem uncaring? When the reality was that I didn’t know if I could stop from breaking down if the mask slipped?

  Stay here.

  Raidt was saying they also wanted my thoughts on how to improve security going forward.

  “We realize that many of our questions will be asked with the benefit of hindsight,” Raidt added.

  I nodded and took a deep breath. I absorbed the word he’d used—“hindsight”—without yet absorbing how its application to Logan’s, and therefore my, responsibility for the 9/11 attacks was a foundational ingredient for the blame heaped on me.

  I cleared my throat.

  “I know setting the record straight as to Logan’s role in this pales in comparison to the enormous pain and suffering of so many families.” I could feel the investigators’ and lawyers’ eyes on me. I didn’t dare look over at Massport’s or my attorney as I began to speak again. “But I do hope that this process can resolve the fact that there was unfair blame brought to bear on me and on the hundreds of hardworking Logan employees.

  “Your job is to get to the truth and be objective,” I added quietly. “I am hopeful that your work will lift the burden off those of us who were at Massport.”

  The tw
o investigators had no visible response to my statement. I had no way of knowing if they even understood what I was asking: “Please answer the question I’ve been asking myself for more than two years—Am I to blame?”

  The investigators asked if I was ready to move on to their questions. I nodded.

  First, Raidt asked me to outline my background and the mission and responsibilities of the agency.

  I detailed my past career in state government. I noted that because Massport operated infrastructure that was critical to the state’s economy, there were community challenges over growth, pointing to the thirty-year runway battle as an example. “My job was to set the agenda. To drive the leadership team,” I said.

  As the interview continued, I felt my cheeks redden. Their questions, one after another, seemed drawn directly from the pages of the Boston Globe and Boston Herald.

  “Did you know . . . ? Why didn’t you do . . . ? What about this . . . ? When were you going to . . . ?”

  “We were where we should have been on security and were pushing the envelope by going beyond FAA requirements,” I said, referring to Logan’s instituting of a requirement, from as early as 1998, that all airport personnel submit to fingerprinting for background checks. “Security responsibility at the time was trifurcated,” I continued, trying to be firm without being defensive. “The FAA was in charge of the airspace, Massport was in charge of the airfield and public spaces, and the airlines were responsible for their operations areas and security screening.” I pointed out that I felt this division of responsibility was the major problem with pre-9/11 security and the reason I had pushed to federalize aviation security after the attacks.

  “Everyone at Massport recognized that security and safety were the core of our mission. Before 9/11, our major concerns were runway safety, perimeter security, and bombs, especially a bomb-carrying car at the entrance to a terminal.

  “When I was called to testify before Congress it was about air traffic delays and customer satisfaction issues. That was what was driving public-policy debate that summer.”

  Even as I said this, I felt the familiar despair in the pit of my stomach. What I said was true—no one was focused on the threat of terrorism before the attacks. Not Congress. Not aviation leaders. Not me. But this rationale was no match for the acute stab of regret I felt in response to their continuing questions: “Did you know . . . ? Why didn’t you do . . . ? What about this . . . ? When were you going to . . . ?”

  Emotion tightened my throat. “If we had realized the degree of vulnerability, God dammit, we would have told Congress to turn security over to the federal government.”

  The interview turned to my recommendations for the future.

  “Focus security on stopping bad people, not weapons,” I said, seeing as I spoke the knife disguised as a pen that Detective Robichaud had shown me in the operations center in the days after the attacks.

  “Treat airport security as a national security issue with a true federal system of information sharing. Now all it looks like is putting a different logo on the jacket of the screener, so it’s basically the same system with different people operating it. If three thousand people dying didn’t shake up the establishment, the responsibility for security needs to be put in the hands of people that understand the threat.”

  The interview wrapped up shortly after.

  “I thought that went well,” one of the attorneys said as we made our way down the hall when it was over.

  “Well?” I exclaimed incredulously. “Every question came straight out of the newspapers!”

  Any hope I’d had that the Commission would bring some national perspective to the conclusions they’d draw about Logan’s—about my—culpability sank with the elevator I took back down to the ground floor.

  An hour or so later, completely depleted, I sat at my desk, staring at, without reading, the word processor in front of me. I should have gone home, I thought.

  The phone rang. I looked at it, trying to summon the will to lift the receiver. “Hello,” I finally said, my exhaustion evident.

  “They found Marianne.”

  It was Anne MacFarlane.

  “What do you mean?” I asked quickly, sitting up straight, my full concentration now on her voice.

  Anne said her son George had gotten the news from a buddy in the local police department. Some of Marianne’s remains had been identified in the massive forensic recovery effort still ongoing in New York.

  “I don’t even know what they have—it could just be a fingernail,” Anne said, the shock evident in her flat, emotionless tone.

  I tried to take in what she had said, and I searched for an appropriate response.

  “Do you feel relieved at all?” I finally asked. “Does it help?”

  “Well,” Anne paused, “all along, I think part of me just thought she had amnesia. I figured one day she would walk through the door and say, ‘How ya doing?’”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m going to need to lean on you for a while,” Anne said, filling the silence.

  “I’m here,” I answered.

  Although we continued to see each other only intermittently, our relationship was another life ring we hung on to in the years following the hijackings. We didn’t always talk about 9/11 on these visits, but we usually did. And with Marianne’s picture still prominently displayed right above her heart in the pendant, it sometimes felt like she was there also.

  I hung up the phone, the worry about the 9/11 investigation’s outcome now interwoven with Anne’s unexpected news.

  ***

  That evening, the small TV was on in the kitchen as I was preparing dinner. I was just about to change the channel from a sports network to the news when a song being played at the start of a NASCAR race stopped me, remote poised in midair.

  It was Lee Greenwood. As he evoked losing everything, starting over, and his gratitude for America, I squeezed my eyes shut, and again, I was back in the Delta hangar at Logan, just a few days after 9/11. The lyrics to “God Bless the USA” echoed across my kitchen.

  I was vaguely aware of Maddy tugging at my hand. “Mama, uppie.” Maddy was insistent now, reaching her arms up to me. “Uppie, Mama.”

  I picked her up and held her on my hip, wiping my cheeks so my tears wouldn’t upset her. Maddy loved music and she was delighted to have a better vantage point to see where the melody was coming from.

  “Clap, Mama, clap,” she said, giggling and clapping her dimpled eighteen-month-old hands in time with the music. I couldn’t help smiling and then clapping along as she had commanded.

  “Yay, Mama!” Maddy cheered.

  ***

  “Mommy?” Jack interrupted my brooding thoughts the next day as we drove by King’s Beach in nearby Swampscott on the way to do an errand.

  “Mommy!” He yelled louder because I was not answering.

  “Shh, my little love, you’ll wake Maddy.” I could see in the rearview mirror that she had fallen asleep, the sucking of her pacifier the only movement she made.

  “Mommy, I have to tell you something.”

  “What, honey?”

  “I love you deeper than any ocean.”

  I looked up, startled by his earnestness.

  He was not done. “More than there are shells on the beach. More than anything on earth.”

  I smiled, as he pronounced our planet as “earf,” not able to make the “th” sound yet.

  “Mommy,” he said, as if he feared that somehow I didn’t believe him. “Everything I’m telling you is true.”

  It was possible, I realized then, to physically feel, not just sense, a shift in how you hold a painful memory. It was possible for one memory to move over rather than disappear to make room for another.

  “That’s how healing happens,” Andrea said, when I told her
the two stories.

  A song that evoked a grief-filled airport hangar would also bring me the moment of holding my baby girl on my hip and dancing with her in the kitchen. The sight of the ocean, once a pleasure, but now a reminder of painful questions to which I had found no answer, also a reminder of a son’s love, so deep, it was deeper than the ocean.

  “I’m here,” I said silently to Jack and Maddy as I looked in the rearview mirror and blew him a kiss. “I’m here.”

  It was what I had told Anne, all I could offer to her, just as I had promised it to Jack that night I came home from sitting in my car at the beach.

  “That’s how healing happens.”

  I would try to hold on to that promise, too.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Maybe God Cried, Too

  November 2003—Sharon, Massachusetts

  I was here.

  In a synagogue. I’d hardly set foot in any house of worship since 9/11, never mind a temple. And I had never been to a bar mitzvah. Yet, unexpectedly, the surroundings felt comfortable. Familiar.

  The cantor began to sing. I closed my eyes and let the music wash over me, wondering if it would mean anything, not only because the language was foreign, but because music, just like prayer, had ceased being a way to God for me.

  My mother had been the soloist in our parish church, her rich soprano a central part of the congregation’s worship. While it had embarrassed my teenage sensibilities to see her standing behind the lectern each Sunday morning, it also taught me to pray through music.

  “Turn to Me.”

  “Here I Am, Lord.”

  “Be Not Afraid.”

  Sometimes, through these favorite hymns, I felt God was speaking directly to me. Telling me He would be there if I needed Him.

  As the unfamiliar music and Hebrew chanting filled the sanctuary, I thought back to a recent session with Andrea. She had, uncharacteristically, asked me about my relationship with God.

  “I wouldn’t typically talk about religion,” she said, “but I have a gut feeling that the way you’ll get back to yourself is through God.” I was surprised by the comment, although I had once described to her the many times I would sit in the chapel at Boston College as a young student and think I felt God’s presence.