On My Watch

by Virginia Buckingham

  “Hindsight.” That word again. As painful as being the target of blame in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks was, I got no satisfaction from national figures being held up to similar scrutiny. Seeing the same faulty expectation of perfect hindsight applied again simply punctuated my despair that perspectives hadn’t changed much in three years: someone still had to be blamed.

  Nor was the sense of isolation I had felt when I was singled out assuaged now that others were being scrutinized. It was intensified. The media spotlight had moved on. There were no news trucks driving up and down my street, no microphones being stuck in my face. I was not part of the 9/11 narrative, yet I still felt utterly broken, like a rusted-out car on a front lawn that neighbors grew so used to, they no longer saw it when they drove by.

  Around the same time as the president’s press conference, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission. Her testimony was being aired live on the radio as I pulled into the Herald parking lot. I sat with the engine running, riveted by her recounting, stunned when she added, “I’ve asked myself a thousand times what more we could have done.”

  Oh my God, so have I, I thought, thousands and thousands of times.

  But how could she sound so certain that the answer was that she could not have done anything? Would I ever stop seeking certainty about my role? Could I live with anything less?

  ***

  I don’t know if this next call was exactly in this time frame, but in my mind I connect it, another life ring thrown to me.

  I was at my desk and received a call from Joe Landolfi, a friend I’d worked with in the State House.

  “Hey, Joe, how’s it going?” I said.

  “Listen,” he began, “this is going to sound a little strange, but a woman who lives in my town tracked me down because she knows I know you. She wants to talk to you. Her name’s Lauren Rosenzweig. Her husband died on one of the planes on 9/11.”

  I felt my back stiffen. I tightened the grip of my hand on the phone. “What does she want?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joe answered. “And I didn’t want to give her your number without asking you first. I see her around town and she’s still very emotional.”

  I found myself shaking my head, even though Joe couldn’t see me. I couldn’t tell him, without sounding a little crazy, how afraid his call had made me.

  “Can you try to find out what she wants, Joe?” He agreed to try.

  Several days passed.

  When he finally called back, the sound of his voice caused my heart to pound.

  “I talked to her. She asked me to pass along a message.”

  I swallowed and responded, “Yes?” urging him to continue while at the same time wishing I could hang up so I didn’t have to hear what she had to say.

  “She said it’s been on her list of things to do since 9/11.” Joe’s quiet voice was edged with kindness. “She said to tell you that she knows you did all you could.” I silently began to cry.

  I marveled at Lauren Rosenzweig’s ability to reach beyond her own pain to comfort someone else, especially someone whom she could have easily seen in a harsher light. I struggled for days to express my feelings in a note to her and finally kept my message simple, too: “Thank you.”

  Her simple message cradled me like a gentle wave that then lifted me on its crest so I could see the horizon more clearly.

  Thank you.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ganesh

  In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the human spirit.

  —Albert Schweitzer

  April 2004—Boston Herald

  Why did I meet her then, just when I needed her most?

  I had noticed Raakhee Mirchandani in the Herald newsroom many times. She was hard to miss. A diamond stud piercing her nose. Long, curly hair framing funky, dark-rimmed glasses. The Yankees T-shirt the young Indian American features writer from New Jersey sometimes wore to taunt the die-hard Red Sox fans on the copy desk.

  Still, I didn’t actually meet Raakhee until she burst into my office one afternoon.

  “Shelly here?” the young woman asked, rushing through the door, looking for my boss.

  “No. She’s out for a few days,” I answered.

  Raakhee wasn’t gone five minutes before she was back. “I’m so upset, I just have to talk to you,” she said, pulling up a chair near my desk without being asked to sit down. “Look at this,” she pointed to the headlines of the papers on my desk. Splashed on the front page of both the Herald and the New York Post in similar large print was this headline: “Savages.” Below the headline was a picture of four American civilian contractors who had been killed in Iraq, their bodies dragged through the streets, mutilated, and burned beyond recognition.

  “Who are we to call them savages?” Raakhee exclaimed. “We’ve never had our land invaded, our homes taken. We have no idea what they’ve been through.”

  Raakhee, whose family, I learned, emigrated from India, went on to say she felt “Americans have no idea what it’s like to have foreigners occupying their land.” She described how her grandmother had lost her home in 1947 when her homeland was partitioned into Pakistan and India.

  “I swear I was not even this upset when my cousin died in the World Trade Center,” Raakhee said, caught up in the heat of the moment.

  I inhaled sharply. “I’m sorry about your cousin. I didn’t know,” I said.

  “Yes, it was terrible. My aunt and uncle are devastated. He was their only child.” Raakhee said they had taken his ashes back to India, to place in the Ganges, a holy river.

  We both fell silent, but somehow it was a comfortable rather than awkward silence.

  “How do you feel about me working here?” I finally asked, summoning the courage I hadn’t found yet to ask the same question of Matt West.

  “I was happy for you,” Raakhee answered. “You’re only one person. You deserve good things to happen.”

  An intense, close friendship grew out of that first conversation. Some fifteen years in age separated us, but our relationship was completely equal. We both gave and received advice and, often, just laughed at the quirks of working in a big-city newsroom. I cherished each walk we took in the South End neighborhood outside the Herald, me counseling her on whether she should move back to New York, her assuring me that one day my despair over my role on 9/11 would lift. During an evening spent at my house watching a political debate and eating the Indian food she’d introduced me to from a nearby restaurant, Jack found a hug and a warm lap in his new friend, “Rocky.”

  “Hey, Ginny,” Raakhee called to me one day as I walked through the newsroom on the way to the copy machine. “I have something for you.”

  I crouched down next to her desk as she rummaged through her bag.

  “Here.” In her hand was a small glass object. It was blue and seemed to glow from within. She handed it to me.

  The glass was slightly warm from her touch. I stood up and turned it over in my hands.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s Ganesh,” Raakhee said.

  I looked more closely at what I could now tell was the frontal outline of an elephant figure, carved as if it were sitting on its haunches. About the size of the palm of my hand, the back and bottom of the glass figure were flat. I set it down on the edge of her desk. It still seemed to glow from within, the light transforming its blue color from aqua to deep navy.

  I looked at Raakhee questioningly. “My grandmother gave it to me,” she said. “Ganesh is the Hindu god for overcoming obstacles. I don’t need it anymore.”

  Raakhee smiled gently and placed Ganesh back in my hands. “I want you to have it.”

  She didn’t need
it anymore, but she knew I did. When I got home that evening, I placed Ganesh on my bedside table, cherishing its glow and, more so, the warmth of being deeply understood.

  June 2004—Marblehead

  It was a beautiful early-summer day. A birthday party at my friend Kate’s for her son was in full swing. Jack had his shirt off and was running through the sprinkler. The pleasant chaos of five-year-old squeals mingled with the chatter of parents sitting on blankets and lawn chairs. I leaned back on the rope hammock, Maddy sitting on my lap, and gently rocked her back and forth while watching Jack play. I thought about a conversation I had with him earlier that day.

  Jack, at times a serious little boy, had become curious about death. As I helped him get dressed, he asked me: “Is everyone afraid of dying, Mommy? Is it true you turn to dust?”

  “Well, your bones do,” I answered, “but your soul goes to heaven to live with God, where you get to eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Despite my own questions of faith, I instinctively tried to assuage Jack’s fears with the same promise of heaven I had been brought up with, albeit with the added twist of a sweet-treat-filled menu.

  “You know what I’m going to wish for?” Jack said, apparently unsatisfied with this rosy description. His blue eyes reflected his widening smile.

  “What, my darling?” I asked, pulling on his white socks.

  “To start life all over again.”

  “Wow. That’s a great wish!” I said, giving him a squeeze and kiss on the forehead. Just like your dad, I thought to myself, marveling as I said my first prayer of thanks in many years that David’s enthusiasm rather than my deepest moments of despair seemed to be defining our little boy.

  I looked over from the hammock as the gate to the backyard swung open. I instantly recognized the man walking through it. Josh Reznick, his unusually styled thick white hair unmistakable, was the editor of a string of local newspapers, including in East Boston, which covered Logan operations most closely.

  “What began at Logan on Buckingham’s watch is a disaster whose outcome will follow her the rest of her life. . . .”

  His harsh editorial had felt like a wave knocking me off my feet shortly before I resigned.

  What is he doing here? I abruptly stood up, holding Maddy protectively, as if to shield her. I looked left. Right.

  Even in the vast backyard, there was nowhere to hide.

  Hide. That’s what I wanted to do. From him, from his words.

  “She is being swept away . . . like the salmon which swim upstream . . .”

  Swept away. Like a bottle tossed in the sea. Tumbled apart over time by the fury of the waves.

  I handed Maddy to David and fled through the kitchen. Other mothers were there, helping to bring out more juice boxes and plates for the birthday cake. I avoided their glances and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom on the second floor and shut the door. I sat down in the rocking chair in the corner, tucking my legs protectively underneath me. My arms hugged my chest as I rocked the chair back and forth, staring blindly out the window.

  I had had no idea that Reznick’s daughter was in the same preschool class as Jack. I had never seen him at pick up or drop off and so never made the connection. His unexpected arrival at a place where I felt safe, a close friend’s home, made me feel exposed and vulnerable. No matter where I went, no matter how much time had passed, 9/11 seemed to follow me.

  I have to go back outside, I thought, disgusted at myself for crumbling so easily.

  Hold your ground.

  My bravado faded as soon as I reached the backyard and noticed Reznick chatting with some of the other parents. I fled again, taking Maddy into the blow-up moon bounce where kids were jumping and tumbling, emitting squeals of laughter. She sat on my lap, the movement of the other children gently bouncing us up and down. Maddy giggled at the motion. Through the mesh netting, I could observe the party but not be observed, and I thought that I would spend the rest of the afternoon with this protective vantage point. But Maddy had other ideas and wanted to get out.

  “Okay, honey, let’s go,” I said.

  As we climbed out of the narrow opening, Maddy reached her arms out to David, who was standing nearby. I looked up and saw Reznick coming around the side of the structure. I didn’t know whether he was purposely seeking me out, but he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He reached his hand out and said, “I’m Josh Reznick.”

  “I know who you are,” I answered as firmly as I could manage. I kept my eyes locked on his. My fear was suddenly replaced by a low boiling anger.

  “You owe me an apology,” I said, the words surprising me, as if they came from someone else. Someone tougher. Braver. Someone like who I used to be.

  Reznick looked uneasy as his unmet hand dropped back to his side.

  “What you wrote was far crueler than anything the Globe or Herald or anyone else did,” I said. “I’m a writer now. Words matter.”

  Reznick objected. “C’mon, what I wrote wasn’t that bad.”

  “Go back and read it,” I challenged him. “I think you’ll agree that you owe me an apology. If you don’t think so, fine, but I think you will.”

  The next week, I attended a ribbon cutting for a massive renovation project to make a state-of-the-art YMCA in East Boston out of an old railhead shed in the shadow of Logan Airport. The event had brought out many of the well-known anti-airport activists to celebrate the community milestone. I greeted some of the people I’d gotten to know from community forums on Logan operations. One longtime activist seemed surprised to see me. “In the paper this week, it said you would never be seen in East Boston again. I guess they were wrong.”

  I was puzzled by the reference. Why would the local newspaper say that? I wondered. Then I put two and two together. I had heard Reznick wrote an anonymous column in the paper with gossipy, sometimes snarky items, and one of the items that week recounted our meeting at the birthday party. Instead of apologizing, he must have decided he was in the right.

  Years later I ran into Reznick again at a local coffee shop. We said polite hellos and exchanged pleasantries and inquiries about each other’s children. “You know,” he said, “I’m not really into covering those politics anymore,” referring to Logan and East Boston. It wasn’t an apology. But I no longer demanded one. I had come to see Reznick was partially right. His words hurt because they rang true. The events of 9/11 did sweep me away as he predicted, though the aftermath didn’t so much “follow me” as become part of me. The question for me was finally becoming this: What could I do with that reality other than simply carry it?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Footnote #1

  July 13, 2004, 7:00 a.m.—Boston Public Garden

  Boston’s famed public park was nearly deserted. I saw only the occasional student or commuter making their way along its winding paths. Some paused momentarily, as I usually did, to appreciate the mallard ducks congregating on the side of the lagoon. The swan boats were still tethered to the dock. I walked slowly toward the garden’s southwest corner.

  The Garden of Remembrance, the official memorial to the victims of 9/11 from Massachusetts, had been dedicated in a private ceremony the day before. The governor and the mayor had spoken. Tom Kinton, my colleague at Logan, had stood discreetly in the back of the crowd.

  I approached the stone bench flanking the side of a granite crescent. As if she were still standing there, I could clearly see the face of a little girl with long dark hair, pictured in the morning paper, holding a perfect white rose. Her dad, the account said, had been on one of the planes. Somewhere, carved in the granite, was his name along with the 201 others with connections to Massachusetts.

  I began reading each of the names, which were listed in alphabetical order. Slowly, left to right. I tried to hold each name in my mind, to pay each victim honor. Were you that little girl’s father? I asked silently as I read one n
ame. Who were you? I silently asked another.

  I took a step closer to the crescent as I reached the M’s.

  Marianne MacFarlane, I read silently. Anne had told me she wasn’t up to coming to the dedication, so I knew she hadn’t been here the day before. I bent down. With my forefinger, I traced each letter of Marianne’s name. When I finished, I kissed two fingers and gently pressed them on the carved letters. “From your mom,” I said quietly. I continued to read each name, pausing again to press my palm against the name “Daniel Trant.” I had never met him but knew he was the brother of a former deputy director of Massport, Matt Trant, who had served before my tenure. I’m sorry for your loss, Matt, I said silently.

  My eyes swept back across the names. “I’m so sorry,” I mouthed silently. I repeated those words over and over again. My dark glasses hid my eyes, but the heaving of my shoulders couldn’t hide the sobs that were now wracking my body. “I’m sorry.” I spoke to the 202 names etched in the granite, to the little girl clutching the white rose, to every family member who had stood in this same place just the day before. “I am so, so sorry.”

  What did I mean? Was I apologizing, as the caller to the Herald had demanded, for something I felt responsible for? Or was I expressing my despair that I knew there was nothing I could have done to stop their deaths but desperately wished I could have? Try as I might to discern my own meaning then, I couldn’t. I only knew those words came from a place inside as elemental as the instinct to draw breath into my lungs, my sorrow swirling like mist into the shape of the face of a little girl holding a white rose.

  July 22, 2004—Boston Herald

  The TV was on in Shelly’s office. Coverage of the live press conference to release the findings of the 9/11 Commission was about to begin. I sat, frozen in my chair, which I’d moved into her doorway so I could see the TV.