“Go upstairs,” David said quietly. Firmly. “Go sit by the fire and read your book. I’ll take care of this.”
Losing control and yelling at my kids. It was what I swore I’d never do. Throw a coffee cup across the room. Impatiently dismiss the little girl wanting to help her mother in the kitchen. These memories of my mother, understandably stressed, are certainly not the only ones I carried, but these burned most brightly. However far-fetched, I didn’t want Jack and Maddy to have any childhood memory stand out unless it was a particularly joyful one. But, like the signs that a volcano was preparing to erupt, the yelling had been happening more and more in the last few weeks. I’d yell at small things. Childish antics that wouldn’t have bothered me at all before. Screaming at Jack and Maddy to stop bickering. To pick up their toys. To go to bed without any pushback.
I sat by the fire, my eyes burning with exhaustion. I hadn’t slept much since receiving the subpoena. The house we were staying in for the weekend respite was the same one we had come to with Jack just after 9/11. I glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows. The view from the edge of a meadow, ringed by woods and mountains, was reassuring in its peaceful immutability but also contrasted with my fear that I would never feel that kind of peace inside. No matter how I tried to make peace with all that had happened, another shoe dropped and sent me reeling. And now it was affecting my parenting.
I could hear Jack’s whimpering and David’s soft voice trying to comfort him. I went back downstairs. “I’m so sorry, buddy. I shouldn’t have yelled like that.” Jack clung to my neck, moistening it with his tears. “Want me to sing to you?” I asked. He nodded and I tucked him under his blanket and softly sang “Edelweiss.” As I finished, Jack’s eyes grew heavy, and before I left the room, he was sound asleep.
Shortly after, David came upstairs. “They’re both asleep now,” he said.
“Thanks.” I was too embarrassed by my outburst to look at him. “I’m sorry. It’s the deposition.”
“I know,” he answered. He sat next to me on the couch, and reached for my hand. We sat, saying nothing, and looked at the fire, as if some answer burned there. I took a deep sip from my glass of red wine, and felt it travel down my throat and into me. I grew warm from the fire and the wine. I reached for David and kissed him deeply, urgently. I lifted my shirt off over my head, and he reached behind me to undo my bra. I lay on the couch as he pulled off my pants and quickly undressed. He took my wine from the table and poured a little onto my belly and then inside me. With his tongue, he tasted the wine and me together. I closed my eyes and tried to feel him there. When he pulled up and kissed me, I tasted the wine and my wetness in his mouth. He put himself inside me and as he went deeper, I opened my eyes. There was a skylight directly above us. It was dark out now, so I could see our reflection in the sloped glass. David was moving on top of me. I stared at the reflection. I was not there.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“We Share a Pain”
September 2006—Marblehead
“Why Is This Maine Man Haunted by 9/11?”
I stared at the headline on the front cover of Yankee magazine.
Haunted. Like me.
My mother, a longtime subscriber to the New England–based magazine, had called that morning after reading about Michael Tuohey, the gate agent at Portland International Jetport. “I turned to your father,” she’d said, “and told him, ‘This is how Ginny feels.’”
When we’d hung up, I grabbed my keys and rushed to the local newsstand to find a copy.
I sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom, the article about the man who checked Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al Omari in for their commuter flight to Boston opened in my lap.
“I thought I could put it behind me,” Tuohey said to the interviewer. “I thought I could just grab it and confront it. I figured, the more I confront it, I won’t let it bother me.” He paused. “I was wrong. There’s never a day without thinking about that day. It’s just there. It’s in your blood, your system. Your feelings. It’s like the sky—always there. It’s like you know your name. How do you try and not know your name?”
Me, too, I thought. It’s always there.
I read on about Tuohey’s experience on 9/11. He was about to take a break after checking in the flight to Boston, when he saw two men hurrying to the check-in counter. “I motioned them over,” he said. “These guys showed up twenty minutes prior. Back then, I didn’t think anything of it. Back then, it was all set up for convenience of passengers.” I found myself nodding my head as I read.
Tuohey recounted that when he saw that Atta and al Omari had one-way first-class tickets to Boston connecting to American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles, he decided to issue them only a boarding pass to Boston. “I never liked the system where you give a boarding pass to a follow-up flight. I worked for US Airways, not American,” Tuohey told the interviewer. “So I just gave them a boarding pass from here to Boston.”
The decision prompted a confrontation with Atta. “They told me ‘one-step check-in,’” Tuohey said, relating Atta’s insistence.
“Everyone knows the pictures of the guy now,” Tuohey continued. “That cold, hard picture. Well that is a warm and cuddly look compared to what I saw. My stomach literally turned over when Atta looked at me . . . We locked eyes,” he said. “We were this close. And I said, ‘Mr. Atta, if you don’t go now, you will miss your plane.’”
Goose bumps rose on my arms as I pictured the scene with Atta. I tried to put myself in Tuohey’s place, staring into the terrorist’s eyes.
The interviewer described tears welling in Tuohey’s own eyes. “Why didn’t I recognize the devil? I did recognize him. But I didn’t stop him.”
“You couldn’t,” I whispered out loud, as if somehow he could hear me. “You just couldn’t.”
It was after The 9/11 Commission Report was released in 2004, Tuohey related, that the full force of his experience hit him. “I just started crying,” he said. “I’d say, ‘Get over it. Get over it.’”
Get over it. Get over it. I thought, Just what I’d told myself and what I’d been told by others.
Tuohey said that he’d be at the mailbox and he’d see Mohamed Atta driving by in a car or at the mall and Atta would be walking ahead of him. “My heart would pound. My stomach felt like ice,” Tuohey said. “I ran after him . . . I knew it wasn’t him, but at that moment it was.”
My dreams. Planes blowing apart. Crashing. Trying to get there. To save them. Never being able to.
As soon as I finished the article, I went to the computer and watched the episode of Oprah that the article said Tuohey had appeared on.
I needed to contact him. Right away. I typed in the address for the The Oprah Winfrey Show’s website. There was a place to register comments, and I quickly typed that I would like to get in touch with Michael Tuohey. I briefly explained my role at Logan and wrote something like, “I think I can help him.”
I heard nothing back from the show’s producers. I knew Tuohey lived somewhere in southern Maine near Portland, so after a few days of waiting, I took a chance and called information. His number was listed.
One ring, two. My heart was pounding. An answering machine clicked on. I left a message. “Mr. Tuohey, my name is Virginia Buckingham,” I said. “I, I, just want to thank you. For telling your story. You helped my family understand what I have been unable to explain for the past five years.”
Before hanging up, I added, “I want you to know you aren’t to blame. You did the best you could.”
Tuohey returned my call a short time after. “Ah, Virginia, I thought I recognized your name,” he said, when I told him who I was.
I don’t remember most details of the conversation, but we talked for a very long time with the instant familiarity of two people who didn’t have to know each other to understand each other.
Tuohey had retired from US A
irways, he told me, and it was then that he began fearing to leave his house, began to see Atta when he went out.
I told him a little about my own fears.
The second plane.
The ball of fire.
The black smoke.
The bodies falling.
The people mouthing “help me” in the Windows on the World restaurant.
We talked and talked. We interrupted each other with exclamations of “exactly” or “I felt that way, too.” When we both were finally exhausted, we started to say our goodbyes.
“I don’t know if we will,” I said, “but I hope we talk again.”
“Well, Virginia,” Tuohey answered simply, “we share a pain.”
***
We didn’t talk again, though I thought of Michael Tuohey a lot. Sometimes I’d see him on TV around 9/11 anniversaries advocating for additional security changes. Mostly though, I saw his story in my mind. Atta driving by his house. Atta in the mall. I felt his pain like it was my own. “We share a pain,” he had said. And oddly, however dubious, those words were a gift from him to me. I had been understood. I hoped he felt the same.
Part V
Chapter Twenty-Eight
New York
May 2007—Boston Herald
Like too many in the journalism profession, when I was recruited for a position in the private sector, I reluctantly said yes for the financial security it offered. Yet, the position in government affairs for the biopharmaceutical company Pfizer posed an additional challenge for me. While I would be based in New England, its corporate headquarters were in midtown Manhattan. I knew I would have to spend time in a city I had once feared would reject me, or worse.
Was I ready?
On my last day at One Herald Square, I was presented with a mock-up of a front page, a traditional parting gift, and I smiled with a sense of belonging so different from when I had started four years earlier. I realized that working at the Herald had offered me more than a job when I needed it; it had helped me begin to rebuild the person I had lost. As I turned to leave, Shelly and I embraced by the dusty doorframe. “You saved me,” I said quietly to her. “In more ways than one.”
How much rebuilding I still had ahead of me was punctuated by an offhand comment by a new friend I soon made at Pfizer. My office was on Beacon Hill, just steps from the State House. I’d hung an assortment of pictures on the wall, including a favorite of me as a young press secretary standing over Governor Weld and Lieutenant Governor Cellucci, who were seated at a table. They were looking up at me expectantly as I briefed them on an issue and likely, given my role, told them what to say to the press. I didn’t remember the moment, but I remembered the feeling: the confidence, that I knew exactly what I was doing and didn’t hesitate for a moment to rely on my instincts. Looking at the picture—my posture, my face—my new friend Heidi, with insight and concern, noted, “I don’t recognize that person.”
Neither do I, I thought to myself. I wondered if I ever would again.
I flew to the company’s New York headquarters about once a month. The flight from Logan took only about thirty-eight minutes. Once in a while, on the approach, the plane would follow the Hudson River and circle around Lower Manhattan. One early morning, a few months into the new job, I was seated in the window seat on the left side of the plane. As the city came into view, I pressed my face against the pane, and I felt my heart rate increase. Any minute I knew I would see them. The footprints of the Twin Towers, yawning, empty, as clear from the sky as the World Trade Center targets must have been that September morning. As they came into view, the familiar throbbing in my wrists returned. I craned my neck so I could see them for as long as possible through the small oval window. As the plane banked wide over the mouth of New York Harbor, I also could see the Statue of Liberty. Triumphant, beckoning, its promise of shelter unbowed. I wanted to feel awed, I wanted to fill up with pride that it and all it meant were still standing. Instead, the fog of dissociation began to form, wrapping me in its protective tendrils. I welcomed its embrace, even as I began to understand it was keeping me from myself.
In our sessions, Andrea tried to illustrate the impact of dissociation by holding both of her arms horizontally from her body. “This is the range of human feeling,” she’d say. And then folding one arm at the elbow toward her body, she’d explain, “And if you cut off feeling one extreme, pain, you can’t fully feel joy either.” I understood by then I wasn’t doing this purposely. Andrea had often said that a more accurate name for my condition would be “post-traumatic stress order.” She re-explained that my mind was protecting me as I tried to make some sense of what had happened.
On the New York business trips, I needn’t have feared that I’d be swept away by the ferocity of my emotions because this automatic response of dissociation never let me down. I learned my way around the corporate culture and did what I’d always done—worked hard. I was aware that many of my New York–based colleagues must have experienced the events of 9/11 firsthand, but I didn’t know if any knew my own experience until one day when I stepped into the elevator. A longtime employee said hello, not unfriendly but not friendly either, and nodded toward me, saying to the person standing next to her, “She’s googleable.” My face burned red, as I wondered whether the neutral statement was more than that. Pushing down an instant defensiveness, I brushed off their questions about my past with a “wrong place, wrong time” type of answer, my blitheness a cover for renewed despair. Others I soon met, though, were genuinely curious and supportive.
Slowly, like muscles that grow stronger from the work of carrying heavy cases of goods, I realized that just being among these colleagues with their own 9/11 stories and being in New York itself brought their own measure of healing. Walking the few blocks from my office in Midtown to my hotel, moving past the Chrysler Building, its sloping spire rising above Forty-Second Street like a watchtower, being buffeted by the rush of the crowd emerging from Grand Central Terminal all made me feel less alone, despite my presence in the midst of thousands of strangers. Yes, I imagined them thinking, we might be afraid sometimes. And it still hurts, but we’ll be okay.
By that time, Raakhee Mirchandani, my Herald colleague who had gifted me with Ganesh, had left Boston for a job writing at the New York Post. One evening, we walked the streets of the city continuing the same kind of conversations we’d had in Boston about the meaning and the inheritance of 9/11. Nearly six years had passed. Jack was eight years old and Maddy was five. Yet, I didn’t offer to give back to Raakhee her statue of the Hindu god of overcoming obstacles. She didn’t ask. She knew I still needed it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Blameless”
September 2008—Logan Airport
Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick looked surprised to see me. I could tell from his puzzled expression that he was trying to figure out why I would be at the Logan Airport 9/11 Memorial dedication. By then, I’d interviewed him many times for the Herald. But evidently he also knew I’d left the paper for Pfizer.
“How’s the new gig?” he asked.
I reached for his outstretched hand, looked him in the eye, and instead of answering his question, I said, “Thank you for being here.”
His expression instantly softened, as it seemed the pieces fell into place. Oh, that’s right, I imagined he was thinking. You were here.
I was here.
A front-page story on the memorial had been published in the Sunday Globe a day or two before. Referring to Logan Airport, the piece began with this simple summation: “It is the place where a nation’s nightmare began.”
As I read, I tucked my legs underneath me and squeezed as far into the corner of the couch as I could manage. The nation’s nightmare, I thought. And a nightmare for so many families. I closed my eyes as the phantom throbbing ran through the veins of my wrists. My nightmare. Mine, too.
I read on: “The
airport’s connection to Sept. 11 is especially fraught because both of the planes that brought down the World Trade Center in New York departed from Boston. Though investigators found airport personnel blameless in the hijacking—no aviation security protocol was violated—the deaths of more than 2,700 people will never really clear the conscience of many who were working at Logan that day.”
“Blameless.”
I turned the word over in my mind, accepting its small solace. The writer had gotten it exactly right. No matter the official findings, the deaths of thousands of people would never be fully gone from my conscience. Somehow, by acknowledging this reality, it felt like the writer had helped me dial the combination of a lock, the tumblers opening to a sort of acceptance upon hitting the right series of words, opening a safe containing the greatest of treasures: an understanding of the difference between moving on and moving forward.
Now, on the slight rise in front of me was the glass cube, the centerpiece of the new Logan 9/11 memorial. The light was reflecting off the glass. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
As I settled in my chair in front of the makeshift stage festooned with American flags, I saw Carl Stevens, a reporter for the city’s leading radio news station. He was plugging his recorder into the sound system. Carl had called me that morning, asking if I would do an interview. I demurred, saying I was just heading into the airport for the dedication.
It was Carl who had shocked me by stopping me in the grocery store a few years earlier and saying, “I owe you an apology.” For what, I asked, confused. “For going along with the crowd,” he’d said, “in my coverage after 9/11.”
I listened to the series of speakers—the architects who designed the memorial, the head of the airport, the CEO who had replaced me, Governor Patrick. Tom Kinton, Logan’s longtime aviation director, welcomed past CEOs and board members.
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