Through much of the last century, America’s faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations.
Jordan rose up to the top of One World Trade Center in an elevator that traveled at a rate of 1,600 feet per minute. That elevator could make you forget how high you were going until you walked out and saw where you ended up.
Joe’s childhood friends were amazed that Joe ended up working in the World Trade Center, of all places. They were amazed because when Joe was a child, he had one big fear:
He was scared of heights.
He did not hide this from anybody. He did not share it with one friend and beg that friend to keep the secret. That wasn’t his style. He was Joe Maio, take him or leave him. All his friends knew he was scared of heights.
When you’re a child, getting to know your landscape, tunnels and ponds and spooky houses have an outsized hold on your mind. For Joe, the spot that messed with his head was a bridge near his house, in Spring Valley, New York, just over the New Jersey border.
The bridge was on Scotland Hill Road. It was an overpass over the Garden State Parkway; it was only as long as the width of the parkway and just high enough to allow trucks to pass through underneath. Joe and his friends had to go over this bridge to get to the Nanuet Mall on their BMX bikes.
Everybody else could ride their bikes across the bridge and think nothing of it. Whenever Joe rode to the bridge, he stopped, got off his bike, and walked it across. He would put his head on a friend’s shoulder and hide his eyes so he would not even glimpse the edge of the bridge. Even if his friend started looking over the edge, Joe would freak out.
When he was little and walked past a high building, he would have to stay close to the building or he would get scared. He did not like standing on high balconies. When he visited his grandmother in Florida, the high steps and catwalks in her apartment complex frightened him. When he drove into the city, he had to be driving. He had to feel like he was in control. Otherwise, he would get nervous and worry about veering off the bridge and into the river.
This fear of heights was limited—he was fine, for example, on a chairlift or on top of a ski slope—but it was severe, and it extended into adulthood. He and Sharri once went hiking on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong, and Sharri noticed he was a ghostly white.
He looked at her and said, “Can we go down now?”
But when Joe worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, in one of the tallest buildings in this country, on one of the highest floors in America, it felt different. He was enclosed. It felt safer. He would put his head against the glass and look out at the world below, unfazed. There was nothing to fear, no edge from which to fall. He was in an enormous office building. The windows were closed. Nothing could possibly happen.
Every once in a while, a friend of his from childhood would remember his fear of heights and ask what it was like working so high up in the World Trade Center.
“Bro,” Joe would say, “I’m sitting on top of the world.”
On this day, Jordan got out of the elevator. This was not a social visit. Jordan sold Joe disability and life insurance, and Joe had referred Jordan to a lot of his friends and colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald. Joe even coached Jordan on how to sell to businesspeople. He’d say, “They’re not interested in a long conversation. Think about what you want to say and say it. Don’t beat around the bush.”
Jordan had been in One World Trade Center a few dozen times to sell insurance, but this day felt different. It was stiflingly hot inside the building. The rain and fog meant he couldn’t see outside. He was sure he felt the building swaying. It made him uncomfortable.
“This is scary, being up here,” Jordan told Joe. “Do you ever think about how high you are?”
Joe said, “Never … until recently.”
He explained that Cantor Fitzgerald was planning to move its offices to New Jersey. Joe had started to think about the move.
“I gotta tell you,” Joe said, “for the first time, I can’t wait to go. I’ve had it, working up here.”
12
Sharri and Joe had honeymooned in Italy. Sharri and I looked for places we could go on our honeymoon without getting on a plane. Joe’s death instilled a lot of anxiety in Sharri. Initially, there was the anxiety of leaving her house and the anxiety of going back inside. She was terrified of losing Devon and scared to drive over a bridge into New York City. But maybe the biggest, most lingering fear, for her, was the fear of flying.
It’s amazing how a fear can plant itself inside you in an instant and put down roots. Sharri never had a fear of flying before Joe died. She thought nothing of long transoceanic flights. But after 9/11, the image of those planes flying into the towers was difficult to shake. Anyone would understand.
So instead of flying, we went to Nantucket and Vermont for four nights. Sharri couldn’t bear the idea of being away any longer. We had a great time. Devon stayed with Sharri’s parents, and she knew he would be fine, but she worried anyway. Sharri was still so scared that something would happen to her and leave Devon an orphan. She couldn’t get past it.
When we returned home, my adjustment continued. Getting married did not immediately make living together easier. That first year was rough for both of us. I had no idea what our married life would really be like. I thought I did, but I didn’t. How could I know? I wanted romance, passion, love. I got that, but I also got everything else that comes with daily life.
Rick Reilly’s Sea-Monkeys joke was hilarious at the time, but it was just a joke. Real life was not so simple. I was used to eating out for every meal; I’d been a bachelor. People talk about bachelors like they can date anybody whenever they want, but the real freedom is that you don’t have to do anything. You can do whatever you’re in the mood to do. Life with a spouse and a child doesn’t work like that.
I’d ask, “Where are we going to lunch today?”
And Sharri would say, “What do you mean? I’ve got to get Devon from school, I have the plumber coming over…”
It was an enormous adjustment for me. My life changed quickly. I thought I was ready for it, but I really wasn’t. I’d spent two decades as an adult basically doing whatever I wanted as long as I got my work done. Work was all that mattered, my only real concern. All of a sudden, I’d hear, “I know you have this story you’re trying to break, but Devon is throwing up. We have to go to the doctor.” I had this naive guy notion that it was going to be like dating: dinner dates, traveling—the life I had led, plus a partner. But when there is a child involved, it doesn’t work like that. And we didn’t have that typical break-in period to be together before a child came into the picture. Devon was in the picture before I was. I was intruding on their world.
I had been living in a Denver neighborhood with plenty of restaurants and bars. I’m not a big drinker—in fact, Sharri still has never seen me intoxicated—but I enjoyed the social scene. Then I moved to New York City. I was very lonely, but I was still in New York City, by myself, living in a one-bedroom apartment, doing whatever I wanted to do. I was missing a lot of things in life, but I did have social freedom.
Then I started living in a house in the suburbs with a wife, a child, three dogs, and the memory of Joe.
He wasn’t physically there, but he was always present.
Almost anybody who knew Sharri knew that he had lived there. And those who didn’t know Joe’s story still figured she had a husband there. One time she had gone into a restaurant on a date, and the maître d’ looked at the guy and said, “Hi, Mr. Maio, how are you this evening?” She had been there so often that he just assumed the man with her was her husband. This was the same restaurant where Sharri and I went on our first date.
I got used to people calling me “Mr. Maio”—when solicitors called our house, or came to the door, or stopped us in a local shop. When they didn’t know any different, I was Mr. Maio, always.
I had moved into Joe’s house. He had paid for it with money from the
job where he was working when he died. This is the place where he would take baths with Devon until his hands were wrinkly. His pictures were in frames on the shelves. Sharri’s redecorating projects continued, but still, if you thought about it at all, it was hard to escape the feeling that he was supposed to be there.
I even inherited some of Joe’s friends. Even though Joe and Sharri were a couple, some of his friends were not really Sharri’s friends—they were just her husband’s friends that she had met. Even some people who had been very close to Joe did not know Sharri that well. But some of his closest friends, like Jordan Bergstein, would become close friends of mine. It was just one more connection to the life of Joe.
* * *
Adjusting to my new world was hard enough, but it was important to make sure I remained sensitive to Sharri’s thoughts and feelings about Joe, and both respected and honored his memory in my own way.
I tried to get to know Joe Maio as best I could. He couldn’t just be Sharri’s deceased ex-husband; I had to have a sense of who he was. I found out that we had some things in common. He was competitive, a trait I recognized. Sharri remembers playing Monopoly with him one Christmas, and he was hoarding so much real estate that she quit the game. At a blackjack table in Las Vegas, he once told her to move away. She was covering her eyes, and he said that was bad luck.
Joe set high professional goals and worked hard to achieve them, and I’m the same way. That torpedoed a few of my relationships, but not this one.
My workaholic tendencies and the 24-7 nature of my job meant that I was not always available at conventional times. Sundays always were for work. Holidays often took me away from her and the family. Night shifts often were regular shifts. And with the changing nature of the reporting job and the emergence of social media, no conscientious reporter ever was able to truly punch the clock, not anymore, not in this day and age. A reporter always is on the clock.
But Sharri was used to being alone. And no matter how much I worked, no matter how often I was gone, she would never feel as alone as she did in the days after 9/11.
13
I had worked at newspapers for a long time. Good stories always resonated. When I found out Joe and I had the same birthday, it made me feel as if Sharri and I were supposed to be together—which was great, because I already had seen and heard and felt enough to know I wanted us to be together.
But as we went from first date to married couple, I learned that this was not just a quirky fact or an eerie coincidence. It made my birthday a pretty odd day on the calendar for us. Even when you’re an adult, your birthday is the one day of the year that is a celebration of you—a reminder of people who care about you, and a day to reflect and indulge yourself. But it’s not that simple for us.
Every year on my birthday, I call my wife’s deceased husband’s parents to say I’m thinking of them. It’s a strange tradition, but it’s also the right thing to do. It’s a hard day for Paula and George. I want them to know I will never forget that—or forget him.
And every year on my birthday, there is a part of my wife that’s just a little bit distant. She doesn’t really talk about it. She understands it’s my birthday, and she doesn’t want to spend it in mourning. I think, in some way, it helps her that my birthday is the same as Joe’s—it gives her something to enjoy instead of just being sad all day.
I guess the best way to say it is this: Joe’s birthday is easier for her because it’s also my birthday. My birthday is complicated for me because it’s also Joe’s birthday. But every year, it has gotten a little easier for Sharri. There will always be some sadness for her on that day, as there should be. It might not be quite as pronounced as it was when we first met, but no matter what the celebration is on December 21, Joe is not far from any of our thoughts.
* * *
When I was younger, I occasionally felt pangs of jealousy. An ex-girlfriend would date somebody else, or somebody I found attractive turned out to have a boyfriend. But I can honestly say I have never been jealous of Joe Maio. I always have admired, respected, and appreciated him. I never have felt like I’m being compared to Joe, nor am I trying to live up to Joe. I don’t know if that’s normal or not, but Sharri’s relationship with Joe never made me uncomfortable.
I guess this is partly because the Maios have been incredibly kind and decent and very accepting. I’m sure that made all of this that much easier. If they had been standoffish, or if they kept talking about how Joe was a better golfer or smarter businessman than I was, then maybe I might feel differently.
The only time I really get a jolt, and it’s only a slight jolt, is when I hear Sharri call people on the phone and say, “Hi, this is Sharri Maio.” Maio was not her maiden name; it’s the name she had when she was married to somebody else. I think of her as Sharri Schefter, but she rarely calls herself Sharri Schefter. She still uses the last name Maio more than she does Schefter, in part because it is just one more way to be as connected as possible to Devon.
Sharri and I don’t talk about Joe constantly, but we don’t avoid talking about him, either. Sometimes, while we are hanging out as a family, she thinks about Joe—something he used to do, or a funny experience they shared, but Sharri is the only one in the family who has memories of him.
And so she looks at her husband and children, all happy and unimpeded by grief, and she thinks, Maybe I shouldn’t say this.
And then she thinks, No. This is my life. I can say it if I want to say it.
I never try to stop her from talking about Joe. I never wince. Joe is a part of her, as well as a part of us. When we sit in our kitchen, I can’t ask her to put her memories of Joe in a box in the attic.
Most days, we just try to live our lives, like anybody else does, but the reality is that in any relationship, two people come from two different places. In our case, Sharri was a widow with a young child, and I was a single man looking to get married and have kids.
My dream scenario always involved having children. That is what I pictured: find the perfect woman, get married, have kids. I had embraced the fact that the perfect woman for me was a widow with a son. I loved them both. But there was this difference between Sharri and me: She already had a biological child, and I didn’t.
Her pregnancy with Devon had not been the smoothest—she had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and he was a big baby: ten pounds, four ounces when he was born. Then, about a year after 9/11, Sharri was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. I think of that as another consequence of 9/11. Doctors probably never will be able to prove this, but I believe the stress she experienced of being alone and having to raise a child by herself contributed to her body breaking down and the type 1 diabetes taking hold. Her diabetes is such a prominent part of our life. It had an impact on how she thought about having another child. She had already been through so much. She wasn’t convinced she wanted to have more children.
She asked me, “What if we don’t have another child? Will that be a deal-breaker for you? Because it might not happen.”
I said, “I love you. Whatever you want is fine with me.”
I meant what I said. I wanted another child, but I had learned by that point to appreciate what we had instead of focusing on something else I might want. We sort of tabled the discussion. There was never a definitive “let’s try” or “no way.” I figured we could make a final decision when we wanted. It didn’t quite work out that way.
* * *
In February of 2008, I flew from New York to Indianapolis for the NFL Scouting Combine. As I landed, I had something happen to me that never had happened before and hasn’t happened since. The moment I landed, I turned on my phone, and as soon as it turned on, it was ringing. It was Sharri.
I said, “Hello.”
She said, “I’m pregnant.”
I said, “Pregnant?”
There was surprise in my voice, concern in hers. She had taken a pregnancy test, and it was positive. I couldn’t quite believe it. It didn’t make much sense to me.
We weren’t trying to have a baby. We also weren’t trying to not have a baby. We were … open to the possibility. Sharri had initially been wary for a variety of reasons, mostly related to her health and her diabetes, but she came around to the idea. She decided she was open to having another child.
We weren’t using birth control, but we weren’t determined to conceive a baby, either. I had been out of town working, when she was last ovulating, so I didn’t expect her to get pregnant.
Sharri was not overjoyed, to say the least. She was worried. Sharri was a thirty-eight-year-old type 1 diabetic, and she was not thrilled at the prospect of going through another pregnancy. Now she was on her way to the doctor to get confirmation.
I got off the plane and into the airport in Indianapolis, and even though I was there, I was not there. I was dazed. I didn’t know what to think. Was I sure that I wanted this?
I was about to see a few hundred people that I knew at the Combine. Yet just as I stepped off the plane, just as I began to make my way to the baggage claim, the first person I ran into was Kyle Shanahan, who was the offensive coordinator of the Houston Texans at the time. I had known Kyle since he was ten years old, because his father, Mike, coached for the Broncos when I was the beat writer there. When he went on to become a wide receiver at Texas, I took him and his best friend from college, Chris Simms, the son of the CBS analyst Phil Simms, out to dinner to do a feature on them. Kyle and I always had a good relationship, but now it was about to get very personal.
Kyle was the very first person I told that my wife was pregnant. I guess that was fitting since I had known him since he was a little boy. He congratulated me before I grabbed my bags and headed out of the airport, where I bumped into another friend from my Denver days, Rick Smith, then the Houston Texans’ general manager. Smith had been the Broncos assistant secondary coach when they won the Super Bowl, and I had gotten to know him over the years as well.
The Man I Never Met Page 9