Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  When Ron called Ruth before his big meeting, Ruth boosted his confidence and assured him that he’d close the deal. Meanwhile, Ruth had some news of her own. She, Juliana, and Juliana’s godmother, Paige Farley-Hackel, would be flying to California in a few days. Paige had launched a radio program on spirituality, and she had arranged a meeting with Deepak Chopra. Ruth told Ron that after spending several days at Chopra’s Center for Well Being in La Jolla, she and Paige planned to visit friends in Los Angeles and take Juliana to Disneyland.

  During the call, Ruth urged Ron to wear a bright tie to his big meeting, to make a strong impression. “You always want to stand out,” Ruth said. Ron went out and bought a yellow silk tie as sunny as an egg yolk, paired with a new blue suit and a crisp white shirt.

  The night before the meeting, a thunderstorm raged over Glen Ridge. An avid sailor, attuned to wind and weather, Ron listened to the rain as he laid out his Ruth-approved wardrobe. He peeked in on Monica then joined Brigid in bed.

  Elaine Duch

  North Tower, World Trade Center

  Elaine Duch swam leisurely,2 her hands caressing the water with each stroke, her legs churning a modest wake. After a busy Monday at work, Elaine had dragged her twin sister, Janet, to adult swim at the Lincoln Community Pool in their hometown of Bayonne, New Jersey. Whether in a pool or at the Jersey Shore, since childhood Elaine had always loved how her body felt in water, buoyant and sensuous, her skin and muscles relaxed and recharged.

  With Elaine taking charge, as usual in their twinship, the two sisters had resolved months earlier to get into eye-catching shape. Elaine and Janet, whose surname was pronounced “Duke,” spent summer nights and weekends swimming, with long walks and bike rides on the side, while planning for their first yoga class. Both single, closing in on their shared fiftieth birthday, they wouldn’t go quietly.

  Janet had a boyfriend, and Elaine wouldn’t have minded one, but she didn’t consider it essential. She’d built a comfortable, fulfilling life highlighted by monthly overnight visits to the casinos of Atlantic City. Occasionally they took longer trips, including a weeklong bus tour in July to Niagara Falls.

  Elaine’s workdays revolved around hourlong journeys via train between the underdog city of Bayonne and glittering Manhattan, two distinct worlds separated by New York Harbor. Thirty-one years earlier, a week after she graduated from high school, Elaine had followed her older sister Maryann to a job at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, in time rising to senior administrative assistant in the real estate department.

  Elaine’s workplace was the Port Authority’s pride and joy, the World Trade Center, where she relished the responsibilities and the people but never warmed to the buildings’ immense height. Her feelings hardened in February 1993, when her office was on the 35th floor of the North Tower. Terrorists had packed a rental van with fifteen hundred pounds of explosives and parked in the underground garage. The blast killed six people, injured more than a thousand, and caused an estimated $300 million in damage. The evacuation down soot-filled stairwells ruined Elaine’s white pants and her black-and-white winter coat. Soon Elaine discovered that the real cost had been far greater: five of the six people killed were Port Authority employees she knew and liked. The death of secretary Monica Rodriguez Smith, seven months pregnant, on her last day at work before a maternity leave, upset Elaine most of all. Elaine attended yearly memorials and cherished her memory of Monica’s gentle nature.

  In the years that followed, Elaine’s office migrated skyward to the 88th floor of the North Tower. She liked that floor even less, especially on windy days when the elevators creaked and moaned as the building swayed a foot or so in either direction.

  In September 2001, Elaine’s work life in the North Tower was near an end. That summer, the Port Authority had entered into a ninety-nine-year, $3.2 billion agreement to lease3 the World Trade Center to two private firms, Silverstein Properties and Westfield America. With management of the real estate changing hands, Elaine had accepted a new job in the Port Authority’s audit department, located across the river in Jersey City. She was supposed to have begun working there already, but paperwork for the new lease hadn’t come through, so her move was pushed back to later in September.

  Their swimming exercise complete, Elaine and Janet toweled dry, ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and returned to the apartment they shared. Before bed, Elaine prepared lunch and laid out her clothes for the next day: a favorite gold skirt with a blue paisley print and a new sleeveless cream top. She’d wear her blond hair down, letting it drape over the shoulders of a navy jacket. White canvas sneakers would carry her to work, then she’d change at her desk into strappy leather sandals.

  FDNY Captain Jay Jonas

  North Tower, World Trade Center

  Eight and eighteen.

  The two numbers rattled around Jay Jonas’s mind4 as he drove his aging Subaru south along the Hudson River, heading from his home in the sleepy village of Goshen, New York, to his second home, a busy firehouse in Lower Manhattan. At forty-three, Jay carried a solid 240 pounds on his six-foot-one frame. He had ruddy cheeks, catcher’s-mitt hands, steady blue eyes, and a big man’s quiet confidence.

  Rain splashed musically on his windshield as Jay’s numbers kept the beat. Eight: the years he’d been a captain in the Fire Department of the City of New York, the FDNY. Eighteen: Jay’s place on the civil service list awaiting promotion to battalion chief.

  The raise that came with the higher rank would be welcome, as Jay and his wife, Judy, looked ahead to sending three bright kids to college. But the money was secondary. The jump to battalion chief would pin two gold bugles on Jay’s collar and place him among his mentors and heroes: the top brass of “New York’s Bravest.”

  When that might happen was anyone’s guess. The FDNY promotional pipeline had long been clogged, with no indication when the spigot might reopen. As 6 p.m. neared on September 10, Jay filed away his numbers and parked behind the squat Canal Street headquarters of Ladder Company 6, nicknamed the Dragon Fighters for the unit’s Chinatown territory. Stepping from his car, Jay focused on his immediate future: twenty-four hours on duty, keeping his men sharp and a slice of the city safe.

  Jay’s career goal had its roots in boyhood. His father, a telephone installer by day and a volunteer firefighter by desire, let Jay tag along to the fire station on weekends. By sixteen, Jay was a junior firefighter. By nineteen, he was studying fire science under veteran FDNY instructors at Orange County (N.Y.) Community College, paying for his classes by working as an ambulance driver and emergency medical technician. Upon joining the FDNY in 1979, Jay was assigned to a New York City borough so synonymous with arson that it had a catchphrase: “The Bronx is burning.”

  During more than two decades of service, he’d fought too many fires to count. But one stood out. In May 1982, Jay followed a lieutenant into a fourth-floor apartment of a burning tenement5 building on East 182nd Street. Flames rose through the floorboards and licked at the windows. Choking on acrid smoke, Jay heard a moan. He crawled inside a bedroom, felt around, and found a semiconscious man on the bed. Jay dragged sixty-year-old Al Pecchinenda from the apartment and outside to safety. The next day, the New York Post ran a photo of a grateful young woman throwing her arms around Jay’s neck and kissing his cheek.

  Over time, Jay worked in a rescue unit, rose to lieutenant, earned a bachelor’s degree, and made captain in 1993. As a new captain, Jay bounced among fire companies until one day he stood in line at a wake for a lieutenant killed in the line of duty. The unit’s captain was on the verge of being promoted, and its troops were reeling. A group of firefighters approached Jay, and Firefighter Tommy Falco delivered their message: “We need you.”6 Soon after, Jay took over as captain of Ladder 6.

  Jay was determined to make Ladder 6 the best company in the city. He repurposed materials he studied for promotional tests into drills for his men. He showed them videotapes of building collapses and taught advanced rope techniques.
Even on a slow day, they went home with the feeling that Jay loved most: “I was a fireman today.”

  In the summer of 2001, Jay was one of 11,336 firefighters7 employed by the FDNY, plus another 2,908 in Emergency Medical Services. Yet to Jay the department felt like a small town: everyone eventually crossed paths. Now and then, Jay ran into Orio Palmer, who’d followed him up the stairs at the 1982 tenement fire. Orio was a probationary firefighter at the time, and afterward he quizzed Jay, soaking up information about how to navigate danger. Orio rose quickly after that and had already been promoted to Jay’s dream job of battalion chief.

  Rain fell on Jay’s shoulders as he entered the Chinatown firehouse to begin his double shift. He’d have his usual Ladder 6 crew, plus firefighters Scott Kopytko and Doug Oelschlager, assigned to the company for the night. Soon the alarm sounded, and they joined multiple companies answering a call for collapsed scaffolding at the base of the nearby Manhattan Bridge. Like neighbors running into one another at a yard sale, Jay caught up with two friends who were lieutenants in other companies, Peter Freund and William “Billy” McGinn, whom Jay had trained when he was a lieutenant in Ladder 11.

  Back at the firehouse, Jay ducked into his office to get some rest, happy to be a firefighter, but still in his eighth year as a captain, still eighteenth on the promotion list.

  Chris Young

  North Tower, World Trade Center

  Walk into any New York City restaurant or temporary employment agency and yell “Places!” or “Action!”—then stand back as the waitstaff or the clerks spring to life, revealing their true selves as actors awaiting big breaks. Those two sides of Chris Young’s life came into stark relief on September 10, 2001.

  Tall and lean, thirty-three years old, an introvert in life and an extrovert on stage, Chris had expressive features that casting directors might describe as borderline between “best friend” and “leading man.” With his glasses on, Clark Kent; with them off, who knows? To pay his rent8 between acting gigs, Chris took a temporary administrative job in the Midtown office of Marsh & McLennan, a global insurance and financial services firm. He’d done too many temp jobs to count, from data entry to reception, but Chris liked the people at Marsh & McLennan, where he worked in the training department.

  Chris especially enjoyed working for a young manager with a dragonfly tattoo named Dominique Pandolfo. A bubbly brunette, Dominique described herself as “a pizza bagel”9 to explain her Italian Catholic–Russian Jewish heritage. She quietly allowed Chris to keep a flexible schedule so he could duck out for auditions. After several weeks, Dominique “lent” Chris to Angela Kyte, a hyperorganized manager who in two decades at the company had risen to managing director. Angela needed Chris’s help preparing printed materials to accompany a PowerPoint presentation she planned to deliver on September 11 at the company’s other New York offices, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  As September 10 wound down, Chris sneaked peeks at the clock, eager to move on to his “real” life. Shortly before Chris left work, Angela told him to return to the Midtown office early the next morning. She instructed him to pick up a final box of materials and deliver it to her on the 99th floor of the North Tower.

  When the workday ended, Chris hurried to his apartment in the unfashionable Brooklyn neighborhood of Gowanus. Awaiting him was a fellow actor named Ted deChatelet, a friend from their days as theater majors at Wake Forest University, in Chris’s native North Carolina. Ted had moved to Oregon, but he’d returned to New York for the September 10 world premiere of the first movie in which either had a role: a low-budget, gender-bending farce called Macbeth: The Comedy. Set in modern times, Ted played Shakespeare’s hero Macduff, while Chris played a flamboyantly gay witch. Chris still shivered at the thought of being stuck in a New Jersey field on a frigid day to shoot the cauldron scene, chanting “Double, double, toil and trouble!”

  As he dressed for his star turn, Chris felt as passionate as ever about acting, though he’d tired of the countless auditions with rare callbacks. A dozen years had passed since his greatest theatrical triumph, playing Don Quixote in a college production of the musical Man of La Mancha. Yet the fading glow of that success sustained him. When his confidence flagged, Chris drew upon memories of the ovations and the raves. He used the show’s monologues for auditions and often sang its score, especially Don Quixote’s rousing cry for courage, “The Impossible Dream.”

  In April 1999 he’d followed friends to New York for a shot at Broadway. Since then, he’d sung in the chorus with the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players, but beyond that and his fledgling film career, Chris remained the very definition of a struggling modern actor.

  Chris and Ted raced to a theater on the Upper East Side for their movie’s opening at the New York Independent Film Festival. Even on their big night, they were reminded of their true status. Security officers held them outside in the rain until Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his entourage swept out of the theater after seeing a different movie.

  When the lights came up, the festival audience cheered Macbeth: The Comedy. Afterward, the cast and crew celebrated at a nearby bar. But when the party reached full tilt, Chris reluctantly found Ted. “I’ve got to go home,” he said. “I have to be up early in the morning and go down to the World Trade Center.”

  FDNY Paramedic Carlos Lillo

  Ground Level, World Trade Center

  Cecilia Lillo

  North Tower, World Trade Center

  Relaxing poolside at a Caribbean resort in May 2001, newlyweds Carlos and Cecilia Lillo10 fell into conversation with a married pair of Chicago police officers. Over frosty drinks, Cecilia mentioned that she worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, with an office in the World Trade Center.

  The officers asked about the 1993 bombing, so Cecilia briefly told them that she’d evacuated the North Tower down a smoky stairwell. Did she fear another attack? No, she told them, strict new security precautions made her feel safe.

  Carlos, a paramedic with the FDNY, chimed in: “If something was to happen again in that building, my baby works there. I’ll be the first one there, and I’ll go looking for her.” The poolside discussion moved on, but Carlos’s vow bothered Cecilia.

  Back in their room, Cecilia told Carlos the story of her harrowing escape eight years earlier, how she’d been enveloped in black smoke and considered hurling herself out a window before she stumbled down to the street. Then she laid down the law.

  “Listen,” Cecilia said, “whatever you do, promise you won’t come inside looking for me. I’m not waiting for you on the sixty-fourth floor.” When Carlos reluctantly agreed, Cecilia softened. “I promise I’ll make it out, because someone who loves me will be waiting for me outside.”

  Carlos agreed, on one condition: “If you’re ever hurt,” he said, “find an FDNY ambulance. Tell them who I am. They’ll find me.” Cecilia promised, and their vacation resumed.

  The challenge of finding each other was a running theme for Carlos and Cecilia. At thirty-seven, Carlos had been married once before, unhappily. At thirty-four, Cecilia had ended a previous relationship to search for “the perfect man.” Half a lifetime earlier, they nearly crossed paths when both attended Long Island City High School in Astoria, Queens. Charming and athletic, Carlos was captain of the gymnastics team. Cecilia, studious and pretty, noticed how kind and protective he was to his then girlfriend, walking her to every class. They shared friends, but never met. A decade later, Cecilia spotted Carlos looking dashing in his blue FDNY uniform outside Elmhurst Hospital. “So that’s what became of him,” Cecilia told her mother, who urged her to say hello. Cecilia demurred: “He doesn’t know who I am.”

  More years passed. In 1997, Cecilia attended a housewarming party for a work friend, Sandra Lillo. While leafing through Sandra’s wedding album, Cecilia spotted a photo of Carlos. “That’s my brother-in-law,” said Sandra, who’d married Carlos’s brother Cesar. After months of missed connections, Carlos picked up Cecilia for a New Y
ear’s Eve party. By then, he knew that she remembered him from high school.

  “What do you think?” Carlos asked when Cecilia met him at the door.

  “Oh, you look bigger,” she said.

  “Are you calling me fat?” he said playfully.

  “No! You were a kid, on the gymnastics team. Now you’re bigger, a man!”

  Carlos smiled and opened the car door for Cecilia, who felt a spark of recognition for the young gentleman she’d admired as a girl. Carlos stayed glued to her side the entire night. After the party, they talked in a café until dawn. Later that day, he drove his ambulance to her house to show her the lifesaving tools of his trade. In time, Cecilia would learn that Carlos loomed large as a mentor to his colleagues, among them a quiet EMT named Moussa “Moose” Diaz, who graduated from the same high school they did.

  As romance bloomed, Cecilia worried about Carlos bounding into danger. When she heard a story about a paramedic who ran toward injured firefighters without a helmet, she exploded: “You would have done the same thing! I don’t want to get a call that you’re in a coma because you weren’t wearing a helmet. I’ll go to the hospital and finish you off!” Carlos promised he wouldn’t be that reckless, then told her: “If you’re ever in a situation like that, get into a fetal position and cover your head.”

  Before they married in 2000, Carlos and Cecilia purchased a comfortable home on Long Island and invited her parents to live with them. As they dreamed of their future, Carlos made plans to take the lieutenant’s exam. He intended to retire after twenty-five years at the FDNY, then start a computer business. With a degree in marketing, Cecilia set goals to rise from her job as a Port Authority human resources administrator. As encouragement, for their anniversary Carlos bought her two pairs of professional-looking black flats, to replace the open-toed sandals she favored.