Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  “No,” he called out. “I’m right here.”

  He called his wife, Ericka, from a pay phone. Her cries made him weep again.

  “Don’t go back in!” she pleaded.

  “They won’t release me,” Moose told her. “The city’s locked down.”

  “Come home now!”

  Moose and another EMT commandeered an empty ambulance. Bringing along a group of EMT trainees who’d leapt into service, they ignored the citywide lockdown and drove off Manhattan island, across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, back to Battalion 49 in Astoria. He soon learned that his partner Paul Adams was accounted for, as was paramedic Roberto Abril. Carlos Lillo remained among the missing.

  Exhausted, covered with bits of building and other remains, coughing and wheezing, Moose drove his car upstate to the little town where his day had begun nearly twenty-four hours earlier. By the time Moose arrived home, President Bush had already delivered his address from the Oval Office. “Missing” posters had already begun spreading around Manhattan. The Pentagon and an old coal mine in Pennsylvania still smoldered. Fighter jets, tankers, and radar planes ruled the skies over the United States. The country and large parts of the world braced for a future where the only certainty seemed to be war.

  Ericka was dreaming of water when Moose reached their front stoop. She woke and opened the door to the ash-covered man she loved, a gentle man who loved to help people, a brave man who saved lives that day and nearly lost his own, an American man of Cuban/Palestinian/Haitian descent whose Arabic name meant Moses.

  Together they sat on the floor and cried.

  Andrea Maffeo rushed home from work to comfort her parents. She called one hospital after another, but no one had heard of Jennieann. Bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were closed to everyone except emergency responders and public safety workers. Andrea sought help from a family friend, a retired New York City police officer named Gaspere Randazzo.

  “C’mon, we’re going to the city,” Gaspere told her.

  Joined by Gaspere’s former partner, the two old cops flashed their badges and gained passage across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Andrea had never seen Manhattan so empty. An occasional emergency vehicle broke the eerie silence. Teams of firefighters walked through the streets, hunched, exhausted, covered in ash. An army in retreat.

  They drove to the Beekman Downtown Hospital, but Jennieann wasn’t there. A nurse told Andrea to try the city’s major burn unit, at Weill Cornell Medical Center on Sixty-Eighth Street. After sorting out confusion about Jennieann’s name—she’d been registered as Jeannie—Andrea found her sister. She went upstairs to the burn unit and made what felt like the longest walk in creation. “How am I going to have my mother make this walk?” Andrea wondered.

  A nurse named Mike greeted her warmly and asked what she knew.

  “Her arms are burned,” Andrea said, echoing what Ron Clifford told her.

  “It’s a little more than that,” Mike said.

  “What you mean? How bad is she?”

  Mike held Andrea’s hands. He explained that Jennieann had third-degree burns over more than 80 percent of her body. Fourth-degree might have been more accurate, but that level didn’t exist. Jennieann’s burns penetrated to her stomach and other internal organs.

  Andrea steeled herself and entered the room. Jennieann was mummified in white gauze from neck to feet, with clear bandages on her face and head. Andrea could see that the tops of her sister’s ears and part of her nose had burned off. Fingertips as black as coal peeked out from the wraps. A ventilator breathed for her. Doctors had placed Jennieann in a drug-induced coma to spare her from pain. Her eyelids were swollen shut, but her corneas weren’t damaged. When the fireball from American Flight 11 raced down the North Tower, Jennieann might have shielded her eyes with her arms. If she recovered she might retain her sight.

  Andrea began to whimper, then forced herself to stop, worried that Jennieann might hear her. She moved to the head of her sister’s bed.

  “You’re here, you’re safe,” Andrea whispered. “You’re going to get help.”

  Jennieann moved her legs.

  “Did she hear me?” Andrea asked.

  A doctor said it was muscle reflex, but outside, a nurse disagreed. “That was her way of telling you she heard you,” the nurse said. Andrea chose to believe it.

  When Andrea returned home, Gaspere offered to walk her inside, but Andrea said no—his presence would immediately tip off her mother how awful it was. If Frances Maffeo could be spared for even a minute, Andrea wanted to give her that time.

  The two women sat across from each other in the kitchen.

  “How is she?” Frances asked.

  Andrea put her head down on the table. The silence became too much to bear, so she forced herself to speak: “They don’t know if she’s going to make it through the night.”

  Neighbors heard Frances Maffeo’s screams.

  Part III

  RISE

  From the Ashes

  Chapter 22

  “Your Sister and Niece Will Never Be Lonely”

  September 12, 2001, and Beyond

  September 12 dawned clear and warm on the wounded East Coast. The attacks had knocked out the two front teeth from the United States’ financial center, damaged its military brain, and scarred its rural flesh. During the first hours of the “post-9/11 era,” as smoke still rose and tears still flowed, aftershocks reverberated from the epicenters of pain. They rattled stock markets and houses of worship, schools and government offices, airports and stadiums, hearts and minds.

  Within weeks of the attacks, the United States went to war in Afghanistan, a conflict that continues at this writing. The war in Iraq followed, starting in 2003 and officially ending in 2011.1 Before committing to either, President Bush made a statement often overlooked afterward: “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.”

  The pursuit of Osama bin Laden consumed a decade, culminating with a May 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, during which he was killed by members of SEAL Team Six. Alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in 2003 and tortured for information by the CIA. He and four other men accused of training, financing, and directing the hijackers have spent more than a decade imprisoned at the United States’ Guantanamo Naval Base in the Caribbean, with no firm trial date in sight.

  Before any of that happened, the nation needed to account for the dead and injured. At first, hope took the form of countless “Missing” posters plastered throughout Manhattan. Soon it became clear that anyone unaccounted for was gone. The death toll was not as high as originally feared, but Mayor Rudy Giuliani proved correct when, hours after the attacks, he said: “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately.”2

  Not including the hijackers, 2,977 men, women, and children were known to have been killed on the four planes and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Among the dead were 1,462 people in the North Tower, 630 in the South Tower, 421 emergency responders in New York, 246 passengers and crew members on the planes, and 125 men and women in the Pentagon. No one died on the ground at Shanksville.

  Roughly six thousand more sustained physical injuries, some of whom would never fully recover. Thousands more, many of them emergency responders and investigators, suffered from respiratory, psychological, and other ailments that revealed themselves later. Nearly seventeen years after 9/11, the FBI announced the death of David LeValley, special agent in charge of the Atlanta bureau, who’d spent several weeks investigating the attacks. “Dave died in the line of duty,”3 the FBI declared, “as a direct result of his work at the World Trade Center.” Weeks later, the FDNY chief who led recovery efforts died of cancer traced to toxins from Ground Zero. Ronald Spadafora was the 178th member4 of the FDNY to die of 9/11-related illnesses. No one expected him to be the last. Authorities estimated that by the twentieth an
niversary of 9/11, more people will have died5 of an illness related to Ground Zero than in the attacks.

  Along with counting the dead and injured came the notification of loved ones. Wives lost husbands, husbands lost wives, parents lost children, siblings lost siblings, friends lost friends. The losses touched grandparents and godparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and classmates, neighbors and colleagues. Every death carved a ragged hole. Some who suffered the most were children who had no previous understanding of the permanency of mortal loss. Roughly three thousand children6 under age eighteen lost a parent on 9/11, including 108 babies born in the months after their father’s death. Each one needed some kind of explanation.

  John Creamer taught math at an alternative high school in Worcester, Massachusetts, working with students who’d previously dropped out, or were school-age mothers, or who struggled with English. On the morning of September 11, a teacher’s aide told John that a plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. The news disturbed John, but he didn’t worry. He knew that his wife, Tara, was on an American Airlines flight headed from Boston to Los Angeles, not to New York.

  Hours later, John left school with a janitor during a free period to run an errand for the school. John didn’t have a cellphone, but the janitor took a beeper that would display a phone number in case anyone needed to reach them. Suddenly, the beeper flashed 9-1-1, and the janitor worried that he was in trouble for leaving school grounds without notice.

  “We’re close to my house,”7 John told him. “We’ll call from there.”

  John called the school secretary, to reassure her that they’d be back soon. But the beeper message wasn’t about school rules.

  “Wait there,” secretary Dorry Lemay told him. “Your dad is coming.”

  John’s mind flashed to his son, Colin, and daughter, Nora, both at daycare.

  “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

  Dorry handed the phone to John’s father, Gerry, who ran the school. He’d heard the news about American Flight 11 from Tara’s sister Maureen, who’d heard from another sister, Kellie, who worked with Tara at the retailing giant TJX Cos.

  “Where are you, John?” Gerry Creamer asked.

  “I’m at the house.”

  “Wait there, I’m coming.”

  “Why, Dad?”

  Gerry wouldn’t say.

  John met his father in the driveway of the pretty yellow Cape Cod–style cottage that John and Tara had filled with love.

  “It was Tara’s plane that hit the World Trade Center,” Gerry said. “Tara was on that plane.” John collapsed into his father’s arms.

  The next day, September 12, it seemed as though everyone John knew, and many he didn’t, converged on the house that would never again be a home. Family members, old and new friends, colleagues from TJX and the Worcester schools, reporters and photographers, neighbors bearing casseroles and condolences.

  Everyone except Tara.

  John and Gerry drove an hour to Boston to answer routine questions from the FBI, whose work had just begun. Although Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were immediately the prime suspects, investigators didn’t want to overlook any other possible motive. Before returning home, John sought out a child psychologist for advice on what to tell his children. When John and Gerry reached the house, John saw his mother, Julie, holding one-year-old Nora, who was oblivious to the commotion. Colin, at four, sensed something was amiss. The boy had inherited his mother’s oversized smile, but it was nowhere in sight. John led him upstairs.

  Father and son lay down on John and Tara’s king-sized bed, atop the wedding quilt with interlocking rings made by Tara’s aunt. “I need to talk to you about something,”8 John told Colin. John opened a pack of crayons, laid out two sheets of paper, and drew an image of a brown-haired woman with angel wings. Then he helped Colin to sketch his own picture of a “mommy angel.”

  “There was an accident,” John said, fighting sobs. “Your mommy is in heaven and she won’t be coming back. She’s up in heaven and she’s an angel now.”

  Weeks earlier, Tara had used similar words to help Colin understand why he had only one grandmother. Tara wasn’t sure she’d been clear. Now, as John fell silent, Colin erupted in sobs. He’d understood his mother after all.

  On the other side of the door, heartbroken, Julie listened to Colin wail for an hour as John tried to comfort him. Finally Colin fell asleep, nestled against his father, on his parents’ wedding quilt. Later, John placed Tara’s plush robe in Nora’s crib so she’d fall asleep to her mother’s scent.

  Months passed, and John Creamer got a call from the New York medical examiner’s office. DNA testing of recovered remains identified a piece of Tara’s foot and part of one breast. A few months later, John got a call about more remains. John had what they found of Tara buried at St. John’s Cemetery in Worcester, so he and his children could visit whenever they needed solace. They brought flowers every Mother’s Day.

  Years passed, and the coroner called again and again. John told them to keep whatever else they found entombed with other partial remains at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan, which opened to the public on the tenth anniversary. Victims’ remains are kept in a secluded repository, deep within the memorial, with an adjacent Reflection Room open only to 9/11 family members.

  Nearby, above ground, are two enormous reflecting pools. They occupy the exact footprints of the missing Twin Towers. The names of all the known fatalities of 9/11, plus the six people killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, are inscribed in bronze on parapets that surround the pools. At night, lights shine through the letters of each name.

  Looming over the memorial is a building called One World Trade Center. At a height of 1,776 feet, an elevation chosen for the historical resonance, it opened in October 2014 as the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere, and sixth-tallest in the world. While celebrating its architectural splendor, the building’s owners acknowledged the horrible circumstances that allowed its construction. They advertised the inclusion of “life-safety systems9 [that] far exceed NYC building code.”

  John Creamer remarried. His wife, Tina, is the first to say that Tara will always be part of their family. As he entered manhood, Colin often said that his mother is his inspiration to succeed in life. Nora had no memories of her mother, but she grew up basking in stories about Tara. She plans to wear her mother’s wedding gown when the time comes.

  John and his family bought a new house overlooking a lake. When John sold the yellow Cape, the new owners promised they’d never remove the thick strokes of white paint on the basement wall, the ones that read “Tara ♥s John.”

  Countless others awoke on September 12 with their own eternal connections to 9/11. Some, like Lorne Lyles, husband of Flight 93 flight attendant CeeCee Lyles, would hear their lost loved ones calling to them from answering machines. “Hi, baby,10” CeeCee said in the call, which Lorne found a week later. “I hope to be able to see your face again, baby. I love you. Goodbye.”

  More than fifteen years after 9/11, after she remarried and became Julie Sweeney Roth, the widow of Flight 175 passenger Brian “Moose” Sweeney could recite every word of his last voicemail from memory: “Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and I’ll see you when you get there. ’Bye, babe. Hope I’ll call you.”

  Others treasured physical tokens of the missing. Solicitor General Ted Olson, husband of Flight 77 passenger Barbara Olson, fell into bed at 1 a.m. on September 12. There he found the note Barbara left the previous morning on his pillow: “I love you,”11 it said. “When you read this, I will be thinking of you and I will be back on Friday.”

  In the rubble of the World Trade Center, among thousands of pulverized and partial human remains, searchers found a wom
an’s left hand with the bejeweled wedding ring of Sonia Puopolo, a first-class passenger on American Flight 11. Her family considered it a minor miracle12 and a message from Sonia about the need to persevere.

  For some, the loss proved too much. Before Flight 11 took off, passenger Pendyala “Vamsi” Vamsikrishna had left a voicemail for his wife, Prasanna Kalahasti, a dental student at the University of Southern California, to tell her he’d be home for lunch. A month later, Prasanna hanged herself in their apartment. In a suicide note to her brother, she wrote: “I love Vamsi13 too much, and the pain is excruciating. . . . If there exists any form after this life, I’ll be with him. If not, it will relieve me from this deep pain.”

  Some accounts of survivors and those left behind would be kept private or be handed down within families like heirlooms. Others would appear in newspapers, magazines, websites, and movies, or in oral histories and aural archives. Some would be memorialized in books.

  In their Connecticut home, Lee and Eunice Hanson watched the televised explosion of the plane carrying their son, Peter, daughter-in-law, Sue Kim, and granddaughter, Christine. The strike into the South Tower ended the Airfone call between Peter and Lee. Later, Eunice realized: “We heard his first cries and his last cries.”

  They endured the unspeakable, and yet they endured. Lee and Eunice drove to Peter, Sue, and Christine’s house to pick through hairbrushes to provide DNA matches. They found Christine’s Peter Rabbit doll, tucked into her bed, waiting for her. (They subsequently donated it to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York.)

  Eventually, they heard from the medical examiner’s office, and Lee asked a friend who ran a funeral home to go to New York. Back at the funeral home, the friend left Lee alone in a room with a little box. Inside rested a single piece of bone that fitted into his hand. Holding it, Lee told himself, “That’s all I have14 of my beautiful red-headed son.” Lee and Eunice held out hope that someday remains would be linked to Sue and Christine.