The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  The next bell rang at 9:03 a.m., the moment that the second airliner hit the south tower. Tania walked over to Angelo and grabbed his hand. He looked at her and saw that her eyes were squeezed shut, as if she were trying to extrude some terrible image. He was certain that she was reliving her memories of those excruciating moments in the sky lobby. Angelo held tightly to Tania’s hand. She seemed to be in a trance, surely trying to fight off some horrific flashback. How much more could this poor woman take? he wondered. She had worked so hard to reclaim some normalcy in her life after 9/11, but the reminders were just too many and too terrible. He wondered if she would ever be free. The others looked on, feeling impotent and frustrated that there was nothing they could say or do to make Tania feel better. Silent moments passed.

  The next voice streaming over the public address system was a familiar one. “Good morning,” the speaker said. “I’m Condoleezza Rice. I am so deeply moved to hear the individual stories of brothers and sisters. To learn about the lives of those who died here. For we all know that no matter how many fall, each life tells a unique story, and that each death diminishes us all.”

  Secretary of State Rice commenced by reading a poem by the nineteenth-century English poet Christina Rossetti:

  For if the darkness and corruption leave

  A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

  Better by far you should forget and smile

  Than that you should remember and be sad.

  Tania’s face flamed red with rage, and she burst into tears. She loathed the Bush White House and everyone in it. If it hadn’t been for them, she always said, there wouldn’t have been a terrorist attack. The towers would still be standing, and she wouldn’t have ugly scars on her arm and her back, and she would still have Dave.

  “What is she doing here?” she sobbed, as Rice’s voice echoed through the open space. “Why does it have to be this way? Why did this have to happen?”

  The others didn’t know what to do. They had never seen Tania that agitated. Someone patted water from a bottle on her forehead. Someone else gently rubbed her back.

  Janice and Elia stepped in and, speaking quietly and reassuringly, told Tania that it was almost time to walk down to bedrock, where she could pay her respects to Dave at the memorial reflecting pool. They would all go down with her, so there was no reason to worry. But if she wanted to, they could all leave, right then, in the middle of the service. No one would be upset. They just wanted what was best for her. No, Tania said. She didn’t want to leave. She needed to have her moment at ground zero to honor Dave, to read her letter to him and to leave the toy taxi by the side of the memorial.

  By the time it was the group’s turn to journey down the long ramp to the footprint, Tania had regained her composure. The sun’s rays flooded the towers’ imprints, and the still water of the memorial shimmered like a crystal curtain. This was the place of the death of her dreams, and she walked haltingly toward it. Tania watched as others dropped colored roses into the reflecting pool and inscribed dedications on its wooden frame. A moment passed, and she pulled the letter from her pocket. The paper trembled in her hand. As the others looked on, she read aloud.

  “Dear Dave. I will never stop crying for you. I can’t breathe without you. Every single day I think of you. I love you.”

  When she finished, she tossed the letter into the water.

  As the others walked back toward the ramp leading out of the hollow, Tania asked Angelo to stay behind with her. They were standing quietly a few feet from the pool, and she opened her purse and took out a photograph of a beautiful young couple in a tropical setting with turquoise water and palm trees.

  “Look at this. This was us,” Tania said, searching Angelo’s eyes for a reaction.

  The photograph showed a much thinner woman, looking lovingly at the handsome young man standing beside her. Angelo thought he understood the plight of the survivors, having seen the aftermath of the massacre with his own eyes, and maybe he did understand the others and what they were going through. But Tania’s burden was so much more. She seemed to know his thoughts as he stood there, staring at the photograph, choking back tears while searching for the right words that just wouldn’t come.

  “Yes, that was me,” Tania said finally, her voice faint and unsure, her eyes searching for acceptance.

  “Look what this has done to me.”

  They held each other, and he wept with her.

  At 12:36 p.m. the name of David was read. Linda and Elia looked at each other knowingly. Tania had told only the people closest to her Dave’s last name. Now they looked around for her.

  Tania was already gone.

  A few weeks later, seemingly recovered from the trauma brought on by the anniversary, Tania remembered her husband in her own special way. In a letter to the survivors, she wrote:

  Hi all,

  Today would have been my 4th wedding anniversary. I usually have a private ceremony, and it’s a day that brings me closer to Dave. However, at a recent tour for the Tribute Center, I talked about how the WTC was a special place for me because Dave and I met there and got engaged at Windows on the World restaurant. I also mentioned that our wedding was going to be Oct. 12. Well, today I went to a focus group session for Tribute, and everyone there remembered and made it so special for me. I even had a card from someone from Tribute when I got home. It really touched my heart. One of the questions we were asked at the focus group was how the experience of being a Tribute docent has impacted our lives. We all said how much of a gift it was, and although it is hard at times, it really takes you a step forward in healing.

  Tania

  A STRANGER

  For many survivors, the first step to deliverance from the mental maelstrom of 9/11 was still the online forum. It was certainly Jim Jenca’s salvation. An ex-marine from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Jenca was the married father of two, the kind of a guy with a hard-boiled exterior and a mushy heart. Fiercely loyal to his country, he had joined the marines in 1980, not long after a mob of Islamic students and militants swarmed the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. He felt it was his patriotic duty. Jenca was completing his thirteenth year as a security manager for the Madison Avenue banking firm Credit Suisse First Boston when the towers were attacked.

  His pager went off, and he had rushed to the site to help get his people out of the company’s branch office there. He had headed down to the World Trade Center’s underground command center but decided to turn back after discovering that he couldn’t make telephone contact with anyone there. Jenca had just left the buildings when the first tower collapsed above him. As he ran for his life, he was knocked down and trampled by others fleeing from the buildings. Three strangers risked their lives by stopping to pick him up. But in his own haste to get away, Jenca ran past an elderly woman hobbling with a cane. He had never forgiven himself for not helping her. More than four years later, he was still questioning why he, a former leatherneck, hadn’t had the guts to do for the old woman what the strangers did for him. The answer was that his inaction had nothing to do with courage. He was the victim of his own hardwired human survival instinct. Still, his survivor’s guilt was eating him alive.

  After September 11, Jenca changed from a fun-loving optimist who everyone wanted to be around into a brooding man with a short fuse and recurring thoughts of suicide. He had lost friends in the towers, and he was pretty sure that the woman with the cane hadn’t made it out either. Rather than be grateful to be alive, he blamed himself for surviving. Jenca couldn’t work, and he slogged through every day, mad at the world, alienating his family and friends. He sobbed at sad television commercials, and he snapped at his kids for every little thing. Inside, he felt utterly worthless. He knew he was in trouble, but he didn’t dare admit it because marines don’t fall apart.

  It was only after he’d confessed to his wife on one particularly bad night that he felt everyone would be better off without him that he was forced to get help. Lisa Jen
ca was a nurse, and she and one of her hospital coworkers diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He exhibited all of the classic symptoms. Jim did see a psychologist for a while after that. He pretended to be healing, but he continued to have dark thoughts. If that was what his life was going to be, he didn’t want any part of it.

  Then, late one night while his family was sleeping, he was searching the Internet for anything that could help him to understand what was happening and stumbled on the Survivors’ Network forum. He joined that very night as one of the first members, and Tania welcomed him to the group. He truly believed that the camaraderie he found there saved his life. Like everyone else who met her, Tania inspired Jenca. That she had triumphed over such adversity meant it was possible that he could reclaim his life too. There were many times when he was feeling low that he would log onto the forum and gather strength from her posts. Especially in the beginning, Tania had gone out of her way to encourage him. Some days she spent hours talking him through an emotional collapse, and he had come to depend on her more than he did his own wife. When he finally met her, during the inaugural visit to ground zero, he felt as if he were in the presence of a saint.

  The forum and the people who were part of it became as essential to Jenca’s existence as the blood coursing through his veins. Every time he had a setback and thought about dying, he found someone there who understood the profound ache in his heart. It was that solidarity with the other survivors that got him through each day. But after nearly three years of pouring out his heart and developing the most intimate friendships of his life, things took a terrible turn.

  It all started shortly after the fourth anniversary, when Jenca posted politically charged commentary in the forum. The survivors, of course, were of varying political stripes, and they tried to stay away from discussions about politics. Jenca was always being called out for his veiled pro-Bush, pro-war postings, but then all would be forgiven, and the discussions in the forum would go on as usual. That October, he posted a treatise that a friend with similar political leanings had passed along to him.

  Under the subject line “Things that make you think a little,” the piece was a long recitation on war and the military and read in part: “In the years since terrorists attacked us, President Bush has liberated two countries, crushed the Taliban, crippled al-Qaeda, put nuclear inspectors in Libya, Iran, and North Korea without firing a shot, and captured a terrorist who slaughtered 300,000 of his own people. The Democrats are complaining about how long the war is taking. But it took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound.” The last comment referred to the government’s fifty day siege of the religious sect’s complex near Waco, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of scores of followers and their children, and four FBI agents.

  The second part of the discourse was of an exchange between Ohio senator John Glenn, a former marine pilot and astronaut, and his opponent Howard Metzenbaum during a 1974 Democratic primary. The story went that Metzenbaum, who had a business background, attempted to undermine Glenn’s credentials during a debate by saying that he had “never worked for a living.” Glenn volleyed back with a response that many believe won him the election. The senator challenged his opponent to go to a veteran’s hospital and “look at those men with mangled bodies in the eyes and tell them they didn’t hold a job.”

  Jenca prefaced the post with a note that said:

  All,

  I am sorry, but I feel I need to pass this on. I know this is political in nature, however, it is fact. In my heart I know we, as Americans, need to unite. I am prepared to take all of the penalty flags that can be thrown by everyone.

  Jim

  Some of the other survivors raised objections to the political nature of the post, and Tania was beside herself when she read it. She called Jenca and reminded him that she and she alone ran the forum and that she had the power to accept or reject anyone who wanted to use it. His posting was an egregious violation of the forum rules, she said, and he was no longer welcome there. She was throwing him out.

  Jenca was stunned. He fought back with evidence of past posts from others that were of a political nature, including some from Gerry Bogacz and one from Tania herself, just before the 2004 presidential election, when she took an online poll of the survivors, asking them to reveal what their votes would be. When Jenca said he was backing Bush, she responded with a terse rebuke, saying that she was disappointed in him and adding that he obviously wasn’t as smart as she had once thought he was. Her attitude toward him began to change after that. She was dismissive and often ignored him when both were on the forum.

  Jenca didn’t know it, but Tania had begun telling other survivors that she suspected he was a fraud; that he wasn’t a survivor at all and probably wasn’t anywhere near the towers on that day. She had made such accusations before, and those people had gone away. One woman claimed that she was in her mail truck when the towers crashed around her. Tania told everyone her story didn’t add up. Another said she was near the Pentagon in a tour bus and had witnessed the plane diving into the building. Tania questioned her story as well.

  A third, Lisa Fenger, was in town for a meeting and witnessed the disaster from a boardroom in an office building on Fiftieth Street and Broadway. Fenger was so traumatized by what she saw that she ended up joining the network and made a point of attending survivors’ functions whenever she was in the city for business. She walked the Tunnel to Towers 5K benefit run with Tania by her side. On that particular day, Tania was wearing a T-shirt with Dave’s picture, which Lisa recognized as one of her colleagues from Deloitte. She had heard Tania talk about her husband Dave but never realized it was the Dave she’d known.

  “I had no idea Dave and Dave was the same guy,” she wrote Tania in an email after the event. “Wow, the only person that my company lost turns out to be your husband. How bizarre.” Tania never answered the email and never spoke about it. When Lisa mentioned the coincidence the next time she saw her, Tania retorted, “I can’t talk about this. It’s too painful. And I’m too fragile.” Soon after that, Tania began a campaign to get rid of Lisa and told her she was no longer welcome in the group.

  So when trouble began with the John Glenn posting, even though Jenca had been seen on film running from the towers, many of the survivors were already questioning whether he was, indeed, an impostor. Tania said she could spot a fake a mile away.

  The emails between Tania and Jenca bounced back and forth as he attempted to defend his action, and she continued to refuse to restore his membership. “I feel you have abused your power as a moderator, and I will do my best to get back to the group,” he wrote. “I feel that you have discriminated against me due to my political beliefs, and I will see if there is a course of action I can take. I feel that I belong there and am quite sad about this whole thing. You have just crushed my every inner self with what you did.”

  The more he pushed, the more Tania resisted, even when he appealed to her ego. “No matter what the end result, you will always be an awesome person in my mind,” he wrote. “You were a true inspiration to me and still are. I have been so down at times with regard to 9/11, where I had thought that I could not go on and considered doing something very stupid. There were a couple of things that came to my mind and stopped me. They were my family and you. I know what you went through, and if you can go on, that gave me the strength to go on.”

  Tania wouldn’t budge. She had removed him from the group, she said, because he had broken the rules. And the decision hadn’t been hers alone. “I consulted with the others before I did it,” she wrote. She wouldn’t say who the others were.

  Jenca emailed some of the other members he felt closest to, telling them that Tania had banned him from the group. “I am really devastated by this,” he wrote one survivor. “I guess I am all alone, since no one will take my side.” He was right about that. No one was going to go against Tania. Even the survivors who came to Jenca’s defense tiptoed around her, su
ggesting to her that he needed the help and should be allowed back. Tania was unmoved. When she got wind of his complaints to the others, she refused to respond to any more of his communiqués.

  After a week of watching his lifeline slip away and being ignored by Tania, Jenca saw her online and pleaded with her to be able to return to the group. In a series of instant messages, he reminded her about their heart-to-heart talks in the past and of all of the times he had said he respected and admired her. He meant that, he said. But he had never intended to offend her with his political posting or his emails telling the others about his expulsion. He had just needed some time to cool off to understand the error of his ways, he explained. Now he wanted to come back.

  Tania’s response was immediate but curt. She would reinstate him, she said, if he promised to respect the others and abide by the rules of the forum. “And an apology would help,” she wrote.

  Jenca said he was sorry and that he would do his best to follow the rules. “When do I get reinstated?” he asked. “When I cool off,” she replied.