The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  “Well, today is October 18. How long will it take?”

  “Well, you’ve been bitching for a whole week. I can take that long too, right? . . . Now it’s me that needs some time.”

  Jenca could hardly believe that the same sweet woman who had welcomed him to the forum almost three years earlier could be so callous now. She knew how fragile he’d been and still was. He had revealed to her his most intimate thoughts, even those about suicide at his lowest points. She knew that he believed he needed the group to survive, but she was playing a cat and mouse game about his coming back.

  “Who is this woman?” he wondered. She wasn’t the Tania he knew. She was a stranger.

  Jenca checked his messages every day for permission to return to the forum. He could feel himself withering without his survivor friends.

  Finally, he received an email saying he was back in.

  It was signed, “Tania Head.”

  PART 5

  2006

  MEETING THE CROWTHERS

  The voice on the other end of the phone babbled with excitement. Alison Crowther was at home in the New York City suburb of Upper Nyack. The caller was Kimberly Grieger, a friend from the Tribute Center.

  “Alison,” she said, “I think I met someone else Welles saved.”

  Alison’s son, Welles, a twenty-four-year-old equities trader, was working on the one hundred fourth floor of the south tower when the plane flew into the building. He was a hero that day, and he had become a legend in death. Welles Remy Crowther, Nyack High School honors student, Boston College class of ’99, volunteer firefighter, athlete, brother, son. For all that he had been in his tragically brief life, for the longest time he was known only as “the man with the red bandanna.”

  Welles was Alison and Jeff Crowther’s only son. At first they knew very little about the day he died. Welles had gone to work that morning as usual. He called both of his parents to say the towers had been struck and that he was okay and on his way out of his building. He had made it down to the ground level of the south tower before it collapsed. His body was found six months later, along with the bodies of a group of New York City firefighters.

  That was enough information to satisfy Jeff Crowther. But Alison needed to know more about their son’s final moments. She wanted some sense of how Welles had died. Why he died. For months after the attack, she spent every day scanning newspaper articles and television shows for clues. In May 2002, buried in a New York Times story about the 102 minutes between the first plane hitting and the second tower falling, she found the lead that would give her answers:

  A mysterious man appeared at one point, his mouth and nose covered with a red handkerchief. He was looking for a fire extinguisher. As Judy Wein recalls, he pointed to the stairs and made an announcement that saved lives: Anyone who can walk, get up and walk now. Anyone who can perhaps help others, find someone who needs help and then head down.

  In groups of two and three, the survivors struggled to the stairs. A few minutes behind this group was Ling Young, who also survived the impact in the sky lobby. She, too, said she had been steered by the man in the red bandanna, hearing him call out, “This way to the stairs.” He trailed her down the stairs. Ms. Young said she soon noticed that he was carrying a woman on his back. Once they reached clearer air, he put her down and went back up.

  Alison gasped. That mystery man could only have been her Welles. He had carried a red bandanna in his pocket every day since he was eight years old. On the Sunday before the attack, he’d met his parents in Soho for dinner. He’d pulled out his wallet, and it was wrapped in the red bandanna. “Oh my God!” Alison cried. “It has to be him. I just know that was Welles.”

  Alison tracked down the women in the story and sent them a photograph of her son. Both said that, yes, he was the man wearing the red bandanna; the man who had given his life to save theirs and others. The Crowthers had since formed close ties with both Ling Young and Judy Wein.

  Now, four years later, they were learning about a third person their son had saved.

  The woman’s name was Tania, Grieger said. She’d met her in the docent program and watched her give a tour. When she’d told her personal account, toward the end of her tour, she had said that a man wearing a red bandanna rescued her. He had snuffed out her burning clothing, led her down to safety, and then headed back upstairs to help more people. She called him her guardian angel.

  “I’d like to meet her,” Alison said.

  Grieger promised to arrange a meeting. She called back a few days later to say that Tania had demurred because she’d had sticky experiences with family members of people who died in the towers. They always wanted to know too much about what she saw, and she didn’t feel comfortable giving them those awful details.

  Greiger tried again a few months later, and in February 2006 she called Alison to say that Tania had reconsidered. She would meet them provided that any such meeting would be completely private. The Crowthers were private people and rarely discussed September 11 with anyone but their very closest confidantes. Of course they would keep the meeting confidential, Alison promised. They weren’t about to alert the media or anyone else. They simply wanted to know whatever she could tell them about their beloved son, Welles, on the last day of his life.

  A date was chosen for later that month, and the Crowthers arranged for a private dining room at the Princeton Club on West Forty-Third Street in the city. Tania invited Janice along for support. Tania was petrified. On the cab ride over, she had worked herself into a panic. She wasn’t going to say much during the dinner, she told Janice. She was just going to listen. Everyone knew that she didn’t like talking with family members about her experience. It was too painful all around. They would have to respect her silence.

  Janice did what she could to pacify Tania. “Their son saved your life,” she said. “It’s a gift that you can meet them and they can meet you. If my son had died, I would be thrilled to hear whatever you had to say.”

  The Crowthers were kind people. When Tania walked into the club, they embraced her as if she were a long-lost relative. She presented them with a box of expensive chocolates she’d picked up on the way. The candy in the box rattled along with her shaking hands. Alison felt for her. She certainly didn’t want to do anything to add to this poor woman’s burden. The private dining room was serene. For the first hour or so, the Crowthers took turns sharing stories about Welles. How he’d always doted on his sisters, Honor and Paige, and how, as a boy, he had loved fishing with his grandfather. They talked about their son’s pride in playing varsity lacrosse in college and his dream of becoming a full-time firefighter. Alison tried to be stoic, but Jeff could barely get through a story without his lip quivering.

  Tania listened quietly. The man who had saved her life sounded a lot like the man she married, she said.

  “Now I’ll tell you my story.”

  She started with getting to work on that morning and then quickly made her way to the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby. That’s where she encountered Welles. She had given up any hope of surviving when the stranger with the red kerchief over his mouth appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere. She heard him first, she said. He was shouting out general instructions, just as the Times had said in its story “102 Minutes.” “To anyone who can hear me, anyone who can walk, I know the way out. If you can help someone else, help. There are people here you cannot help anymore, so don’t try.” When she saw him, finally, he was dressed only in pants and a T-shirt, but she wondered if he was a firefighter. First, he gingerly patted out the fire on her burning jacket, and then, as she cried out in pain, he explained that he was going to show her the way out. His voice was strong and self-assured, as soothing as the sound of ocean waves lapping on the sand. He had placed his hand gently on her arm and guided her to the exit. They started down, and he’d encouraged her with every step. She could make it, he said. If she kept her head and kept walking, soon she would be safe. They were a dozen or so flights down when the
air cleared, and he took the bandanna away from his face. She had gotten a good look at him then. It was Welles. Definitely Welles. He promised she would be safe. The danger was behind her. She remembered that as he turned to go back up the stairs, he looked back at her, and she was struck by the kindness of his eyes.

  “You’ll be okay now,” he said. “Just keep going down. I have to go back up and help other people.”

  Tania’s telling of the story had been uncharacteristically brief; more of a recitation than a recollection, but everyone was in tears by the time she finished. For Alison, who was a violinist, hearing about her son and his incredible courage was as beautiful as listening to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos played on a Stradivarius. She was spellbound and filled with deep emotion. Welles’s last hour would be his legacy, she thought. Had it not been for her wonderful, brave boy, who knows how many others would have died?

  The hour was late. As everyone stood to leave, they all embraced. Alison handed Tania a red bandanna. If it was possible that she could feel any closer to her son than she already had, she said, Tania had made it so. They promised to stay in touch. In fact, Alison said, every September they hosted a memorial concert for Welles. Judy Wein and Ling Young always attended. Perhaps this year Tania would come too? Tania said, yes, it would be an honor. The group began to part, and Tania hesitated, as if she were mulling over something. There was one more thing, she said after a moment. She had kept her burned jacket all these years because it was one of the last things that the man who saved her life touched and she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. They could have it if they wished, she said.

  The Crowthers were touched by the gesture, but they said, no, they wanted to remember Welles in life. Besides, she had already given them the best gift of all. She had given them a last glorious glimpse of their hero son. For that, they said, they would be indebted to her for the rest of their lives.

  The cab ride home was quiet. Tania dropped off Janice at Penn Station for the train back to Long Island before heading home. There was really nothing left to say.

  As the cab pulled away from the curb, Janice looked through the glass at Tania. She had never seen her friend look so sad.

  BETRAYAL

  It was early that summer when Gerry Bogacz got the first inkling that things in the Survivors’ Network were not as they seemed. He and Tania were manning a booth for the group at a New York City street fair. Gerry enjoyed Tania’s company, and he had been looking forward to the day. In the heat of the morning, they’d guzzled bottles of water and greeted people and caught up, as friends do. But as the day wore on, and the crowd thinned, the conversation took a startling twist.

  The two had been discussing future plans for the network, when Tania began talking about how dissatisfied the other board members were with the way things were going. Speaking bluntly, she said that they were questioning his performance as cochair. Everyone appreciated that he’d founded the group, but sometimes they felt as if they were stuck on a rudderless ship and drifting with no real direction. Bogacz was wordless as she ran down a laundry list of complaints. Some board members were disappointed that he wasn’t pushing harder to save the Survivors’ Stairway. Others thought that he hadn’t been a strong enough voice as their representative on the 9/11 memorial committee. And he hadn’t won many fans when he appealed to the board to open a dialogue with the local Muslim community, and chastised members for posting anti-Muslim rants on the forum. He should have known that it was still too early, and feelings were still too raw, to try to force that kind of amnesty. There were so many things to say, Tania said. He had his finger in too many pies, and he wasn’t giving the network the attention it deserved. He delegated too much. He was too preoccupied. Too acquiescent. Too laid-back.

  Of course, she had defended him on every point, because that’s what cochairs did for each other. But as much as she cared for him personally, she said, she had to say that some of the criticism seemed fair. She was telling him these things only because she didn’t want to see him blindsided. The job he did was fine for what the network started out as: a small peer support group. But now they had hundreds of members and lofty goals, and no one was confident that he could get them where they wanted to go.

  Was it the message or the messenger that hurt him more? Bogacz wasn’t sure. Tania basically said that the people he had come to care so deeply for were losing faith in him, that they no longer trusted in his leadership, and she’d said it with the indifference of a dissatisfied boss preparing to fire a negligent employee. He returned home that afternoon feeling as if he had lost his best friends, and he didn’t know why. It had been he who, a year after the attack, suggested that something needed to be done to bring the survivors out of their shell-shocked cocoons. Having lived through both attacks on the towers and experiencing for himself the consequences of surviving such a catastrophic event, he had recognized that they needed one another if there was any hope of healing, and he had pulled the group together believing that survivors, and survivors alone, were one another’s own best chance for recovery. The network had come a long way from those early days, and he had thought he was at least a part of that success. Obviously, he was the only one who did. Now he sat at his kitchen table wondering, “Where the hell did I go wrong?”

  How do you act as though nothing has changed when everything you believed to be true apparently wasn’t? Bogacz began to look at the other board members with a doubting eye. He had opened his soul to these people. He’d cried with them and divulged to them his most closeted thoughts and fears. Now he found himself questioning the loyalty even of those with whom he had been the closest. If they had been so disappointed with his leadership, or so angry at his political beliefs, why hadn’t any of them said something before it became a them-versus-him fight?

  Bogacz began to perceive certain slights from some members. Decisions were being made without his input. Meetings were being held without his knowledge. In late July he was called to a special meeting of the board. It was a venting session, with Tania leading the discussion and the others confirming everything she had told him the month before. They issued him an ultimatum: lead, follow, or get out of the way.

  Bogacz felt so betrayed. Getting up to leave, he said he was taking a leave of absence, and no one tried to dissuade him. He stayed away for the rest of that month and all of August, and, when he finally returned, he announced that he would remain on the board but was relinquishing his position as cochair. The board voted to eliminate the cochair position altogether, and Tania was elected president.

  Whatever fears Bogacz had about being frozen out of the group were reinforced at the survivors’ tree-planting ceremony on September 10, the day before the fifth anniversary commemoration. Two years earlier, the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing presented the Survivors’ Network with a cutting from their own Survivor Tree, an American elm that had been badly damaged but somehow survived the explosion outside the Murrah Federal Building. The sapling was kept in a New York City Parks Commission greenhouse for two years, and it had grown into a healthy six-foot-tall tree, ready for a home. Tania had arranged for it to be planted in the Living Memorial Grove, across the street from city hall, next to five trees from the World Trade Center Plaza. A hundred or so people attended the ceremony, and most of the WTCSN board was there: Richard Zimbler, Peter Miller, Elia Zedeño, Lori Mogol, and Linda and Janice, who were hovering around Tania. Both Tania and Linda attempted to get Bogacz to participate in the planting, but he stood far away from the others, feeling like an outcast. When some of the others wondered aloud why he wouldn’t join them, Tania responded by grimacing. “Oh, poor Gerry,” she said mockingly. “Look at him back there sulking.”

  The anniversary was different for the survivors that year. Five years had passed, and they were stronger and more alive. For the first time, they planned a schedule of events for the days leading up to the memorial service. There were panel discussions, concerts, and an art show, and, on the
eve of the anniversary, Tania hosted a barbecue on her terrace. She had recruited Angelo to film the survivors at the ground zero ceremony, and he’d captured many of the most poignant moments of the service. In the hours of footage, all that is missing is Bogacz. For the first time, he’d chosen to spend the anniversary with his work colleagues. They didn’t even go to the site but instead paid their respects from across the street in Zuccotti Park.

  He kept a low profile after that, quietly going about his work on 9/11-related issues that were important to him. One of those projects was a long-term health care plan not just for survivors but also for all people who had been impacted by the attack. He had been working with World Cares Center, another 9/11 service organization, the executive director of which had had a series of contentious run-ins with Tania and other Survivors’ Network board members. Tania blew a gasket when she heard. The board members issued an ultimatum to Bogacz: they didn’t want any further association whatsoever with World Cares.

  Bogacz, bristling, fired off an email to Tania saying that under her leadership, the group was becoming exactly what he hadn’t wanted it to be when he started it. Survivors had their own unique problems. They were damaged and needed special handling. That had been the purpose of forming the network, to address those individual needs. Instead it was becoming a political machine with backbiting and personal agendas. How could they be so arrogant and dictatorial, telling members who they could and could not associate with, and even throwing people out based on dissenting opinions and unfounded suspicions?

  “Why is it so difficult for [the board] to accept and incorporate differences of opinion?” he wrote. “Why is [the board] not opening meetings to all of the directors? When did we develop a cabal? When did we become so political that we stopped being a caring organization? . . . I am not in the mood to have [the network] become a purely political exercise. I am not in the mood to watch it dissolve into cliques. If it is to be that, good luck with it. I hope it doesn’t come around to bite you like it did me.”