The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  Tania responded within minutes.

  “Hey, Gerry,” she wrote. “You know what, I think you’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion. I haven’t insulted you, I haven’t been disrespectful, I haven’t put a condition on your return. I love you as my friend and always will. I’m sorry you’re getting stuck on something like this after all we’ve been through and with the potential we have to do great things.”

  The Survivors’ Network board elections were scheduled to take place two weeks later, on October 25. The night before the vote, Tania telephoned Bogacz at home. She was calling him out of friendship, she said. There was no need for him to be at the meeting.

  “Please don’t come,” she said.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” he asked. “That I’m not going to be reelected?”

  Later that night, Tania composed an email to board members Peter Miller and Richard Zimbler.

  “Attached is the revised agenda and ballot,” she wrote. “Peter, remember that mathematically you need to give everyone a vote except for Patrick and Gerry for a desired outcome.” The message was clear. The makeup of the board hinged on Peter Miller’s vote, and the “desired outcome” was that Gerry Bogacz disappear.

  The meeting convened at six thirty in the organization’s new meeting space at 22 Cortlandt Street. Bogacz ignored Tania’s advice and arrived early. Everyone marked his or her ballots, and Tania and Linda counted each vote. Bogacz trembled as he waited for the outcome. These were the people with whom he had spent the last three years of his life. They had cared for one another and loved one another, and he needed them. He felt dizzy and sick to his stomach as he waited for the count to end. Finally, Tania read the names of the winners. He hadn’t made the cut.

  Embarrassed and ashamed, Bogacz left the building without a word. But outside, waiting for the bus home to the Bronx, he wiped away a torrent of tears. The rejection of these people, who had meant as much to him as family, felt like a slam to the gut. What had he done that was terrible enough for everyone to turn against him that way? One of the unspoken rules of survivorship was that you went out of your way never to hurt a fellow survivor. They were all in the throes of trauma. Their injuries were grave and deep, and you never knew what might trigger those festering wounds.

  On the bus ride, he remembered other times, either when someone in the group hadn’t been doing his or her share, or needed to be replaced on a committee, and Janice had always been dispatched to soften the blow. The campaign to expel him felt deliberate and mean-spirited. It hadn’t been some inadvertent, ill-thought-out reaction to something he’d said or done. It had been calculated and ruthless. And Tania. He would have never thought her capable of such deceit. How could he have been so wrong? He cried all the way home.

  Inside the Cortlandt meeting room, the mood was somber. How had it come to this? some of the board members wondered. What had begun as a philosophical disagreement over the mission of the network spun into an ugly battle of wills. At the same time, there was a sense of relief that Bogacz was gone. It was time to move forward.

  THROUGH THE LENS

  Filming for a survivors’ documentary on Tania and the survivors began in earnest that fall. She had been after Angelo for months to do the project. At first he balked. He had already done a film about September 11, and he didn’t think he had another one in him. The two had developed an intense bond since training together for the docent program. Their friendship was deep and comfortable. Tania seemed to appreciate that she didn’t have to be a survivor when they were together. She got to be just Tania.

  There were days that she would arrive at Angelo’s Manhattan apartment and just lounge around with him and his partner, Gabriel. They took in movies and talked books. She had been their guest at the screening of Angelo’s first feature documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier that year. The Heart of Steel was a film about the civilians who volunteered at ground zero in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack, as he did, and she was moved by it. Soon after that, she’d begun pushing for a survivors’ story. Throughout the spring and summer, Angelo stood his ground. He didn’t want to do it. But Tania was as persistent as she was accustomed to getting her way, and, after the filmmaker viewed the footage from the fifth anniversary and saw how powerful it was, he finally gave in.

  Once she got him to agree, though, Tania was almost impossible to pin down for an on-camera interview. She always had some excuse. “Why do you want to focus on me?” she would ask. “Why don’t you film the other survivors?” For weeks, Angelo shot around her, filming the others telling their stories. He pursued her relentlessly, but she was an artful dodger. Even when he got her to agree to an interview, she always came up with a last-minute excuse about another pressing commitment and cancelled. Finally, he asked Linda to intervene on his behalf, and the filming was arranged.

  Tania’s first interview was shot in a church rectory downtown. She was a reluctant subject, but showing up was her mea culpa for having been so wily in the preceding days. She was remarkably composed as she talked about what her life was like and of moving forward. The past five years had been about working through her grief, she said. Over time, she said, “it had transformed into a drive. I was driven. For these five years, I’ve been working nonstop. I’ve been working at my job, I’ve been working at the Survivors’ Network, for Dave’s Foundation, for the widows’ group. I turned it into action.” The fifth anniversary had been a milestone in her healing. She was feeling better than she had since the attack, and she had been thinking a lot about moving to California to get far away from her memories of 9/11 and start over. “But I know I can never move away,” she said.

  The last interview took place on September 12 at Tania’s apartment. She had ordered in donuts and coffee. She sat in front of the camera and talked about her Hawaiian wedding and how when she and Dave had gotten back to New York, a group of family and friends wearing Hawaiian shirts surprised them with a cake with an erupting volcano. They had never filed their marriage certificate because they were planning for the formal ceremony, and there hadn’t seemed to be any rush. After Dave died, she said, a judge married them posthumously. “It was the saddest thing in the world, to become a widow, you know, like that,” she said. “It’s strange.”

  Tania was almost giddy when she talked about Dave. But when the subject changed to the day of the attack, her demeanor changed. She squirmed in her seat and groped for words. “The first thing I felt was the air sucked out of my lungs,” she said. “I . . . I . . . I was flying through the air. I remember very well the pain of hitting the wall. I knew I . . . I was going to die, and I was just praying it wouldn’t hurt. Then I passed out.”

  “What happened when you woke up?” Angelo asked gently.

  “I wanted it to be a dream,” she said, her voice helpless and childlike. “I wanted to find myself in my bed, but it wasn’t like that. I was feeling a lot of pain. My brain didn’t understand what was happening.”

  The smell in the sky lobby was overpowering, and she realized that her own skin was on fire, Tania said. “That’s when my brain caught up with my body.” She began stammering. She was reaching deep, pulling out memories so tender that Angelo felt almost guilty for bearing witness to her pain. He realized that she wasn’t talking to the camera anymore. She was reliving the worst day of her life with a trusted friend. This was a Tania that few people ever saw. For the next few minutes, she spoke pensively about her experience. She told her story with a quiet kind of grace. Her humanity and courage almost brought him to tears.

  “I just lied there,” she said. “So many thoughts going through my brain . . . And I was thinking about all these things. My family and my friends and my life. And I think I wanted to die at that moment, and I really thought those were the last moments of my life. And I was very angry. I was very angry because I never thought it would end that way, and I was angry that it was going to end there and at that moment.”

  It was then that Welles Cr
owther appeared, she said quietly. “At some point, I heard him say, ‘I found the exit. Anyone who can walk, please follow me.’ I was scared; very, very scared. I could feel my heart pumping. I thought my chest was going to explode.” She hesitated. “And . . . and . . . and I think the problem was . . . the problem was that I had looked around, and I saw my friends . . . my friends . . . my coworkers . . .” Tania shook her head and jumped out of her seat. “Oh, I can’t do this!” she cried, running off camera.

  Angelo comforted Tania, and she said she was sorry. There would be other opportunities for filming, but she was too overwrought to continue that day. He stayed until she recovered, then hugged her and went home.

  That night, he lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering why God allowed good people to suffer.

  IN MEMORIAM

  The ride from Manhattan to Nyack was fraught with tension. Janice drove the car while Linda bore the brunt of Tania’s anxiety. That usually meant taking Tania’s jabs about her appearance or her intellect or anything else that was certain to sting. Their roles had become clear over the course of the friendship. Linda’s job was to be loyal and deferential. Tania seemed well aware of Linda’s dependence on the relationship, and she often exploited it by mocking or scolding her. Linda rarely pushed back. The suggestion that she wasn’t quite good enough only drove her to try harder to please. The more devoted she was, the more Tania demanded.

  For days, Tania had been working herself into a dither about speaking at Alison and Jeff Crowther’s annual memorial concert for their son, Welles. She growled at Linda all the way there. She always said she loathed the spotlight and never sought it, that her role was to be quietly supportive of the other survivors. But the Crowthers had asked her to say a few words at the memorial, and she had no choice but to agree. How do you refuse the parents of the man who saved your life? She couldn’t, and she’d painted herself into a corner.

  Linda and Janice did what they always did when Tania was in a dither. They tried to get her mind off whatever was distressing her. Sometimes joking and cajoling worked for a little while. Now Tania seemed irritated by the banter. She stared at the speech in her hand and shook her head from side to side.

  “I can’t do it,” she said. “You’ll have to read the speech for me.”

  Tania went back and forth during the whole car ride. She couldn’t do it. Yes, she would do it. No, she wouldn’t; Linda could.

  Linda tried to humor her. “No, Tania,” she said. “You’ll read it, and you’ll be fine.”

  Days earlier, Tania had called Linda in a panic to say that she was sitting at her computer trying to compose her speech, and the words just wouldn’t come. Linda had come to the rescue again. She took a train from Hoboken to Manhattan and went to Tania’s apartment, where they sat down together and composed the speech. Now Tania wanted her to deliver it, too. The Concert for Remembrance was held at the Grace Episcopal Church in Nyack, a hauntingly beautiful old English Gothic structure made of stone and stained glass. The carved oak pews were full with hundreds of guests. Tania sat in the third row, flanked by Linda and Janice, just behind Ling Young and Judy Wein, the two other women who had stories of being saved by the young man wearing the red bandanna.

  Before the musicians took their places, the Crowthers stood to dedicate a paschal candle sculpture of a phoenix rising from the ashes of the towers, which they’d commissioned as a tribute to their son.

  “Our thoughts were how fitting to use the phoenix bird as a symbol,” Jeff Crowther said, struggling for composure. “A symbol of rebirth. Rising from the ashes. Rising from a piece of steel that was once a part of the World Trade Center.”

  Tania fanned herself with the program and fidgeted in her seat. “I can’t do it,” she whispered to Linda. “I can’t.”

  As self-assured and composed as she usually was, she had suffered with stage fright all of her life, she told friends. Sometimes she was able to control it. Other times her dry mouth and shaking hands took control. She was a pro at giving presentations for work, but large crowds sent her into a tailspin.

  Linda rubbed her back and reassured her. “Tania, you can do this,” she said. “You must do this.”

  The first sonata tinkled sweetly, but neither the strum of a harp nor the airy warble of a flute calmed Tania. Her chest heaved with heavy breaths, and she fanned harder. Linda finally gave in. She couldn’t stand to see her friend suffer so. She took Tania’s speech from the pew and began to study it. Tania looked at her, her eyes popping with expectation. Linda simply nodded, and Tania sighed deeply. Everyone could see the relief on her face.

  Ling Young was the first of the survivors to speak that afternoon. Her daughter had urged her to prepare something, she said, but she wanted to speak from the heart. Ling was one of the first people from the sky lobby that Welles had helped that day. She had suffered third-degree burns over 40 percent of her body and was lying in the sky lobby when he found her. He had shown her to the stairwell and then led her down to the sixty-first floor, where the lights were on and the air was clear, and she could proceed safely the rest of the way down without him. Her story was strikingly similar to Tania’s.

  “When my building was struck, I was on the seventy-eighth floor,” she said, recalling that day. “There was no one alive except a couple of us. We didn’t know where to go. You look around, and there’s no place to go. So we just kind of decided to wait it out to be rescued. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, this young man with a T-shirt said, ‘I found the stairs. Come with me.’ And he said it with such strong command, I followed him.”

  She ended by thanking his parents for “raising a kid with such courage.”

  The air in the sanctuary was heavy with emotion. Tania’s eyes filled up, and both Linda and Janice leaned in to comfort her. Tania had told Linda that she’d read about Young, and, since only a handful of people from the sky lobby had survived, she suspected they’d crossed paths that day, but they’d never formally met. Nor had she ever met Judy Wein, who had also been in the sky lobby. She had suffered a broken arm, cracked ribs, and a punctured lung and lost her boss, who was standing right next to her. Just like Tania’s coworker, Christine. Still fragile from her experience, Wein had elected for her husband to speak for her, and his words were stirring.

  “I was lucky to find my wife in a hospital that day,” he said. “She had just come out of surgery, and she could hardly speak, but she wanted to tell me what happened. She told me she was in the sky lobby when the plane crashed into the building and everybody went flying. The walls came down, and bodies were torn into parts. Nobody knew what to do. Nobody knew where to go. Nobody was ready for what happened. Judy was watching, and waiting for the worst, when out of the darkness came a young man wearing a red bandanna. And he knew what to do. And he knew where to go. And he was ready.”

  And then it was Tania’s turn. Jeff Crowther introduced her.

  “Alison and I are really honored that we were able to meet, this past winter, a delightful person, a wonderful young woman, who was also trapped on the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby in the south tower,” he said, his voice cracking. “She was on that seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby, and she’s here with us, thank God.”

  As the audience applauded, Linda and Tania walked to the altar. Tania stood off to the side with Jeff Crowther, who placed a hand protectively on her back, and Linda took her place at the lectern.

  “Hi, I’m Linda and I’m going to ask Welles for some strength here because I’m going to be the one reading what Tania wrote, and it’s an honor to be up here because I have an incredible friend now thanks to him,” she said.

  Then, reading from Tania’s script, she delivered the most rousing address of the service:

  When Alison and Jeff asked me to speak today, I sat down and stared at a blank screen, and I cried, unable to find the right words to say. What exactly do you say to the family of the man who saved your life and gave his in the process? But then I thought about what Welles would
do if our roles were reversed and he was asked to do this for me. This is what gave me the strength to be here today.

  On September 11, I was on the ninety-sixth floor of the south tower. I waited to get on an express elevator. As we waited, United Airlines 175 headed toward the south tower. The impact was brutal, and I found myself flying through the air, and I eventually crashed against a marble wall. When I came to, my back and my arm were on fire, and all I could do was hope it would be over very soon.

  A young man named Welles had also survived the impact, and he took charge. He came to me and started patting my back. At first I was angry because he was hurting me, and then I understood he was actually helping me. In a very calm voice, he told me to stay awake. To me he was a stranger, but his calm made me calm. When I turned my head toward him, I saw a red scarf over his face. I did what he told me, and I stayed awake despite the pain, smoke, and the shock.

  Months after September 11, my parents read the story in USA Today about a man who had saved many lives in the sky lobby of the south tower. They were immediately drawn to the story when they read this man wore a bandanna. Could this be the same man that helped their daughter? Even after five years, I still carry the burden of being alive when so many others lives were taken from us—including that of my husband, Dave. I am still here, and I’m trying to find a purpose for being here.

  In my family, we have a tradition at Christmas. Each year we tell the children in our family stories drawn from our lives during the past year. The story they want to hear, year after year, is the story of the man with the red bandanna, whose courage stood taller than the twin towers themselves. I like to tell them that on the day the buildings burned down, Welles stood up to the heavens. By sharing it with them year after year, I know they will never forget it, and the message will carry on to their own children, the children of tomorrow, ensuring Welles’s story will live on forever.