The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  The gray sky gave way to pelting rain as hundreds of family members and survivors walked from the park, across the street to the place where the towers once stood, and down a long ramp to the reflecting pool, seven stories below ground level. Tania walked alone behind Linda, Elia, Janice, and the others in her group. Linda couldn’t help but think how destroyed her friend looked, slumped over and soaking wet, with her white blouse stuck to her and her short hair matted to her head. As people took turns dropping roses in the reflecting pool and moving on, Tania stood still, clutching her rose to her chest. She seemed to be somewhere else. Linda wondered where.

  By the end of the four-hour ceremony, the rain had slowed to a trickle. A knot of stragglers lingered as the trumpeters played “Taps.” Tania’s friends looked over at her. She looked beyond miserable. “What can I do?” Janice asked gently, walking up behind her. Tania swung around. “I can’t take this!” she cried, shoving her cell phone toward the clutch of survivors who remained. “They won’t leave me alone! The reporters! They just won’t leave me alone!” Janice stood there, stunned. She had thought that Tania was overcome with terrible memories and missing Dave. But she hadn’t even mentioned her husband. She was still worrying about the damn newspaper interview. The relentless pressure from the Times had obviously sent Tania into a perilous emotional spiral.

  “My God, Tania,” Janice said. “You don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. If you’re feeling that they’re harassing you, why don’t you call a lawyer? This way, you’ll know what your rights are. I’ll even go with you.”

  Tania’s face was red and blotchy, and her hands shook. “Leave me alone!” she shouted. “I’ll take care of this. Stop interfering! Just leave me alone.”

  “We’re only trying to help you,” Linda said, trying to get Tania to calm down.

  “I don’t need your help!” Tania fumed, pushing past Janice.

  The others looked on, bewildered. “What’s wrong with you?” Janice cried. “I’m trying to help you. Please, just let me help you.”

  “I said leave me alone!” Tania screamed. “All of you! Just leave me alone!”

  And then she was gone.

  As the survivors suffered through their anniversary with Tania, Angelo was sitting, of all places, in the Bob Barker Studios in Hollywood, California.

  “Angelo Guglielmo! Come on down! You’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right!” the announcer shouted over the loudspeakers. It was a quick appearance, and as he left the soundstage with his winnings—a birdbath—his cell phone rang. Gabriel was calling.

  “Angelo,” he said, “you need to come back to New York. Something is terribly wrong with Tania.”

  UNRAVELING

  Tania’s friends were tiring of her frantic calls about the Times story. The paper was out to get her, she said, and she didn’t understand why. It was David against Goliath. One of the largest news organizations in the world was going to write lies, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She passed around copies of the questions in Dunlap’s email. What was Dave’s last name? What was she doing on the ninety-sixth floor? What was her alma mater? Did she work for Merrill Lynch? How dare he question the veracity of her story!

  Her friends were puzzled.

  “Tania, why are you so upset?” Elia asked after reading Dunlap’s questions. “Everything he wants to know is verifiable. Get Dave’s parents to talk to him. Dave’s friends. Have Merrill Lynch verify that you work there. There is nothing to worry about.”

  Tania couldn’t be mollified. She dispatched Janice to the Times’s offices to appeal directly to the staff. Dunlap listened politely as Janice explained that Tania was going through hell and didn’t want them to write about her. “I don’t think it did any good,” she told Tania after she left the newspaper that day.

  Linda begged Tania to let her help. “Give me some evidence that I can bring to the Times,” she said. “Give me the name of the firefighter that carried you out that morning. The one that you were handed off to, that carried you out and threw you under that fire truck when the tower came down, right on West Street. You told me that story a million times. He can verify your story. Give me his name so I can bring it to the Times.”

  Tania refused.

  On Friday, September 21, she called Janice to say that she had made an appointment with a lawyer. Would she please come? That afternoon, Janice took the train from her home in Seaford, Long Island, and met Tania outside the attorney’s office on the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. She was surprised to see someone else—a person she had never seen before—with her. Tania introduced the woman as her mother. An obviously well-heeled woman who was neatly groomed and wearing a conservative business suit, she seemed to be shy and spoke broken English.

  Inside the office tower, the three women boarded the elevator. Tania giggled nervously.

  “I have a confession to make,” she said when the elevator doors closed.

  “What is it?” Janice asked.

  “I’m not a US citizen.”

  Janice looked at Tania, waiting for the punch line.

  “Don’t you understand?” Tania asked. She suddenly seemed like the old Tania. Sweet and funny and childlike.

  “Understand?” Janice asked.

  The reason that she had been avoiding the Times and didn’t want to speak to the reporter, Tania explained, was that she wasn’t a US citizen, and she feared the newspaper would reveal that in its story. She could lose her job or, worse yet, be deported if all of her papers weren’t in order. It took a minute for what Tania had said to register, but when it did, Janice started to laugh. It suddenly all made sense. The bizarre behavior of late. The growing anxiety every time the paper called. Tania had a secret, and she was afraid of what the Times would do with it.

  “That’s what all of this is about?” Janice cried. “That you’re not a US citizen? Oh, Tania! No one is going to care that you’re not a citizen.”

  Tania took a deep breath and smiled. Her mother shook her head up and down, but she didn’t seem to understand. “No importa,” Tania said.

  The law firm of Furgang & Adwar occupied a plush suite of offices on the twenty-eighth floor filled with mahogany furniture, marble statuary, and paintings that looked like they belonged in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Stephanie Furgang Adwar was a high-priced entertainment attorney with offices in midtown, West Nyack, and White Plains. Janice figured she must be an acquaintance of Tania’s family. Adwar was a good-looking woman with a firm, confident handshake.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pumping Janice’s hand, “but you’re not family, so you won’t be able to come into the meeting.”

  “No problem,” Janice said. “I’m just here as her friend. To be supportive.”

  The door closed behind Tania and her mother, and Janice picked up a magazine and began leafing through it. She couldn’t help but smile thinking about what Tania had just said. “I’m not a US citizen.” She had looked like a child in trouble when she made her big confession. All these weeks, the poor woman had put herself through hell because she was afraid that the Times would reveal she wasn’t a citizen—as if that meant anything in the context of her incredible story of courage and survival. Janice felt even more determined to help Tania understand that, in fact, she was moving forward, and that irrational fears, while debilitating and to be overcome, were an inevitable part of healing.

  Two hours passed, maybe a little less. The door to Adwar’s office swung open, and the lawyer smiled warmly and invited Janice inside. Janice joined Tania and her mother at a long conference table. As she pulled up a chair, Tania looked at her with a strange gaze. “Are you mad at me?” she asked. Janice was puzzled by the question.

  “Why would I be mad at you?” Tania didn’t respond.

  Adwar seemed to be in a hurry and remained standing while she spoke. “You know, Tania, that it’s okay that you didn’t really work in the World Trade Center but had only been visiting when the terrorist atta
ck happened, right?” the lawyer asked. “And you know that no one will hold it against you that you only knew Dave for a couple of months and weren’t married to him, right?”

  Janice was confused. “What the hell is this woman talking about?”

  “And no one is going to hold it against you that you embellished a few things here and there. You know that, Tania, right? Everyone tells a white lie now and then.”

  Tania gazed at the attorney but said nothing. She reached for a candy in a bowl on the conference table. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the crinkling of the cellophane wrapper. Janice’s brain raced with questions. Tania hadn’t actually worked in the Trade Center? She wasn’t married to Dave? Embellishing? White lies?

  The enormity of what the lawyer was saying suddenly hit her like a boulder falling from the sky, and she gasped. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” she said to herself. “Tania is lying? She has been lying to all of these people for all of this time? Suddenly, everything Tania had ever told Janice was suspect. Janice even doubted the little bits of her story Tania clung to in the lawyer’s office. There wasn’t an executive job in the south tower? Was there no Dave? No storybook meeting in a New York City cab? No wedding? This can’t be.” Janice felt the blood drain from her face. The lawyer was speaking again, but her words blurred into background noise.

  If Dave was a figment of Tania’s imagination, had there really been an assistant who’d lost her life in the sky lobby? Had there been a dying man who’d begged her to take his wedding ring and return it to his wife? And had Welles Remy Crowther, one of the great heroes of the September 11 tragedy, really saved Tania?

  “My God,” Janice thought, “I went with her to meet that young man’s family. I sat with them at dinner in the Princeton Club and listened to her promise to send them a piece of her burned clothing because it was one of the last things their son had ever touched. I listened as they thanked her, from the bottom of their hearts, for sharing the story of their boy’s heroics, and asked her to speak at his memorial. I heard her badger Linda into delivering her speech and then watched her cry with Jeff Crowther at that memorial.”

  Had Tania even been at the World Trade Center that day? Her story had been so horrific that no one had ever thought to question it. Not her new friends who had spent countless hours crying with her, not the media that had written so many accounts of her survival, and not the politicians who lauded her for her courage. Besides, Tania said that she had been gravely injured in the attack, and she did have the scars on her arm.

  Janice suddenly felt sick. A fist to the stomach. She was overcome with forbidding thoughts. It was too much, and she had to get away. She thanked the attorney for her time and slowly rose to her feet to leave. She felt wobbly as she walked out of the office, and she was so distracted she didn’t even realize that Tania and her mother had followed her back into the elevator. No one spoke at first. Janice wasn’t sure she could find the words even if she wanted to say something.

  Then Tania piped up, “Want to go get something to eat?”

  Janice was incredulous. She wanted to scream but managed to keep her composure. She needed to escape, to try to make sense of what she’d just heard. “No, I’ve got to get home,” she said.

  The three women stepped out onto the busy city street, said hasty good-byes, and Janice headed for the train station. But before she had gotten too far, she heard Tania’s mother say to her, “I don’t understand. I told her not to do these things.”

  Janice boarded the train back to Seaford and lost herself in a labyrinth of thoughts. She returned to conversations with Tania, sometimes at two and three in the morning, and talking to her the way a mother would a daughter until she was finally able to fall asleep. Her mind drifted to Lee Ielpi, and how he had entrusted Tania with representing his beloved son on tours of the sacred ground where Jonathan had given his life. She thought about the survivors, whose faith in humanity had been shattered but who had risked trusting again and had chosen Tania to lead them out of the abyss. She thought about Linda, dear Linda, and how she had unselfishly devoted herself to Tania at the monumental expense of helping herself.

  “How could Tania have done this?” Janice asked herself. “How could she have betrayed so many people who had been through so much? And for God’s sake, why?” She had chosen the most vulnerable people and exploited them by making up a tale so terribly heartbreaking that they couldn’t do anything but trust her and care for her—care for her more than they’d cared for themselves—because her story was the saddest of them all. Except that now she doubted it had even happened. Was all a lie?

  For four years, Tania had been telling her story, and no one had questioned the validity of it until now. There had been signs along the way, little discrepancies that everyone, herself included, had been almost too willing to overlook. “Why?” she wondered as the train chugged toward Seaford. Why hadn’t she ever stopped Tania when she referred to Dave as her fiancé rather than her husband? Why hadn’t she pushed to see the house in Amagansett after Tania had made and then broken so many promises to take her there? Why had she never insisted on seeing the burned jacket? Had she wanted that badly for Tania’s story to be true?

  Janice missed her stop that night. She never even heard the conductor announce the Seaford station. When she finally got home, she sat alone in the dark for hours, wondering how to break the news to Linda and the other survivors. Would they even believe her when she told them that the woman who had been there for them—who had turned herself over to them, nurturing them and rallying them and teaching them by example how to transcend their unimaginable sorrow, who had also taken as much as she had given—may never have been there at all.

  THE TRUTH REVEALED

  Janice hardly slept that night. She tossed and turned as the hours passed, thinking about how to tell the others what she knew. These were people who had been torn apart by tragedy and were mended only tenuously by the thread of trust they had in one another. When they learned that the most devout among them had violated that oath of faith, and so egregiously, would the thread snap?

  Linda was of most concern. When she first joined the group, she was broken, and she had invested so much of her energy in Tania that she’d often neglected to take care of herself. Tania was her best friend. Her mentor. Her reason for being when there wasn’t much else. She often told people that Tania had taught her how to live with dignity. How would she possibly react when she learned that she had entrusted her heart to a woman who wasn’t there?

  Janice dialed Linda’s number, and she answered on the first ring.

  “Are you sitting down?” Janice asked.

  “Yes,” Linda said, her voice bright and singsongy. “I’m sitting at my kitchen table, having my first cup of coffee.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  People in the survivors’ circle were always playing little jokes on one another, and Janice, more than most, loved pranks. Linda waited to hear more.

  “Tania’s a fraud,” Janice said.

  Linda giggled politely, but she didn’t think this little joke was funny. Not at all.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this,” Janice said. Linda could hear the tremor in her friend’s voice.

  “Come on, Janice,” she said. “She’s not a fraud. What are you talking about?”

  Janice went on to describe the scene in the lawyer’s office the day before, and how Tania had all but admitted that there had been no husband named Dave or sprawling office in the twin towers with a full staff. Listening with disbelief, Linda sank deeper and deeper in her chair. She just couldn’t get her head around what Janice was saying. She needed time to think. To decide whether she even believed what she was hearing.

  When the women hung up, Linda went to her couch, where she spent the remainder of the morning staring out her living room window and feeling nothing but numbness. All of a sudden, it just made sense. All of the inconsistencies that everyone in their
inner circle—Brendan and Janice and Elia and Gerry—relegated to Tania’s trauma. Sometimes she called Dave her husband. Other times, she referred to him as her fiancé. The fact that no one ever met Dave’s parents or even saw them with her at an anniversary. Her coworkers who were never around. Elvis the golden retriever. She had always said the dog was with her housekeeper, Lupe, at the beach house in Amagansett. Yet as often as she had promised to take Linda there, she had always come up with last-minute excuses. In a strange and bizarre way, it all seemed to add up to what Janice was saying. Tania was an imposter.

  Meanwhile, Janice dialed Dunlap at the Times. For weeks, she and the others had stonewalled the reporter and vilified him to one another, when all he had been trying to do was get at the truth. He obviously had suspicions about Tania’s story, and she realized how foolish she must have seemed in her blind defense of her. At the time, she thought she was doing the right thing, protecting a lamb from being preyed upon. She owed it to Dunlap, and she owed it to the survivors, to make things right.

  The reporter answered his phone.

  “This is Janice Cilento,” she said. “I hate doing this, but I wanted to call you to say that I think Tania has been lying.”

  “You’re doing the right thing,” he said.

  The rest of the Survivors’ Network board took the news with disbelief. Elia was at her desk at the Port Authority when the call came from Linda.

  “It’s about Tania,” Linda said.

  Elia began screaming and crying, bringing her coworkers to her side. Her first thought was that Tania had died.