Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice

by Helman, Scott

  Around the country, total strangers—many of them runners—were moved by what they saw in Boston and sought ways to help. The month after the bombing, Marsha Strickhouser, a public relations manager from Clearwater, Florida, helped put on the Boston Memorial Run in nearby St. Petersburg. Runners held candles, heard from competitors who had taken part in the Boston Marathon, sang “Ave Maria,” and then set off on an untimed 2.62-mile run through the streets. The run raised about $20,000 for the One Fund. “It was something that happened to our country, not just Boston,” Strickhouser said. That same spirit drove the One Run for Boston, a 3,300-mile coast-to-coast relay run begun in June that raised tens of thousands of dollars. From Venice Beach, California, across Route 66, through the Ozarks, and eventually onto Boylston Street, the route involved 319 legs and more than one thousand runners, each carrying a baton with a GPS transponder. Marathoner Nicole Reis, whose father, John Odom, was badly injured in the bombing after coming to watch his daughter, capped off the benefit run by pushing her dad across the finish line in a wheelchair shortly before 1:00 A.M. one night in early July.

  Allison Byrne was among thousands of marathoners, spectators, and responders who came together to rerun the course’s final mile at a Boston event later in the spring known as #onerun. Byrne was one of the only runners seriously injured in the April bombing. She was nervous about participating, knowing she would have to pass the very spot where shrapnel had brought her down, where she’d lain on the ground fearing for her life. But that fear wasn’t enough to keep her away. This was a woman who had been so determined to complete the race on Marathon Day that she had asked the nurse at her side, Nancy Shorter, if Shorter could carry her across the finish line. “We’d love to,” Shorter told her. “Don’t think that’s going to happen.” Nearly six weeks later, with her husband beside her in the cold rain, Byrne finally did make it across. She had finished the race.

  These moments were triumphs, signs of continuing progress, and they could bring an overwhelming rush of emotions. A few weeks after the bombing, when the Boston Pops Orchestra opened its 128th season at Symphony Hall, David King attended the concert as the special guest. The trauma surgeon stepped onstage for the final encore, vigorously guest-conducting a rousing rendition of the orchestra’s signature anthem, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” played every July 4 on the Esplanade. Standing in the historic concert hall, arms pumping as the crowd rose to its feet and clapped along, King was overcome by the support from so many strangers. He had to fight back tears. At times it could seem like the city really had changed, its broken pieces somehow soldered back together more tightly than before.

  • • •

  Her friends weren’t wild about the idea. Neither was Heather, at first. Forum, the bar and restaurant where she had been when the bomb took her foot, was finally reopening, and its owners had invited her to be there. It was the last business on Boylston Street to come back, a missing piece of the puzzle about to snap into place. The more Heather thought it over, the more she felt drawn to return. There were gaps in her memory that bothered her. As time passed, it got harder to ask others who had been there, to drag them back to that day against their will. If she saw it again, it might make the picture clearer. Her friends were wary, but they agreed to go with her.

  The reopening was a spectacle, a pop-up party on the busy Boylston Street sidewalk in the middle of a picture-perfect late summer evening. A brass band from New Orleans kicked off the festivities, marching from the marathon finish line down the sidewalk to the restaurant’s refurbished front door. They settled in under the brand-new brown-and-red-striped awning and played “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Curious passersby paused to listen. People leaned out of passing cabs to snap photos. “Go, Boston!” someone yelled from a trolley. Traffic snarled; a helmeted policeman blew a whistle. The wait staff at L’Espalier, the acclaimed eatery across the street, gathered at a second-story window to watch the commotion. Heather appeared, wearing a long dress, and helped hold a blue-and-yellow ribbon across the front of the restaurant as the mayor cut it. Inside, the din of socializing filled the space that had been silent for so long. “Being here, I can see how the city is moving along with life,” said Carlos Arredondo, looking down at Boylston Street from an upstairs window, wearing his familiar cowboy hat. “It’s moving along beautifully. And I’m moving on, too.”

  Downstairs, Heather sat at the bar receiving hugs and kisses from an endless stream of friends and well-wishers. A glass of wine sat untouched on the bar behind her. She looked happy and peaceful. A photographer approached to take her picture, and her friends gathered around, arms looped around one another’s shoulders. Earlier, she had ventured out to the back alley, where she had lain on the ground on Marathon Monday. She had stood at the back door looking down, searching for the grass she remembered lying on. Asphalt stretched in every direction. There was no grass, she realized. She had imagined it. A voice rose from the alley—one of Forum’s managers, thanking her for coming back.

  “I’m going to have a good memory now,” Heather told him.

  • • •

  For weeks, people had been coming to Copley Square to pay respects, strolling quietly through the memorial that had grown there, studying the somber handwritten messages and photographing the rows of running shoes hung on metal barricades. In June, the city put out word that it was time to take down the weathered shrine and transfer everything to the archives. On the evening of June 24, a muggy summer night, the public gathered at the spot for one last time. Around 5:30 P.M., police began moving everybody out to make room for a special ceremony for bombing survivors, their families, and the relatives of those who had been killed. A little while later they began arriving—the Richard family, with Jane in a wheelchair; Adrianne Haslet-Davis, the dancer who had lost part of her left leg; and others. There was even a brazen imposter in their midst: Branden Mattier, twenty-two, who soon after would plead not guilty, with his brother, to charges that they had tried to defraud the One Fund of $2 million by falsely claiming that a long-dead aunt had lost a leg in the bombing. Tom Menino, Ed Davis, and other local leaders greeted the victims with hugs and words of encouragement. Menino, after climbing gingerly out of his SUV, pointed playfully at Jane Richard as he approached her family. He spoke gently to her surviving brother, Henry. As the family walked away, Henry’s mom put an arm around his neck. The memorial, in its first days, had been christened as a place of mourning and healing. Its final night would be perhaps its most poignant, the survivors gathered to observe another milestone’s passing while the city hummed on, duck boats and ambulances rolling by as always.

  At dawn the next morning, about a dozen city employees and volunteers pulled on rubber gloves, unfurled rolls of plastic bags, and began picking through the tattered inventory, untying the knots on the many tangled shoelaces. The only sound was the ripping of paper as careful hands tore down signs and banners. In a letter he had written to the survivors and to victims’ families, Menino had spoken of “a respectful closing,” one that would “help us all look to the future.” For Billy and Patty Campbell, who came early that morning in matching blue-and-yellow BOSTON STRONG T-shirts, that future felt a long way off. They remained mired in the present, trying to make it through each day, trying to understand why Krystle had been taken. It was their first visit to the memorial. Patty put on glasses and leaned in close to read the writing on a poster; she reached out to touch a stuffed toy, a polished rock. A reporter asked her what the memorial meant to her. “It’s confusing,” she said. “I’m still in shock.” The Tsarnaevs had lived a quarter of a mile from her mother-in-law, Patty said; her sister’s son had gone to school with Dzhokhar. “I just don’t get it,” she said, her voice trailing off. Before they left, the Campbells took a string of rosary beads, one of hundreds draped by strangers on the four white crosses at the memorial’s center. Then they walked away slowly down the sidewalk, their arms wrapped around each other.

  The
dismantling accelerated after their departure. Workers cut away deflated balloons and sodden ribbons and started sweeping. Kevin Brown, the volunteer caretaker who had lovingly maintained the site, helped to lift the wooden crosses and load them into a truck. By 8:45 A.M., three hours after they had started, the pavement was bare. A city archivist hoisted a pile of brooms over his shoulder and turned to go. Behind him, the morning foot traffic easily, unthinkingly reverted to its normal pattern, flowing across the sunny pink-and-gray brick.

  CHAPTER 21

  MILE 27

  The road beyond

  At first Shana Cottone didn’t recognize the feeling. She was at a Zac Brown Band concert, at an outdoor venue south of Boston, when she started to feel sick. She figured it must be the piece of sausage she had eaten; Shana never ate sausages at concerts. She wandered away from her friends toward the restrooms. The crowd thinned as she walked, and her stomach stopped hurting. It wasn’t the sausage, she realized—it was the crowd, triggering some memory of Patriot’s Day and the marathon. It was like that now: a well of anxiety lay hidden within her, and without warning her reflexes could tap it. One night her dog started barking in the backyard, and before she knew it, Shana was creeping outside ninja-style, senses on high alert—only to find a fallen tree branch on the ground. She slept with both an air conditioner and a fan humming; still she woke up at the slightest murmur. It made her mad. The places that had once felt safe didn’t anymore.

  After the marathon, to cope with the stress, she had gone back to the treatment program, the one that had helped her stop drinking. It had helped, just as it had the first time. She had taken time off from work, and used it to plant a garden in her yard. She was growing vegetables and herbs—cucumbers, basil, peppers, zucchini, eggplant—and roses in a soft peach color. The roses she chose in tribute to Roseann Sdoia, the woman whose life she had helped save on Boylston Street. They were friends now; Shana saw her often. It went back to those fateful minutes in the street: the connection she had felt to a wounded stranger, and the desperate, overwhelming need to help her. It had been an instant kinship, and she could not walk away. It was a feeling she had never had before in her role as a cop, and it was difficult to explain. “I need to see it through,” she said. “I can’t have it any other way.” In her backyard, the roses bloomed through the summer.

  Shana was deeply grateful for the changes she had made in the months leading up to the marathon. If she hadn’t stopped drinking, if she had been hungover that day, would she have reacted differently? She would never know, but it convinced her there was some larger purpose in the painful reckoning that she had faced. She was grateful, too, that after the bombing she had not given in to the urge to start drinking again. It had been so tempting to seek that easy solace, at a moment when she knew no one would judge her for it. But she would have judged herself, harshly, for breaking her promise. Instead, she knew she had been tested, and she had been faithful.

  A week or so before September 11, working her regular tour in East Boston, Shana responded to a call about a suspicious package on the sidewalk. Standing there waiting for the bomb squad, she fought to keep calm. Was this a dry run, preparation for a real attack planned for the upcoming anniversary? Was a would-be bomber watching them right now, taking notes on their positions, all to fine-tune some twisted plot? No one around her seemed concerned. But it turned out the suspicious object really was a bomb—a cardboard container roughly the size of a soda can, filled with explosive powder and wired with a fuse. The bomb squad X-rayed it on the scene to confirm what it was, then took it away in a blast-proof bag and detonated it at their remote test range. It seemed a case unlikely to be solved. The knowledge that the bomb had been real raised the stakes for Shana. It was one thing to be anxious and write it off as irrational. But if people really were inside their homes making bombs, well, what then? It had to change the way you lived. You couldn’t let your guard down ever, even for a single second. It was hard to imagine living that way and still living fully. How, for example, could she ever decide to have children in a world so fraught with hidden danger?

  On the night of September 11, she attended a remembrance ceremony at John Hancock Hall, a few blocks from the finish line. The organizers, from a Boston charity, had invited Shana and other marathon first responders to be honored as part of their program. She wore her uniform and sat in the front row. It was the first time she had been singled out that way for recognition. There were a lot of speeches about heroes, a lot of talk about stepping up and making a difference. Finally, near the end of the night, somebody read Shana’s name. She stood up and turned, shyly, to face the applause.

  • • •

  He’d done this hundreds of times, sharing the stories of his running feats, the self-deprecating jokes about his height, and the motivational life lessons he’d picked up in staging the Boston Marathon all these years. But this address by Dave McGillivray, to a group of hospital CEOs in Boston’s Seaport District on an October afternoon, was different. “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it here,” he told them. The day before, he’d gone to the hospital to get checked out. He hadn’t been feeling quite right lately. His breathing had been off. He’d undergone a CT scan and an angiogram, which shows blood flow in arteries and veins. The news had been worse than he expected. The tests had revealed some significant blockage. He was devastated. He’d been so fit his entire life. How could this be? “I always thought I was invincible,” he told the hospital group. The room was silent as he spoke in a shaky voice. He offered sincere thanks for everything the medical community did—work that, in the past, he had known largely from afar. Now it was his well-being they were guarding, too.

  All his life, McGillivray had been able to outrun almost anything. Discipline, self-assurance, a clear mind, and a willingness to put in the hard work—these were the essential ingredients to success, whether his end goal was running the Eastern Seaboard or managing an unwieldy road race for thousands. He had been a paragon of health and fitness, a promoter of active lifestyles who ran more miles than most people ever would. He left the hospital deeply chastened. Yes, he had been fit. But he hadn’t always been healthy. He hadn’t been eating right. After a long run, he might grab three or four cookies. He had fueled his famous cross-country trek with junk food. None of it, he had figured, would do much harm. “I thought I was out there burning it all up,” he said. Partly it was genetics. His father had undergone quadruple bypass surgery at age sixty-five, then lived to ninety after changing his diet and hitting the health club. But McGillivray knew this was also his own doing, and that made him feel embarrassed and frustrated. “I cheated myself,” he said.

  Once the initial shock faded, he returned to the McGillivray Way, determined to apply the same zeal and same lessons of preparation and execution that had always served him so well. He began to see his diagnosis not as a sentence, but as a second chance, believing that he could beat it with the right diet, medication, and exercise. “I don’t need two warnings,” he said. He began eating red rice and other healthy foods to lower his cholesterol, finding success immediately. He joined the local YMCA and planned to start swimming and lifting weights. He sought out a trainer, a nutritionist, a masseuse, and a new bike. He got a heart rate monitor, knowing he had to limit his intensity when he ran. “It’s a whole new beginning,” he said.

  The year 2013 had already been a stark reminder of the fragility of life. One minute in April, McGillivray had been ready to start down the marathon course; the next, he was racing back to Boston to see his finish line in disarray. Six months later, his personal brush with mortality was a heavy postscript. He considered his youngest children—he had a daughter who was only four—and thought about how he had to make it a while yet. There was a lot still left to see. In the immediate term, he had another Boston Marathon to plan, which, given all the security changes, all the expectations, all the sensitivities involved with the first anniversary of the bombing, was already going t
o be one of his biggest tests ever. He had no intention of giving it up, though. If anything, his diagnosis had made him more motivated to dive into his work and to stay busy. The race needed him, and he needed the race. He credited the one hundredth Boston Marathon, in 1996, with saving his life after his difficult divorce. He looked at the 2014 race in much the same way. “I am not even going to remotely consider pulling back on the throttle,” he said. Assuming he still had control. About six weeks after the bombing, McGillivray’s son Luke came up to him again.

  “Remember I told you I didn’t want you to direct the marathon again?” the seven-year-old said.

  “Yes,” McGillivray said.

  “You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to direct it.”

  McGillivray’s cardiologist had talked to him about stress, telling him that he was always going a mile a minute. McGillivray believed that stress lay in the eye of the beholder. For him, working hard, focusing on big problems, taking on a heavy responsibility—those things didn’t feel stressful. Even putting on the 2014 marathon, the most intense, most fraught staging of the event in its 118-year history, did not, for him, feel like a source of strain. Or at least it didn’t feel as stressful as not putting on the Boston Marathon, sitting on the sidelines watching it all go off without him. “I would be stressed if I was lying on a beach,” he said. “I would be so stressed that the clock is ticking and I’m not getting anything done.” His doctor, when McGillivray told him this, rolled his eyes. A lot had changed, but some things never would.