When Rose called the following week, I had trouble holding on to the phone. “She wouldn’t wake up,” Rose said. “I sat with her all afternoon. The doctors said the surgery was successful. I kept asking her to wake up. Then she opened her eyes once.”
“Did she say anything?” I asked.
“She just told me, ‘no,’” Rose said. “No, she didn’t want to wake up. And then she gave up.”
Gracie had a kind, loving nature, but she was vulnerable. Her dependence on drugs gave her a cloak of invisibility and made her weak, so that she wasn’t able to stand up for herself, and in the end, too weak to live.
It wasn’t long after the funeral that I wrote to the parole board to ask for Julie’s release. In my grief, the part of me that had somehow always believed I could have saved Gracie thought that I should set a hijacker free.
I took a deep breath and listened
to the old brag of my heart;
I am, I am, I am.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Face-to-Face
I received Julie’s last letter on a warm October day as the eighties came to a close. In the kitchen, Kaitlin ate the Cheerios I served her for snack while I opened the envelope.
I am so thankful for your letters to me and to the parole board. I will never forget your kindness. I will arrive in New York on the 24th, and I’m so excited to meet you! I know it will be intense, but we have both done enough work on our issues to know how to adequately express our feelings to one another and not get off track.
She sounded so sure of herself.
We would meet at O’Neal’s Restaurant across from Central Park. She asked if we might take a walk, and I said yes, but asked that we meet for lunch. I wanted our meeting to be during the daytime, where people would surround us. I felt nervous as the date arrived and had a hard time concentrating. I got out of bed that morning feeling jittery.
“What’s the matter?” James wanted to know. I couldn’t tell him I was going to do something I knew was dangerous and reckless, but couldn’t stop myself. He wouldn’t understand. I didn’t understand myself.
Looking at my bed I couldn’t believe how many dresses I tried on before I ran out of time and finally settled on a black dress with low, comfortable heels. I looked in the mirror at a forty-one-year-old woman. I was still slim, my hair still red, but lines were beginning to appear around my eyes. I wondered if prison life had turned Julie old and gray.
__________
If I were being honest with myself I would admit that I was afraid of Julie, the woman who slept in the same room with eight sticks of dynamite, who took eighty-six passengers hostage, who fought her way through prison. I was here today on my own. I had lied to my family because there was no way I could convince them a face-to-face with Julie Busic would be in my best interest. It was one thing to write to Julie about how I felt about her, but talking to her in person would take a lot more courage.
As the train passed from the suburban streets of Long Island toward the brilliant skyline of Manhattan, my resolve weakened and my doubts returned. What if sanctioning her early release was a big mistake? What if she commits another crime? What if she wants revenge for the hateful things I wrote to her? My foot tapped with a will of its own, my knuckles white around the handle of my handbag. How can I eat lunch with the terrorist responsible for my husband’s death?
I knew the answer and had known it all along. The connection she had to Brian had somehow brought him into focus for me, and I needed her to keep him alive in my mind.
When the train darkened and roared through the tunnel under the East River I stared at my ghostly reflection and tried to imagine what she looked like. I pictured her many times over the years, reconstructing the image in the photographs from newspapers, but she remained in those photos like a shadow. She wasn’t real, and I’ll admit I did want to know what she was like, know how someone who grew up in a privileged home could abandon everything for what seemed like a thrill. I wanted to ask her if spending thirteen years behind bars was worth following the man she ultimately divorced.
I walked along Eighth Avenue intending to catch a bus, but found myself daydreaming about how Julie would look at what I was seeing. I was born in New York and must have walked along Eighth Avenue a hundred times, but today I looked at the streets the way I imagined Julie would see them. They were vibrant, alive with an energy that was invigorating, and before I knew it, I had walked thirty blocks. I stopped in front of Lincoln Center to take in the grandeur of the philharmonic and Alice Tully Hall, feeling pride for my city. The weather was mild, and the walk helped me calm down, and I arrived early and stood outside O’Neal’s looking at Central Park, cinnamon leaves scattered along the paths, families of tourists on buggy rides.
And then as I waited at the hostess station someone tapped on my shoulder, and I turned to see Julie Busic. I inhaled sharply. The woman in front of me was stunning, taller than my 5 foot 6 inches, slender, lovely in her blue dress. We were both 41, and I looked for the wear of prison life, but the woman standing there was much prettier than her photos, a natural blue-eyed blonde with even, white teeth. She seemed sophisticated and worldly in a way I feared I would never be.
“Oh my God, you’re so beautiful,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long, and here you are.”
My insides were shaking. All the words I had practiced were now trapped inside me. I felt the trust I had built through our letters begin to erode. Sounds of the restaurant, traffic beeping, everything was suddenly too loud. I felt faint, and a thin line of perspiration broke out on my lip. I looked down at Julie’s shoes, a pair of canvas espadrilles that looked just this minute bought. I wondered if supporters had given her money to buy her outfit, to get her started in her new life. She leaned toward me, and I had the horrible feeling she was about to touch me.
“I’m not sure I should be here,” I stammered. All the intimate details I wrote to her seemed sullied now in her presence. “I don’t think I can go through with this.”
“I understand.” Julie tucked her hair behind her ear and talked quickly as though we were in a time jam. “But I came all this way and hope you can give me just a few minutes.”
“Table for two?” A bald host in a bowtie beamed at us, and without knowing how, my feet pushed me forward. I followed Julie across the restaurant, smelling a hint of something flowery, Estee Lauder maybe. She was carrying a shopping bag, the kind sold in Hallmark stores. It didn’t have a star on it, but for a moment, it frightened me.
The host escorted us to the far side of the room where we were seated at an interior table. The rich, creamy linen napkins were shaped like party hats. Around us, the restaurant bustled with a hundred conversations. At the next table, two women laughed.
“Yesterday I went to a banquet given in my honor,” Julie said right away. “It was given by the Croatian community to thank me for my loyalty. They raised money for you and your sons, and gave me a gift for you.”
I stared at her. Her supposed loyalty had cost my husband his life, my boys their father. What in hell was I doing here? My eyes turned toward the door.
She saw me and said, “I hope you’ll stay. I was so looking forward to meeting you in person,” she added.
She handed me the shopping bag. “It’s a hand-woven purse from Croatia, and a card with a cash donation.” Her voice was soft and cajoling, like her letters, and I felt myself taking the bag. Inside the bag I could see a box wrapped in white paper with bright-colored flowers and red ribbon curling down the sides. It didn’t weigh anything. It couldn’t be a bomb. I set it next to my chair.
“It must have been hell waiting so long for your freedom.” The words tumbled from my mouth, something to say that would inflict some damage, the tone of my voice raw enough to surprise me.
“I thought I would be out in eight years, and I knew I could do that—spend eight years for what
I thought was a noble and worthy cause,” she said. “We would both be out when we were still in our 30s, and that was doable. We would still have our lives ahead of us. But McTigue held such animosity toward us and did everything he could to keep us locked up far past when we should have been released. He wrote letters and came to our parole hearings—he came all the way to California for mine, and to Pennsylvania for Zvonko’s, and told all sorts of lies and distortions about the bombing. He was obsessed with keeping us behind bars.”
She looked straight at me and I saw that flash of steel in her eyes. Eight years would have killed me, and yet here she sat only a few weeks free from prison, as defiant as the day she went in.
The two women at the next table toasted to something. They seemed so normal and uncomplicated, and I thought about my life. I had a husband who loved me and children who brought joy into my life. I did not have to be here. I did not have to sit and make conversation with this woman, and again looked toward the door.
“How is your family?” she asked, as though she sensed what I was thinking. “Did you bring photos?”
I did bring photos: James holding Kaitlin in her tiny dance costume. Keith sitting on the front step, Chris in his soccer outfit. But I couldn’t show them to this woman who had handed my boys so much confusion, terror, and grief.
“No. I don’t have any photos,” I lied. In an effort to calm down, I felt myself smoothing my napkin again and again on my lap. I changed the subject. “You’re free now. What do you plan to do?”
“I would like to go to Croatia to work with women who were displaced by the war, women who, like Zvonko’s mother and sisters, lost everything to the Yugoslavs.”
But her letters had said she had planned to live in Oregon, where I had understood she was going to make a new life close to her father the professor, her mother the librarian, and her three well-educated brothers. And now she sat across from me in her new outfit, telling me she was still fighting her ex-husband’s cause. She had lied. In another person, I might have admired such steadfast loyalty, but Julie Busic had taken up a place in my life that had drained me. I watched the busboy set down our waters and felt hollowed out.
“Your server will be right with you,” the boy said. And in him I saw a flash of Chris, that innocent, green-eyed sweetness that wanted so badly to believe all was right with the world. My boys had learned too early that all was not right, that someone as constant and sure as their father could be torn from them in the glance of a single evening.
“I thought you were divorced,” I said as I watched the busboy walk away. “Why would you try to help his family now?”
“Actually,” Julie took her napkin from the table and set it on her lap. “We’ve remarried.” She smiled quickly, showing those brilliant white teeth that had not seemed to be bothered by prison. “I’ve made some hasty decisions, but really, I love my husband, and it’s in our best interest to be together.”
I looked into her eyes. “Which hasty decision?” I asked. “Hijack a plane? Build a bomb?” My voice rose, and the women at the next table stared openly at us.
“I had no choice,” Julie said, leaning forward, her forearms on the table, and I saw the indignation pass over her eyes. “I told you that in my letters. We had to hijack that plane. Zvonko was wanted by the Yugoslav secret police. We were desperate. We thought he would be killed. We had to bring the Croatian situation to the public.”
I watched her, and then I saw her again that day she took the witness stand, an indignant young woman who had lied about being pregnant, who had helped hijack a plane and set a bomb in the middle of one of the busiest train stations in the world.
“You had a choice,” I said, lowering my voice. “You could have gone to the embassy, the police. You could have paid for your declaration to be printed. You chose to commit a crime. You could have prevented it, Julie.”
And then our waiter was beside us, a pad in his hand. “Do you ladies need a few more minutes?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him. “Please.”
“Look,” Julie said when he had gone. “There has to be an end to our suffering. You said yourself that we paid our debt to society. Which brings me to ask again if you would consider writing a letter on Zvonko’s behalf?” She ran her finger around the rim of her water glass and smiled, as though she were sharing a friendly lunch with a girlfriend. “I really hate to ask, but I know you would do the same if you were in my position.”
Around us people clinked glasses, ate shrimp scampi and drank chardonnay, and in the middle of this seemingly normal day, I saw that I had not only used Julie Busic, she had used me. Her real motivation all along had been to save herself and Zvonko Busic. All the cajoling and confiding had been artifice.
Out of the yellow paper and the pens they gave her in prison, she had made for herself a stage, whereby she could play at regret and apology and seduce me with her life story. She could play at being fascinated by me, so that one day I would set her free. I had hidden her letters from my husband, had lowered my guard and allowed us to become friends. I had let a criminal into my life.
As she sat there smiling at me expectantly, I understood that all this time she had been trying to save herself and her husband. And I had been trying to save myself from the pain of being a widow, pain of the boys losing their father, pain of not being heard when I asked why that bomb exploded, pain of losing my lawsuit to the City of New York, pain of not growing up with the opportunities Julie had: the white picket fence and the middle-class income. It was always easy, when Gracie and I were sharing books across the bedroom we shared, to believe in the fictional worlds those pages spun for us. And I knew now, with Julie sitting in front of me, that Julie’s letters had been just that, a fairytale I had wanted to believe.
I closed my menu and set it aside. I wasn’t that little girl from the Bronx anymore. I wasn’t begging for dollars from my father in front of Horn & Hardart, or getting punched by a brother after he stole my camera. I wasn’t crying because I thought my mother didn’t care about me or because Gracie was lost to the streets. I was Kathleen Murray Moran, wife, mother, educator. I no longer needed saving, least of all from this woman who wasn’t any kind of savior. She was just a hijacker, dressed in very pretty clothing.
I set my napkin on the table. “I’m not going to help him get out of jail,” I told her. “As a matter of fact, I’m going do everything in my power to keep him locked up for the rest of his life.” I scraped back the chair. “I’m leaving.” I stood up.
“Wait, please.”
But I didn’t wait. The Busics had hijacked me before when I was a young mother with two boys, and I let myself be hijacked a second time when I thought she might take away the pain. But it had taken meeting the hijacker face-to-face to understand that I was tired of being hijacked. I was ready to be free. I turned and walked across the room, leaving Julie Busic and the gift she brought from her supporters sitting beside the chair.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Full Circle
The words I wrote to Julie to unburden my soul seemed tainted now, but strangely enough, I did not regret getting to know Julie Busic. I did not wish I had never written to her, as those letters allowed me to grow in ways I had not realized. I thought about how ironic life was as I rode the elevator up to Governor Mario Cuomo’s office. The bill that Susan, Mary Beth, and I had been working so hard for over the last few years was finally going to be signed in the presence of senators and countless media.
From the fifty-eighth floor, jackhammers and car horns in the financial district below were silenced, and through the wall of glass windows a tugboat streamed along the Hudson toward the Statue of Liberty, rising above the river like a phoenix. It was a New York day, filtered sunshine with smok
estacks filling the air with promise. We’d met with the Governor once before on a freezing cold day in February when the sky was a brilliant blue and the waves held white caps. Sitting across from him then, we had given him our wish list, the things that would improve our lives and those of our children: the right to remarry without losing our pensions, scholarships for ourselves and our offspring, grief counseling training so we could console new widows. He added two monuments for fallen police and fire officers, one in Battery Park City, and one in Albany, and special license plates with the Survivors of the Shield logo.
A glint of sun caught the governor’s eyeglasses that winter day as he put down the pen he used to make notes. “Let me talk to my senators,” he said. “Garner support in Albany.”
Celebrating with a glass of wine afterward, Susan told us, “Sometimes dreams do come true.” But the year following had been hard, trips to Albany were canceled because senators weren’t available, there had been delays over appropriating funds, and sometimes it looked like it was never going to happen. Except now we were standing in his office. It was springtime, the view greener, and the conference room smelled of rich coffee and baked goods. I watched the wind catch the sail of a cutter as it headed up the East River.
“Hey Murray.” The governor came up beside me. “What do you do when you’re not pushing for legislation?”
“English professor,” I said, enjoying the look on his face that said I’d made an impression. His heavy dark eyebrows rose toward his brow. “Shakespeare?”
“I’m teaching Macbeth this semester.” I couldn’t hold back my smile as his widened.
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