The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  Chellis didn’t have any trouble finding out about David . The man existed, all right, and he had died in the terrorist attack, just as Tania said. He had been a popular young man. There were websites and memorial forums dedicated to him, and he had been the subject of numerous newspaper stories in his hometown. Reporters and friends had mined his life story, and his biography was full of details from grammar school to his wish to attend Harvard for a master’s degree. The sites and the stories covered the entire spectrum of Dave’s celebrated life with one exception: there was no mention of a wife or a fiancée named Tania.

  As taken aback as he was, Chellis could think of reasons that she might not have been mentioned. Maybe she had been on the outs with Dave’s family? Or maybe Dave had been estranged from his family, and they didn’t even know about her? Then he remembered her saying how Dave’s mother had tried to take over their wedding plans. And she had talked about Dave’s parents visiting Amagansett, and her long talks with his mother, and the foundation in his name that they formed jointly.

  What was the name of that foundation anyway? Chellis scratched his head and tried to remember. Dave’s Foundation? Dave’s Kids? Dave’s something. Nothing came up in his Internet search. He remembered that Tania said it was a place in New Jersey for underprivileged kids, and she’d offered to take the Okies there when they were in the city for the last anniversary, but he couldn’t recall ever hearing anything about the visit. Maybe he would call Richard Williams and ask him about the charity. But he couldn’t reveal his doubts about Tania. What if Williams didn’t believe him? Chellis knew what happened to people who got on Tania’s wrong side: they disappeared. He thought about Gerry Bogacz and Jim Jenca and all of the people who had left the network because she’d accused them of being impostors. Even more frightening than her wrath was other survivors’ blind loyalty to her. Williams, Richard Zimbler, and Lori Mogol were among his closest friends, but he had no illusions about where their allegiances lay. Everyone worshipped Tania, and he couldn’t risk losing his support network—the people who sustained him—because he had questioned her honesty.

  Chellis decided to check newspaper archives for stories about Tania, to see if she had ever mentioned Dave’s name during interviews. She certainly had talked to enough reporters in her tenure as head of the network, and, as it turned out, she had mentioned Dave, but never his last name. Hadn’t anyone ever asked? he wondered. A snippet from the Daily News story about her docent work with the Tribute WTC Visitor Center caught his eye. The reporter had obviously known Tania’s story when he took the tour. “Head had not told this group that her husband died in the other tower,” he wrote. “She also did not say that as she crawled through the carnage on the 78th floor a man charred from head to toe placed a wedding band in her palm. She stuck it in her pocket and forgot about it until months later, when her mother went through the personal possessions the hospital had bagged.” Could these have been oversights? Chellis asked himself. Or maybe she had just run out of time? Or maybe she hadn’t mentioned those things because she knew there was a reporter there writing down what she said on her tours.

  Chellis didn’t sleep that night. He tossed and turned, wondering what to do. If he told anyone his concerns, he risked being banished from the group, and for what? For proving that she, for whatever reason, needed people to think she was engaged or married to Dave? To catch her in a bunch of white lies? If he were wrong, the very relationships that had brought him back to life after September 11 and sustained him to this very day would be gone.

  He decided to keep his eyes open and his suspicions to himself.

  SLAYING THE DRAGON

  While Brendan was wrestling with his doubts about Tania, Linda grappled with how to tell her that she could no longer participate in the flooding exercises. The second session had been worse than the first for Linda. She was running out of excuses for postponing a next time, and each time she cancelled, Tania acted more annoyed. Linda didn’t want to disappoint her friend, but she had gotten physically sick after the last time. Tania videotaped her reaction and then taunted her with it, calling her weak and pathetic, and threatening to share it with the others.

  The whole thing was just too weird, too gruesome. Linda was overwhelmed by knowing that when she went back for another session, if she did, she would be forced to hear about the man, unrecognizable as a human being, and moments from death in the burning sky lobby, begging Tania to take his wedding ring and get it to his wife. She couldn’t bear to hear the story again. She couldn’t take watching Tania shake and sweat and scream, “Bodies are falling! Bodies are falling!” But she felt ashamed for copping out on her best friend, and she couldn’t stand it when they were at odds with each other.

  In late June, Linda called her therapist to explain what was happening. “You need to come in,” the therapist said. Tania accompanied Linda to the appointment. That was Tania’s idea; she hadn’t been invited to go. She said she didn’t want to be home alone that day and asked if she could tag along. She wanted to hear for herself what the therapist had to say. Linda wavered but finally gave in. But when they got to the appointment, the therapist made Tania wait outside in the lobby. Tania was none too happy about that.

  “What’s going on?” the therapist asked Linda after closing her office door.

  The therapist knew all about Tania. Linda often spent half of each therapy session talking about how worried she was about her friend. Despite the therapist’s attempts to guide the conversation back to her patient’s troubles, Linda found ways to return to the topic of Tania.

  “I’m having nightmares again, and flashbacks,” Linda told the therapist, starting to sob. Wiping her eyes, she went on to describe the flooding exercises and her role to keep Tania safe while she was in a trance. It was brutal, watching her, Linda said, her hands shaking as she spoke. “I had always pictured what went on inside the towers, but I never knew until Tania relived her experience right in front of me,” Linda cried. “She confirmed all of my worst fears. Now I can’t focus. I’m having severe anxiety attacks. I don’t want to be alone.”

  The therapist was furious at what she was hearing. Linda had no place playing the role of Tania’s caretaker, she said, and Tania had no right to ask her to play such a role. She was Tania’s friend. She wasn’t her therapist, or her mother. Nor was she qualified to participate in such an intensive and grueling psychological exercise. Indeed, because Linda had suffered such a severe case of post-traumatic stress herself after September 11, she risked a catastrophic setback in her own continuing quest for normalcy.

  “Why is she asking you to do this?” the therapist asked. “This is not something you should be doing. It’s inappropriate for her to ask. You have to stop. All the work you’ve done, and you’re right back where you were.”

  “But Tania will be angry,” Linda said.

  At that point, the thought of sitting through another flooding session was more debilitating than the fear of Tania’s wrath. Linda hoped the therapist wouldn’t back down. Her sanity was at stake, and maybe even her life. Who could relive the events of 9/11 every day and still live a happy, productive life? Linda had spent years learning how not to focus on the horrors of that day, and now that was all she could think about.

  “No more,” the therapist said, holding firm. “You can’t do this anymore.”

  A sense of relief washed over Linda. The therapist had given her permission to say no. She had ordered her not to participate in any more of Tania’s therapy exercises. When Tania heard what the therapist said, she would have to understand.

  “What did she say?” Tania asked as they left the office and walked down Forty-Second Street toward the PATH train station.

  “She said I can’t do the flooding with you anymore,” Linda said. “I can come to your place every day if I want to, but I can’t help you with that.”

  Tania shook her head. “What’s the big deal?” she scoffed, her tone biting and angry. “Why are you making such a big deal out
of this?”

  “I was traumatized all over again, Tania,” Linda said, the strength of her therapist’s words helping her to stand her ground. “I’m having nightmares. I’m always panicky. I need some space. The flooding. The constant phone calls from you. It’s too much.”

  Tania stopped walking. Linda could see that she was beside herself with rage.

  “You’re so selfish,” Tania said, speaking through gritted teeth. “All you ever think about is yourself. Do you know no one in the group likes you because of that? No one likes you, Linda. Everyone in the group talks about you behind your back.”

  Linda gasped. She was a perpetual people pleaser. No matter how much therapy she had, she’d never been able to overcome that. She’d do anything for anyone if it meant being accepted. Being liked. Tania hit her where it would hurt most. She had taken aim at Linda’s delicate ego and swung as hard as she could, shattering Linda with her heartless words. Linda’s throat stung, the way it does when you’re choking back tears.

  “I’m going home,” she said.

  Tania didn’t respond. The look of disgust on her face said it all.

  A MELTDOWN AT THE ST. REGIS

  That summer of 2007, Tania had taken to disappearing for days and sometimes weeks at a time. She told her therapist that her flooding sessions were helping her to move on. Her progress was achieved no thanks to Linda, she said, whose own counselor had finally forbidden her to participate in any more of the flooding exercises because it had set back her own healing. After all she had done for Linda, the rejection was a real slap in the face.

  After six years of feeling dead inside, Tania said, she thought it might be time to start thinking about what she wanted for herself and not doing for everyone else. She didn’t want to be defined by September 11 for the rest of her life. It was in that light that she had begun thinking about keeping a lower profile within the Survivors’ Network, she said, and maybe even divorcing herself from the group eventually.

  That was all well and good, Kedem said, but between the widespread impact of her story, and all of the good she had done for the survivors, it was unlikely that she could live anonymously again. “You are the face of 9/11, and people will always know you as that,” he said. Tania responded with a self-assured grin. “Well, believe it or not, I can change that,” she said. It was a strange response, but the therapist didn’t pursue it. In his mind, Tania could accomplish anything she wanted to, even if that meant becoming someone else.

  At that point, though, she was survivor nobility. It was under her leadership that the survivors’ group had gone from virtual obscurity to a formidable advocacy organization with power and respect. In its short existence, the network had recruited over a thousand members, forged important political alliances, saved the Survivors’ Stairway from destruction, lobbied Washington for health services, and convinced the 9/11 Memorial Committee to give the survivors a presence in the museum planned for the World Trade Center site, ensuring that their legacy would be preserved for generations to come.

  As if all of that hadn’t been enough, next Tania spread her good will to the Tribute Center, where she had inspired hundreds of visitors with her story. So when David Dunlap of the New York Times was looking for a story to observe the sixth anniversary, Jennifer Adams didn’t hesitate with a suggestion. Do a story on Tania Head, she said.

  No news organization covered September 11, during or since, as comprehensively or as poignantly as the Times did. The newspaper had been awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its sweeping coverage of the attack and its aftermath. Its “Portraits of Grief” series about the lives lost that day resonated with readers around the country and around the world, and the lengthy story titled “102 Minutes,” which told in superlative detail what happened inside the towers from the first plane hitting to the second tower falling, evolved into a best-selling book. Dunlap’s archive of stories related to the attack—including the one he’d written nearly two years earlier, launching the campaign to save the Survivors’ Stairway—was vast. Other media outlets had run stories on Tania, but not the Times. Indeed, its reporting had been so absolute that Dunlap and his editors wondered how they could have missed her.

  Tania told the Survivors’ Network board that Adams had asked her to consider doing an interview with the Times. She remembered Dunlap’s name from the story about the Survivors’ Stairway. She said that, as she’d understood it, the piece he wanted to do for the anniversary would showcase all of the survivors. She knew a story in the Times would be good for the network. That kind of exposure would bring in more members and remind the public that the survivors were still around and struggling. The others urged Tania to sit for the interview, and she called Adams to say that the reporter could call her.

  But as had happened so often before, almost as soon as she agreed, Tania began having second thoughts. She had never wanted her work for the Survivors’ Network or the Tribute Center to be about her, she told her friends on the board. Frankly, the Times frightened her a little, she said, although she wasn’t quite sure why. “What should I do?” she asked the others. But before Tania had a chance to decide, fate intervened.

  One morning, as summer was winding down, Tania called Linda at work, and she could barely choke out her words. It had been weeks since their falling-out over the flooding, and they’d had no contact since. Linda had mixed feelings about that. Some days she relished the freedom that came with the loss of such a demanding friend. Other times she missed Tania so much that not being able to talk to her hurt physically.

  “What’s wrong?” Linda asked.

  Tania said that her brother Jay had died after a long battle with cancer. She hadn’t wanted to burden anyone with her family problems, but she couldn’t deal with another death of a loved one, and she was coming undone.

  “Please come, Linda!” she cried. “I need you.”

  Linda ran from her office and grabbed a taxi downtown. Tania’s eyes were red and swollen when she answered her apartment door. She wanted to go to church, she said. Linda walked Tania to a nearby Catholic church, where the two sat together in a wooden pew and prayed the Rosary. From there, she took Tania to her apartment in Hoboken, and they sat around talking about Jay for the remainder of the day. Linda felt so guilty. How could she have abandoned Tania the way that she had? The poor woman had almost lost her life in the terrorist attack, and her husband was killed. Now she’d lost a brother too. How much could one person take? Linda wondered. “How can I help you?” she asked. “What can I do?”

  “Just be my friend,” Tania said through her tears.

  “Of course, Tania. I’ll always be here for you. No matter what.”

  Linda promised to hold down the fort while Tania attended the funeral, and she promptly sent off an email to everyone on the network’s mailing list. Under the subject line “Very Sad News,” she wrote: “I wanted to let everyone know that Tania Head’s (chair/ president of the WTC Survivors’ Network) brother Jay lost his battle to cancer last Wednesday. She is out in California with her family and I am sure would appreciate everyone’s prayers for her and her family. Godspeed—we love you, Tania!”

  Well wishes poured into the network. Tania’s survivor friends took the news hard. They hadn’t even known her brother was ill, and they couldn’t fathom why such a beautiful person had to endure so much loss. When Tania got back to New York a week later, she told Linda that her whole family had gathered for the service, and everyone took turns telling stories about Jay. People had flown in from Spain and England to pay their respects. It was a touching tribute, and she was happy to have been there, but she was glad to be back home in New York, where she could lose herself in her work.

  Tania quickly immersed herself in planning for the sixth anniversary, but her friends noticed something different about her. She was irritable and ornery almost all of the time, and she seemed to be trying to distance herself from the others. As always, Linda was on the receiving end of Tania’s moods, and, as
always, she tolerated the hurt that came with Tania’s razor-sharp words. She worried that, between regurgitating September 11 during her therapy sessions, and now losing her brother, Tania was headed for a nervous breakdown.

  In early September, her worry turned to panic.

  Shortly after returning from California, Tania had told Linda that Merrill Lynch was arranging for her to meet with the families of eleven of her coworkers who’d died in the towers. Over the years, she had been besieged with requests to meet the families, and she’d always refused. She knew what they wanted—details about the last moments of their loved ones’ lives—and she had always resolved that they didn’t really want to know what she knew. Those images had nearly destroyed her life, and she still couldn’t get through a night without closing her eyes and seeing a charred or broken body. How could sharing those terrible memories possibly help them? But for some reason—maybe it was having recently lost her brother—this year she had agreed.

  Tania said that the meeting was scheduled for the first Saturday in September at the St. Regis Hotel on Park Avenue. Linda was worried about the effect it would have on her friend. “Call me if you need me,” she said. “Call me if you need anything at all.” At ten thirty that morning, Linda’s phone rang. Tania was on the other end, sobbing. Coming to the St. Regis had been a mistake, she said. She had barely made it into the room at the hotel when the family members started bombarding her with questions. The atmosphere felt almost ghoulish, and she’d started to panic and look for the way out. When she wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to know, they turned on her, yelling and screaming at her that she had no right to withhold what she knew.