Chapter 1 #5
Given the oil truck accident (one death, ten injuries, no decon needed), I only get two hours of sleep before leaving for New York City.
I scarf down a Kind bar when I realize the gnawing inside me is not stress but actual hunger, and then I blow cold air--conditioning onto my face to keep me wide awake.
By the time I reach the coffee shop where Tabs and I always meet up on this anniversary, it’s already 7:45 a.m.
Tabs is checking her watch. She wears oversize glasses and men’s trousers, tied at the waist with a bandanna.
Her T--shirt reads: no regerts. “Finally,” she shrieks, wrapping me up in an embrace.
“You’re late. And don’t give me a lame excuse like you were saving lives in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. ”
I hug her back. “They changed the legal name in 2020.”
“And to think it only took 384 years for that teensy little state to notice its big racist energy.”
Since nine years ago, when she decked the cameraman, Tabs and I have bonded from the shared anguish of losing a parent on 9/11.
Her father, Francisco Cubero, had worked as a security guard for Summit Security Services in the South Tower.
As she said to me when she dragged me to a bar that day (one which wouldn’t card me), the problem with those anniversary ceremonies is that they’re public events for very private grief.
If your father dies in a car accident, it’s terrible, but your pain belongs to you.
If your dad died on 9/11, your pain is subject matter that the people watching coverage on TV feel like they have a right to witness, because the attacks were a global event.
“The news networks,” Tabs had said that day, as she ate martini olives and maraschino cherries right out of a little plastic box on the bar, “make it a spectator sport. Hollywood’s been blowing up buildings for years with CGI, and we watch it on screens as entertainment.
People at home don’t differentiate between that and footage from the terrorist attacks.
But you and me, we’re not actors. We’re not playing characters who lost a parent. We don’t get to change the channel.”
Tabs is eight years older than me. Like my mother, her dad’s remains were never found.
They are two of the thousands for whom there are still no bone fragments, no burned ID cards, no DNA.
Unlike me, Tabs has actual memories of her father.
Once, when it was snowing hard, he took me down Madison Avenue in a toddler sled.
He fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and it sounds weird, but I’ll never make them any other way.
He used to make shadow animals with his hands while I was eating breakfast. She’s told me these so often that she’s begun to repeat herself, but I never call her on it. How could I, when I’m jealous?
This year, as Tabs pulls me toward Ground Zero, I feel a rush of gratitude for her company.
We are part of a club no one wants to join, and apparently, it’s a lifetime membership you can never cancel.
“Today’s going to be an utter zoo,” she says as we power walk.
“How’s Jesse? How’s the job? Tell me all the things. ”
“Jesse’s fine,” I tell her.
“I know he’s fine.” Tabs smirks. “I’ve seen the man. How’s he doing?”
I roll my eyes. “He’s busy. All public services are kind of a mess. Let’s just say we’re doing a lot of creative budgeting now that the federal government’s decided Emergency Preparedness and Public Health are luxury items instead of essentials.”
She pauses. “For real? Can you say measles?”
“No, actually, we can’t. We have a gag order on us, too.”
The memorial is closed to everyone but the families of the dead this morning.
We walk toward the reflecting pools, surrounded by bronze panels etched with the names of the dead.
There are little American flags stuck into the grooves of the letters.
Photographs of babies and married couples, taped to chopsticks and wedged in the divots of a G or a P.
The stem of a rose. A red bandanna on the name of Welles Crowther, who made three trips from the South Tower’s sky lobby down stairwells, leading terrified people to safety.
Aviator pins, peanut butter cups, messages with cramped writing, a seashell.
Ballet slippers. A lei. Prayer cards. Someone has left a glove with a quartz heart in its palm.
This is the only ceremony many families have for their loved ones, the only headstone to decorate.
Every night maintenance teams sweep the panels for these relics.
They get rid of perishables—-food, flora, fifths of Jack Daniel’s—-and they save the rest. These are entered into an electronic database by size and date.
Most bits and pieces of memory get tucked away in storehouses in Jersey City and upstate New York.
A few are selected by curators of the museum and become part of the collection.
Okay, yes, I went down a rabbit hole once, trying to find out what happened to all the things that were left behind at the memorial.
A name is just a name. But when you see a note that says, Jim, she is all grown up now, you would be proud, it makes you stop and wonder.
Who raised this girl? Who was she to Jim?
It makes him real. It makes him flicker, like a pilot light, in a world he no longer inhabits.
Tabs moves away, looking for the panel with her father’s name. I do the same for my mother.
cesar amoranto alviar. tariq amanullah. angelo amaranto. james m. amato. joseph amatuccio.
eloise ambrose.
I reach up and unravel my braid. When my hair is loose and whipping around my face, I take the red ribbon I’ve woven through it and press it just beneath my mother’s etched name, underlining.
She was here. She was mine. It won’t stick, which is why other notes and photos and memorabilia are secured with little rocks or tape—-neither of which I have.
I rummage in my backpack for loose change and use coins to wedge the ribbon into the horizontal dash of the E, the A, the e.
By the time I’m done, Tabs is back, her own eyelashes damp.
The twenty--fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11 straddles the line between respectful solemnity and justifiable circus.
The dignitaries are back, but there are more of them—-every living president, leaders from other countries, Zohran Mamdani and Kathy Hochul, plus every NYC mayor and governor since Giuliani and Pataki.
The Blue Angels fly overhead, leaving seams in the sky.
But the same devoted families and friends are here, clutching their framed portraits and frayed posters.
When my mother’s name is read, Tabs squeezes my hand.
When her father’s name is read, I lean my head on her shoulder.
I try to pay attention to the litany of others, but I find my mind drifting, thinking about the pictures I have seen and the footage I have watched.
I was alive that day, unlike some in the crowd, but I was blessedly too young to remember anything.
I close my eyes and imagine a sky so blue that it burned.
I try to imagine what I would have done, as a scholar of emergency preparedness, to minimize the casualties and mitigate the disaster.
I can tell you anything you want to know about homemade explosives.
I know not to use a walkie--talkie or phone near any suspected device, because cellular and radio signals are sometimes used for detonation.
I have the State Bomb Squad and K--9 explosive detection on speed dial.
Not a single one of these things would have helped on 9/11.
Because until that morning, nobody had ever considered using a plane itself as a bomb.
Finally, the last name, Igor Zukelman, is read. When there’s nothing left but silence, two trumpeters lift their instruments. They play Taps in a call--and--response that sounds like a conversation, until a solo note hangs in the air, like the smoke and dust and shock that hazed the city for weeks.
Tabs and I walk past the Scylla and Charybdis of two press pools, stuffed with cameras and reporters. “Fuckers,” she mutters as she turns away to wipe her cheeks. When we reach the gorgeous new PATH station, we stop to say goodbye. Tabs will take the subway home.
It’s always like this for us. Although there’s no one else I want to be here with, the bond I have with Tabs is situational. After the ceremony, we each want to be left alone to our thoughts.
“Next year,” Tabs says, hugging me close, “Aruba.”
“Hawaii,” I suggest.
Every year since we’ve been coming, we promise each other that next year we will privately celebrate our parents with daiquiris on a beach.
And then every year, we still come back to Ground Zero.
One of my favorite emergency preparedness stories happened on the day my mother died.
Rick Rescorla was a Vietnam vet and the head of security for Morgan Stanley.
The bank had nearly three thousand employees and was the largest tenant of the South Tower, from level 50 to level 72.
Every month, like clockwork, Rick forced everyone in the company to do a fire drill.
While finance bros were buried in their cubicles making deals that would net them hundreds of thousands of dollars, Rick would go around with his megaphone shouting at them to walk down all those flights of stairs to the lobby.
Suffice it to say that most employees hated this.