Chapter 1 #6
On September 11, when the first plane hit the North Tower, at 8:46 a.m., Port Authority sent word to the people in the South Tower to remain in place.
Rick, however, said Hell no. He picked up that megaphone and started herding Morgan Stanley employees down the stairwells.
At 9:03 a.m., when the second plane struck that tower, the impact knocked people down and sent office furniture flying.
The power cut out. In the stairwells, those who were fleeing fell and were injured.
So Rick did what he had done in Vietnam, when he wanted his soldiers to keep marching—-he sang old Welsh songs he remembered from his childhood.
At one point, between songs, he called his wife.
She later reported what he’d told her: Stop crying.
I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.
By 9:45, most of Morgan Stanley had been safely evacuated.
But because a handful of people were unaccounted for, Rick turned around and walked back into the South Tower.
Thirteen Morgan Stanley employees, including Rick and four of his security staff—- died when the building collapsed at 9:59, but 2,687 employees and 250 visitors to the bank lived, because Rick Rescorla had a plan.
I wonder if there was someone trying to help my mother on that day.
By the time I get back to Providence, the sun is setting.
Inside our condo, the lights are off and a line of mismatched candles forms a trail that wraps around the corner of the hallway.
Smiling faintly, I follow the path past our kitchen table, through the bedroom, and into the bathroom, where Jesse sits on the edge of the tub.
Steam rises above the bath bubbles. Five more candles stand on the windowsill.
“Candles are a fire hazard,” I murmur.
“Oh, damn,” Jesse teases. “I forgot the accelerant.” He folds me into a tight embrace. “How’d it go?”
“Fine.” I shrug, and he raises a brow.
“It was fine,” I repeat. “Just like last year, but with more hoopla.”
He ignores me, unbuttoning my cardigan and peeling it away.
Sometimes it really sucks to have a husband whose job it is to spot liars.
It’s not looking away or biting your lip that gives you away, he told me once.
It’s if the suspect does that when he hasn’t done it any other time.
It’s longer hesitations between the question and the answer.
It’s dropping the words me, my, I—-which you do because lying is actually hard on your brain.
On the other hand, he had added, you can only spot a liar who seems stressed. If someone’s told themselves a story so often that they’ve begun to believe it, they can turn around and tell it to you as if it were the truth.
Jesse shucks off my shoes and my pants and finally my underwear. A groan escapes me when I sink into the water, loosening muscles that I hadn’t even realized were so tense. “Can you bring me my work phone?”
Jesse shakes his head. “You still have the rest of today off.”
“But—-”
“Mol,” he says, “Rhode Island will still be standing tomorrow morning. And if it’s not, you get to say I told you so. See? Win--win.”
He bends to kiss me, and I cup his face in my hands, giving him a beard made of bubbles. “You look like Santa.”
Jesse grins. “Then it’s good you have a thing for old guys.” He edges out of the bathroom, leaving me to relax.
For a while I stare at the candle flames as they dance and weave. Then I look out the window, where stars are just starting to wink into existence.
At that first memorial, the time when I met Tabs, after we left the bar, we wandered around Lower Manhattan for hours. When it was finally dark, the Tribute in Light soared into the night, two towers illuminated like phantoms of the buildings that had once stood there.
“That one’s for your mom,” Tabs said, pointing. “And that one’s for my dad.”
In New York City, those beams will scrape the heavens tonight. But here, it’s the same view I had last night, of the stars littering the sky.
It was Jesse’s father, Brian, who taught me to find the constellations, to navigate by their position. It was Brian who reminded me a star is just a fire that can’t be extinguished.
That night, even with Jesse’s arms around me, I fight sleep. “Worst--case scenario,” I whisper. “Finding the missing smallpox sample.”
I can feel him swim back to consciousness. “It’s lost?”
“After the disease was wiped out, there were only two samples left in the whole world,” I tell him.
“One at the CDC, the other at a similar lab in Russia. But when the USSR fell, so did the building the lab was in. No one knows where that sample went—-if it’s buried underground or in someone’s pocket just waiting to become a bioweapon. ”
Jesse hums against my throat. “Okay. My worst--case scenario: L.A. wildfires,” he counters. “Like the ones in 2025, but with the Santa Ana winds and the mountain wave.”
“What’s that?”
“Winds that get compressed when they hit the mountain range and start acting like tornadoes spinning a hundred miles per hour. They can send sparks over your head to start a fire behind you. Or travel a mile in less than a minute. A perfect storm of disasters.”
I pull his arms tighter around me. “But not tonight,” I murmur.
“Not tonight,” he agrees.
I fell for Jesse slowly, gradually. For one thing, we met during Covid, and I was working 24/7 in the midst of the biggest public health emergency of my lifetime.
He might have had the most striking eyes I’d ever seen and a smile that felt like a power source, but the entire world was in a tailspin and I didn’t have the time or energy to invest in dating when I was so busy trying to keep everyone in the state alive.
So when he brought me Chinese takeout at the end of a very long, very fraught vaccine clinic, I told him that although I was flattered, I wasn’t interested in anything more than friendship.
Jesse scrutinized my face, then shook his head. “You’re lying,” he said.
“Um, I don’t think so.”
“I do,” he told me, “and I can prove it to you.”
He asked for one chance to do just that, and when I rolled my eyes and agreed, he patiently waited until a time when there was enough of a lull in the pandemic response for us to find time to get together. Then he asked me to meet him for our date . . . at the police station.
During Covid, the Providence police station was far less busy than it had been before.
Jesse met me in the lobby and led me through a rabbit warren to a small interrogation room, where we took off our masks.
On the table in the room, there were deli sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, and bottles of Coke.
There was also a polygraph machine—-a small black box with wires snaking out of one side, that fed into a computer on the other.
He gestured to a seat with a small pad on it.
“Is this all because I said I don’t want to go out with you?” I asked.
Jesse leaned against the table across from me. “You know polygraphs don’t really detect lies?” he said, which was not an answer. “They detect emotional responses that you’re trying to hide. My job is to interview you in a way that reveals them.”
I raised a brow. “And that works?”
“Ninety--two percent of the time.”
“So some people can still get away with a lie?” I said. “That’s why it’s not admissible in court.”
Jesse rolled his eyes. “Yeah, so instead the judge instructs the jury to consider how direct a witness was in answering questions, and whatever else gives them a gut feeling of truth. But witnesses are coached on how to look sympathetic, and the average juror can detect a liar accurately only about half the time. Why do you think so many convictions are overturned with DNA evidence?”
Then he picked up a springy black tube connected to the polygraph device. “May I?” he asked.
When I nodded, he gently slipped the tube around me, his fingers grazing my collarbones. I swallowed. “So you’re admitting this isn’t a science,” I said.
“On the contrary,” Jesse replied, settling a second black tube just below the band of my bra. “When you lie, you relive the event. The fear of getting caught in the lie triggers the autonomic nervous system. You’re familiar with fight, flight, or freeze?”
I was intimately familiar with it, because my body was exactly in that space right now.
“That’s the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system, trying to protect the body.
” His hands slipped to the edge of my sweater, tugging it down so that the tubes around me sat as flush as possible.
“The parasympathetic part, on the other hand, is what brings your body back to its resting state. For example, if you watch a horror movie and scream at a scary part, and then you calm down again? That’s what the polygraph measures.
You can’t control those responses, even if you try. ”
He gestured to the bands he’d wrapped around me.
“Those tubes measure breathing rate.” Then he took a stainless steel plate and velcroed it to my pointer finger, then secured a second plate on my ring finger.
“These measure skin sensitivity—-the more you lie, the more you sweat, which means sodium ions come out of your pores and trigger the electric response.” Finally, he affixed a blood pressure cuff around my bicep and a pulse oximeter on my finger.
“And this measures your heart rate and pulse.”
Traitorously, my heart took that moment to thump hard against my ribs.
I was here voluntarily, and I had nothing to hide—-and yet there was something so intimate about knowing that Jesse would be able to tell if I wasn’t being honest with him.
He handed me a piece of paper. “Write down a number between two and six. Don’t tell me what it is.” Abruptly, he moved away, all business, and sat down across the table. “All right, time to begin. This is the only time I’m going to ask you to lie to me during this interview.”
“Interview,” I repeated, scoffing.
“Date?” he suggested.
I frowned.