Heart of the City (30 page)

He lived at Ten House for a week. Some days he worked so hard and with so little self-awareness that he felt like an automaton, a robocop. He shut out his darkest thoughts and focused on the river of need streaming into the triage center. It is better not to dwell, he told himself. It is better to make believe things will be all right.

BACK AT North Dakota State, Robin plunged deeper into her thesis. She organized the material she’d collected in New York and prepared outlines, preliminary drawings, and a progress report for her professors.

She awoke on September 11, 2002, in a pensive mood. For reasons she couldn’t at first give voice to, her thoughts turned to the police officer she’d met in Times Square. She pulled out a binder where she’d stored keepsakes from the trip. Beneath a crumpled map, subway tickets, and a brochure for the Guggenheim Museum, she found the photo of her and Nancy with the three policemen. She looked at the dark patches beneath the one officer’s eyes, trying to divine what he had seen a year earlier. Directly or indirectly, she thought, the attacks had to have touched
every officer on that force. She felt a pang of regret, and shame, that she had stood him up. Even if he had been interested in her, what harm would there have been in a cup of coffee?

Inside her binder, she found the business card he had given her. She inhaled and haltingly dialed the phone number. “Marcel, this is Robin Miller.”

“Who?”

“You gave me your card in Times Square a couple of months ago. You don’t remember me, but I’m calling just to say that I appreciate whatever you did last September 11.”

“Land O’Lakes! Of course I remember you. How’s Minnesota?”

“I’m serious. I know it’s the anniversary, and I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Peachy. How’s the Midwest? You guys getting ready for your first ice storm yet?”

She laughed. “Don’t be silly. Our fall isn’t real different from New York.”

They made small talk for a while. Then, for the first time, Robin told him about her architecture thesis. “I want to design something that helps people confront their grief. But, Marcel, I want it to be sensitive. I don’t want to offend anyone.”

“Yeah, Robin, that’s probably a good idea,” he said. “Your school’s in, like, Fargo, right? They know a lot about Al Qaeda there?”

“Actually, that’s why I may have to come back to New York.”

She said that her professors had wanted her to gather more details about the buildings around Ground Zero.

“Well, hey, if you decide to come, give me a ring,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

As she hung up the phone, she looked in the mirror and saw that she was smiling.

HER PLANE landed at La Guardia a month later, and they met at the baggage claim. “So I was thinking that tomorrow night we
could go out on that date we never had,” he said on the drive to her hostel, near Central Park. “Remember?”

“Was that going to be a date?” she said, cocking her head flirtatiously. “I thought you were just going to tell us what other museums to see.”

“So innocent,” he cracked, shaking his head. “So naïve.”

At an Italian restaurant the next evening, she told him more about her project. He nodded politely. At one point, he rolled up his shirt sleeve and showed her the tattoo on his upper arm: the numbers 9, 11, and 01 over a silhouetted Twin Towers, and as a backdrop an American flag in the shape of a public safety badge. “It’s in memory of friends, police, firefighters,” he said. The skin on his arm was softer, smoother than Robin would have guessed. There were freckles on his shoulder.

She wanted him to open up, to talk about his experiences. But nothing. Just a few sound bites about the heroism of men in uniform, the kind of truisms anyone who had watched TV coverage of the attacks might have come up with. Sitting across a restaurant booth from him, looking at the creases around his eyes, she was suddenly aware of their difference in age.

“Do you want to talk about something else?” she asked.

“Yeah, Robin. Maybe.”

Grief, she was beginning to suspect, was something people had to come to on their own terms.

MARCEL HAD never met someone who saw the world as brightly as Robin. She loved her family. She saw only goodness in people. Though the attacks hadn’t touched her personally, she had a big enough heart to want to help people halfway across the country. And she saw hope and recovery as inevitable. To his ears, it sounded a little like a fairy tale. But it felt good sometimes to let go of his “New York defenses,” as he called them, and look at the world through her eyes. He felt strangely protective of her,
and not just because she was thirteen years younger. He didn’t want his cynicism to rub off on her, to cloud her view of the world. Though he was physically attracted to her, he played cool. He saw how much she wanted to think well of people. He wanted to measure up to her expectations.

Over the next few days, he took her to a favorite Irish restaurant and to the American Museum of Natural History, where they sat in adjoining chairs in the darkened planetarium and listened to Harrison Ford narrate a new space show,
The Search for Life: Are We Alone?

On Sunday, they walked the streets around Ground Zero. He showed her a Burger King that had served as a triage center and explained that the red X’s still visible on buildings had been left by rescuers as a sign they’d been searched. Marcel treated her to everything. He pulled back chairs and held doors. But he never lingered after dropping her at the door of her hostel, where men and women were segregated on different floors.

Marcel had drifted from his Catholic faith after his parents’ divorce. He was in fifth grade when they split, and after his mother moved to Arizona he watched his dad struggle to raise four kids on his own. If God was part of his life then, he felt, it was pretty hard to tell. Before long, the job was his only religion. This ambulance is my sanctuary, Marcel sometimes thought, as he raced the bleeding, broken, or breathless to some hospital, sirens bleating against the void. It is only here, in this box, that my life has meaning.

But after September 11, 2001, even that was gone. And in his searching, he had returned to church, first once every few weeks but now more regularly. At dinner with Robin that Friday, he asked, “Have you ever been to Saint Patrick’s?”

ROBIN WAS a practicing Catholic, seeing God’s works in places big and small. She was surprised, though, when Marcel, who seemed so worldly and cynical, mentioned church. It wasn’t a
place she’d have guessed if someone had asked, Where do New York cops take dates on Saturdays? When he proposed they go the next day, she felt something bloom inside her. “No, I’ve never been,” she said. “But I’ve heard of it. It’s the famous one, right?”

In the sunlit pews, under Gothic ceilings of vaulted marble, they sat with knees touching. “Let us ask our Father,” the priest said, “to forgive our sins and to bring us to forgive those who sin against us.”

The worshipers stood up. “Our Father,” they said, “who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

In Robin’s church back home, it was custom during the Lord’s Prayer to clasp hands with people beside you, stranger or friend. When she reached for Marcel’s, though, he did something she had not expected: he lifted her hand and, with both of his, gently pressed her palm against his heart.

Was the East Coast custom different? She looked around. They were the only two people holding hands. There was no such custom here at all. Yet when the prayer ended—“the kingdom, the power, the glory ... ”—and Marcel was still gently holding her hand, she had never felt more grateful for being misunderstood.

Before saying goodbye at the airport the next day, they kissed for the first time.

WITH ROBIN back in Fargo and Marcel back on the streets of New York, they talked nearly every night, sometimes for as many as four hours. In dribs and drabs, often in the wee hours of the night, Marcel let Robin in on his life in the attacks’ aftermath. He told her about gruesome images he could not shake. He told her about friends who died: five police officers, four firemen, a paramedic. He told her about his aborted search for the remains of Officer Moira Smith. He told her about feeling powerless, as though he could not do enough to help. They were stories he hadn’t told anyone else.

Robin just listened at first. She came to see that beneath his hard shell was a man who had known hurt as a kid—the divorce, the gunned-down friend—and now felt other people’s suffering keenly. He had spent his life searching for ways to relieve some of that suffering. In big ways, like risking his own life to save someone else’s, and small, like bringing soup to homeless vets in Times Square. But in his focus on others’ suffering, she thought, he had perhaps neglected his own.

Robin’s thesis offered cover for the asking and answering of difficult questions. In one phone call, she told Marcel she was thinking about a pair of shaftlike fountains that would fall each morning at the precise time—9:59 a.m., 10:28 a.m.—of the collapse of the South and North Towers. They would spring up again seconds later, she told him, a symbol of rebirth. But Marcel demurred. He told her it was too literal. He worried that seeing the fountains fall at exactly those times could cause survivors unnecessary anxiety. The more they talked, the more nuanced her designs became. The drawings she would eventually turn in featured shallow reflecting pools where the towers had stood. At a midpoint between the pools was an asymmetric cylindrical glass atrium where visitors would enter an underground museum and exhibit space. In her talks with Marcel, she came to see how the space would mean different things to the families and friends of the dead than it would to, say, tourists. In response, she designed a private, separate entrance for those who had lost loved ones in the attacks.