The Woman Who Wasn’t There (15 page)

It was only after he’d confessed to his wife on one particularly bad night that he felt everyone would be better off without him that he was forced to get help. Lisa Jenca was a nurse, and she and one of her hospital coworkers diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He exhibited all of the classic symptoms. Jim did see a psychologist for a while after that. He pretended to be healing, but he continued to have dark thoughts. If that was what his life was going to be, he didn’t want any part of it.

Then, late one night while his family was sleeping, he was searching the Internet for anything that could help him to understand what was happening and stumbled on the Survivors’ Network forum. He joined that very night as one of the first members, and Tania welcomed him to the group. He truly believed that the camaraderie he found there saved his life. Like everyone else who met her, Tania inspired Jenca. That she had triumphed over such adversity meant it was possible that he could reclaim his life too. There were many times when he was feeling low that he would log onto the forum and gather strength from her posts. Especially in the beginning, Tania had gone out of her way to encourage him. Some days she spent hours talking him through an emotional collapse, and he had come to depend on her more than he did his own wife. When he finally met her, during the inaugural visit to ground zero, he felt as if he were in the presence of a saint.

The forum and the people who were part of it became as essential to Jenca’s existence as the blood coursing through his veins. Every
time he had a setback and thought about dying, he found someone there who understood the profound ache in his heart. It was that solidarity with the other survivors that got him through each day. But after nearly three years of pouring out his heart and developing the most intimate friendships of his life, things took a terrible turn.

It all started shortly after the fourth anniversary, when Jenca posted politically charged commentary in the forum. The survivors, of course, were of varying political stripes, and they tried to stay away from discussions about politics. Jenca was always being called out for his veiled pro-Bush, pro-war postings, but then all would be forgiven, and the discussions in the forum would go on as usual. That October, he posted a treatise that a friend with similar political leanings had passed along to him.

Under the subject line “Things that make you think a little,” the piece was a long recitation on war and the military and read in part: “In the years since terrorists attacked us, President Bush has liberated two countries, crushed the Taliban, crippled al-Qaeda, put nuclear inspectors in Libya, Iran, and North Korea without firing a shot, and captured a terrorist who slaughtered 300,000 of his own people. The Democrats are complaining about how long the war is taking. But it took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound.” The last comment referred to the government’s fifty day siege of the religious sect’s complex near Waco, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of scores of followers and their children, and four FBI agents.

The second part of the discourse was of an exchange between Ohio senator John Glenn, a former marine pilot and astronaut, and his opponent Howard Metzenbaum during a 1974 Democratic primary. The story went that Metzenbaum, who had a business background, attempted to undermine Glenn’s credentials during a debate by saying that he had “never worked for a living.” Glenn volleyed back with a response that many believe won him the election. The senator challenged his opponent to go to a veteran’s hospital and “look at those men with mangled bodies in the eyes and tell them they didn’t hold a job.”

Jenca prefaced the post with a note that said:

All,

I am sorry, but I feel I need to pass this on. I know this is political in nature, however, it is fact. In my heart I know we, as Americans, need to unite. I am prepared to take all of the penalty flags that can be thrown by everyone.

Jim

Some of the other survivors raised objections to the political nature of the post, and Tania was beside herself when she read it. She called Jenca and reminded him that she and she alone ran the forum and that she had the power to accept or reject anyone who wanted to use it. His posting was an egregious violation of the forum rules, she said, and he was no longer welcome there. She was throwing him out.

Jenca was stunned. He fought back with evidence of past posts from others that were of a political nature, including some from Gerry Bogacz and one from Tania herself, just before the 2004 presidential election, when she took an online poll of the survivors, asking them to reveal what their votes would be. When Jenca said he was backing Bush, she responded with a terse rebuke, saying that she was disappointed in him and adding that he obviously wasn’t as smart as she had once thought he was. Her attitude toward him began to change after that. She was dismissive and often ignored him when both were on the forum.

Jenca didn’t know it, but Tania had begun telling other survivors that she suspected he was a fraud; that he wasn’t a survivor at all and probably wasn’t anywhere near the towers on that day. She had made such accusations before, and those people had gone away. One woman claimed that she was in her mail truck when the towers crashed around her. Tania told everyone her story didn’t add up. Another said she was near the Pentagon in a tour bus and had witnessed the plane diving into the building. Tania questioned her story as well.

A third, Lisa Fenger, was in town for a meeting and witnessed the disaster from a boardroom in an office building on Fiftieth Street
and Broadway. Fenger was so traumatized by what she saw that she ended up joining the network and made a point of attending survivors’ functions whenever she was in the city for business. She walked the Tunnel to Towers 5K benefit run with Tania by her side. On that particular day, Tania was wearing a T-shirt with Dave’s picture, which Lisa recognized as one of her colleagues from Deloitte. She had heard Tania talk about her husband Dave but never realized it was the Dave she’d known.

“I had no idea Dave and Dave
was the same guy,” she wrote Tania in an email after the event. “Wow, the only person that my company lost turns out to be your husband. How bizarre.” Tania never answered the email and never spoke about it. When Lisa mentioned the coincidence the next time she saw her, Tania retorted, “I can’t talk about this. It’s too painful. And I’m too fragile.” Soon after that, Tania began a campaign to get rid of Lisa and told her she was no longer welcome in the group.

So when trouble began with the John Glenn posting, even though Jenca had been seen on film running from the towers, many of the survivors were already questioning whether he was, indeed, an impostor. Tania said she could spot a fake a mile away.

The emails between Tania and Jenca bounced back and forth as he attempted to defend his action, and she continued to refuse to restore his membership. “I feel you have abused your power as a moderator, and I will do my best to get back to the group,” he wrote. “I feel that you have discriminated against me due to my political beliefs, and I will see if there is a course of action I can take. I feel that I belong there and am quite sad about this whole thing. You have just crushed my every inner self with what you did.”

The more he pushed, the more Tania resisted, even when he appealed to her ego. “No matter what the end result, you will always be an awesome person in my mind,” he wrote. “You were a true inspiration to me and still are. I have been so down at times with regard to 9/11, where I had thought that I could not go on and considered doing something very stupid. There were a couple of things that came to my mind and stopped me. They were my family and you. I
know what you went through, and if you can go on, that gave me the strength to go on.”

Tania wouldn’t budge. She had removed him from the group, she said, because he had broken the rules. And the decision hadn’t been hers alone. “I consulted with the others before I did it,” she wrote. She wouldn’t say who the others were.

Jenca emailed some of the other members he felt closest to, telling them that Tania had banned him from the group. “I am really devastated by this,” he wrote one survivor. “I guess I am all alone, since no one will take my side.” He was right about that. No one was going to go against Tania. Even the survivors who came to Jenca’s defense tiptoed around her, suggesting to her that he needed the help and should be allowed back. Tania was unmoved. When she got wind of his complaints to the others, she refused to respond to any more of his communiqués.

After a week of watching his lifeline slip away and being ignored by Tania, Jenca saw her online and pleaded with her to be able to return to the group. In a series of instant messages, he reminded her about their heart-to-heart talks in the past and of all of the times he had said he respected and admired her. He meant that, he said. But he had never intended to offend her with his political posting or his emails telling the others about his expulsion. He had just needed some time to cool off to understand the error of his ways, he explained. Now he wanted to come back.

Tania’s response was immediate but curt. She would reinstate him, she said, if he promised to respect the others and abide by the rules of the forum. “And an apology would help,” she wrote.

Jenca said he was sorry and that he would do his best to follow the rules. “When do I get reinstated?” he asked. “When I cool off,” she replied.

“Well, today is October 18. How long will it take?”

“Well, you’ve been bitching for a whole week. I can take that long too, right? . . . Now it’s me that needs some time.”

Jenca could hardly believe that the same sweet woman who had welcomed him to the forum almost three years earlier could be so
callous now. She knew how fragile he’d been and still was. He had revealed to her his most intimate thoughts, even those about suicide at his lowest points. She knew that he believed he needed the group to survive, but she was playing a cat and mouse game about his coming back.

“Who is this woman?” he wondered. She wasn’t the Tania he knew. She was a stranger.

Jenca checked his messages every day for permission to return to the forum. He could feel himself withering without his survivor friends.

Finally, he received an email saying he was back in.

It was signed, “Tania Head.”

T
he voice on the other end of the phone babbled with excitement. Alison Crowther was at home in the New York City suburb of Upper Nyack. The caller was Kimberly Grieger, a friend from the Tribute Center.

“Alison,” she said, “I think I met someone else Welles saved.”

Alison’s son, Welles, a twenty-four-year-old equities trader, was working on the one hundred fourth floor of the south tower when the plane flew into the building. He was a hero that day, and he had become a legend in death. Welles Remy Crowther, Nyack High School honors student, Boston College class of ’99, volunteer firefighter, athlete, brother, son. For all that he had been in his tragically brief life, for the longest time he was known only as “the man with the red bandanna.”

Welles was Alison and Jeff Crowther’s only son. At first they knew very little about the day he died. Welles had gone to work that morning as usual. He called both of his parents to say the towers had been struck and that he was okay and on his way out of his building. He had made it down to the ground level of the south tower before it collapsed. His body was found six months later, along with the bodies of a group of New York City firefighters.

That was enough information to satisfy Jeff Crowther. But Alison needed to know more about their son’s final moments. She wanted some sense of how Welles had died. Why he died. For months after the attack, she spent every day scanning newspaper articles and television shows for clues. In May 2002, buried in a
New York Times
story
about the 102 minutes between the first plane hitting and the second tower falling, she found the lead that would give her answers:

A mysterious man appeared at one point, his mouth and nose covered with a red handkerchief. He was looking for a fire extinguisher. As Judy Wein recalls, he pointed to the stairs and made an announcement that saved lives: Anyone who can walk, get up and walk now. Anyone who can perhaps help others, find someone who needs help and then head down.

In groups of two and three, the survivors struggled to the stairs. A few minutes behind this group was Ling Young, who also survived the impact in the sky lobby. She, too, said she had been steered by the man in the red bandanna, hearing him call out, “This way to the stairs.” He trailed her down the stairs. Ms. Young said she soon noticed that he was carrying a woman on his back. Once they reached clearer air, he put her down and went back up.

Alison gasped. That mystery man could only have been her Welles. He had carried a red bandanna in his pocket every day since he was eight years old. On the Sunday before the attack, he’d met his parents in Soho for dinner. He’d pulled out his wallet, and it was wrapped in the red bandanna. “Oh my God!” Alison cried. “It has to be him. I just know that was Welles.”