The Good Liar(2)

Remembering’s important, but the Initiative’s real purpose is compensation. Weighing up a life lost and assigning it a value, then paying it out to the victim’s family, changing their lives forever, though they’ve already been changed forever. There’s big money in this, I’ve learned, as the furnishings on this floor attest. I’m surrounded by plush gray carpet, newly painted cream walls, and expensive pieces by up-and-coming Chicago artists hanging under directed lighting. People might leave here millionaires or paupers, but they’ll all be treated to the experience.

As if love or loss has a price. As if being denied access to the funds set aside to ease their way through life after suffering this tragedy can be softened by a glass of ice water with a perfect lemon wedge floating in it.

I push these ungrateful thoughts aside. The Initiative has done a lot of good for a lot of people, myself included. I shouldn’t be so critical.

Teo Jackson’s waiting for me in a boardroom lined with corkboards. They’re covered in multicolored cue cards arranged in columns. Above each one is a white card with one word on it. STREET, reads one. UNIDENTIFIED, reads another.

“Cecily,” Teo says. “Great to see you again.”

“Is it?”

Teo rubs at his close-cut beard. His skin is a dark amber, and he’s wearing his trademark gray-blue T-shirt under a well-cut corduroy jacket. Inky jeans. Converse shoes. He’s worn some variation of this outfit every time I’ve seen him. I imagine his closet divided into four neat sections, his day eased by a lack of decisions.

“Why would you even question that?” he asks, smiling with his eyes. I avoid eye contact. Teo’s far too handsome for my current level of self-esteem.

“My therapist says I need to be more . . . definite.”

“Does he?”

“She. Yes.”

I wasn’t in therapy before, but it’s the only place I can unburden myself. Now I use the fact that I have a therapist as a measure of someone’s merit—if they flinch or look embarrassed when I mention it, then I know they’re not worth bothering over.

Teo doesn’t flinch or look embarrassed. He does, however, say, “Wait.”

He picks up a pink card, writes POSTER CHILD? on it in thick marker, then tacks it into place beneath the STREET column.

“What’s all this?”

“It’s my storyboard. My map of the day.”

He smiles again. It’s the first thing I remember about him, how he smiled and told me it was going to be all right when he had no way of knowing if that was true. But there was something about him that made me want to believe him, and so I did.

“It’s what I do for every film,” he says. “It’s a way to set out the narrative.”

“But it’s a documentary.”

“It still has to tell a story. Have a beginning, middle, and end. A protagonist and an antagonist.” His hand shifts from one column to the next, tapping the cards so they pop. “A hero.”

His hand comes to land on the card he just wrote on.

“I’m not the hero, Teo.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

A year ago, Teo had been scouting locations with his assistant for a commercial he’d agreed to shoot to pay his bills. He was photographing some of the homeless who hang out at Quincy Station when the world turned sideways. He was another person who stood still that day, photographing Chicago as it changed irrevocably, taking a more careful catalog than the crowds who captured what they could on their cell phones. When the fire started to spread up Adams Street, he knew they had to get out of there. But first he decided to take one last shot.

He caught me in a whirlwind of debris with the river glinting in the background. When I look at it now, the image seems staged, like a scene in a movie where the heroine’s been through hell and is waiting for her final showdown with a bad man who’s almost impossible to kill. My clothes are covered in grime, but my face is unmarred, and I’m staring fixedly at the building. If you look closely enough, the fireball it’s become is reflected in my eyes.

He got his shots—click, click, click—and then he grabbed my hand and pulled me to safety.

While we waited in Washington Station like Londoners during the Blitz, Teo uploaded that picture to a website freelance photographers use to sell their photos. It became the shot of the day, the image everyone associated with October tenth, and for the next month, two, three, wherever I went, my own face stared back at me.

Somehow, I’d become the poster child for a tragedy that killed 513 people and injured more than 2,000, including Teo’s assistant, who ended up with second-degree burns on his arms and torso.

I didn’t want the recognition, the notoriety, the fame. When Teo asked for my permission to upload the picture as we waited for the all clear in the station, I didn’t think of the consequences; I just said yes to the man who’d saved my life. By the time I thought to revoke my consent, it was too late. So instead, I’ve tried to pass it off, to play it down, to let it pass me by.

But I’ve learned that you don’t get to choose what becomes an enduring image, even when you’re the subject of it.

A couple of months ago, Teo was hired by the Initiative to make a documentary about what’s become known as Triple Ten, because the explosion occurred at precisely ten a.m. on October tenth. His approach, he told me in the series of e-mails he used to persuade me to participate in his film, is to follow three families a year later.