The Nest(33)
“Poor choice of words,” Tommy said, trying to keep his voice light instead of bitter.
“You know what I mean, Dad.”
Tommy knew. He showed up at the pile every day because it was his wife’s grave, as much of a grave as she’d ever have anyway. Ronnie had been an office manager for a financial services company on the ninety-fifth floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. Before the planes hit that morning, Tommy and Ronnie had passed each other in the outdoor concourse between buildings, as they did many days when Tommy was heading home from the occasional late-night security guard shift and Ronnie was arriving. She was supposed to be off that Tuesday but had decided to go in and help her boss clear out a backlog of files.
“I’ll take an extra day next week,” she’d told Tommy. “I’ll enjoy it more if I get this work out of the way.” They’d kissed in the lobby, talked about what to do for dinner. “Load the dishwasher,” she’d said, giving him a little squeeze on his upper arm.
“Roger,” he’d said. She’d smiled and rolled her eyes a little; they both knew he’d forget. He was tired after working all night but not too tired to notice her short skirt, how fine and high her ass looked beneath the center seam of the gray wool, how shapely and firm her legs were after three daughters and, soon, a grandson.
Through the excruciating hours and days and weeks following that morning, he’d thought repeatedly about that moment: Ronnie’s long, strong stride in the bright morning sun, how those legs should have carried her down to safety, how he should have been there to catch her. He remembered the shoes she wore that day, red patent leather with a little cutout for the toes. She always wore sneakers to commute from their house in the Rockaways, but would stop in the concourse lobby to slip on her heels. She cared about things like that.
“Appearances count,” she would tell their kids. “If you want people to judge you based on the inside, don’t distract them from the outside.”
His eyes had followed her that morning as she’d walked to the elevators. He would always be grateful for that, at least, how he’d stopped and admired the little sway of her derriere, watched her swipe her employee ID, press the up button for the elevator, gently tug at the hem of her skirt. How his heart had softened thinking what a fierce specimen of a woman she was, how lucky that she belonged to him.
“Mom would have hated you going there every day,” Maggie told him repeatedly in the following months. “She would have hated you putting yourself at risk.”
Tommy didn’t care what Ronnie might have thought of his days spent digging through the pile, but the concern on his daughter’s face wore on him. Her husband had pulled him aside recently to delineate how poorly she was still sleeping, the frequency of her nightmares and crying jags. How her grief had transmuted from her mother’s absence to fear for her father’s health, a sticky certainty that he was using the pile to slowly kill himself and that he wouldn’t even live to see his first grandson’s first birthday. Maggie repeatedly asked Tommy if he’d help with the baby so she could go back to work part time. He knew the request was just her way of trying to get him away from the site. With the cleanup only weeks away from being finished, he decided to give notice and help with his grandson to give Maggie and her two sisters some peace of mind. They deserved it.
TOMMY SPENT HIS LAST MORNING at work walking around and shaking the hands of the men and women he’d worked with side by side for twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, for months. Soon they’d all be gone, this unlikely, contentious family of firefighters, ironworkers, electricians, construction workers, police, medics. They’d spent months dismantling the ruins of the buildings and it was time for all of them to return to their lives, including him, whatever that meant, whatever life was going to be on the unimaginable other side of the pile. He took his rake and went to his usual position, still believing that today, his last day, might be the day—the day he found something belonging to Ronnie.
It was a silly, unlikely desire and one he couldn’t shake. Every morning as he crossed the Gil Hodges bridge and followed the Belt Parkway to downtown Manhattan, he imagined coming across something of hers while sifting through the debris—anything—her reading glasses in the fuchsia leather case, her house keys on the Cape Cod key chain she’d used for years, one of those red shoes.
On his worst days, he was angry with Ronnie, angry that she hadn’t sent him a sign, some small reassuring object. He knew this was just one of the many irrational thoughts he’d had over the past months. For weeks he was sure he’d find her, still alive and huddled under a pile, dirty and tired and coated with that omnipresent gray dust; she’d look up at him, extend a hand, and say, Take your sweet time why don’t you, O’Toole?
He knew from the first wrenching moments he saw the wreckage on television, before the towers even fell, that she didn’t have a chance. Still, he’d spent the first few weeks digging frantically where he imagined she might have fallen. And then, for a disconcerting number of weeks, he’d had an overwhelming desire to taste the ash, to take it into his mouth. The only thing that stopped him was the fear that someone would see and send him to the tent for grief counseling and not allow him back. Finally, he’d gotten himself assigned to the raking fields nearest the north tower, a silly distinction because there was little rhyme or reason as to how the piles of debris arrived at his feet; still, it reassured him. He spent his days with a garden rake in his hands, hoeing for artifacts. His desire made him a fastidious spotter. He’d found countless objects. More wallets and eyeglasses than he could count, faded stuffed animals, keys, backpacks, shoes; he made sure each and every one was tagged and bagged, hoping it would give some other family relief, however anemic.