A Fall of Marigolds (7 page)

“Quite . . . quite all right,” I stammered. “It’s going on six months.”

“Still, it was a terrible day in New York,” Dr. Treaver said. “Six months, six years, it will always be a terrible day. So many lives lost. I had no idea you survived that fire, Nurse Wood.”

I felt for the footboard of Andrew’s bed to steady myself as the room seemed to gently spin. Neither doctor appeared to notice. But Andrew did.

Dr. Treaver asked Dr. Randall to step over to the bed and examine Andrew’s throat and feel the swollen glands in his neck. Andrew opened his mouth when Dr. Treaver asked him to, but his gaze was on me.

The doctors conferred with each other and then Dr. Treaver told Andrew he was in very good hands and to mind the nurses, to take his medicine when we offered it to him, and that he and Dr. Randall would be back to see him the following day.

Then they washed their hands in the little basin on my cart, and proceeded to examine the man in the cot next to Andrew. I stayed at Andrew’s bed for a moment longer, gathering my composure and letting the room—and what I could only describe as anger—settle, so that the island could slide back into its role as an in-between place where the fire did not exist.

I knew Andrew was watching me the whole time.

But what could I do about it?

He had already seen the dark place I had somehow emerged from. Just a tiny corner of it.

He knew I had survived something terrible that others had not.

•   •   •

THE
day after the fire had been a Sunday. Churches all over lower Manhattan tolled bells of mourning for the senseless loss of life, but I could not bring myself to step inside one. Newspaper headlines lamented the city’s sorrow in a typeface meant for unimaginable woe, but I didn’t read the account. I didn’t need to read what I had seen with my eyes and heard with my ears.

I looked out my apartment window over Washington Square Park, where the side of the stalwart Asch Building met my gaze. The outside showed hardly any evidence of the catastrophe that had taken place inside it the day before. Word on the street was that it was a fireproof building. And indeed the building itself had survived marvelously. It was the people on the floors where the fire had raged—and the tinder-dry goods they worked with—that had not been fireproof.

The fire had already begun when I got on the elevator to meet Edward. As soon as the elevator doors opened on the ninth floor a rush of heat, smoke, and girls pressed in. “There’s a fire!” one of the girls yelled, and the car instantly filled with as many people as it could hold. I could smell ash on their clothes and hair. I asked one of the girls where the fire was and she said it was everywhere, gobbling up shirtwaists in the workroom as they hung on their hangers. As soon as we were safely delivered to the lobby, the elevator operator bade us to quickly exit so that he could go back. I wanted to wait in the lobby for Edward to arrive, but after only a few minutes I was shooed outside as the building was being evacuated. I rushed out onto the other side of Greene Street, where a small crowd was gathering on the sidewalk. A fire engine was just arriving and police were cordoning off the area around the building. A ninth-floor seamstress who arrived after me said the elevator could make no more trips, as the fire was now in the elevator shaft. Several girls had fallen into the shaft and been killed, pushed into the abyss by panicked coworkers behind them.

I asked whether anyone had been using the stairs. She said no one could get to the stairs. The door was locked. There were others from the building standing where I stood but Edward was not among us.

The first faces appeared at the fire-laced windows as I prayed Edward had made it out safely. And then a man close to me gasped. “She’s going to jump!” I looked to where he pointed, and as the crowd cried out in horror, the first girl stepped out of the smoke and into air that refused to hold her. She crashed onto a plate-glass protection over part of the sidewalk and it shattered with terrifying force. Even from many yards away we could see that her fall had reduced her to ribbons. Then there were more women at the windows, high above us, making their way out onto the sills.

“Don’t jump! Don’t jump,” the bystanders all around me started yelling. I started yelling it, too. But girl after girl began to jump anyway.

A trio of firemen scrambled to spread open a net, but the distance was too high. The first girl to land in the net soared out of it and landed in an unmoving crumple many feet away.

I staggered forward into the street, my instinct to nurse the broken striking me like a lightning bolt. A man next to me, a greengrocer with the smell of cabbage on his hands, stopped me.

“Stay back, miss!”

“But I’m a nurse!” I exclaimed.

“They’ll fall on you and kill you!”

The audacity of this notion immobilized me for a moment. That someone falling on me could kill me. Absurd.

I looked up then at these falling people, challenging reason to prove to me it could be true. And that was when I saw him: Edward, standing on a ledge a hundred feet above me. Fire wreathing his neck. A girl next to him. Flames ballooning her work dress. Her long hair on fire. Edward, moving toward the edge. The girl screaming. Reaching for Edward. Him taking her hand.

And as I shouted, “No!” they took to the sky.

The grocer reached for me as I dashed for the street, but I slipped from his grasp. I arrived at the cordon and a policeman held up his hand, ordering me to stop.

“I’m a nurse, I’m a nurse!” I yelled. Beyond him lay rag-doll people, broken and twisted, sprawled over red blooms that marked the spots where they had landed. I saw Edward’s contorted body several yards away, saw his broken neck even from behind the rope, saw the girl he’d escorted to heaven with him, their hands no longer touching.

“You can’t be here!” the policeman barked. “It’s not safe. And there’s not a one of these poor souls you can help. Now get back to the other side of the street!”

Above us came the sound of a terrible wail and a whoosh of air. The body of a black-haired girl landed a few feet away.

“Go!” the policeman yelled.

It was several seconds before I found the strength to obey him.

I don’t remember getting back across Greene Street to where the greengrocer was. I didn’t remember until later his wife folding me into her arms as I wept. And I don’t remember at what point they brought me into the back room of their store and made me sip brandy. It was into the evening when they insisted their delivery boy walk me home. The crowd on Greene Street had not diminished. But the bodies had blessedly been removed.

The fire had long since been put out by then; it had lasted only half an hour.

Thirty minutes.

The owners of Triangle Shirtwaist, I learned later, were on the tenth floor when the fire broke out. But they had quickly evacuated onto the roof and then to the adjoining building, a way of escape that had not been available to the eighth- and ninth-floor workers.

Edward might have been with the owners at the top of the building when the fire started had he not made plans to be on the sewing floor at that moment. He was a bookkeeper, not a seamstress. There was only one reason he was on the ninth floor at twenty minutes to five.

He was waiting for me.

TARYN

Manhattan

September 2011

THE
first reporter found me in two days.

I hadn’t taken Celine up on her offer to call the magazine and tell them I didn’t wish to be contacted. That would merely identify me.

“The magazine is going to find out it’s you,” Celine had countered. “It’s a phenomenally emotional picture. Other publications are going to want to print it; I can guarantee it. You’re going to get a call, probably several. A quarter of our customer base knows you lost your husband that day.”

“Well, then I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

Celine had been right. With the tenth anniversary only a week away, the dailies had the most interest in hearing how bystanders on the streets had escaped the collapse of the South Tower, the first one to fall. The photo had reacquainted the public with its horror of having witnessed the slaughter of so many innocents. The two faces in the photograph—one male and one female—resonated with every person on the planet who remembered that day, so the editorials said.

I politely turned down the first interview request, then the second, and then the subsequent morning TV talk shows. No one in the media pressured me to reconsider; that was one of the kindnesses extended to those of us who lost someone we loved on 9/11. We were not made to feel guilty for declining to speak of our heartaches.

But Kendal had questions that I did feel compelled to address, though I didn’t know where to begin. For ten years I’d been able to crouch in between reality and regret and pretend neither had any influence on me, never moving forward, never looking backward. Residing above the Heirloom Yard was like living above the stuff of other people’s dreams, not my own. It took the photograph for me to realize that.

The photographer who had happened upon the memory card said it had been a fluke, a chance rendezvous with a camera bag she didn’t think she still owned.

But this wasn’t the first time that what some would call a coincidence had shattered my notion that life is composed of mere random events, both lovely and terrible. It had happened to me an hour before the photographer snapped that shot.

As I lay in bed on the fourth night after the photo was published, I knew my flimsy truce with chance and destiny was gone. That in-between place had never really existed.

People who say everything happens for a reason usually say that only when they agree with the reason.

Those people are not the ones who wish they could fold back time and make different choices. They don’t lie awake at night and whisper,
If only . . .

•   •   •

THE
sky that Tuesday morning was the sweetest shade of robin’s-egg blue, cloudless and smooth.

Rays of a promising saffron sun were creeping over the bedspread as Kent walked across the bedroom to kiss me good-bye, a red travel mug in his hand.

His dress shirt was celery green, and his tie a silky charcoal.

I remember that day by its colors.

My yellow polka-dot pajamas as I lay in bed waiting for him to leave the apartment.

The white-and-sea-foam package I had hidden under my side of the bed.

The gray of waiting for several tense minutes.

The pink plus sign.

After so many years, a pink plus sign.

And then later, the marigold scarf—the last beautiful thing I saw that day.

I used to spend the nights when I couldn’t sleep re-creating that Tuesday in different colors. The sky not so blue, the sun coy behind puffy clouds, Kent in a yellow shirt and no travel mug. Me in my purple pajamas, telling him my period was late and did he want to stick around for a few minutes to see the test results even though it probably meant nothing?

Or the sky steel gray with rain. Kent in a blue-striped shirt and taupe raincoat, leaving the apartment while I still slept. Me in my teal nightgown with the little white daisies all over it, calling him as he was arriving at his office on the thirty-fourth floor, shouting into the phone those two words I’d been dying to say for four years: “I’m pregnant.” And as we discussed plans for a celebratory dinner, I stepped out onto the balcony where red geraniums were nodding hello and there was no orange scarf that day. The unthinkable would still happen, but Kent would come home to me a few hours later, shaken and ash-covered, but he would come home. We would cry about what had occurred that day, both the good and the bad.

I’ve imagined that day in different colors so many times.

When I think back to the first waking moments, before the terrible sequence of events was set in motion, I am awed by how two simple phone calls changed everything. Two ordinary, seemingly unremarkable phone calls.

The first was mine to Kent a few minutes after seven. I knew he would be on a transatlantic conference call and unable to answer his BlackBerry. I held the little pregnancy test wand in my hand, barely able to contain myself as I left him the voice mail that would send him to the one hundred and sixth floor.
Hey, hon. Can you meet me for breakfast at Windows on the World at eight forty-five? There’s something I want to show you, okay? It’s pretty cool. Call me back if you can’t make it. Love you
.

The second was to me from Rosalynn Stauer, one of Celine’s best customers. Mrs. Stauer had a very old piece of fabric she desperately needed me to pick up before she left for Scotland that day so that I could begin the task of finding its match while she was away. Could I come on my way to work?

If I hadn’t called Kent, he would have been on the thirty-fourth floor when the first jet slammed into the North Tower.

If Rosalynn Stauer hadn’t called me, I wouldn’t have been late to meet Kent, and Kendal and I would be dead.

This was why I hadn’t told Kendal I’d been there on the street when the towers fell and her father flew to heaven. It would mean telling her about those two phone calls, one that gave, and one that took.

I didn’t want her to think that the day began to unravel when she became a part of it, just like I hadn’t wanted to give Kent false hope when it had been so easy to protect him from it. I’d bought the pregnancy test in secret. If it had been negative, he would never have had to know.

Seeing that plus sign for the first time in my life was surreal. For several seconds I could only stare at the bit of plastic that quietly announced our baby was growing inside me. And then the joy that filled me was almost painful. It was too magnificent a feeling to experience alone. I wanted to be with Kent when I told him that finally, finally we were pregnant. That was the ache mixed with my joy: He wasn’t with me.

I paced our Brooklyn apartment, over-the-moon happy as I contemplated how I should tell him. I didn’t want to wait until he got home. I wasn’t sure I could. I actually didn’t think I could wait another hour. I wanted wings to fly over the river to tell him. I remembered Kent and I had enjoyed breakfast not too long before at Windows on the World for our sixth anniversary. The restaurant near the top of the North Tower was the perfect place to tell him, since, at one hundred and six floors off the ground, it was practically on cloud nine already.

I made the call to Kent, glad that I had to leave a voice mail. Then I showered and got ready, choosing a pale pink sundress patterned with tulips, as it was supposed to be eighty degrees for a high. The phone call from Rosalynn Stauer came as I was putting on earrings. At first I was annoyed by her intrusion and ridiculous request. She wanted me to essentially rearrange my morning so that I could pick up from her a piece of fabric she wanted me to match. Mrs. Stauer lived on Long Island, more than an hour’s train ride away.

“We’re leaving for Scotland today. I have to be at Newark at eleven,” she said.

If she hadn’t been Celine’s best customer I would have told her she should’ve taken care of this before the day she had to leave.

“Can you stick it in the mail to me before you go?” I said instead, grabbing a pair of ballerina flats from my closet.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that. It’s a family heirloom, Taryn.”

“I’m afraid I can’t come to Long Island. I’m meeting someone downtown this morning, Mrs. Stauer. It’s important.”

“Oh! Didn’t I mention it?” she said excitedly. “I’m already downtown! Roger had business to take care of before we head out, so we stayed overnight in the city. This is perfect.”

I slipped on my shoes and looked at my watch. Celine was in Paris on a buying trip and I was in charge. I wanted her to be glad she had left me at the helm, as she had only recently made me assistant manager. If I left Brooklyn at that moment, I might have time to make a very quick stop before meeting Kent, depending on the location of her hotel. “Where are you?”

“At the Millenium.”

The Millenium was just a five-minute walk from the North Tower. Practically across the street from it. For just a moment, the strangest feeling came over me. It was as if it were no quirky twist that Mrs. Stauer had stayed downtown last night, that there was a reason I had this errand to run before meeting Kent.

But I shook that unfounded notion away. I didn’t want to think about Mrs. Stauer or her fabric. I just wanted to get in, get out, and reach Kent.

“Okay. I’m leaving now, Mrs. Stauer. I should be there in twenty-five minutes. Can you meet me in the lobby?”

“Oh, splendid, Taryn. Just splendid. See you soon!”

She clicked off. I scooted into the kitchen to turn off the coffee and close the window above the sink—despite its squeaky protest—and then I dashed out the door.

The morning commute was in full swing and the High Street station was bustling with people heading into Manhattan. I sandwiched my way onto an A train and we took off. Ten minutes later I emerged onto Wall Street and I could feel how lovely the new day was going to be. The air was warm and fresh. And I was carrying a tiny speck of human life inside me.

After a quick five-minute walk, I was standing inside the Millenium’s lobby and it was twenty-four minutes past eight. I still had plenty of time. But there was no Mrs. Stauer.

I waited five minutes and then went to the front desk to have the desk clerk phone her room.

“She wants you to come up,” the clerk said as she replaced the phone. “Sixteenth floor, room sixteen twenty-four.”

I sighed audibly but there was nothing the desk clerk could do for me. I headed for the elevators.

Seventy-plus Mrs. Stauer, sporting auburn curls of a shade seen only on Irish setters, greeted me in her bathrobe.

“Oh, thanks for coming, Taryn. I am so glad we can take care of this before I go. Here, come in, come in.” She opened the door wide.

“I really should be on my way. I’ve an appointment and—”

“But I’m not even dressed. And this won’t take but a minute. I have it right here. Come in.”

She waddled back inside her room and I followed. The door eased itself shut behind me. Mr. Stauer was apparently out getting a paper or coffee or fresh air. Several large suitcases filled one corner, and a service table in the middle of the room boasted two plates of nearly eaten blueberry pancakes.

Mrs. Stauer picked up a large handbag from off the floor and set it on the unmade king-size bed. She stuffed her hand inside and drew out a drawstring hosiery bag.

“We planned this trip to see my cousin in Glasgow ages ago and then I suddenly remembered yesterday that I’d promised her I would try to find a scarf like the one our auntie had. I wasn’t sure where I had put this old thing.” She looked up at me. “My side of the family is Scottish, you know. This particular aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, came over in 1912, a month after the
Titanic
. Went through Ellis and everything. She had been a maid for a professor at the University of Edinburgh.”

“Mrs. Stauer, I really must be going.”

“Of course. Well, I found it buried in the cedar chest in the guest room.” Mrs. Stauer opened the bag and pulled out a length of shining orange-red. Right away I could see the sweeping pattern of marigolds woven into the fabric’s Indian design. The color palette was a soft mix of autumn hues, warm and inviting. Mrs. Stauer unfolded it and draped it across her ample front to show me the scarf in its entirety. It was beautiful.

Instinctively I reached for it.

Pleased with my interest, Mrs. Stauer laid it across my open hand. “Pretty, isn’t it? It has to be near a hundred years old.”

I fingered the silken threads. The scarf had no doubt been spun in France based on an Indian motif. Marigolds were used heavily in India in the worship of deities, the celebration of weddings, and in mourning the dead. A bit of black on the trailing edge caught my eye. Someone had stitched a name. Lily.

“Lily was your aunt?” I asked.

“Not sure who that was. My aunt’s name was Eleanor. But she was given this scarf by someone who also worked for the professor, an American. That’s why my aunt gave it to me instead of my cousin. There’s only the one scarf, though, and two of us nieces. Corrine would love to have a replica of this scarf if that’s possible. Our auntie wore it all the time. I’d like to get to Glasgow tonight and tell her you’ll be able to find something for her.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, still intrigued with the scarf’s beauty and the way it seemed to beckon me. But then I remembered I was to meet Kent at a quarter to nine and tell him the most amazing news. I looked at my watch. It was eight forty-two.

“I’ve got to go. I’m late. I promise I will get right on it, Mrs. Stauer.” I rushed to the door. “Have a great time in Scotland.”

I pulled the door open and flew out of it, folding the scarf into a rectangle as I sailed down the hallway toward the elevators. Behind me I heard Mrs. Stauer shout that I’d forgotten the bag. I hurriedly retraced my steps and took it from her. I hurried off again, rounded the corner to the elevators, and waited impatiently.

It seemed to take forever to reach the first-floor lobby. There was a faint tremor in the elevator car between the eighth and ninth floors, but I thought nothing of it. As soon as the elevator doors parted on the lobby level, I reached into my purse for my cell phone to let Kent know I was on my way. My fingers groped the inside but I could feel no phone. Had I left it at home? Had someone stolen it out of my purse during the standing-room-only commute? Distracted, I was only half-aware that people were coming to the lobby with strange looks on their faces. I heard someone ask a bellman what had happened outside, but I didn’t listen for his answer. I looked at my watch again. Now it was eight forty-eight. It would take me five minutes to walk across the World Trade Center’s central plaza and another five minutes to ascend to the one hundred and sixth floor. I was angry at Mrs. Stauer for stealing those minutes from me. Kent would wonder why I hadn’t called or texted him.