“So I’m holdin’ the steering wheel,” Donna was saying, white-knuckling an invisible wheel with one hand while she held a glass of alcohol-free champagne in the other. “And I’m just cryin’. I mean bawling my eyes out. That’s how helpless I was. I just froze, you know? Meanwhile the smoke is pouring out of the hood and over the windshield.”
She made a billowing motion with her arm. Andy sat there grinning, the marble top of the kitchen island cold on her forearms.
“And this guy just appears out of nowhere, and he’s banging on my window. ‘Lady! Your car’s on fire! Are you out of your mind? Open the door!’”
“Is this the craziest meet-cute I’ve ever heard of?” Andy wondered aloud.
“Ten minutes later I was sitting on the hood of his car a little further down the highway, and he was writing me out a phone number for this guy he knows who could get me a good deal on a new car,” Donna said. “I remember it like it was yesterday. Matt was wearing a black guayabera shirt and chinos. And the fire and smoke all behind him? Urgh. God. I’m getting hot flushes just thinkin’ about it. The car blew, of course, just like he said it would. Pieces flew all over the highway. And you know what? He didn’t even flinch. I’m thinking: Either this guy is hard of hearing or he’s the biggest badass I’ve met in my life.”
Andy leaned her chin on her palm, appreciated Matt’s wife. She was a skilled comical mime, might have made a good actress at some point. Pretty, if weathered by a rough Jersey childhood and a couple of years married to the biggest badass the girl had ever met in her life.
“Is he a badass?” Andy asked curiously, playing with the stem of her wineglass. “Or did the Towers just make him numb to everything?”
Donna’s head swiveled, checking for her husband. “Oh, shit! Babe, we don’t talk about that in this house.”
“I know.”
“As soon as my mother heard he’d been a part of all that? She tried to warn me off him.” Donna’s voice was barely above a whisper. “My mom remembers that day. I was too young. She’s like: ‘A man goes through something like that? He’s a walking bag of problems for the rest of his life.’ And she was right. Matt is a walking bag of problems. The nightmares. The rage. The paranoia. His exes all tried to warn me, too, but I didn’t listen.”
“Paranoia?” Andy leaned in. “What’s that all about?”
“He thinks he’s gonna get cancer from it.” She shook her head. “Always getting me to feel his neck. ‘Can you feel a lump? Is this a lump right here?’” She pushed her fingers into her jugular, poked around. “He thinks he deserves to get it. Because everybody who went into the Towers paid some kind of price, right? The guys who didn’t come out. The guys who got the cancer afterward. When’s Matt gonna get called up to pay his share?”
Andy didn’t answer. Donna rubbed her belly, looked at the round dome of it stretching the front of her dress.
“Especially him, of all people,” she said. “He says he should pay the biggest price of all.”
“Why?”
“Because he lost everybody. His whole crew. There are plenty of guys around still who were there, but not many of them lost everybody. So people give Matt a little extra, because he was the only one left from his station.”
“Jesus. How did that happen?”
Donna leaned in now. Andy could smell her breath, the fake champagne and Doritos. “Not a lot of people know this, okay? I had to get him fall-down drunk just so he’d tell me.”
“Okay.”
“Matt was part of the North Tower response. They got prior warning about the collapse. The calls were coming through like crazy after the South Tower went down. Mayday! Mayday! Everybody get the fuck out! It was like Drop your equipment and go! His whole crew were there, trying to help the people who were trapped or injured and couldn’t walk. Nobody was leaving. There was a consensus. We’re staying to help these people. The guys didn’t know the other tower had gone down; you couldn’t see it through the smoke. They didn’t believe it was possible, a thing like that. So they heard the calls but they decided they were staying no matter what.”
“But Matt didn’t stay.”
“No. Matt grabbed some lady off the floor and just ran,” Donna said. “Took him an hour to get up to the forty-first floor. Ten minutes to get back down. He lost everybody. Even the station probie. He kills himself about every part of it, you know? That this guy stayed, and not him. That that guy stayed, and not him. That the fucking probie stayed. He even beats himself up about which woman he grabbed on his way out. Because there were two to choose from, both lying on the floor just by the fire stairs. He picked one and not the other. Turns out the one he didn’t pick was a mother with three kids.”
“Jesus.”
“And so now, everywhere you go, it’s like Never forget! Never forget! All Matt wants to do is forget that day. He says: That’s the day he found out he’s one of the bad guys.”