“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.
Still, this one idea persisted: that he would find something of hers, and as long as he was there digging through the carnage it was possible—it had happened, just not to him. Salvatore Martin, retired EMS, who worked the 5:30 A.M. shift seven days a week had drawn his rake through a tangled pile of cable and dirt one bitter, frozen winter day and staring up at him was a photo of his son Sal Jr. on a laminated corporate ID, slightly burned around the edges, picture intact. Sal had quit the following week and everyone thought seeing the plastic badge had been too much, had sent him over the edge. Tommy knew the truth. Sal had found what he’d been looking for—proof, a talisman—and so he was free to leave.
Tommy’s last afternoon on the pile. He decided to find his own souvenir to take that was of this place where Ronnie had last lived and breathed—something easily pocketed to sit on his desk or the windowsill above the kitchen sink, something he could bear to look at every day. As he raked through the rubble, considering his options (a piece of stone, a pebble—it couldn’t be anyone else’s personal effect, he wouldn’t do that), one of his coworkers hollered for him.