The latest: The White House was being evacuated; the State Department was being evacuated; the Capitol was being evacuated. Sirens screamed; loudspeakers blared, “Take cover immediately.” My parents lived 15 minutes from the Pentagon.
I slipped out of my chair, ran to the production area, and picked up a landline. “Mom, Dad,” I blurted into the receiver, “please get down to the basement.” I still couldn’t get through to Tom.
And then we saw it: The South Tower disintegrating—that sky-high pillar of glass and steel crashing to the ground, generating tidal waves of smoke and debris that thundered through the concrete canyons downtown as terrified pedestrians tried to outrun them. At the North Tower, something unthinkable was happening: People were breaking windows and jumping to their deaths to avoid being burned alive. Then that tower imploded too, its iconic antenna, 360 feet tall, sinking into the wreckage.
CNBC’s Ron Insana rushed into the studio and debriefed us at the anchor desk, his bald head and dark suit covered in a ghostly layer of soot. Someone handed me some wire copy. Flight 93 had crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We would later hear of the brave passengers who stormed the cockpit with “Let’s roll!” as their battle cry.
TODAY went off the air at 1:00 p.m. Afterward, I retreated to my office, shut the door, and wept. All those people on those planes—did they know what was happening? Did they feel the aircraft change course? And everyone in the towers…did the people on the floors above the gaping holes in the buildings realize they were going to die too? What was it like, falling a thousand feet through the air, moments from death?
Never before had I felt such an overwhelming sense of responsibility to stay calm and get it right, as an audience of millions watched, desperate for any new shred of information. When I look at the replay, my composure seems utterly incongruous with how I felt.
Outside, I was assaulted by the sharp smell of burning plastic and metal wafting up from what forevermore would be known as Ground Zero. I stared out the car window at the shell-shocked city—people looking dazed, wandering the sidewalks holding candles. In the coming weeks, Frank Campbell, the funeral home that took care of Jay, would become a hotbed of perpetual mourning—hearses, flowers, swelling crowds spilling onto Madison Avenue.
I finally heard from Tom: His plane had made an emergency landing in Kansas City; he and his seatmate were driving the 23 hours to LA.
But relief would never come for so many—all those whose loved ones perished that day: Tall, 20-something Annelise—so excited about her future—who lost both her fiancé and brother. Ten-year-old Kevin Hickey, who came on the show to talk about his father, Brian, a firefighter from Queens; I’ll never forget his sweet face crumpling in grief and Matt comforting him. The widows whose husbands kept Flight 93 from crashing into the Capitol.
Some were spared by the capriciousness of fate: The father, heading to Logan Airport, who turned around at the last minute so he could take his daughter to preschool. The secretary who walked to work, just to change things up—her tardiness saved her life. Michael Lomonaco, who’d become the chef at Windows on the World （who’d laughed a decade earlier when I joked about Velveeta during his cooking segment）， getting his glasses fixed in the lobby when his restaurant on the 107th floor was incinerated, along with his employees and every last diner.
When I got home, Lori Beth was at the kitchen table with the girls, who were happily digging into their mac and cheese—I envied how oblivious they were. I hugged them extra-tight, knowing how many children would never experience that kind of hug again, their parents’ faces peering out of HAVE YOU SEEN…flyers hanging on chain-link fences across the city.
52
WWED?
AS AMERICA DEALT with the aftermath of the carnage, my family was dealing with its own private tragedy.
Driving down Route 29, I thought how strange it was to be back in Charlottesville. I had spent four glorious years at UVA, for the most part balancing my academic pursuits with the pursuit of fun, all under the watchful eye of our founder, Thomas Jefferson.
I made bookcases from cinder blocks and planks and stashed my record player under the bed, along with albums by those anguished truth-tellers we were all so obsessed with: Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Janis Ian…I learned the truth at 17 / That love was meant for beauty queens…
My first-year roommate had lush golden hair in a feathered cut with a serene aura suggesting she might have been aware of how good she had it. It was a rude awakening when the freshman boys, having seen her beatific smile in our pre-Facebook face book, lined up outside our door asking, “Is Molly there?”