Free The Woman Who Wasn’t There by Robin Gaby Fisher, Jr. Angelo J. Guglielmo Page B

Linda’s thoughts, the woman beside her leaned over and whispered, “That’s Tania.”
    Linda knew something about Tania. She had met her online a few weeks earlier when she joined the survivors’ forum. In fact, it had been Tania who responded to her first post, suggesting that she come to a meeting of the Survivors’ Network. She was vaguely aware that Tania had escaped from the south tower but knew little else. So she watched, fascinated, as one person after the next jockeyed to get a word with Tania.
    One woman introduced herself as Amanda Ripley, a reporter for Time magazine. Ripley was in the process of interviewing survivors for a story. In her travels, she’d met another survivor who told her she should speak to Tania; that Tania’s story was bigger than all of the others. The other survivor, acting as a go-between, had approached Tania about doing the interview, and she agreed to speak to Ripley at some point; she just wasn’t sure when she could fit it into her schedule.
    Ripley, having heard that Tania was willing to talk to her, had come to the meeting simply to formally introduce herself, leave her business card, and perhaps set up a date to meet. But she’d barely had the chance to say her piece when the others stepped in. Tania was having a bad day, they said, rebuking the reporter for approaching her. Ripley was whisked out of the meeting and escorted from thebuilding. By the time the evening was over, Linda was completely intrigued and wanted to know more about the special survivor.
    Linda didn’t approach Tania that night, except to briefly introduce herself, but she did race home to scope her out online. She didn’t have to look further than the group forum archives to find what she needed to know. She was stunned to read Tania’s powerful account from the previous November about her life-and-death escape from one tower, and losing her husband in the other. A more recent post, written just before Linda had discovered the forum that spring, was heart wrenching.
    “Today I got a promotion at work, and I still don’t know why,” Tania wrote. “Most of the time, my mind is miles away. I relive over and over the moments I shared with Dave, my fiancé who died in the north tower. After I heard about the promotion, I had this urge to call the store where the wedding dress I never got to wear was being stored and told them to go ahead and donate it to charity. This is a big step for me. It’s been accumulating dust for 21/2 years . . . and it’s time. Tania.”
    Sitting at her home computer, trying to take it all in, Linda felt as if she couldn’t possibly attend another survivors’ meeting or even post on the forum anymore. If Tania was the definition of a survivor, how could she deign to put herself in that category? She didn’t even deserve to share the same air with her. She wrote that in an email to Tania that night, and, within minutes, Tania responded most graciously, the way that she did with others who had expressed similar sentiments. Of course she deserved to be part of the group, Tania wrote Linda. Everyone’s story was of equal importance and value. They weren’t competing for best survivor, ha-ha. No one’s experience was any more or less compelling than anyone else’s. They were all wounded souls who needed to stick together. She ended her note with “Warm regards, Tania.”
    The next meeting coincided with the Time magazine story hitting the newsstands, and everyone was chattering about it when Linda arrived at September Space. As it turned out, Tania had been interviewed for the story after all. Accompanied by another survivor formoral support, she had met with Ripley for coffee a few days after the last meeting. She did it, she told the others, certainly not for herself—she didn’t even like reporters much—but because she recognized an opportunity for the survivors to have a national platform. Tania was glowing. “Not bad, huh?” she said, holding up her