The Red Bandanna

Alison Crowther gets premonitions, but on the evening of September 10, 2001, “anxiety came on with a force she’d never experienced” (97). The next morning, driving to work, “the premonition came to her again, this time in a sentence. You’re going to die today” (97).

That morning, Welles leaves early for work and joins 14,000 other workers who make their way up into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Welles’s co-tenant, Chuck Platz, is getting ready for work “when he heard a sound that shook the bones of the room itself, rattling the glass in the mirror, a roar that forced him to tense his upper body, as if bracing for a blow” (102). Dressing quickly, he runs outside to the street, where he can see the World Trade Center’s North Tower burning.

Jeff Crowther is about to go play golf on the morning of September 11 when he gets a call from his father, Bosley, who asks, “Hey, are you watching TV?” (98). Sandler O’Neill senior manager Jimmy Dunne also loves golf, and is practicing about an hour north of New York City for an amateur tournament when a Links official walks over and says, “You need to call your office . . . A plane hit your building” (100).

Sandler O’Neill’s Natalie McIver, overworked and seven months pregnant, decides to sleep in an extra hour. On the ferry to Manhattan, she hears a strange thunder and sees a plane flying low.

The American Airlines Boeing 767 slams into the 93rd through 99th floors of the North Tower; all aboard die. In the building, hundreds more “were killed instantly by the impact, without ever having known what ended their lives” (109). Ten thousand gallons of jet fuel explode into flames.

On the 104th floor of the South Tower, confusion reigns at first. Then Herman Sandler announces that “anyone who felt uncomfortable at all and wanted to leave should absolutely go” (114). Workers begin to take him up on it; “none possessed the truth that every additional second spent on the floor was a move closer to death” (114), but those who did leave “were taking the first steps to their survival” (115).

At 8:55 a.m., the Port Authority announces over the South Tower PA system that there is no need to evacuate. At 9:02 a.m., the announcement changes. “If the conditions warrant on your floor, you may wish to start an orderly evacuation” (116). One minute later, United Airlines Flight 175 slams into the South Tower, crashing through the 78th to 84th floors, killing all on board the plane and many more inside the building, and igniting 10,000 gallons of jet fuel.

All stairwells are sliced through except one, Stairway A, in the northwest corner away from the impact. Sandler O’Neill employees and officers already making their way down these stairs are knocked off their feet by the explosion. They gather themselves and continue down at a much faster clip.

At 9:12 a.m., Welles leaves phone messages for his parents, telling them he’s all right. These words are the last they ever hear from him. Why didn’t he leave sooner? He “wasn’t made or trained to run away from peril but to go toward it” (121).

Ling Young, a New York state tax agent, is waiting on the 78th floor elevator transfer lobby when Flight 175 strikes, hurling her across the lobby and severely burning her. Dozens lie dead or injured around her. She hears a young man’s authoritative voice say, “I found the stairs. […] Follow me. Only help the ones that you can help. And follow me” (124). Ling remembers “he was wearing a white T-shirt and appeared to be uninjured. She thought she saw him with a red bandanna” (125).

The young man carries an injured woman over his shoulder. At the 61st floor, he stops, sets the woman down, urges the group to continue, and goes back up the stairs. Ling continues down to the 51st floor, where she sits, bleeding and in pain. Fire Marshal Jim Devery finds her, carries her down several flights of stairs, and ushers her the rest of the way in a freight elevator. Devery puts Ling into an ambulance on a street outside.

Just before 10:00 a.m., the South Tower “began driving downward, the floors failing, the steel buckling, the structure collapsing. Seconds later, it was gone” (129). The entire collapse takes ten seconds.

By the next morning, the public has begun searching for their missing friends and relatives. Flyers appear everywhere, “on telephone poles and mailboxes, on streetlamps and tree trunks” (135). Jeff Crowther brings Welles’s fingerprints and dental records to Manhattan, and, along with hundreds of others, files a missing-person report. 

Firefighter Harry Wanamaker appears at Alison’s door, “covered in silt, ash soaked into the fiber of his gear and caked on his turnouts” (135). He’d spent the past two days at the World Trade Center ruins, searching for survivors. “I just want to tell you…we’re doing everything we can” (136).

Late one night, making calls to hospitals, hoping against hope to find Welles alive, Alison has a strong sense of Welles’s presence in the room. She speaks aloud, “I know you’re okay. You’re not here anymore” (139). She stops calling hospitals.

At the end of September, the family holds a memorial service at the Episcopal church in Nyack. A thousand come to mourn. Welles’s sister Honor delivers a heartfelt eulogy about a brother who “could brighten a room from the house next door” (141). She reveals that while driving on September 11 she was “filled with a terrible sense of certainty. She knew, even before reaching Nyack, that her brother was gone […] she heard his voice come to her, Welles speaking to her, her feeling him. The message was clear. She should be the one to speak for him” (140).

Nyack Fire Chaplain Bill Cassidy delivers a traditional homage to a fallen fireman, one that includes: “The last alarm has sounded for our brother” (142). As she leaves the church, Alison finds outside “a color guard and an honor guard, and there were firefighters as far as she could see, standing in uniform dress” (142).