Leah Elizabeth Oliver was technically my step-cousin. You would never know it.
“Hey, primo!” Leah would say whenever she’d see me walk into one of the Manhattan bars where we had arranged to meet up in the New York City of the late 1990s and early aughts.
“Hey prima!” I’d smile and respond, a nod to our shared Portuguese heritage and experiences growing up in Greater New Bedford, a city of roughly 100,000 souls in Southeastern Massachusetts, where generations of immigrants from the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde and mainland Portugal settled over the past century and a half.
Leah was 24 when she died on Sept. 11, 2001. She would have turned 25 the next day.
At the time, Leah worked as a consultant for Marsh & McLennan, which had office space in the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. From what I understand, Leah was or was on her way to the agency’s offices on the North Tower’s 96th floor when the first hijacked airline struck the building. A direct hit.
It’s still surreal, 20 years later. I don’t know if I’ll ever completely process not only the events of that Tuesday morning, but everything that happened in the weeks and months that followed.
I was 24 and in my final year at Hunter College on New York City’s Upper East Side, juggling a full academic course load, a part-time retail job, the sports editor’s position at the school newspaper, and my responsibilities as a journalist/public affairs specialist in the U.S. Army Reserves.
Leah, a Top Ten student in high school, graduated from Columbia University, and had lived in New York for the better part of a decade. We both cohabitated with significant others in Brooklyn but always found time to hang out amid our busy schedules. It could have been a night out bar-hopping in the city, catching a movie, cutting it up at the Velvet Room, going to Mass at the neighborhood parish, or laughing through a free-wheeling dinner party with drag queens at Lucky Cheng’s in the East Village.
One time, I remember hanging out in a Brooklyn Heights apartment with Leah and her boyfriend, watching The Sound of Music on television, which I knew he was not a fan of. Having to leave before the movie was over, I busted his chops by telling him to enjoy the film. Leah laughed her ass off.
“Get outta here, asshole,” she said through stifled laughter.
Before she died, I hadn’t seen Leah in perhaps two or three weeks, maybe longer. Previous plans to meet up had fallen through. In late August or early September, she called my apartment, but I wasn’t home, so she spoke with my girlfriend. I remember that Leah asked about me, and said we’d catch up soon.
We never got that chance.
It sounds trite, but Leah really was special. She was intelligent, and had a friendly, outgoing, and somewhat mischievous personality to complement her first-rate intellect. And she was beautiful with a smile you could never forget.
Leah was only a year ahead of me in school. We both ran on the track and field team and joked around in practice. We spent time together doing activities in our parish youth group. She entered The National Honor Society, and welcomed me to its ranks a year later when I was a junior.
Leah was a wunderkind; brilliant, driven, talented and motivated. But she wasn’t a robotic drone curating her extra-curriculars for a college application or a professional resume. She was a flesh-and-blood human being who worked hard in school and played just as hard in her downtime, sometimes to her poor mom’s chagrin. I loved that about Leah.
We hit it off from the moment we met. I was 11 when my father remarried. I made connections with my stepmother’s extended family, which still included her late husband’s relatives. Leah was my step-siblings’ cousin through their father, so she and I didn’t actually share a biological familial relationship. Not that that mattered. From Day 1, Leah and I related to each other like we were cousins who grew up playing at their parents’ houses.
“Fraga!” she’d sometimes yell my last name to get my attention over the loud music in whatever New York City club or bar we were at on a particular night. Once after an evening out clubbing or drinking, Leah, another friend and I stopped at a McDonald’s in Greenwich Village for 2 a.m. fast-food when an overly-friendly drunk man tried to kiss the top of my head. Leah laughed so hard she almost fell out of her seat. At the time, I was embarrassed, but now I adore that memory.
We actually lost contact for a few years in the mid-90s, which was easier to do in the days before everyone had cell phones and Facebook accounts. She went off to college. In my last year of high school, I had a girlfriend and enlisted in the US Army. While Leah experienced college life in New York, I served out an active-duty enlistment as a young infantryman at Fort Stewart, Georgia.
In hindsight, that I ended up in New York City to attend college as Leah was starting out her professional life in that city was one of life’s blessings. Leah learned through speaking with relatives that I was in New York, and one of us got the other’s phone number. The rest was a wonderful but too short history.
Sept. 11, 2001 was primary election day in the crowded New York City mayoral race. We were coming off a hot, humid summer and an early warm September. But that Tuesday morning was cool and comfortable, with clear blue skies. No clouds in sight.
I took my dog for a morning walk around our Park Slope neighborhood. I had a scheduled meeting later that day with my academic advisor in the city. After returning to my apartment, I turned on the television to catch the day’s weather forecast when I saw a gaping hole in the World Trade Center, and black smoke billowing out.
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I had forgotten that Leah had not too long before started a gig at the Twin Towers. I sat on my couch and watched the surreal news coverage just like millions of other Americans that day, even though the real-world events were unfolding less than 20 miles from my apartment.
My next-door neighbor worked in World Trade Center, and his fiancé was scared to death that morning. The cell phone reception that day was spotty at best, and she couldn’t get through to him. He finally walked into the lobby and told us about the chaos, how he saw fire and debris shooting out of the North Tower and that his first instinct was to buy a disposable camera and snap a few pictures before he realized that the right and safe thing to do was to get the hell out of there and come home.
My US Army Reserves sergeant called me. He and I were on the phone talking when I saw the fireball erupt from the South Tower. At first I missed the second plane and thought it was a gas explosion. But when I realized what had happened, the reality that it was a terrorist attack set in.
My parents and friends from Massachusetts called to make sure I was safe. In between those calls all I could do was sit and watch the television and experience the sinking feeling in my stomach as news reports came in about the Pentagon being hit with a hijacked airliner, and that another aircraft had crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania. At one point, I had to walk outside my apartment building, even though my head felt like it was spinning. Over the apartment buildings in my neighborhood, I saw an enormous ashen-gray cloud rising high into the sky from the direction of lower Manhattan.
The first tower had collapsed.
A couple of college friends called and said they were going to swing by to pick me up. I walked back into my lobby and saw a U.S. Postal Service worker putting envelopes in residents’ mail slots. I made a comment about how it’s apparently true that neither rain, snow, sleet nor disaster could stop the mail.
My friends and I drove to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which has a clear view across the East River of lower Manhattan. The towers were no longer there. A thick column of smoke, ash and debris rose from their place. The same iconic Twin Towers that I often ran past on my morning jogs, and whose illuminated profiles I would look at as I seemingly jogged into the city’s skyline itself at night over the Brooklyn Bridge; gone forever.
On the Promenade, fine ash and singed paper rained down on us. A few people wore respirators and others carried handheld video recorders to document the history. Walking down Montague Street a little while later, I saw countless New Yorkers eating lunch in diners and going about their normal business. But there was no denying that the world had changed.
It wasn’t until later that afternoon that I thought of calling Leah’s boyfriend, who was also a high school friend of mine from Massachusetts who I had introduced to Leah a couple of years earlier. I wanted to check in on them, just to make sure they were okay. I didn’t think too much of it at the time.
He told me Leah was unaccounted for.
All I remember next is my then-girlfriend and I taking the subway to Brooklyn Heights, at one point the train going over the elevated tracks and being able to see the glow of the emergency vehicles’ lights in lower Manhattan. We knocked on my friend’s door. He answered, holding a rosary, his face flushed with anxiety as he spoke with someone on the phone.
That days and weeks that followed remain a blur. There was a memorial Mass back in Massachusetts. I eulogized her in the Hunter College newspaper. Red-white-and-blue ribbons were everywhere. We spent time with our friend in Brooklyn Heights, and Leah’s relatives also came to the city. Together we watched President George W. Bush’s speech to a joint session of Congress affirming America’s resolve in responding to the attacks.
My girlfriend at the time and I made a missing person flier with Leah’s photo that we posted all over lower Manhattan. We called several hospitals in the city, hoping that she had been checked into an emergency room or ICU.
My girlfriend and I went to a loved ones’ informational meeting that Marsh & McCllennan hosted at a midtown hotel a few days after the attacks. The emotions in that room were raw, to say the least. One man accused a company executive of not doing enough to find out about the status of our loved ones. My girlfriend and I asked a company representative, a woman who carried a list of employees whose whereabouts had been accounted for, if she had any information about Leah. The woman looked through her list, looked at us, shook her head, hugged us both, and cried.
The phone calls and missing person fliers never brought her back.
The day after 9/11, my US Army Reserves sergeant picked me up at my apartment and drove to our duty station at Fort Totten, located in Queens. Not too far from the main gate, I saw a NY Fire Department commander’s vehicle, covered in dust and its back window smashed out. Our unit commander was a New York City firefighter. I remember him holding a printout of several pages containing all the names of the city’s firefighters who had died responding to the towers. The fire station in my own Brooklyn neighborhood lost at least 12 men.
The anger, the public desire for vengeance, was already palpable a little more than 24 hours after the attacks. When my Army Reserve friends and I went to lunch that day, a man saw us in our military uniforms and made a comment along the lines of, “I hope you guys go over there and kill them all.”
A month after the attacks, my public affairs unit deployed for a three-week training mission in Egypt. But as fate had it, I never deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq for the so-called forever wars that 9/11 sparked. The end of my enlistment overlapped with the beginning of the“War on Terror.” In hindsight I am glad because, in my opinion, that would not have been the best way for me to honor Leah’s memory.
I think of all the conversations and debates that Leah and I could have had these past 20 years, not only about the wars but so much else that we’ve lived through; the election of Barack Obama, the Trump years, the advent of social media, smartphones, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots dynasty, Pope Francis, the Red Sox winning the World Series, the gay rights movement, the 2008 global financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, the national reckoning with racism.
I imagine all the off-color memes I’d be sharing today with Leah via text or Facebook messenger, and what some of her responses to them would be.
It pains me to reflect on how much Leah — who will forever be one day shy of her 25th birthday on this side of eternity — missed out on in terms of life experiences. She never got the opportunity to walk down the aisle, to celebrate a 30th birthday or a 40th “over the hill” party for that matter. She never got to attend her 10-year high school reunion, give birth to a child, hug her nieces, or take first-day-of-school pictures of her own kids and post them on Facebook. Leah didn’t have the chance to gain the kind of wisdom, insight, perspective and seasoned maturity that only the passage of time can give you.
Leah would have been beaming at my wedding, and she would absolutely have loved my daughter, who has the same kind of feisty spirit and inquisitive nature that she possessed in spades. I hope Leah would be proud of the man I’ve become in my middle age, and what I’ve been able to accomplish so far in my journalism career.
“Goodbye, primo. Love ya,” Leah would often say at the end of our phone calls.
Goodbye, prima. For now.
