Nicole Reda’s house is spotless. She has two young children and no hired help, but there isn’t a Tonka truck in sight. The one sign of clutter is basket after basket of warm, crisply folded laundry. You can see your reflection in her living-room floor.
Nicole used to be the messy half of her marriage. Her husband Greg was the family maid, quietly picking up other people’s stuff. He wiped the bathroom mirror with Windex after his morning shower and gently insisted that he and Nicole rotate which chairs they sat in so no single cushion sagged from overuse. He actually enjoyed changing diapers. Ever since the Tuesday when Greg, 33, did not return from his 95th-floor office at 1 World Trade Center, Nicole has been the one sweeping and scrubbing. “I think that by cleaning and leaving his clothes in the closet and keeping things just the way he had them, it’s like some part of him is still here even if the time is passing,” she says.
The meat loaves and pasta from the neighbors arrive on Nicole’s doorstep just once a week now. A month ago, she spent–and slept through–her first night without either her brother or her mother camped out on the futon in the computer room. Nicole stopped praying that the rescuers would turn up a wisp of Greg’s DNA; on Sept. 22 she buried him without a body or a casket.
Nicole is just 28, but she had already spent nearly half those years with Greg. Both born and raised in Brooklyn, they met the first week of her freshman year at Pace University. They watched Ghost on their first date. Defying the marriage-and-kids-can-wait trend, they bought a starter house on Long Island almost three years ago. Nicole quit her job as a speech therapist to stay home with the children. Greg’s hour-and-a-half commute to the insurance brokerage firm Marsh & McLennan started and ended in the dark. But on weekends he was all theirs.
From Greg’s work schedule, Nicole divines the only metaphor she can for her current existence: “a never-ending weekday with no Saturday night.” There are meetings with lawyers, unreturned calls to charities and memorial services for Greg’s colleagues. (In Greg’s lunch club alone, only 3 of 8 survived the attacks.) Nearly 500 condolence cards need answering–some from people who met Greg just briefly in a four-day management seminar in August, one from a grade-school classmate recounting how Greg owned the first skateboard on the block. When she comes up for air, Nicole calls to check on Greg’s best friend and colleague Michael Cantatore, so sick with grief and guilt that two weeks ago he had a grand mal seizure. He is 34, and has had to strap a heart monitor to his chest.
Michael calls himself “Greg’s other wife.” The two first met 15 years ago and joke that they “slept together” before Greg and Nicole did–in the same bed on a freshman-year ski trip. Greg later brought Michael to Marsh & McLennan. Michael thought Greg worked too hard and goaded him into taking afternoon outings to buy doughnuts and DVDs. Only in the past few months had Greg really begun heeding Michael’s advice to take the earlier evening train so he could spend more time with his second son Matthew, who was born in July.
On the morning of Sept. 11, however, Greg had an early budget meeting. Michael, whose mother-in-law was late to watch his kids, was still getting dressed in his Queens apartment when he heard on the news about the crash. Minutes later, Greg sent a message through to Michael’s Blackberry pager that he was trapped. For more than an hour, the two systems analysts tapped messages back and forth, Michael urging Greg to get out and Greg telling Michael that he loved Nicole and the boys. Greg’s final words popped up at 10:03: “Fire here. Love yous.”
Nicole says she has bypassed the anger stage of grief. Now she’s stuck somewhere between denial and acceptance. The rational part of her knows that Greg–who scoffed at working out–could not possibly have managed 95 flights of stairs in the 27 minutes between his last page and the tower’s collapse. But her heart is still playing tricks. “I’ll get home and someone will have sent roses, and for the moment I’ll think that was so nice of Greg. Or a friend will talk about having a party on a weekend, and I’ll think, Oh, great, Greg will be able to make it.” She pauses. “For a second, I just forget what happened, and then I remember again.”
To get herself through the day, she’s keeping a diary for the first time since high school. The story she spins recasts the past in a way that makes Greg’s death inevitable because, of course, it was so absurd. She thinks she was preparing herself for a time without him: like the day in August when she asked him for the password to access the family budget on Microsoft Money, or when she inquired about how to change a tire and he sent her an AAA card embossed with her own name–not his. The narrative turns on the night of Sept. 10. Greg got home later than usual, so Nicole picked out a shirt and pants for him to put on the next day. He got dressed and left for the station before she awakened. “Since I knew what he had on, it was like I was meant to have that very last picture of him, of what he was wearing, of what he looked like at the end,” she says.
Yet there comes a point when Greg’s death begins making too much sense, when her grief loses its novelty and becomes scarily routine. This happened when her toddler Nicholas stopped reflexively asking for his father and started hugging people other than her. At first Nicole thought this was a sign he was adjusting, but then the worry set in. Would Nicholas’ two-year-old mind begin to lose scant recollections of his father? “So now I just keep saying to him, ‘Remember when Daddy used to do this or that,'” she says. And when they talk about Greg, Nicholas now blows kisses to the sky.
Nicole has begun jostling her own memory as well. She wants the pain for its intimacy. She has been eating a lot of chocolate and peanut butter, Greg’s favorite combination, and shocked herself by craving Taco Bell, food he loved but she had long disdained. On Thanksgiving, after having turkey at her parents’ house and dessert with Greg’s family, she might just eat a late-night peanut-butter sandwich as he used to do. On Oct. 8, she watched a home video for the first time. Greg was offscreen, but that was precisely the point: all she wanted was to hear the familiar inflections of his voice.
Only on some days can she begin planning for the future. She wants to put Greg’s red Miata, still parked out front, into storage so Nicholas and Matthew will have their father’s car one day. Next year she will go back to work as a speech therapist. But this future extends only so far. “There are some things I’m just not ready to think about,” she says. “When Matthew’s pediatrician saw me for the first time after Sept. 11, he was trying to comfort me, and he looked at me and said, ‘You’re so young and beautiful; one day you should date again.’ Right there in his office I just broke down.”
There is already a new rhythm to Nicole’s days. She makes dates with girlfriends to go to movies that she and Greg talked of seeing together. The children have their first firsts without Greg. Matthew’s first laugh came when Nicole nuzzled his cheek, as she’s done a hundred times before; he was christened on the Sunday the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan. Nicole was a single mom on Nicholas’ first day of nursery school.
When the last guest drops off a banana bread and the children go to sleep, Nicole phones Michael if he hasn’t called her already. They have the same conversations with each other that they used to save only for Greg. “The two of them used to quote movie lines together, and I’d just sit and listen and not really say anything. But the other night on the phone I said one of Greg’s favorite lines from Striptease, and we both just cracked up,” says Nicole. And when they are too tired to laugh or cry anymore, they hang up, usually well past midnight.
Her son Nicholas calls for her at 6:30 a.m., and they perform a new ritual. She brings him a photograph of Greg, and they lie in Nicholas’ bed for a moment, staring at husband and father. When he is ready to rise, Nicholas kisses good morning to the picture, the glass now smudged with the little boy’s lip prints. This is one stain Nicole will not clean.
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