The Man I Never Met Read online

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

  For nothing now can ever come to any good.

  Paula and George missed seeing their son truly grow into being a father. George would always give Joe a kiss on his cheek when he saw him. He had always told Joe, “You don’t know what love is until you have your own child.”

  Joe got to feel that love for less than fifteen months.

  And Anthony … well, maybe it was most complicated for Anthony. When the boys were little, Anthony was a proud and in some ways protective big brother. Once, when Joe was three or four years old, they went to Disney World in Orlando. Joe saw Mickey Mouse and got excited. Anthony turned to his father and said, “Dad, don’t tell Joe, but I know that’s not the real Mickey Mouse.”

  They were close, so close—“very, very close,” George liked to say. And as close as they were as kids, they were even closer as adults. Their personalities meshed well. As adults, Anthony and Joe spoke every day. They bonded over their shared love of golf. (Both were single-digit handicaps.) Anthony grew up to be a very warm, easygoing guy—the kind of person who shows up at a family function and naturally helps everybody relax and have fun.

  They were the best of friends, which made Paula and George beam. Isn’t that the dream of every parent who has multiple children? To have children who are happy on their own, but even happier together?

  Anthony was the older brother, but when they were adults, Joe was so successful and charismatic that it was hard to imagine him as anybody’s younger brother. They were equals. Now, inexplicably and suddenly, Joe was dead. Anthony was devastated. And it felt a little like he had to be Joe’s older brother again—protective and strong in a time of need.

  Anthony gave a eulogy at the memorial service.

  It was the moment that almost everybody there would remember, years later, long after the other details had drifted away.

  Along with their three daughters, Anthony and Carmela had also had a son. The son had passed away in utero, devastating Anthony and Carmela. Anthony and Carmela named him Anthony Joseph Maio, after his daddy and his uncle.

  Anthony finished his eulogy for Joe by speaking directly to Joe in heaven:

  “You watch over my boy up there,” Anthony said, “and I’ll watch over your boy down here.”

  * * *

  That boy down here would forget his daddy. It was inevitable. Everybody at the memorial service knew it. Devon was barely a year old when Joe died, too young to form long-term memories.

  When Devon was a toddler, Sharri would sign him up for Mommy and Me classes, and sometimes Devon would go, see another father there, and turn to him and say, “Uppy, uppy, uppy,” because he wanted that man to pick him up, like a father would. This is what Sharri had to steel herself against every day—these little bolts of heartbreak hitting her at random times, from all possible directions, for reasons she could not possibly anticipate.

  It pained her that Devon did not know Joe. He did not even know what he was missing. As Devon grew up, his father became a name and a face and a series of stories told by other people.

  5

  After the memorial service, Sharri did not know where to start the rest of her life. The shocking death of a loved one makes you feel that everything has come to a standstill, but of course, it hasn’t. Life keeps moving around you. The little boy who raced to hug his father on weekday evenings was still there, in the house, far too young to understand that his father was not coming back. Sharri had to raise a child whose life had just begun while she mourned a husband whose life had just ended.

  Her existence had a past and a future, and somewhere in there, she had to find the present.

  She was terrified that something would happen to Devon, but she was also terrified that something would happen to her, leaving Devon an orphan. There were reports and rumors that terrorists might target major bridges. Sharri was scared of driving on them. She didn’t want to get trapped. Even when she visited the Maios in New Jersey, George was so generous and kind that he would come pick her up on Long Island and drive her back to New Jersey so she didn’t have to be at the wheel.

  Flying was out of the question. Sharri was sure she would never get on an airplane again.

  There were many days when she didn’t know how she would go on. She did not want to leave the house, but she also did not want to be in it. She did not have that many memories of Joe there—they had only lived in the house for two months. They had not finished unpacking. She was still decorating.

  But the house was a physical reminder of the life they’d planned to live.

  Being there made her uncomfortable, lonely, and depressed. She would wake up in the morning and desperately want to get out of the house. Then she would be out in public and want to go back inside.

  She never turned the television off in her house. Ever. It was on twenty-four hours a day, even when she slept, and never tuned to the news—it was cartoons, or reruns of Seinfeld and Friends, or whatever came on after the reruns of Seinfeld and Friends. The programming was not the point. The TV was her antidote for the quiet, her weapon against the void.

  She would ask herself, How the hell did I wind up here? How does this happen? Why Joe? She did not think she would make it through that first year. She didn’t see how she could.

  She had survivor’s guilt. She thought, Why did this happen to him? Why not me? There was no answer. There is no logical reason why Joe Maio died at age thirty-two—or at least, no reason that makes sense. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  She went through their photo albums. She watched their wedding video. But everything was colored by his death now. She remembered their honeymoon in Italy, when they kept hearing Andrea Bocelli’s hit song “Time to Say Goodbye,” and what had been a fond memory was just sad now. Even that Creed song that had meant so much to Joe, “With Arms Wide Open,” brought more heartache: “If I had just one wish/Only one demand/ I hope he’s not like me.”

  In the summer of 2001, she had hired a painter to paint a mural inside their house, an outdoor scene inside the house full of flowers and grass and blue skies. The original plan was to paint it gray, but Sharri had added color. She wanted it to be full of life.

  The painter was in the house, working on the mural, when the planes hit the towers.

  After Joe died, Sharri decided she wanted to move out, to a condominium on Long Island—something smaller and more manageable and with fewer reminders of what had just happened. But the real-estate market had cratered. She didn’t get any offers on the house. She pulled it off the market.

  The painter kept coming back. Sharri wanted something beautiful to emerge from this ugly, horrific time. The painter had said he would need a month to finish the mural. He took six. She did not fire him.

  * * *

  Paula and George Maio did not know where to go or what to do. They had had such a good life until tragedy struck. They were practically kids when they got married; George was twenty-one, and Paula was nineteen. They had met at a bowling alley, where she asked him to drive her home. For more than three decades, they had built their lives around the two boys, Joe and Anthony, and now one of them was gone.

  A few weeks later, George went back to Tam O’Shanter Country Club, Joe’s old club. Not much time had passed since George had walked the course to watch Joe finish second in the club championship—proud of his boy and the success he had become, excited about the life in front of him.

  This time, George was there to clean out his son’s locker. He found a brand-new putter, wrapped in cellophane, with the price tag on it.

  The Maios were literally picking up the pieces of Joe’s life.

  Paula and George were in extreme emotional pain. Losing Joe was the biggest reason, of course, but it wasn’t the only one. There was the complete shock of it. There was the lingering uncertainty—at first, they hoped he was alive, then they had to accept that he wasn’t, but they still didn’t know exactly how he died. Had he stayed in the World Trade Center o
r jumped when the heat and smoke became overwhelming?

  And then there was the fact that somebody had chosen to do this to Joe—it wasn’t a disease or a random act of nature. That is difficult to reconcile: how other humans could choose to destroy the people who mean the most to you. The Maios are also warm, empathetic people, and they were keenly aware that their tragedy was just one of many. A lot of Joe’s friends and coworkers at Cantor Fitzgerald had also perished in the attacks. George felt like the world was coming to an end.

  The Maios took their love for Joe and directed it toward Devon. He was just a toddler who needed attention and love like any other child, and with Joe gone, Devon would become the glue that connected Paula and George to Sharri as they grieved.

  Devon and Sharri spent every Christmas Day at the Maios’ house in New Jersey. And Paula and George would frequently drive to Long Island to spend some time with Devon. George would sleep at Sharri’s house two nights a week. George taught his grandson the words to “What a Wonderful World,” a song written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss and made famous by Louis Armstrong.

  They would sing, together:

  I see trees of green, red roses too

  I see them bloom for me and you

  Devon alone made them all believe it could be a wonderful world again. He saved lives without knowing it; he made days without realizing it. He gave the whole family strength. When you are in the depths of grief, especially after a loved one dies so young, you need to know that the days ahead will be brighter. That was what Devon did for Sharri, Paula, George, and even George’s mom. They would hold him or play with him or sing to him, and that alone would give them the energy to keep going. Devon gave them what they needed more than anything else: He gave them tomorrow.

  * * *

  In the next circle was Anthony. Not too long after 9/11, Anthony took a job on a desk at Cantor Fitzgerald. He was bright and capable, but the move still surprised a lot of people who knew him. He had been a civil engineer, not a trader. He had a master’s degree in construction management, not business administration.

  And he just never seemed like the Cantor Fitzgerald type. Anthony was your buddy down the street, not your man in the refined world of international finance. It was hard to know if he was looking for a career or his brother.

  * * *

  And in the next circle was a man they called Little Joe Maio. He was Joe’s cousin, three years younger—when Little Joe was born, everybody called him Baby Joe, until he was well past babyhood and Paula, his aunt, said, “You’ve got to stop calling him that.” That’s when he became Little Joe, and the name stuck.

  Joe and Little Joe were closer than many brothers. It was a different relationship from what Joe had with Anthony, because Joe got to be the bigger brother from the start, and the role suited him. They had sleepovers. They entered roller-skating contests together. Little Joe went to a lot of Joe’s baseball games.

  Joe would take Little Joe skiing on the toughest hills. Joe would look down at the mountain, survey the moguls, get a path in mind, and take off, weaving and doing jumps and daffies all the way down. Little Joe was not as skilled—he went side to side slowly down the mountain. Joe always waited for him at the bottom so they could back go up the mountain on the chairlift together.

  Little Joe followed Joe to Boston University, where they lived together. Little Joe always looked up to his cousin, even as an adult. When Little Joe started working at Saks Fifth Avenue, Joe would visit. And when Joe would leave, men and women would ask Little Joe, Who was that?

  When the planes hit the towers, Little Joe was living on Nineteenth Street, in Chelsea. He stayed put initially. He thought Joe would come to his apartment, since it was walking distance from the World Trade Center and Joe knew where it was. He stayed there into the night, hoping his cousin would come to his door. Then a friend came by, and they went to hospitals. They put his name on every list, hoping somebody would see Joe and call.

  Many years later, when Joe was long gone and Little Joe was in his forties, he would think about his cousin. He would go trick-or-treating with Devon and color Easter eggs with him.

  Little Joe thought about the polish that we so often apply to the dead—the things that we say because they are nice, even if they aren’t completely honest. He was sure this was different. With Joe, all the compliments rang true. Little Joe was reminded of Joe in ways big and small, and whenever a family member talked to him. Long after Joe was gone, his cousin was still proud to be known to all as Little Joe.

  * * *

  The friends were in the next, larger concentric circle, further from Joe than family. Many of them were devastated and bewildered. They needed to sort out their feelings of love and grief, but that would take time. They had similar emotions and thoughts, even if they didn’t share them with each other. Nobody attacked life like Joe Maio. The idea that he was suddenly gone was hard for his friends to process.

  The combination of Joe’s age (thirty-two) and the time in history (2001) meant that many of his friends were only in sporadic touch with Joe at that point. There was no Facebook. Email was something you checked when you turned on your computer, not your phone. Keeping in touch took more work than it does now. Joe’s friends were in their early thirties, just starting to settle down, living hectic lives with burgeoning careers and new families that left them too busy to reminisce about the high school or college years. They felt no urgency to reconnect. They had all the time in the world, until they didn’t.

  His friends took their memories of Joe, and they scattered like autumn leaves—a cluster here, a lonely one over there.

  * * *

  Friends who had been so important to Joe when he was fifteen had moved to the periphery when he was twenty-one. People he didn’t meet until he was in his midtwenties had become some of his closest friends.

  Joe may not have realized this, but it was true: Even the people who did not keep in touch with him thought about him all the time.

  His charisma was such that it is common for childhood friends to remember the precise moment they’d met him. Cory Tovin met him at their town’s pool, on the grass next to the beach volleyball court. Lori Sloves first saw him pushing an audiovisual cart through a hallway in first grade. Jeff Heitzner met him when he was invited to Joe’s house by their mutual friend, Scott Benincasa. Duane Tarrant was in summer camp in 1979; friends asked Duane, who is African American, and Joe to reenact the Rocky Balboa–Apollo Creed fight from that summer’s hit, Rocky II. The end of their relationships with Joe had come suddenly, but the beginnings remained etched in their minds.

  They all had their Joe Maio stories. The stories don’t really have a theme or a pattern, except that people remember them so well and say they could only have happened to Joe Maio. When they told people they lost a friend on 9/11, they tried to explain that he was unlike anybody they’d ever met. They thought of him as a superhero in small ways.

  Heitzner tells this story: One day, when Joe and Jeff were at a bar in New York City with some female friends, a stranger started giving them a hard time. Joe didn’t take that from anybody. He responded verbally. He and his friends were asked to leave the bar. They did, and when they got outside, four guys came running after Joe and Jeff.

  Jeff took his sport jacket off and threw it on the sidewalk. He was ready for a fight. He didn’t need to be ready.

  The four guys came running at Joe, and he took them out, one by one—pop-pop-pop—until the fourth guy got smart and ran away before Joe could hit him. Jeff remembers driving home that night, thinking about those four guys and how they must have been asking themselves, How did we just get our asses kicked by one guy?

  Joe just did stuff like that. You couldn’t explain it. And maybe the telling part is not that he took the guys out but that he was so willing to try to take all four guys out.

  This was not a totally isolated incident, either. When Joe worked at Boston University, he worked as a bouncer at a club called Paradise. One day,
he was working and he saw a fight across the street, and in the middle of the fight was Cory Tovin. Joe ran across the street, threw off his jacket, and took on the guy who was fighting Cory. He was fearless, and he did not take crap from anybody.

  One day, before he was a teenager, Joe and his friend Duane Tarrant were riding home on a bus from a camp trip, and they had to pee. They asked the counselor to pull over. The counselor said no. They thought he was being a jerk, and they really had to go. They found a bag to pee in. The counselor found out about it and started screaming at them.

  Duane was terrified that word would get back to his parents. He would get kicked out of camp. He was in trouble, as kids say—every child’s fear. He started crying.

  Joe was having none of it.

  “Duane, what are you getting upset about?” Joe said. “We had to go to the bathroom, and he wouldn’t pull over. Are they going to kick us out of camp because we had to go to the bathroom? I will get home and tell my parents exactly what happened.”

  It was both totally logical and an amazing thing for a preteen to say. How do you describe that attitude? It’s not really courage. Joe just had a comfort with himself, and a confidence that he was doing the right thing and everything would work out, no matter what anybody else said. You don’t see that from too many ten- or eleven-year-old kids. You don’t even see that kind of confidence from that many adults—real, authentic confidence, not false bravado. It even helped some of his friends develop confidence in themselves.

  Now Joe was gone, but his friends were all still alive, still moving, still connecting and disconnecting and reconnecting with people. Many of them were not sure if they should try to keep Joe’s memory alive and talk to his family, or if they should stay in the background and leave his family alone. It was hard to know what to say. Where was the space between too close and too far?

  Jeff Heitzner made a decision: He would leave Sharri, Paula, and George alone. He had known them since he was a kid, but he decided he would not keep in touch, because he did not want to remind them of Joe. Finally, after a few years, another friend set him straight: Everything reminded them of Joe. He could not remind them of Joe’s death any more than he could remind them they had skin or that they spoke English. Joe’s death was a constant part of their lives.