Firehouse (13 page)

Jennifer had never worried very much about the dangers inherent in being a fireman because Kevin had told her never to worry. There was, after all, the famous Bracken Bounce, which was proof of the constancy of his good luck. The term was coined by a friend who played golf with him on a day when Kevin had hit a drive that was heading far into the woods, only to strike a tree and bounce back right smack onto the middle of the fairway. The Bracken Bounce, the friend had called it, and the term stuck. He might not be a great golfer, but in golf as in life, Kevin did better because of the Bracken Bounce. Good things always happened to him, his friends thought—just look at him finding a wonderful young woman such as Jennifer. Bright, pretty, and hip, she had graduated with exceptional grades from Mount Holyoke, the famed elite Seven Sisters college in Western Massachusetts, and had gotten her MBA at NYU. She might have married someone who had graduated from Harvard or Columbia or Princeton, a doctor, lawyer, or stockbroker; instead she had fallen completely in love with Kevin, whose academic record was a bit spotty, and for whom college had never really been in the picture. His previous jobs, before becoming a fireman, had been as a salesman for the American Bartenders School and working regional exhibitions for the rice pudding industry.

Guys like Kevin, his friends had teased, had no right to find someone as lovely as Jennifer. She was second-generation Chinese American, and she thought Kevin was the most optimistic person she had ever met. Always upbeat, always sunny. Some of her old friends had seen the gap in their backgrounds and wondered whether the two of them had much in common, but she loved the fact that he was smart in a way that was tuned to the real world. He could fix anything, for instance. She was tired of bright young men who were full of themselves, but who could not repair anything and were condescending toward those who could. Jennifer and Kevin, Ray Pfeifer said not long after the September tragedy, it was hard to think of them not being together, because they were so good together that it was like they were one person.

They had been together for eleven years, and married for five. They had met on the train platform at Central Islip, where they both lived back in 1990, when Kevin was twenty-six and Jennifer was twenty-one. “You missed your train,” he said to her one morning, while she was waiting, and he was right. She asked him how he knew. “I've seen you on the other train quite often,” he said, but she was sure there was more to it, that because she was so noisy on the train, talking with her friends, that he had taken note of her. If anything had tested their marriage, it was the year and a half of living among the detritus and upheaval of renovation, while doing most of the work themselves. Even so, there had been relatively little tension between them, mostly, she decided, because his disposition was so positive. Perhaps, Jennifer Liang thought, birth order was responsible—he was the youngest of five children, with three older sisters, and he had always felt immensely loved. Whatever the reason, he had come out amazingly centered and comfortable with himself.

His sisters agreed. He was
always
happy and had been since he was a little boy. Rules that had applied to his older siblings seemed not to apply to him, because he tended simply to disregard any rules he seriously disliked. Kevin never fought life—instead he always turned it to his advantage. He was, not surprisingly, the favorite uncle at family gatherings. When the children of his sister Mary Bracken Carlson were young, Uncle Kevin had wired a walkie-talkie into the Christmas tree, so that the Christmas tree would talk to the kids. Remarkably, the tree seemed to know not only their names, but a good deal about them as well. Later, because his name looked so similar to that of his niece, Kerin, on the cards attached to the Christmas presents, Kevin would open at least one of her gifts each year and pretend it was for him; once, when she was about twelve, he had opened a present containing a nightgown and he had put it on and worn it for a few hours.

Kevin had a tendency to play down the dangers of any fire he had been on, even when he was talking with the other men. He might come back to the house, and someone would ask, “How was it, Kevin?” And he would answer, “It was hot, it was smoky, and we put it out.” He tried to make it all seem like just another day at the office, even if his office was a bit hotter and smokier. “Was it scary, Kevin?” Jennifer would ask him when he came home from a fire, and he would always answer, “No, no, no, of course it wasn't scary.”

Besides, he was always calm. Early on in their relationship, she was amazed by the constancy of his calm. “Doesn't anything throw you?” she would ask, and he would shrug his shoulders. Everything was always going to work out and it was always going to work out for the best, he would say. And so, she was not to worry, and she didn't. Perhaps, she later mused, if they had had children, they might have worried, but they were still young. They had always thought they had lots of time.

Michael Lynch and Stephanie Luccioni were engaged to be married on November 16 at St. Benedict's Parish in the Bronx, and at around 10:30 on the night before the tragedy, they talked to each other on the phone about the wedding. He was a probie at the firehouse, on rotation from Ladder 32 in the Bronx, and had been with the 40/35 men for only a few months. Stephanie was at home, addressing their wedding invitations on her computer and feeling that she was falling behind on the enormous amount of work still to be done to prepare for the wedding. “Oh my God, I'm way behind in this,” she had told Michael, who was working a twenty-four-hour shift at the firehouse. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “It'll work out. Everything's going to be fine.” The remark reminded her that she was the organized one, who wanted everything done exactly on time, and he was the casual one, who was sure things would always sort themselves out. “Well, do you still want to marry me?” she asked, teasing him. “Of course I do,” he answered, “and the invitations will get done, and we'll have a wonderful wedding.”

He would be thirty-one in December, and Stephanie was thirty. They had met because she had been a pal of his younger sister, Colleen, and as a teenager had hung out at his house. The Lynches were a large, joyous family; Michael was the seventh child of ten and the fifth son. Their house seemed to be open for everyone, filled all the time with the Lynch children, and the friends of the Lynch children, and the friends of the friends of the Lynch children. Thus it was not that unusual for one of the Lynch boys to become interested in the friend of one of the Lynch daughters. In the case of Stephanie, she was there so often, having been pulled in by the warmth of the family, that Colleen liked to refer to her as the eleventh Lynch child. In particular Stephanie loved the Christmastime brunches served after morning Mass on December 24, when Jack Lynch would cook an immense feast for everyone, and there would be thirty or forty people there. That was the kind of home that she hoped to have for her family one day, albeit perhaps with fewer children.

In August, Michael had been the best man at his brother Thomas's wedding. Michael was two years older than Thomas, and the two were unusually close, more like twins, Jack Lynch, their father, thought. It was almost as if they had their own special language that excluded all others. When, as part of his best-man responsibilities, Michael toasted Thomas, the toast was exceptionally graceful, his siblings recalled, at once loving, funny, and eloquent; Thomas, he predicted, would live a rich, happy life, just as their parents had, and like them, he would have ten children. Jack Lynch had been impressed by how much his son had grown and matured, an impression shared by John Lynch, the eldest child in the family, some ten years older than Michael. After the wedding, John, who worked in London and had not seen much of his younger brother in recent years, took his father aside and said, “My God, he's turned into an absolutely wonderful young man. I'm really impressed—his confidence is amazing.”

Each summer the Lynches would take a family vacation on the Jersey Shore, gathering as a clan of some thirty people from three generations for two weeks or so. In 2001, for the first time, Michael and Stephanie had come as a couple. Jack Lynch had watched the two of them together and had seen that confidence and happiness in his son, and he had been thrilled. Jack believed that his son now had the two things he had always wanted: the job he had always sought and a girl he loved and wanted to marry. Michael had at this moment, his father believed, everything in the world to look forward to.

Both Jack and his wife, Kathleen Lynch, were born in Ireland, he in County Kerry, she in County Sligo. He had come to America when he was twenty-one, and had worked for thirty-three years for the New York City Transit Authority, running the organization's garage in East New York as his last job. He and Kathleen had always lived in the Bronx, first in the Fordham Road area, and then in the Throg's Neck section, staying in the latter neighborhood for some thirty-five years, even as it became a little less Irish and a little more diverse. The couple had not actually set out to have so large a family, but it had happened, and they always managed. He had his salary from the Transit Authority and moonlighted as a plumber; she ran the family finances with great skill and determination, and if she expected that the bills for the month might be a little higher than usual, say, because of some extra medical or clothing expenses, she would tell him how much she thought she needed, and he would make it his assignment to earn the extra money. Somehow he always managed to do it.

Of their ten children, eight went to college, and all of them could have. Michael went to Iona, a Catholic college in nearby Westchester, but he did not want to be a professional. He had always wanted to be a fireman. That was his dream as a boy, and it never changed. For a time after college, he worked in the training program of Dean Witter, a financial company that was housed at the time, ironically enough, in Building Five of the World Trade Center. He did quite well there by all accounts, for he was smart, attractive, courteous, and hardworking. His father thought it might turn out to be a very good career for him—working at a prestigious financial house with so much opportunity; eventually, he thought, Michael might do very well there as a stockbroker, becoming a good deal more affluent than he himself had been. “It's a very good place and a very good company,” he told his son, “and I think you can do well there.” “But that's not what I want to do,” Michael replied. “I don't want to be a stockbroker.” “Well, you at least ought to think about it,” Jack Lynch insisted, anxious that his son not walk away too quickly from a life that might be both easier and more materially rewarding, and in which he might be able to use his many talents. “Dad, I don't have to give it a second thought—it's not what I want. I really know that. Dad, I
know
what I want,” Michael said, and that was that.

That he was not interested in Dean Witter did not surprise Stephanie; she knew Michael hated working indoors, sitting in front of a computer. When he was at Dean Witter, he had seemed bored with life, so lethargic after work that he had had little interest in their doing anything together in the evening. By contrast, when he became a fireman, he never seemed more alive, and his exuberance from the job carried over into his social life.

Theirs was not a firefighting family. But Michael had always been drawn to the profession. As a boy, he had been fascinated by fire trucks. “When kids are young, they all want to be firemen,” said his brother Tom. “Most of us change, but Michael wanted it as a boy, and he wanted it as a man. In fact, he never wanted anything else.” For Michael it had always been a romantic calling, his family thought. In addition, his father believed, he was drawn to it because he possessed a certain selflessness; Michael was perhaps the most sensitive of his children, the unofficial peacemaker in the family, recalled Jack Lynch. He had chosen to be a fireman because he had always seen himself in the role of helping others. “It was always a calling with him,” Jack said later, “it was not just a job.”

Jack Lynch did not usually listen to the radio during breakfast, but on the morning of September 11, he had turned it on. When the first bulletin about the first plane came in, he and Kathleen immediately switched on the television. At first, he thought of the many friends of the family who worked in that building, and he speculated rather casually to his wife that Michael would probably be going down there. As they continued to watch, the second plane hit. Suddenly it was all beyond his comprehension: “Something I could not get my mind around,” he remembered. “It was like watching a science fiction movie at home, except that it was live, and it was real, and it was not going to go away.”

Then he and Kathleen began the long, cruel wait for a phone call from Michael, because they knew he would call if he could. At first they decided he was too busy, but as the day wore on, they became more nervous. When friends called, they would ask them, as politely as possible, to get off the phone because they wanted to keep the line open for their son. Michael had a cell phone, and they called it; it rang but there was no answer. At first they thought this was a sign that he was all right, but then they began to realize it simply meant that he had probably left the phone in his locker back at the firehouse.

Stephanie, who was a guidance counselor at Christ the King High School, was at work in Queens that morning. She and Michael had not talked in the morning because, as usual, she had to be out of the house by 6:00
A.M.
in order to make the commute from the Bronx to Queens. As news of the attack spread throughout the school—and it was a terrible morning there because many of the students had parents who worked in the World Trade Center—she had, like several of the other friends and family members of the 40/35 men, taken solace in the fact that the firehouse was so far uptown that Michael would be safe. She was let out of school early and drove home, getting stuck for six hours on the Van Wyck Expressway. Without her cell phone that day, she was unable to talk to anyone, but, in her stopped car, she had a clear view of the World Trade Center site, shrouded in heavy, black smoke.