Project Rebirth (7 page)

Brian Lyons

 

 

 

B
rian Lyons carries his five-year-old daughter, Patricia, up to bed. He cherishes the small weight of her, her tiny arm draped across his broad shoulder, the way she gives herself fully over to the safety of his arms. After a long day of hauling debris amid a bunch of rough-and-tumble construction workers, the sweet smell of her breath on his neck feels redemptive.

He slowly enters her room—awash in pink—and lays her limp body gently on the bed. He sits beside her for a moment, notices the Irish dancing costumes hanging in the little closet, and situates a stuffed animal close to her body in case she wakes up and feels scared. He takes a deep breath, and as he has since September 11, 2001, he feels the presence of his late brother, Michael.

Brian was at his latest site assignment on Madison and Twenty-third Street, moving things along as always, when someone on the crew got a page that some planes had flown into the World Trade Center. As a salt-of-the-earth, levelheaded construction manager, Brian wasn't the type to panic. He was usually dressed in a pair of sturdy work boots, jeans, and a T-shirt—he looked like the kind of man who could build a house with his own two hands and some scrap wood, as long as an ice cold Coca-Cola was promised at the end of the day. Life, according to Brian, wasn't about drama. He explains, “As long as you work hard, enjoy simple pleasures, take care of your family, and lend a hand to decent people, you're living right.”

As such, on that fateful day, he simply turned to the co-worker next to him and said matter-of-factly, “They're going to need help down there.”

He tried calling his brother, Michael, a firefighter with Squad 41, on his cell phone. He'd spoken to him earlier that morning. No answer. He tried the firehouse. No answer. As he stood thirty-eight stories up on the parapet of the building among a sea of other workers, watching the black smoke drift up into the crisp autumn day downtown, it occurred to him that Michael might be down there, or at least on his way. His brother was a helper too. It was how they were raised.

After a little bit of watching, Brian was anxious to
do.
His wife, Lori, called and urged him to get home, come hell or high water. “Swim if you have to!” she directed. He decided to head uptown to his brother's firehouse in the Bronx to see if he was up there, or if, at the very least, some of the other guys were hanging around and knew what the plan was. But after the long trek up, blending in with the sea of people heading north with briefcases in hand, looks of quiet terror on their faces, he found a completely empty firehouse. No one was left.

If all these guys were helping out, Brian figured, why not him? He quickly hatched a plan—he'd keep on walking north until he could hop on a Metro-North train and get to his brother's house in Westchester, where he knew he could find some of Michael's extra gear in the basement. He'd suit up, grab Michael's extra ID (despite being eight years apart, they looked enough alike to pass for each other—both stocky guys with that pale, Irish skin and round, jolly faces), and just head down there. He would see what he could see, and help in whatever way he could help.

After a stop at his own home where he kissed Lori good-bye and fended off her protests, Brian headed out. He drove down the eerily empty FDR Drive and headed west to the World Trade Center site. A parkway that normally carries upward of 175,000 cars through Lower Manhattan, and all the noise and pollution that they produce, was suddenly a nearly silent passageway for one determined man.

Brian hardly had the energy to notice how bizarre it all was—driving alone on the FDR, a road that he had cursed more than once on other bumper-to-bumper occasions. His entire body was engaged in his mission—his heart was beating fast, his eyes were watching the smoky air drift by, his digestion had slowed down to a quiet grumble. He knew that New York was falling apart all around him, but all he could see was the narrow path he'd carved out in his mind that led straight to his brother.

Thanks to his brother's ID, he got through all the checkpoints that Tuesday morning, parked his car on the corner of Pine and Church Streets, and headed—counter to the stream of people searching for safety—toward the site. “It was like a war zone,” he remembers. Fires were still burning. Paper and dead bodies covered the ground. Piles of steel were everywhere. Brian took a deep breath, surveying the carnage in every direction. He decided to walk the entire perimeter of the demolished site, so as to get a better sense of the scale of the damage and need.

It quickly became very obvious that it would be difficult to find his brother amid all the chaos. There were police and firefighters everywhere, everyone trying to coordinate getting to the injured and buried people still trapped in the ruins. Massive machines were already moving piles of steel to help rescue workers get in to find survivors. In the meantime, he decided, he would just help out. As he walked, he gave himself a little pep talk: “Just one grain of sand. That's all I've got to do. If I can do something to the best of my ability, add one grain of sand to the bucket, then I can help the common goal.”

He wouldn't leave the site for three full weeks.

Brian's firefighter brother Michael was the youngest of four sons and, as a result, had the most eyes and expectations on him as he was coming of age in the Lyons family. “We all wanted to make him what we weren't,” Brian explained. “We wanted to make sure he got good schooling, went to a good college, and he was good in sports.”

Stickball was king on the streets of Yonkers in the sixties and seventies when the boys were growing up. “There would be ten, twenty, thirty kids on the corner at one time,” Brian remembers. “You had generations—my older brother and friends, me and my friends . . .” They would spend hours playing games and talking trash.

The Lyons family immigrated to the United States in 1957, after a decade of economic depression and political violence in their home country of Ireland. Brian was born in 1960. Michael, dubbed “the moon baby,” was born on July 20, 1969—one day before Neil Armstrong first stuck an American flag in that silvery orb far, far away.

All the boys were raised in the Catholic Church and taught to be pious, helpful, and scrappy—always looking for opportunities to make a buck. From a very young age, Brian would wander onto local construction sites and ask if he could lend a hand, “hoping for a dollar to get something to eat.” It was during these long, hot days of summer that he first learned about construction work. On rare trips to Lower Manhattan as a teenager, he remembers marveling at the World Trade towers, which he viewed as feats of construction, symbols of patriotism and power. Brian explains, “I admired the Twin Towers since I was a little kid. Just like you want your baseball team to win the World Series, you want your city to have the biggest, best building in the world. That's how I thought about those towers.”

Brian wasn't very drawn to school, so he figured that he'd join the service instead, even if his heart wasn't really in that either. “I was just a kid going to boot camp,” he remembers. “They do everything bad to you.” But there was a silver lining to all that harsh treatment: “I got stationed in Alaska for a year and half. I was sailing around the North Pacific at nineteen years old. It was really good.”

As Brian was wandering around the world as part of the service, Michael went on to Manhattan College, where he studied mechanical engineering. “He's got a good head on his shoulders,” Brian explains.

Brian finally settled back into the area in the late eighties, at which time he met Lori—a bright young business school student at the time. He proposed to her at the World Trade Center restaurant, Windows on the World, on September 12, 1989, and they were married in 1990. They were excited to start a family right away but weren't able to conceive their first child, Elizabeth, until 1995, followed by Patricia in 1998—right around the same time that Michael started his own family with his new wife, Elaine. Their first daughter, Caitlin, was born in 2000.

This was also the time that Michael became a firefighter. There were very few engineering jobs when Michael graduated, but his name came up on the list for the FDNY—he'd taken the test his senior year in high school—so he jumped at the chance.

Michael and Brian were very close, coming up with all sorts of entrepreneurial schemes, even a baby-bottle business. When Michael decided he wanted to renovate his house, Brian teamed up with him. On their many drives to Home Depot and in almost daily phone calls, they cemented the plans for the renovation and carried it out, side by side. They mourned the loss of their parents together. Their daughters were destined to be playmates. Their wives were friends. Everything seemed to have turned out as the Irish blessing foretold that it would:

Brian slept in his car, ate donated sandwiches, drank copious amounts of donated coffee, and worked for three straight weeks following September 11, 2001. Whatever project he found that needed doing—no matter how seemingly mundane—he would attach himself to it and make sure he saw it through from start to finish. Whether it was removing a small section of debris, in hopes that there was an air pocket below, or making a path to a particular section of the site where rescue workers were concentrating, he was there to see the project through. He knew no one working alongside him but quickly made friends with other bighearted people trying to move the rescue effort along. Brian's steady demeanor was a huge asset in the midst of such traumatic work; rescue workers were attracted to both his calming presence and his capable hand.

Brian would call a few times a day, giving both his wife and Michael's wife updates on what was going on down there. Elaine and Michael's home had become a bustling center where family members came through, bringing food and prayers for Michael's safety. Sometimes they would take the girls to Chuck E. Cheese's or Carvel to keep them away from the steady stream of sobering conversation among the adults. Their sprawling extended family held out hope that Brian would call any minute with news of Michael's rescue. Lori worried about Brian—she couldn't imagine what kinds of things he was experiencing down there. But she tried to keep her worries, small in comparison with Elaine's, at bay and focus on finding Michael. Later, she admitted to Brian that she was absolutely terrified for his safety.