The Red Bandanna

Alison grieves daily; friends and neighbors try to comfort her, and she them. After a while, it’s too much for her, and she takes a short-term job at a Neiman Marcus across the river, because “she wanted to be seen but not watched, to be heard but not known” (145).

The search for bodies at the World Trade Center continues. On March 19, 2002, searchers find Welles’s remains. “The body was recovered in the debris of what had been the lobby of the South Tower” (152), near the bodies of FDNY firefighters in an area designated as a command post. Welles had been helping the firefighters when he died. The family holds a private funeral.

On Memorial Day weekend of 2002, the New York Times publishes a lengthy article “documenting the space of time between the first plane strike and the second tower’s collapse” (156). Alison reads it and discovers, in a description of the 78th floor devastation, a telling incident: “A mysterious man appeared at one point, his mouth and nose covered with a red handkerchief. He was looking for a fire extinguisher” (157).

Alison begins a search for the witnesses mentioned in the article who had noticed the man with