Unrevealed

He’d talk to her any hour of the day or night for as long as she needed to talk. He’d tell her to keep positive and that she deserved a better life.”
    “He died?”
    Ellen’s eyes scanned the carpet. She took another drag on her cigarette. “Yeah. Right after 9/11. Car crash.”
    The first thing I thought was, what were the odds of losing two siblings in that short a period? The second thought was how tragic life could be. Jesus, no wonder Ellen was a
drunk. “You say Frank was good to Marge. Was he good to you?”
    “What?” She seemed unprepared for that question.
    “We all need a decent person to talk to who actually gives a shit. Did Frank give you the same pep talks he gave your older sister?”
    “Well, sure…uh, yeah. He was a good guy.” Ellen appeared flustered. “I’m not trying to say he didn’t help me. He did. But we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to talk about Marge and the possibility of…”
    I sensed a lot of nerves kicking in right then. I leaned forward, clasping my hands on my cluttered desk. “Of what?”
    “That maybe she didn’t die.” The words fell like stone. Ellen pulled her large blue binder to her lap, opened it and rifled through a disorganized heap of pages. “She was on the sixteenth floor. Her interview was with a bank.” Ellen found the page she was looking for. “The plane struck tower one at 8:46 a.m. It hit floors ninety-three to ninety-nine. No one above those floors survived. Below the crash line, approximately seventy-two die but over four thousand survive! Tower one doesn’t collapse until 10:28 a.m. Being on the sixteenth floor, even if the elevators didn’t work, she could have walked down sixteen floors real quick — ”
    “How do you know all the details about your sister’s schedule that day?”
    Ellen looked taken aback. “Well, we talked.” Her eyes drifted to the side. “We didn’t talk a lot but I knew about her interview. She called me a few days before and told me about it.” Ellen’s chin quivered as her mouth went dry. This wasn’t just nerves, I realized. This was outright fear. “You got some water?”

    I grabbed the cleanest glass I could find and filled it with some bottled water. Ellen drank it like she’d just run a marathon in 110-degree heat.
    I wanted to gauge my next question carefully. “Did she call you…from the tower?”
    Ellen looked at me. “No. She called Frank.”
    “Not you.”
    “No. She called Frank.” Ellen hung her head. “He told me what she said. She called him right after 10:00 a.m…. right after tower two collapsed. She told him how she saw the debris hit the windows, obscuring everything outside. And the way the ground shook, like bombs were goin’ off all around her. And…how they should have evacuated right away but she was scared.” Ellen’s hand trembled. “She told him she wasn’t sure if she’d get out alive. And that she loved him. That he’d been the only good thing in her life. And that this was a sign from God.”
    There must have been some serious rift between Ellen and her sister, I thought, for Marge to say that Frank was the “only good thing” in her life. “Wait a second,” I said. “She had twenty-five minutes or so from when she called Frank to get out safely and walk down sixteen floors — ”
    “Maybe she figured she wasn’t worth saving.” Ellen seemed to be in another world.
    I sat back. “What are you saying? She made a split decision to commit suicide in the tower?”
    Ellen was silent for almost a minute. “Her life was so messed up. Maybe she decided at that moment that Marge Challis needed to die.”
    I watched Ellen’s face fight the words she just said. But I also knew that even when people say they don’t want to live, it doesn’t necessarily mean they want to die. The will to survive is programmed into our DNA. I knew from my own
dark past that just because I’d wanted to check out a few times, it didn’t mean that the driving force to sustain my life hadn’t taken over. You may hate life but you may fear death even more.
    “So, she tells Frank that the terror attack is a sign from God and then what?” I asked.
    Ellen’s eyes filled with tears. “She told him she loved him and that she had to make a difficult decision.”
    “To live or die.”
    Ellen nodded weakly.
    “Then what?”
    “She hung up. And no one ever heard from Marge after that.”
    “Ellen,” I said cautiously, “I don’t mean to be