the department had to: choose between friends. In late October, as another service was taking place in the city, I accompanied Shea to a Mass in upstate New York for his lieutenant, John Ginley. Shea still couldn’t drive, and Steve Kelly picked us up. Kelly and Shea wore their Class A uniforms: navy-blue suits and white gloves.
As they spoke in the car about the men who had died, Shea seemed detached, as if he were reading from a piece of paper. Several people close to him had noticed that he seemed increasingly numb. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Shea told me at one point. “I’m not sad enough. I should be sadder.”
While the other men spent more and more time together—searching at Ground Zero, eating their meals at the firehouse, drinking at P. D. O’Hurley’s—Shea spent less and less time with his colleagues.
He now stared out the window at the changing leaves. “Look at them,” he said. “They’re all orange and purple.”
“You sure you’re O.K., Kev?” Kelly asked.
Shea lowered his window and let the wind wash over him. “Ten-four.”
By the time we arrived at the church, scores of firemen were lined up. There was still no body, and in place of a casket a helmet rested at the foot of the altar. “I will never forget those memories,” one of Ginley’s brothers said in his eulogy. “I believe in time this pain will become bearable, because all our memories will be alive in our mind.”
I glanced at Shea. Unlike the other men, who had begun to weep, he was dry-eyed and his face was utterly blank.
By the end of October, Shea began losing interest in his search. “What’s the point?” he asked me. “What am I going to figure out? They’re all dead.”
One day, he found, through the relatives of a deceased firefighter in his house, a news clip from September 11th that showed the men from Engine 40, his truck, going into the towers. At last the quest was over, he thought, as he prepared to watch the clip. On the grainy film he could see each of the men from his company going inside, but he wasn’t there. “I don’t know where the heck I was,” Shea said. “I don’t know what the hell happened to me.”
Finally, he stopped looking for answers, and devoted himself to helping the families of lost firefighters. He was a featured speaker at fund-raisers, though he was suffering from pain in his hand and leg, where the contusions were, and in his groin, where the doctors had surgically removed large amounts of damaged tissue. At a fund-raiser in Buffalo in November, after having appeared only a few days earlier at another in California, he was wan and exhausted. “He’s not letting himself heal,” Stacy told me. “He’s in so much pain, but he won’t say anything.”
As he stared off into space, a stranger asked for his autograph, and he walked away.
The next morning, Flight 587 crashed into the Rockaway Peninsula, near Kennedy Airport, and reporters, believing it was another terrorist attack, tried to track Shea down for comment. Rather than speak to them, he went to the hotel gym and got on the StairMaster in his neck brace, climbing to nowhere and watching the fire burn on TV. “How do you feel, Mr. Shea?” he said, parodying their questions. “How do you feel?”
“He’s starting to have nightmares,” Stacy said. “He’s kicking and thrashing.”
He told me, “I remember the dreams.”
Emotions, once suppressed, overwhelmed him, and periodically he began to cry. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he said.
He found an article about post-traumatic stress, and highlighted the words “It is O.K. to be in pain. That is the first principle of recovery.”
By the beginning of December, many in the firehouse were showing their own symptoms of trauma. “You see signs,” Kelly told me. “Marriages are starting to come under fire more than usual. I don’t know if there is more drinking, but there is plenty of it.”
While the rest of the men relied on the familial nature of the firehouse as a refuge, Shea, after drifting away, felt cut off. Many of the new recruits who had replaced the missing barely recognized him. Shea tried for the first time to reintegrate himself into the fabric of the force. “Being with the guys,” he said. “That’s the most important thing to me right now.”
He went with them to Roosevelt Island for courses on antiterrorism. “He was so excited,” Stacy said. “He got to wear his uniform again.”
In mid-December, the doctors removed his brace. It was possible that, after the bone fused in a year, he could return to active duty. Yet in the kitchen, where the men gathered to eat and reminisce, he sensed that they were shying away from him. Sometimes when he showed up in the morning they barely acknowledged him, he said, and when he tried to engage them in conversation they seemed uninterested. “A lot of the guys are reluctant to even look at me,” Shea told me one day, sitting in his car. “As odd as it may sound, I think I remind them of the others.”
That month, at another wake, Shea stood off by himself. “I sometimes think it would’ve been easier if I had died with the rest of the guys,” he said.
Kelly told me, “It’s hard to watch. Every time I talk to him, he’s not the same guy.” Kelly went on, “First thing he needs to do is simply heal physically. Hopefully, then he can come back and be a full-duty fireman, because he lived for that, and he was going to move up in the department. He was brilliant in the books.”
Shortly before the three-month anniversary of the attack, Shea showed up early for the Christmas party to help with preparation. Many of the relatives of the dead were there, and he served them hot dogs and sauerkraut. He worked alongside the other men, saying, “Yes, sir,” and “Negative K, sir.” “More of the guys are talking to me,” he said. “Maybe in time it will get easier.”
Hanging on the wall at the firehouse was the riding list from the morning of September 11th, a chalkboard that had the name of each member who had hopped on the rig and died. The men had put a piece of Plexiglas over it to preserve it as a memorial. At the bottom, scribbled almost as an afterthought, were the words “Kevin Shea.”
“I need to go down,” Shea said.
He had called me at home one night, his voice agitated, and it took me a moment to realize that he was referring to Ground Zero. He said someone in the Fire Department would pick us up the next afternoon in Chelsea.
It was a cold day, and Shea wore a sweatshirt and mountain-climbing boots. Stacy stood beside him, holding his hand. He had not returned to the area since that day and had consciously avoided pictures of it in the newspaper and on TV. Liam Flaherty, a member of Rescue 4, showed up in a Fire Department van. He had trained Shea at the academy and had been down at the site, searching for his men’s remains, since September 11th, leaving only long enough to sleep. “I saw guys at their absolute best that day,” he said as he drove. “Guys just kept running in. They went up as it came down.”
We passed through several checkpoints, trying to follow the route Shea had taken with his own company. Shea pressed his face against the window, wiping away the steam from his breath. We could see the tops of the cranes rising out of the debris and, farther on, two huge metal beams, molded together in the shape of a cross.
“Look at that,” Shea said, pointing out the opposite window. “That’s Engine 40. That’s the rig we drove in on.” On the side of the road was a huge red truck, the number 40 painted on the side. “It must’ve been moved,” Shea said. “We weren’t parked there.” He looked at me for reassurance. “Right?”
As we passed through the final checkpoint, Flaherty said, “This is it. You’re in.”
“There’s the south tower,” Stacy said.
“Where?”
“There. By the crane.”
“Oh, my God,” Shea said.
All we could see was a giant hole in the skyline. Flaherty parked the van and we climbed out. Flaherty got us hard hats and yelled at us to be careful as we approached the debris.
“Where’s the lobby command post?” Shea asked.
“Ten stories underground,” Flaherty said. “It’s still burning.”
Shea blinked his eyes. He began to recall, in a rush, all the pieces that he had strung together. “I grabbed a
