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Shea hesitated. From the street in front of the
firehouse there on Amsterdam and 66th Street, he could make out smoke rising
from the building downtown. And then there was more shouting. The second tower
was on fire. "Alright, Shea, you're in.'' Shea normally travels on a truck called "a ladder.'' He was trained on it, and learned rescue, ventilation, search and forcible entry. But this time, because it took him a few minutes to change back into uniform, he found himself on the fire engine rig, which is used as a sort of central point for putting out fires. Shea remembers the high-speed trip downtown, the bell clanging, the siren going. And he remembers being assigned to a group that went into the North Tower. But then he was called out to the north of the North Tower where some kind of fuel, aviation fuel they thought at the time, was causing fires to break out among parked cars in a parking lot under the West Side Highway. He remembers manning the hose, spraying water on the fire. And he remembers some of the men going off to find fire-fighting foam to contain the fire. And that's all he remembers until he woke up in a hospital in New Jersey. I am talking to Shea on October 1, 2002, one year and twenty days since that terrible disaster, and he is sitting in a wicker chair on the deck at Gurney's Inn in Montauk, holding hands with the former Stacy Hope Herman, 38, the woman he married just two days ago. Shea is movie star handsome, and the ordeal he went through in front of the North Tower is nowhere to be found on the big smile on his face. The truth is he remembers none of it. He has no recollection that the people who found him thought he was dead. He doesn't remember being blown 150 feet from where he was manning the hose, suffering a neck broken in three places, a concussion, a torn rotator cuff, an injury that cut his right thumb three quarters of the way off and major damage to his leg and groin. Nor does he look like he has gone through this ordeal. His thumb has been re-attached. His neck is now made of titanium nuts and bolts, and he moves gently and wonderfully. He is, clearly, not in pain. He stands up, he sits down, he embraces his new wife. He is back at work on light duty. He is a miracle. Stacy Hope Herman met her future husband on September 28, 2001, seventeen days after Kevin had been through this disaster. She had not known him before. Since the day they met, except for that first night, she has not been without him. Now she is on her honeymoon. She picks up the story. "For four months before September 11," she says, "I had been making a 14-part documentary about the New York Fire Department Special Operations Command. I was born and raised on Long Island. But I went west to college, graduating from UCLA with a degree in science and film. I've produced numerous documentaries. And I didn't think anything would be so special about this one. I was nowhere near the towers when they fell. And I was not filming on that day. But about half the men and women in the department I had been working with died during that disaster and I was devastated. I decided to abandon the project. "On September 28 I was home, still terribly depressed about everything, when a friend of mine from the fire department, Ray Bressingham, called me up and told me there is going to be a benefit for the firemen at a catering hall nearby and would I like to go. I tell him no. He said it would be good for you to get out, 'I'll pick you up at eight,' he said. "Kevin was at the benefit. He had a limp. He had a bandage around his right hand, a neck brace, and I asked Ray about him. After the first tower fell, a Daily News reporter on the scene was attracted by a large pipe that, at regular intervals, was emitting a puff of fire. Everything was covered in white powder. And he shouted that there was a man, unconscious but still moving alongside the pipe, and to get help. Paramedics came. They could see his neck was broken but they had nothing to immobilize it with. But they did have a stretcher. They took him to a nearby garage at which time the second tower collapsed. The garage saved them all. Then they brought him, still on the stretcher, and still without a neck brace, down to the docks where a boat took him across the Hudson to New Jersey and the hospital. The doctors said later that had his head turned in any direction just 45 degrees he would have been a paraplegic. It was a miracle. He was the only member of Engine 40, Ladder 35 to survive. He had only been out of the hospital three days. Ray said to me, 'Go over and give him a kiss,' and I did.'' She also danced with him. Stacy walked Kevin back to the firehouse that evening, then went to her own home. The next day she was back at his home. She volunteered to take him to his doctors' appointments. Wherever he needed to go, she would take him. And she did. "I was in a great deal of pain that first morning after meeting Stacy,'' Kevin said, "in my groin. I apologized to Stacy. I told her I had been out of the hospital for three days, and I had had parts of each of my testicles removed. Yet when I danced with her, I got a partial erection. And it caused me a lot of pain.'' "I felt it,'' Stacy said, smiling. ``Well, I apologized for it,'' Kevin said. "But I thanked her for it, too. I know. This is an amazingly intimate thing to be talking about. But the whole thing was amazing.'' I asked if each of them had been married before. They shook their heads. No. "I held nothing back from Stacy,'' Kevin said. "She went into every doctor's office with me. Except the psychiatrist. She tried to get in, but he threw her out. On the sixth day, I told Stacy I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.'' "Whatever made you think that?'' I asked. Kevin looked at her. "She is steady. Emotionally healthy. No big highs and lows. I met and liked her family. And I had fallen in love with her. She hesitated when I told her. I said think about it. Think about it before you give me an answer.'' "We're going to have children,'' Stacy said. Kevin nodded. "Give us two years. We'll bring them to you here in Montauk." Kevin proposed to Stacy exactly six months from the day he met her. It was March 29, 2002. And he took her to Ground Zero, to the place where he had been found those long months ago, and he got down on one knee. He also dialed somebody on his cell phone, which he held out as he spoke. "There are many people who say that they saved my life six months ago,'' he told her. "But the one who saved my life was really you.'' He took out a ring. "Will you marry me?'' "Listening on the phone were my parents,'' Stacy said. "Can you believe this? Here's the ring.'' She held it out. Stacy and Kevin were married on Sunday at the Metronome, an art deco jazz club on Broadway and 21st Street. One hundred and seventy guests attended, including Stacy's best friends, who flew in from California and Florida, respectively. A rabbi performed the ceremony. I spoke to them on Tuesday. They had been at Gurney's since Sunday, as guests of the Inn, courtesy of Ingrid Lemme, who's in charge of public relations and marketing for that splendid oceanfront resort. I was at the Inn to have dinner with Lance Gumbs, one of the tribal chiefs of the Shinnecock Indian Reservation, and after I spoke with the Sheas, I suggested that Ingrid, Kevin and Stacy join us. But Kevin and Stacy were just sitting there, holding hands and smiling at one another. "Let's just make it us three,'' Ingrid said. "They're newlyweds. They don't need us.'' And so we were three. And they were two. And this was the most extraordinary thing. |
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