Sons of the Mothers

Huffman Aviation had gone out of business. Marilynn tracked down the former owner, who quickly agreed to meet with a grieving mother of a Sept. 11 victim. "He was the one who told me how tall Marwan was -- at least six feet -- and how friendly Marwan was," she recalls. "He called Atta a sourpuss." Marilynn went to a cafe the terrorists frequented and questioned the manager, jotting down their usual order of burgers with coleslaw, like a waitress obsessed.

Marilynn studied Marwan's bank statements, too, and she began working the phone again to find details to match the numbers. The $206 was for a global positioning device. (Was this what the hijackers used, she wondered, after disabling the jetliners' transponders to hamper tracking by air traffic control?) Maybe the $40.79 spent at the dry cleaner was for the brown leather jacket Marwan usually wore. She remembers her aggravation when Burdine's refused to tell her what the terrorist had purchased.

She found a more agreeable source in the firefighter who had been Marwan and Atta's landlord in Florida. He took Marilynn through the vacant, peach-and-white bungalow. Marilynn remembers stepping into the stamp-size living room and wondering where the men found the floor space to kneel and pray. She heard about the widow next door, since passed away, who would bake Marwan cookies to thank him for small favors -- unsticking a window, screwing in a ceiling light. Marilynn felt conflicted. She was humanizing her son's murderer. Was he essentially claiming her life as well?

Marilynn sits in her study overlooking the redbud tree shading her back yard, where the beauty of her garden, nature made precise and orderly, offers respite from the feverish work that has consumed her. "I've been trying to impose an order on my own mind, my own life, my own understanding," she explains. "I have a pretty good idea what happened now on different levels."

She enrolled in a philosophy course called Knowledge and reread Plato, "and I understood what he meant, how most people are caught in a cave and know only shadows."

Blindly, she kept inching toward the light.

A Family's Side

The plane nosed down toward the bleached desert. Marilynn left the Abu Dhabi airport and stepped into the hot August night. It was 2005, and Marilynn had been preparing for this for nearly four years.

Checking into her hotel, she was relieved to find a message from the U.S. ambassador. They had been corresponding about Marilynn's wish to meet Marwan's family, and although no promises had been made, she was hopeful.

She imagined Marwan's mother cloaked in an abaya, greeting her with apprehension. "What would be the right words to say to her?" Marilynn remembers worrying. "I never could find them."

"I thought about it endlessly," she says. "We would go up to the door. I would wear my long dress. I'd be warm and kind and as soft-spoken as I could. One option was to just put an arm around her."

The ambassador took her to meet a brigadier general from Emirati military intelligence. He promised to provide a guide to help Marilynn approach the family. The next morning, a slight, smiling man in his thirties met Marilynn in the hotel lobby. He introduced himself as Maj. Eisa al-Shehhi, a distant cousin of Marwan's.

The soldier was warm and charming, Marilynn recalls, but he wasted no time declaring that Sept. 11 was a CIA-Mossad plot to justify American warfare against Muslim countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Everyone knew, she remembers him asserting, that some 4,000 Jews who worked in the World Trade Center had stayed home that morning because they had received warning calls from Israeli intelligence the night before. Marilynn struggled to refute this preposterous conspiracy theory politely. How can that be? she asked. My son was Je wish, and he was killed.