Proof Of Life In Oklahoma

By Amanda Ripley

Two weeks ago, police officers appeared at the Long Island, N.Y., home of Cathy Ann Marchese-Collins' parents to tell them that her sister's thigh and forearm had been identified from the World Trade Center rubble. It was the first of Laura Ann Marchese's remains to be found, and the end of Cathy's flickering hope that her baby sister, 35, had somehow escaped from the 102nd floor of the north tower, that she might, as Cathy liked to fantasize, have "met this cute guy on the elevator down and locked eyes and run off to Fiji." Stricken, Marchese-Collins did what she has done all year whenever she cannot fathom the new horrors of this ordeal: she called Diane Leonard, a widow of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the one person in Marchese-Collins' life who has survived the debris, the morgue, the memorials and the pain. "The wonderful thing about talking to her," Marchese-Collins says, "is that she knows. She just knows."

Marchese-Collins and Leonard have talked every other week since they met last fall. Along with a dozen other Oklahoma City veterans, Leonard was sent by the Red Cross to offer the grieving New York City-area families a glimpse of what lay ahead for them--just as a widow of the 1988 Pan Am 103 bombing had once done for her. "It's amazing to me how quickly you can talk to someone you don't even know," Leonard says. The two talk for hours, sometimes in mutual tears, signing off with the words "I love you."

When rescue workers recovered the partial body of Leonard's husband Don seven years ago, she fought to see him. She advises Marchese-Collins to do the same. "Diane says somewhere down the road, I'm going to look back at finding her body and get a little comfort from that," Marchese-Collins explains. "If she says that, then she's probably right." --By Amanda Ripley