Constance Roux Scalera called her daughter that morning, worried. Katie Papkee lived 10 miles from the heart of Washington, D.C., and worked for the U.S. Senate. Her mother heard about the plane crashing into the Pentagon. Was she OK?

Papkee was home, and fine.

Neither woman knew to worry about Papkee’s big brother, Jim.

He had packed up his home in Portland and closed his law firm. Jim Roux was headed to Thailand for time off and maybe a new start.

“I thought he flew the day before,” said Sally Tartre, Papkee and Roux’s sister. “It wasn’t really on my radar at all.”

Another sister, Mary Train, pieced things together first.

“I booked the flight, actually,” she said. “(I have) a lot of guilt about that.”

Their family of two boys and four girls had grown up in Lewiston, and after some years away, Roux had come back to Maine. He’d been a military lawyer, then a corporate lawyer. His small firm had broken up. He loved to hike, going all the way up to base camp in Nepal two times, even hosting a Sherpa at his home one summer.

Roux was 42, twice divorced. He described traveling to Thailand as a personal and professional hiatus.

“He was at a crossroads,” Tartre said. “For some reason, he had the pull to go.”

Train lived in Portland then. Roux stayed with her a few weeks before his trip.

“It was sort of an interesting time,” Train said. “I would ask him, ‘So, what’s next?’ He would say, very nonchalant, ‘I don’t know. I can’t see the next chapter.’ That’s always been very eerie. Just that he was so content to be wrapping things up with no plan.”

Train’s family threw an Off To New Adventures party for her son, Bailey, starting kindergarten the next day, and for Roux, flying out Tuesday.

“We walked Bailey off to the bus stop (on Monday) and I came home and brought Jim to the bus station,” she said.

He stayed with friends in Boston overnight.

The morning of Sept. 11, Train was on her daughter’s preschool playground when a teacher came out and said, “Something terrible has happened,” describing the attacks on the news.

“I said, ‘I have to go; that’s my brother,'” Train said. “(The teacher said), ‘Wait a minute; how do you know?’”

“‘I just know,’” Train said.

She called her husband on his lobster boat, then their mom, and, finally, Roux’s travel agent. Train was sitting on her bed, copying down his itinerary when her mother walked up behind her. Newscasters had reported the flight numbers.

“She came in and was looking over my shoulder and it confirmed it for her because she had just seen the TV,” Train said. “I felt like I knew before it happened. When I said goodbye to him, it felt like I was saying goodbye forever. The last thing I said was, ‘I love you.’”

In D.C., Papkee pulled her kids from school and drove to Maine as soon as she heard her brother had been aboard United Flight 175, the second plane to hit the World Trade Center.

“As we were coming into New Jersey, they were closing the Tappan Zee Bridge,” Papkee said. “I remember getting out of the car and screaming, ‘You have to let me cross this bridge!’”

They did.

Tartre had been in her first day of student teaching at a Kennebunk elementary school and caught the image, repeatedly, of that second plane strike. When she got home, her husband’s car was in the driveway. He was supposed to be in Boston.

“He was just like, ‘I’m so sorry,’” Tartre said. “The first image of it and Steve telling me were the two things I remember most.”

Family gathered at their mother’s place in Cumberland. A brother working in Europe found a way back home. So did a sister in California. They held a memorial service the following weekend, though there was nothing of Roux to bury, and all these years later, still isn’t. The family submitted DNA samples to officials clearing ground zero and have never heard anything back.

Roux was honored with a foot stone near their father’s plot in Lewiston’s Mount Hope Cemetery. Papkee has kept up the family tradition of keeping flowers near it.

The sisters have kept in close touch with Roux’s sons, 7 and 15 at the time of the attacks. The youngest is a high school senior living in England, the oldest an artist who just moved to New York City.

Roux’s death was the main reason Papkee returned to Maine in 2002.

She finds herself measuring her words more now. What if that’s the last thing she ever says to that person?

“To the point I won’t even cause waves sometimes,” said Papkee, 46, who lives in Portland. “You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s just on my mind every day.”

So, too, is her 24-year-old son. He’s four months into his first U.S. Army deployment to Afghanistan.

Tartre, 45, of Kennebunk said she’s found it’s trite but true: Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.

“(Once tragedy) really hits home so close, it really makes you enjoy the day more,” she said.

She hikes Mount Washington every year in Roux’s memory.

“I’ve done it pregnant; I’ve done it with a baby on my back,” Tartre said. “We just light a candle at the top and put a picture there.”

She has three children. The oldest was 2 when Roux died. It’s sometimes difficult to navigate post-9/11 with them.

“The kids know, ‘Bad guys took over a plane,’” Tartre said. “I feel bad they have to know that exists.”

When Osama bin Laden was killed, their young school friends said, “Your mom must be so happy.”

“I don’t think I’m happy, and I don’t want them to think that’s the way the world is, too,” she said.

Tartre told them, if he can’t hurt anyone anymore, that is a good thing.

Train moved from Portland to Cumberland a few months after the attacks.

“We bolted and kind of started fresh,” she said. “The 9/11 experience was so traumatic.”

If there was a positive, she said, it’s that the family felt love and support from the entire world after that day.

“My brother was murdered,” Train said. “It happens to people in very quiet ways (all the time).”

Train is 42, the same age as Roux when he died. She’s thought about that a lot this year.

The day before he caught the bus for Boston, they sat down for coffee. He asked, “Tell me about your fall. I want to know what it looks like.”

She remembers launching into “someday”: Someday she’d go back to work, someday this, someday that.

“Everything I was thinking about was in the future,” Train said. “He just said, ‘What are you waiting for?’ If you plan things and wait too long, you might not get a chance to do it then. Find a way to do them now.”

When she gets caught up with life and “someday,” she says she’ll still hear her brother asking, “What are you waiting for?”

 kskelton@sunjournal.com

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