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intertwining of souls, and as her hand pressed up against the window, she could feel the kindness of heaven.
    Not long after, she died.

KITTY … MIMI
— Karen Quinn —
    The days following September 11, 2001, were painful for my children, made even more so by the fact that a beloved family member died just a week later at their mother’s hand. Schuyler was ten and Sam was nine on that clear, crisp morning when jets flew into the World Trade Center. We lived in a twenty-first-floor apartment on Union Square that had postcard views of the Twin Towers from our bedroom and office. It was one of the features that had attracted us to the place.
    I strolled toward home after dropping the kids at school, unaware that anything was amiss. Had I looked up I would have seen it, but I didn’t. As I neared home, I ran into Susan, a parent at the school who would soon get breast cancer, although we did not know it then. Susan told me about her daughter’s new hypoallergenic poodle, a concept I had never heard of. Little did we know as we talked that Susan would never make it home that day because she lived across from the World Trade Center, and that her poodle would have to be rescued by the building’s superintendent and held until Susan and her family could get back into their apartment to retrieve him.
    This is what I do after a tragedy: I think about the moments before it happened and envy my innocent self, the one thatdidn’t know that her life was about to suffer irreparably and could never be put back to the way it was before.
    Once home, I entered my bedroom, glanced at the TV that was on, and caught images of the World Trade Center, both towers fully engulfed in flames. In a surreal moment, I looked out the window and saw the same scene taking place just blocks away. I screamed for my husband, who was in the shower, as oblivious to the disaster as I had been on my walk home. “Mark, turn off the water! The World Trade Center’s on fire!” It didn’t occur to me that the buildings were so far apart that a fire in one would not engulf the other. My mind registered
one fire
and
one World Trade Center
, and I couldn’t begin to fathom the reality of how two separate attacks had taken place during the time it took me to walk my children to school, talk to a few parents, and return home. I crumpled to the floor and watched the TV instead of looking out the window, focused on Katie Couric explaining what had happened—something about plane crashes and a possible attack.
    Before Mark emerged from the bathroom, I was up and out the door again, off to retrieve the children at school. It seemed like the right thing to do. This time I ran, arriving at the front door of Friends Seminary just as they were locking everyone in. “Wait, I want my kids!” I cried to the woman who normally worked in the lower school office.
    “We’re not letting anyone leave,” she explained. “We think the kids are safer at school.”
    I didn’t argue. Nothing like this had ever happened, and if the school wanted to lock my children in during a nationalemergency instead of give them back to me, I didn’t think to disagree with them. What to do? I wondered.
    Then I remembered that we had no food in the house. One of my dearest friends had gotten married the weekend before in Southampton, and the whole family had been there. In fact, I’d shared Sunday brunch with a friend of the bride who at that very moment was trapped inside the Windows of the World restaurant on the 103rd floor of the north tower and would soon die, if he hadn’t already. I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that we were out of milk, and I should go shopping before everyone else got the same idea.
    In the days that followed, my children did not cry, nor did they want to talk about what happened. We kept the TV off to spare them the horrific images, but they could not ignore what had taken place. Every night there were candlelight vigils across the street in Union