I remember my cat cowering in the corner. I couldn’t see her, but knew she was there. I remember my mother standing in front of her, her back to the door as I entered. She was laughing. I knew that laugh. She was sticking hair pins in my cat, clipping her with the hair claws I used to hold back my curtains. My cat was whimpering. She didn’t scratch, it wasn’t in her nature.

Earlier in the day I had been at work. A temp. I moved to Manhattan claiming I wanted to be a singer but knowing I just wanted to get away, although the idea of what I was running away from wasn’t fully formed yet. I answered phones as the normal receptionist basked in a bikini in Bermuda. She’d spent two days training me. Two days at fifteen dollars an hour. It was good pay.

At the office I was arguing with the delivery man. It’s 9:00 a.m. and he is handing me a tray filled with sandwiches. On his cart, the dessert tray piled with brownies and cookies.

“Not now, 11:30,” I tell him. “Come back at 11:30.” That’s what it says on the delivery slip he’s asking me to sign. The meeting isn’t until noon.

“No, now,” he tells me. “I don’t have time, too many deliveries,” and he places them on my desk. A tray overflowing with turkey and brie, eggplant and mozzerella, tuna and cheddar. Then he lifts up the cookies and places them there and leaves the building. I’m left to find a place for them until the meeting begins. I can’t place them in the room now, the partners are playing with the new flatscreen television. It takes up the entire wall.

I try to appease her, my mother. I go to her hotel. “I don’t feel safe here,” she tells me in her little girl whine. “I want to go to your house. I should stay with family, not in a hotel.” I’m at one of the senior partner’s apartment. Everyone is. It’s thirty blocks uptown from my mother’s hotel on the other side of the island with no trains running. “Come here now,” she whimpers again. I can tell it’s fake, her crying, but I grab my bag and walk. I am her daughter.

At work we hear about the attacks first by the sounds coming from the boardroom. The gasps. The shock. The partners have forgotten their coffee and it steams into the air-conditioned chill of the room. We’re all called in. I abandon the sandwiches I was trying to fit into the fridge. We all stare in disbelief, the image is huge. We don’t think it’s real—a plane sticking out of a building. “It has to be empty,” someone says. “There’s no way a plane can fly into a building.”



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