It was just so achingly, brilliantly sunny that day. That’s what I always remember. I would think this later: the weather was some sort of betrayal, God’s infidelity, a terrible injustice it wasn’t heavy, or awful outside, a gloomy kind of morning. Instead, the sky showed us its deepest and clearest blue, as if there could have been promise or hope or anything else but what there really was.

At 8:40 that Tuesday morning, I drove Henry and Sophie to First English Lutheran for preschool. Baby Rose fell asleep in her carseat on the way to school, so after I’d returned home and parked the minivan outside our house, I carried her carseat carefully inside and set it on the living room floor. I began the most ordinary of morning chores on the most ordinary of days: I made the beds. I started a load of diaper laundry. I washed the breakfast dishes and set them to dry next to the sink.

And then, the phone rang. Odd, at 9:30, I mean, nobody calls me in the morning, I thought. I picked it up. Silence on the other end. I got a chill — a feeling. Something’s wrong, I thought. I checked caller ID to see who’d called. It was my sister, but when I called her back, I got one of those funny fast-busy signals.

I put these little bits of information together — Kristin never calls that early, there’s something wrong with the phone lines — and I crossed the house to turn on the TV. When I saw two towers on fire, I had no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t think of the twin towers until somebody on TV said, World Trade Center.

I finally talked to Kristin on the phone — sometime after the Pentagon had been crashed into — and she said this: Come to Cleveland. Just throw some clothes in the car and come. Go get the kids from school. Baltimore’s too close to D.C.

I sat outside with the cordless phone while she said this. I was struck by the silence all around me. No planes in that perfect sky.

I headed back out at 11:45 to get the kids from preschool. They’d been there three short hours, but those three hours had spread out terribly. When I picked Henry and Sophie up, the whole world was different. The teacher who led them to the minivan made that knowing sort of eye contact I was about to become really familiar with. It was a look that said, Nothing will ever be the same again.

I suppose I feel guilty I couldn’t shut the TV off when the kids were around. I was glued like everyone else. Sophie was too little to understand, but Henry — he was 5, a really bright kid. After class one day, Henry’s teacher pulled me aside. “Henry’s taking this really hard,” she said. “He keeps crashing toy planes into everything. He keeps building towers.” She hugged me, and I stiffened against her until I realized, Henry’s teacher was crying. I hugged her back.

A few weeks later, I was walking across our toy room, just like I did about a hundred times a day in that house. I’m sure I was heading to the kitchen to do something in a hurry. Henry had those blocks, those big cardboard blocks that look like bricks, and he’d built a tower as tall as he could reach. This barely registered, I mean, he was always building things, until I crossed the room and saw, out of the corner of my eye, a toy plane. He’d used scotch tape to suspend it there, about a quarter of the way down the tower. He’d gotten the angle just right. The plane was banking just a little as it hit, as it smashed into his red brick tower, as it sent a shudder of shock and sorrow and grief and fear up and down my spine. This tower was right here, inside my house, larger than life. Henry sat silent like a frog at its base.