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this was. Because in the back of my mind I’d always secretly believed that he’d realize—he’d have to realize—that Caroline was a mindless twit, as Mom called her. And he’d get sick of how young and pretty and stupid she was. Then he’d come back, and Mom would forgive him, and we’d all be together again, with Dad and Mom bickering like before, like any normal parents.
    But now this new…I didn’t know what to call it. Now this new development had totally ruined any chance of that ever happening. That dreamwas over. Definitely. And I was really really sad. I kept remembering little details, tiny things about Dad—the way his glasses used to slip down his nose; the clumsy, flat-footed run he had when we played catch; the way he’d pick me up and swing me around when he came home from work until I got so big that he’d groan and complain that his back hurt. When I let myself think about that, I’d go in my room and cry. To tell the truth, it didn’t help all that much to imagine how much worse things could have been if I hadn’t run a fever that morning.
    After a week, I went back to school, but it was like one of those bad dreams in which everyone you know is there but they all seem to be in the wrong place, and nothing that they do or say makes any sense. Everything was a blur, until some kid’s face would come into focus just long enough for him to tell me how sorry he was. The girls were superkind to me, and some of them even cried when they saw me, but it just made me feel weak, like some pitiful freak loser. None ofmy friends, or the kids I knew from before, treated me like the same person, and the new teachers hadn’t known me long enough to know what kind of person I was. My old teachers were nice enough, really nice. Too bad I wasn’t in their classes.
    I made it through two days. Then I asked Mom if I could stay home from school for a while longer. I said I still wasn’t feeling that great. Though she looked concerned, she said, “Sure, honey, let’s let a little time pass, and then we’ll see what’s what.”
    Being home was like staying home sick, except with no TV. Because every time I turned the television on, we had to watch the towers burning. And neither Mom nor I could stand to see that.
    My mother didn’t go back to the office. There was no office for her to go to. She seemed to spend all her time filling out forms and talking to lawyers. Her mom and sisters kept urging her—and me—to join a support group so we could get together with the other 9/11 families. But we didn’t want to.It would have been hard to find the right group—the group made up of kids and parents whose moms or dads (or husbands or wives) had abandoned the family six months before that September.
    Later it occurred to me that, in any group we joined, there might have been people in our situation, or at least something like it. Why not? With so many people, so many different lives, things like that had to happen. But by the time that occurred to me, it was already too late. We’d gotten used to toughing it out, to going it alone.
    Every so often, I’d read the “Portraits of Grief,” those mini-obituaries of people killed on 9/11, in The New York Times . Mostly I looked for the ones in which you could tell that the person wasn’t all that popular or cool. This one had overcome what his survivors called “some problems”; that one had obviously been hard to work with, or difficult to live with. Most of the victims sounded as if they’d been lovable and saintly, but the screwed-up ones, the creepy ones—those were the storiesthat made me feel better. For about a minute.
    After the Times reporter assigned to Dad’s “Portrait of Grief” finally called us, the piece that appeared was the same old, same old about my saving my mom by being sick that day and how it would have