Dawn smiled as I set out on my morning run. No hurricane lurked offshore and the humidity that had blanketed the Cape Fear coast for most of 2001’s torrid summer had lifted. My father seemed to be tossing strikes in his fight against cancer. My wife Linda seemed recovered from the death of her father. Our son Joseph had agreed to at least try to tolerate his first-grade teacher and instant nemesis, Mr. Jim. Joseph’s twin, Gwendolyn, continued to defy dire expectations of girls afflicted with Rett syndrome. I looked forward to an evening of watching our eldest, Patrick, pitch in a fall Little League game. Patrick was born the day Jack Morris threw ten shutout innings in Game 7 and his first word was “ball.”

Clear skies, songbirds, the fragrance of pine, and the thought of Patrick pitching had me breathing easy. Tuesday, September 11, 2001, would be a fine day, even for a New Hanover County psychologist trying to prevent wounded kids from imprisoning themselves in cycles of violence and prematurely ending their childhoods.

On the way to my office at the county’s 4th Street building, I stopped outside the glass-walled first-floor conference room. The room was typically empty, but today the entire staff gathered in front of the TV VCR combo unit watching a live feed of a smoking New York City skyscraper.

A blink later, a plane smashed into tower two. When tower one crumbled, sparse chatter ceased. Silent grief spiraled with the smoke from the unceremonious premature departures of thousands of fellow travelers.

“Ten-thirteens all over the place,” John, a retired New York police officer whispered. It was the code for ‘officer down.’ John signed out, headed west on I-40, then north on I-95 and didn’t stop until getting to Ground Zero.

A newsman announced that another plane crashed into the Pentagon.

“I’m packing my ruck,” Don, a court counselor and army reservist from Wyoming drawled. “I’m going somewhere tomorrow.” Heads turned as if to ask, Where? Don rolled his shoulders back, cracked a thick neck. “Be weak not to do something to somebody.”

No one disagreed. Even those who doubted the wisdom of blind vengeance and would have preferred to take a breath before dropping bombs held our tongues. To do otherwise would have been heresy.

I disengaged from images that would be rerun hundreds of times before dinner and burned into our collective psyche by dusk. As I entered my office, I grieved for prematurely ended childhoods and I wondered many of the same things as my co-workers. Who would we attack first? How much would these attacks change who we believed ourselves to be?

I tried to imagine what my wife, Linda, and her mother must be feeling. Linda’s mother grew up in Stuyvesant Town. Linda started school at PS 61 on the Lower East Side. Linda’s father worked as an attorney with the New York/New Jersey Port Authority. He had worked on the seventy-third floor of tower one and retired just before the 1993 bombing.

I crumpled at my desk, reached for the phone to call Linda. The phone rang before I could pick it up to dial.

“Doctor Basquill, please,” the weak voice coughed.

“How you doin’, Dad?”

“Not even a call on my birthday?”

“You guys ever answer the phone?” I gritted. “The kids and I left a message before the Phils game on Sunday.”

“Your mom’s driving me crazy with this cancer,” my father said.

He explained that his grueling summer course of chemo and radiation therapy for esophageal cancer had ended, that his feeding tube remained in, and that he still wasn’t feeling himself.

“But that woman won’t get off my case about eating,” he said. “I should have come down there when Linda offered.”

“The offer stands.”

“How can I leave this house?”

“Walk out the front door. Don’t wait ‘til they carry you out. I call it the Mausoleum, but our house isn’t Grandpop Galen’s Funeral Home anymore. You can walk out, Dad.”

“What would I do without your mother?” His voice trailed off. “She won’t last a week without me. She said so.”

“So that’s the real reason for the call. You told her you decided to come down here for radiation and she threatened to kill herself if you did.”

“She talks and talks. She would never really do something like that.”

My breath held itself.

When I spoke with my parents, I became as unstuck in time as any Billy Pilgrim. In my mind’s eye, ten-year-old me stood on the pitcher’s mound at Capitolo Playground, watching my grandmother march onto the field in her black dress, black sunglasses, white pancake-powdered face lit by the setting sun. She screamed that my father and his damn baseball drove my mother to kill herself. I felt my father pull me from the field, throw my younger brothers and I in the station wagon, and curse us all the way home. I saw myself scrape the dirt off my baseball shoes on the wrought iron bootscrapers in front of the Mausoleum. I heard the bells toll the hour as the early summer sun sank below St. Monica’s steeple. My brothers and I witnessed the ambulance drivers nearly drop my mother’s stretcher down the Mausoleum’s red sandstone steps. My mother’s bandaged wrists oozed crimson, and she screamed, “Let me die, goddamn it! You and your goddamn kids can all go to hell.”

I silently read the first lines of Whitman’s “Me Imperturbe” from the plaque on my desk, “Standing at ease in Nature, Master of all, or mistress of all—aplomb in the midst of irrational things.”

I stared at the North Carolina psychology license on my office wall, read the name aloud. My name. I reflected on the effort and luck that put the psychology degrees and license there.

“Dad,” I said, pausing long enough for him to acknowledge a history I thought we shared.

“That was a long time ago,” my father said. “When was the last time?”

The “last time” was my family’s coded way of talking about my mother’s suicide attempts and was easy for me to figure out.

The last time we visited my parents, my mother tried to teach Gwendolyn to walk down steps. She insisted her granddaughter did not have Rett Syndrome and was not developmentally delayed. Gwendolyn would walk and talk when her parents realized she was “perfectly normal.” When Gwendolyn refused to be “perfectly normal,” my mother drank vodka from her coffee mug and overdosed on her nerve pills. My father opened another Bud Light, turned up the Phils-Mets game, and refused to call 911 himself. That was the “last time” my mother made a serious suicide attempt as far as I knew, and the last time I spoke with either of my parents until my father was diagnosed with cancer.

“You’ve spent too much of your life with people who are really crazy,” my father said.

“And so little time with actual patients,” I snapped, glancing again at my license. “You have CNN on?”

“Same shit different day.”

“Not today.”

“This cancer’s really got me. If I had to fight a bum on the corner, I’d know what to do,” my father wheezed. “Here’s your mother.”

My father abdicated the rest of the conversation to his wife, as he had abdicated most difficult conversations to someone else. My mother started in about my father’s lack of progress, lack of initiative, his lack of everything. “I don’t know why he’s depressed,” she paused.

“Mom,” I began without hope of finishing.

“He won’t even eat. I order pizza, he won’t eat. Hoagies? He won’t eat. Even calzone from Criniti’s? He won’t eat. When I had breast cancer, I ate!”

“Calzone may not cure esophageal cancer.”

“You’re not a real doctor. You can’t prescribe pills!”

“Mom. You should call Kevin. It’s really bad in New York and DC.”

I could hear the flick of my mother’s Bic as she lit a cigarette—a perfectly normal thing for a breast cancer survivor caring for an esophageal cancer patient to do in a dank South Philadelphia row house that started its life as a funeral parlor.

“What’s that got to do with your father’s cancer?” she asked.

“Mom! The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. This morning. Call Kevin. Your son. My brother. He has accounts in DC. He won’t answer if I call.”

“Why not?”

I took the receiver from my ear, shook my head, and struggled for words.

“Because of that priest?” my mother exhaled, and I imagined a putrid brownish cloud of smoke drifting slowly across the dining room. I saw “that priest,” the parish priest that took a special interest in prematurely ending the childhoods of St. Monica’s altar boys like my brother and I; the portly, sallow-skinned, greasy-haired, whiskey-breathed soldier of Christ that tossed a hand grenade into our family and helped suck the air out of the Mausoleum.

“What’s done is done!” my mother spat. “May that priest rot in hell. What’s done is done!”

Click.

I read the final lines of Whitman’s poem. “O to be self-balanced for contingencies! O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.”

After the call I imagined my mother, wrists bandaged and bloody, costumed like Lady Macbeth, descending the narrow staircase of the Mausoleum, dripping knife in one hand, smoldering cigarette in the other, screaming, “What’s done is done!”

Just before noon, I left the office for an afternoon meeting at our Brunswick County satellite office in Bolivia, North Carolina. The blue Saturn crossed a placid Cape Fear River. The sky was devoid of white streamers trailing planes traveling up and down the eastern seaboard. Even Cherry Point’s military training flights and Black Hawk helicopters were on the ground. Quiet and empty, the Carolina blue canopy felt ready to rain menace.

On the way back from an abbreviated inconsequential meeting, I turned left onto a gravel path to the Wat Carolina, a Buddhist monastery built on what I think of as the buckle of the Bible Belt. The temple leader, Brother Wa Pung-Na, grew up in Vietnam under the rolling thunder of American bombers. I occasionally visited the temple to learn to meditate and to ask naïve questions like how to get from samsara to nirvana, as if they were small towns near Chapel Hill. After one interrogation, Wa Pung-Na directed me to sit on a bench where the path branched, and held a finger up to his lips, “So many words. So much dispersion.”

I recalled the monk’s guidance from that day as I sat on the wooden bench listening to the burble of a small creek, waiting for the waves of words to settle. My closed eyes saw images of the ambulance in front of the Mausoleum, “that priest,” the Twin Towers crumbling, and grown-up Patrick and Joseph dead-eyed, camouflaged, heavily armed, ready to drop off helicopters into a desert or jungle somewhere, ready to pay back somebody for something. To do otherwise would be weak.

In the garden near the temple construction, Brother Wa-Pung Na bowed greeting.

“I am out of balance,” I bowed my head slightly.

Brother Wa-Pung Na closed his eyes, inhaled as he raised his chin skyward to the clear Carolina blue, then exhaled and let the sun bathe his face. The gentle rustle of the breeze through the pines brushed my cheeks. Brother Wa-Pung Na lowered his chin, opened his eyes, half-smiled, and returned to cultivating the temple’s garden.

Patrick and Joseph played catch on the lawn when I pulled into the driveway. Patrick was dressed for the six o’clock game. Inside, the house was silent except for Gwendolyn cooing in her room. Linda lay curled in bed in a fetal position.

“Linda,” I shook her. “Are you doing ok with everything?”

Linda barely moved.

“Did Coach Mike or anyone from the league call to cancel?”

“What?” Linda threw the blanket off and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Fall League opening night. Coach Mike told Patrick he was starting pitcher.”

“Are you serious?” Linda stood toe-to-toe with me. “My mother has been watching the Towers fall all day! ‘Never trust the Germans,’ she says. She’s sure ‘that damn Hitler’ is behind it! And ‘Poor Jack’ she says. ‘Your father’s not home yet. I’m worried about him.’ She thinks my father went to work this morning. My father has been dead for over a year!” Tears welled in Linda’s soft brown eyes. “I used to visit my father’s office on the seventy-third floor when I was a little girl. This is such a violation!”

Linda slumped on the edge of the bed. I sat beside her until the tears slowed to a trickle and then headed out to check on the boys.

On the front lawn, Patrick went into his wind-up, held his breath, then let a fastball fly. The ball flew over Joseph’s head, hitting the trunk of the neighbor’s pear tree before rolling out onto Barnard’s Landing Road. I grabbed the keys to the Saturn and went back into our bedroom.

“I’m goin,” I said, noticing the keys jangling in my trembling left hand.

Linda’s eyes welled and her gaze softened. After what seemed like an hour, her shoulders relaxed, and she sighed a resigned sigh that could not possibly release the anguish of the day. “Stop at Burger King on the way home. And get me a sub from that Italian place.”

“Jesus! Two places?”

Linda stared silent, resolute.

“Fine, we’ll split a large Italian,” I said. “Even my father can’t eat a whole one.”

I packed an excited Patrick and Joseph in the Saturn, confident Linda would not slash her wrists regardless of whether fate permitted Patrick to pitch.

Enough players and parents showed up for the kids to take the field. I stood behind the cyclone fence with Joseph. Coach Mike stood on the mound next to Patrick offering final instructions. Coach Mike exaggerated a big in-breath and bigger out-breath before he jogged back to the dugout.

“Play ball!” shouted the umpire.

Patrick stood on the mound, in a spotless uniform, rubbed the clean new white ball, and toed the rubber. The sinking sun’s rays filtered through the magnolia and longleaf pines, lighting the anticipation of every ten-year-old on the field. Patrick gulped air and pushed it out hard.

“Stee-rike one!” the umpire sang.

I placed my hand on Joseph’s shoulder and exhaled a breath that felt like it had been held for decades. Patrick caught the return throw from the catcher and repeated the ritual. Joseph noticed my tears before I did. Perhaps a quote often attributed to Whitman made a valid point: “Baseball is the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.”

Magnolia, pine, and earthy aromas of hope arose around children playing on the diamond. The day’s public and private tragedies had failed to suck all the air out of this magnificent twilight. I squeezed Joseph’s hand, exhaled into the slowly setting sun. Whatever the uncertain future would bring, tonight there were children untouched by spirals of smoke and grief, playing baseball, dreaming of hitting home runs, or striking out the side in Game 7.

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