Giggle. “Dat puppy so cute, Mama,” she says, swivelling all the way around in her stroller to watch the raggedy white and gray mutt bounce away.  It is an absolutely gorgeous day.  We’re out for a walk to the grocery store to pick up a few things for the roast chicken dinner I’m planning to make tonight, along with a bottle or two of wine.  We’re both in jeans and t-shirts and sneakers, she with a purple leopard print hoodie and I with a red one that declares CAN ADA across the front.

I feel like a Canadian. I am an American citizen by birth and for the first twenty years of my life, I resided there.  But Canada is where I’ve become so defined: I am a wife, a mother, a writer. A failed student, a part-time worker, a terrible housekeeper.  A daughter, a sister, and with in-law suffixes on those as well.  The most powerful experience of my life happened in this very room, where I sweated and screamed and snarled, nude and all the stronger for it, to bring the baby in my womb into the world.  A world where danger and fear exist, yes, but hand-in-hand with love and beauty.  A world worth being a part of.

*

When I woke up this morning, I didn’t think about the day.  I knew it was coming, but exact dates are tenuous to me.  My world and my time are not defined and structured, even though they ought to be.  My cell phone alarm, bearing the eloquent title of wake the fuck up, went off at 7:33, and when I reached over to turn it off, the date popped up there.  Innocently.  7:33am, Sunday, September 11.  My heart clenched, fluttered for a moment.

And I fell back asleep.

I dreamed about my father.  The last time I saw him, the towers were still standing.

I’m not one of those who feels like 9/11 was just yesterday.  It happened so long ago that the memories are foggy; I was a completely different person in those days.  I was shattered and trying to pretend like I wasn’t.  I had been beaten down so far from the girl I should have been that, at eighteen years old, I bore not the self-pity of an angsty teen, but the world-weariness of a woman who was trying to convince herself that my failures and my poor decisions would not define me.

That morning in Michigan, his five year old nephew woke me up from where I laid sleeping on an air mattress on the floor, in need of a shower and some clothing.  I was naked under those blankets. I don’t remember what happened the night before, which means I probably don’t want to, but I remember those circumstances, and his excited, strangely raw voice: “An airplane hit a building!” he said. “It’s on fire!”

Within a few minutes we turned on the television to CNN.  It stayed there for the next several days.

When I took the shower I so desperately needed, I cried.  I cried for the victims, their families, the country.  I cried for myself and my family, because I wanted to be with them.  I did not want to be here.  The images of people hugging and sobbing and seeking comfort in one another’s arms impacted me greatly; so too did the desperate plastering of lost loved one’s pictures on walls and street posts.  I wish I could be there helping, I said to him at one point.  And his ghastly blue eyes flicked at me with the most dismissive of glances as he sneered, There’s nothing you could do to help anyone.

*

The tattoo parlour is perfectly clean and well-lit, gorgeous artworks sketched across the walls.  The glass counters are immaculately polished, and the various rings within them each clearly labelled where they rest within a display of pillowy white.  I’m here with a friend, Anna, to get our navels pierced.  We met online, and we’re not close enough to see each other often, so this mutual alteration of our bodies is how we’re going to commemorate our friendship.  We don’t know that it’s the first and last visit we’ll ever have with one another.

“I can’t take this,” the tattoo artist says, handing the broken ID back to me. “Your birthday’s not clear.”

“But it was good enough to get me on a plane,” I plead.  It’s been eight months since air travel was stained irrevocably by the events of that day, and we both know what I’m implying.  ”It’s gotta be good enough for me to get a piercing.”

He shakes his head.  It’s not.  We go to another parlour, where the gruff man says something that impacts my self-esteem to this very day: Your belly button is crooked.

A few months later, Anna and I stop talking.  She’s in denial that she’s in an abusive relationship and feels like I’m lecturing and not understanding her when I tell her that she needs to escape it, when she knows that I’m warning her.  She knows I’m in one, too.  We’ll get a place together, away from them, I tell her.  But she only says, I don’t want to be away from him.

*

In an almost eerie coincidence, we walk past the local fire station  at a rather specific time: Sept 11-11, 11:11am. The text is orange and blocky, soon enough fading away into reminders delivered with the kind tone of a parent: Going to college?  Check your dorm for a fire alarm.  Learn your school’s fire exits. In her stroller, my daughter gasps and points at the red and white trucks. “Mama!  Dat truck go naptime?”  One sits there, dormant, in the wide driveway; behind it, in the garage, are two more.  Yellow-green suits lashed with reflective orange hang from hooks on the walls.

“Yes, those trucks are taking naps,” I agree.

“Dose trucks so silly,” she informs me, and giggles to highlight her point.  It is the most beautiful sound, but it’s drowned out by the cars rushing past us as we pause there on the sidewalk.  ”Why dey take naptime?”

How can I explain to her?  ”Because no one is hurt right now,” is the only answer I can come up with.

“Ebbybody okay!” she cheers, in that sweet, tiny little voice. “Let’s go shopping!”

Is everybody okay?  Am I okay? I don’t know.

*

It’s been ten years.  I will never forget.