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friends of those who had perished.
    “I guess we’d better get going,” she said, breaking the silence draped over the room like a shroud.
    “Yeah,” he said, glad for the excuse to move. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to the event; he imagined he was not alone in wishing this day would be over.
    Everyone in New York—even those who had deplored the towers as architectural eyesores—took the attack personally. There was a feeling in the city that the terrorists had not bombed America—they had attacked New York. The devastation and its aftermath was felt keenly, personally, in a city that did not identify itself with the rest of America. New York was a place with its own rules, its own code of behavior, even its own way of ordering coffee. In many ways, New York City was as foreign from the rest of the country as Singapore or Bangkok. The rest of the country was attaching oversized American flags to their SUVs and gorging on Freedom Fries, but New Yorkers were still stunned, in a kind of emotional holding pattern.
    “What is it about anniversaries?” Kathy said. “It’s so odd. I’ve been feeling so sad all day. What’s this need we seem to have to commemorate things, even bad things?”
    “I guess it’s part of the healing process,” he said, grabbing a light jacket from the Victorian bentwood coatrack in the hall.
    “They’re going to recite the names of every victim tonight at the Ground Zero ceremony,” Kathy said as they walked down the two flights to the street.
    “I know,” he said. There were events and ceremonies all over the city, but they had chosen the Brahms Requiem; Lee couldn’t imagine better company than Brahms at a time like this.
    They emerged into the gathering twilight of Seventh Street and walked toward the Astor Place subway. The crowd at McSorley’s had already morphed from the afternoon collection of locals to the rowdier evening crowd of bridge-and-tunnel ruffians—or maybe the locals had decided to observe the anniversary by pouring even more copious amounts of McSorley’s Ale down their throats. Lee heard the sound of raucous singing coming from the back room, half a dozen drunken voices slamming together like bricks, attempting harmony in a heavily sloshed version of an old traditional Scottish tune.

    And we’ll all go together to pluck wild mountain thyme
    All around the crystal fountain
    Will you go, lassie, go?

    The familiar lyrics sung by such bravely wavering voices brought unexpected tears to his eyes. It was a song he remembered his father singing to his mother, before Duncan Campbell closed the door behind him the final time, leaving his family for good. Lee had long ago closed his heart to feeling anything toward his father except rage, so the surge of feeling was both surprising and unwelcome. He cleared his throat and wiped his face with his sleeve—but he couldn’t hide anything from Kathy.
    “You okay?” she said as they approached Third Avenue, the Cooper Union building looming in front of them in stolid nineteenth-century splendor. A redbrick fortress of art and architecture, its full-tuition scholarships to every single student were a testament to Peter Cooper’s proclamation that higher education should be “as free as air and water.”
    “I’m fine,” he said, tucking her arm into his as they crossed Third Avenue. But of course that wasn’t really true. In New York City tonight, no one was fine.

CHAPTER SIX
    The bed was so big and white, and his sister’s body was so small. Davey approached on tiptoe, afraid any sound he made would wake her, or make her sicker. The voice of his mother behind him urged him on. He could smell her rose petal perfume.
    “Go ahead, Davey. It’s all right. Go up to her—you won’t hurt her.”
    He wanted to turn and run from the room, but everyone was watching. The rest of the family had gathered in the bedroom, in chairs along the wall or standing around the heavy oak canopy bed. They were all in black,