I turn once again to the old woman in the cream-colored bathrobe, planning her next breath. Where is that hard-won strength now?
        “Mom, do you know what day today is?”
        Her eyes swing toward me; her brow furrows. She shakes her head.
        “September eleventh.”
        Her face is blank.
        “Do you remember what's significant about that date?”
        Mother's eyes shift to the TV screen. She raises her hand and scratches what's left of her hair beneath the blue bandana. There is no room left in her universe for dates.
        The day the towers came down, Sheyene and I went for a long run from our duplex on Wildcat Ridge just a few miles from Meadowlark Hills. We'd been married a little over a year, and were in the middle of the reconstruction of the Heller family. Each weekday after school, I picked up Daniel and Rachael from their mother's house across town, and we cooked dinner, did homework, and hung out. David and Michael came over whenever they felt like it, which was increasingly often. In a few months, Michael would move in with us for the first time. Before Sheyene and I went on our run, I had made a note to call Mother. By the time we returned, it had already happened.
        “It's your anniversary, Mom. You and Dad were married 63 years ago today.”
        She turns back to me. The hazelnut eyes, already rounder than the pictures of her when she was Sheyene's age, grow rounder still.
        “Really?”
        As I smile and nod, I can't help but wonder which faded away first: the 49 anniversaries she celebrated with my father before he died, or the reminders of death and destruction she has seen on TV on this same date for the last seven?
        I inch my chair closer and squeeze her left hand draped over the end of the armrest of her high-backed recliner. “You remember Dad, don't you?”
        Her chest expands too quickly, and she chops the air trapped in her chest with a series of coughs. I lay my hand on the back of her shoulder until her breath has returned and she looks back up at me.
        “Yes.”
        Now it's my turn to find my breath.

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