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The laid-back leg of the threesome, Ginny quit her job as a high school English teacher after Hilary was born, and now works two days a week at the Avon public library. She is the one who races around to the parade of after-school lessons and practices. George had a grueling commute--two hours each way, leaving on the 5:35 a.m. train--but on evenings and weekends he was all Hilary's, supervising homework assignments, shooting hoops. You can see the closeness of the father-daughter bond in the photographs around Hilary's room. Hilary and George skiing, kayaking, golfing and eating chocolate cake. In one image, yellowing a bit from age, she is a preschooler, sitting in a red-and-green plaid dress at her father's desk at the World Trade Center. It was taken on one of her favorite days of the year, Dec. 23, when she was his official date to the annual Aon Christmas party and got to commute with him on the train.
In Hilary's world, no one had ever been seriously ill, let alone died. Indeed, it was such a blue-sky existence that George and Ginny had begun to worry about how their daughter would react when she finally faced a loss. In the spring of 2001, they started gingerly preparing her for what they thought would be the first death in the family: their 17-year-old, half-deaf cat Clancy.
What is everyone looking at?" Hilary asked Maureen Farrington on the morning of Sept. 12. Friends and relatives had descended on her house, and Farrington volunteered to distract Hilary with a day at the beach. Farrington, a peppy, blond social worker, assured Hilary that people were probably gawking, as they very often did, at her adopted Korean daughter Elizabeth, 2. But Hilary wasn't buying it; she kept wondering aloud why anyone might have reason to watch her. The rest of the time, she blithely skipped about the beach and collected shells with Elizabeth.
On one level, Hilary understood what had happened--the crumbling-towers sequence was seared in her memory--but she chose instead to believe her father's last words: I'm fine. He of all people must have known how to find the emergency exits. A safety engineer by training and an executive in risk management at Aon, George was almost comically consumed with accident prevention. He evangelized about helmets and seat belts; he even had a decibel meter that he used to measure loud music lest anyone perforate an eardrum. Hilary's dad was just a little late getting home. Maybe he was buried in the rubble, suffering from amnesia, or his cell phone was broken. Sometimes even engineers had mechanical failures.
Later that week, Ginny suggested that they donate some of George's undershirts and Argyle socks to the rescue workers. "What about when he comes home?" asked Hilary, who had said almost nothing to her mother since the towers had fallen. Ginny, who had nearly shut down from the shock, followed Hilary's lead: "Then obviously we'll buy him some more."