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Hilary made it known that she would be sticking to her routines--most important of all, school. She had taken just two days off and was eager to get back. "When I walked in, everyone spread out in two rows in the hallway, like I had food on my face or something," she says. During her brief hiatus, her classmates did nothing but talk about how they should act when she returned. A few offered clumsy condolences, likening her plight to that of a distant relative's dying. One friend said she knew exactly how Hilary felt because her parents were getting divorced. Someone thought the kids should start clearing out their piggy banks to raise money for victims' families; over the next five days, the class amassed 68,000 pennies.
But mostly everyone tiptoed around her. "No one really knew what to do," says her friend Joey Tardiff. "We just started acting overnice." The posturing made school excruciating. So Hilary employed her own bit of social artifice: she began acting like nothing whatever was wrong. She turned in every assignment on time with her usual fastidiousness. When kids spoke about their fathers, she interjected stories about hers (sometimes in the past tense, sometimes not). If it seemed appropriate, she affected just the right measure of grief. "Even if I was happy, I'd make myself feel just a little bit sad even if I didn't really want to," she says, "because it's how I think I was supposed to be." And no matter how empty she felt, she never ever lost it in public. Before long, teachers were marveling at how well she was coping.
Home was another matter. Hilary couldn't fall asleep in her own bed and started climbing into Ginny's. She was having bad dreams--a recurring nightmare from when she was very young about her house burning to the ground with the three of them trapped inside. Hilary had also taken to blaming herself for her dad's disappearance and was preoccupied with guilty thoughts. "I kept thinking that if the cat had gotten sick or I'd gotten sick that morning, he wouldn't have gone to work," says Hilary. She had seen students at her school have violent asthma attacks. If only her lungs had closed up on Sept. 11, she thought.
For her part, Ginny was going through the motions but nothing more. Friends and relatives, who had colonized the house, were propping her up like a marionette and pulling her through the paperwork mill. "I was numb, hollow," says Ginny upon several months' reflection. "I was just completely terrified, terrified of living the rest of my life without George--still am, but in the beginning I couldn't do a thing."
On Sept. 21, Patty Tardiff got a call from Ginny, who sounded more terrified than usual, almost as if she had seen a ghost. "I just got a dozen beautiful red roses for my 27th wedding anniversary," said a winded Ginny. Then there was a long pause. "They're from George." But it was clear from the loopy cursive who had really sent them, along with the following message:
Dear Ginny, I love you and I am always with you and Hilary. You are still strong and I love you a lot. We will always be GG&H. Geo