September 11, 2001

September 11, 2001, joins a public catastrophe to an intimate, bewildering event in the Stone family: five-month-old Abra abruptly stops crying at the moment the second jet hits the World Trade Center. Her parents’ dreams, which appear to have anticipated details of the attacks, turn that coincidence into a question about whether their daughter was somehow communicating with them. The date therefore marks both the attacks and the first time David and Lucy begin to suspect the extraordinary reach of Abra’s mind.

The Attacks and Abra’s Sudden Calm

The family’s experience unfolds against the reported sequence of the attacks. John Dalton tells David Stone that a passenger jet has hit the World Trade Center and that no one believes it was an accident. The plane is identified as American Airlines Flight 11; seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 strikes the South Tower. At that same time, Abra, whose marathon crying has continued through the morning, suddenly falls silent. By 9:04 she is asleep.

The timing gives the episode its force without resolving what caused it. Abra’s crying does not merely taper off as the adults attend to the emergency: it stops at the precise minute attached to the second impact, and sleep follows almost immediately. The contrast is stark—news of unfolding disaster outside, an infant quiet in the midst of it—and the exact minute becomes the hinge on which her parents later organize their recollection.

On the drive back to Anniston, David and Lucy listen to the radio while Abra sleeps peacefully in her car seat. They continue listening through the unbearable reports; switching the radio off seems unthinkable until a newscaster lists the airlines and flight numbers of the aircraft, including two in New York, one near Washington, and one that has crashed in rural Pennsylvania. David then silences the broadcast. The details that make the disaster legible to the public also bring the broadcast close to the flight numbers from the couple’s private dreams.

The Dreams Behind the Coincidence

The Stone family’s later account begins with the crying and works backward to the dreams. David, a history teacher accustomed to arranging material so that its logic can be followed, identifies the sequence: Abra’s crying ends just after the second jetliner strikes, and before that, he and Lucy had dreamed of flight numbers associated with her. Lucy’s dream places Abra in an airplane bathroom; David’s places her in a burning mall. He regards the flight numbers as compelling, but cannot say what they establish. His uncertainty is part of the account: he is not claiming to understand the dreams, and admits that he may be afraid to know what they mean.

The dreams give the timing a private dimension, but they do not offer a simple forecast that the parents can confidently explain. Each dream supplies a different image, while the numbers seem to connect both parents to the attacks. David’s hesitation leaves the connection unsettled; the evidence that troubles him is also evidence he does not know how to interpret. The story thus presents their dawning suspicion through fragments—a remembered image, a flight number, an infant’s sudden silence—rather than through a complete explanation.

A Family Secret Takes Shape

John Dalton remembers the morning of the attacks and Abra’s nonstop crying. When David explains the dreams, Dalton restates the disturbing possibility: that the five-month-old somehow had a premonition of the attacks and communicated it telepathically to her parents. Concetta Reynolds affirms his summary. David, by contrast, stresses that he and Lucy kept the matter to themselves, apart from Concetta. Lucy had told her that night, continuing a close habit of confiding in her grandmother.

The family’s silence does not erase the episode; it preserves it as something they can revisit once the initial shock has passed. David’s account makes the date a turning point in what the adults think may be possible, even though none can yet define the ability or establish exactly what the dreams meant. The attacks are a public event that reaches the family through Dalton’s warning and the radio, while the possible premonition remains a private story known only to the couple and Concetta.

Retrospective Meaning

By the time David and Lucy cross back into New Hampshire, David has begun to think there may be something to the idea of caul-born second sight. The qualification matters: he has begun to believe, not arrived at certainty. The chronology has altered his sense of what the dreams and Abra’s crying might signify, but it has not supplied an explanation that would dispel his fear of knowing.

In the novel’s account, September 11, 2001, consequently serves as more than a date attached to a national tragedy. It is the point at which a pattern becomes difficult for Abra’s parents to dismiss: the two dreams, their flight numbers, the precisely timed end of the crying, and the subsequent sleep. David’s later reconstruction turns those separate moments into a story while preserving the uncertainty at its center. The attacks are unmistakable; what Abra perceived, and how she might have conveyed it, remain the questions that make the day a beginning in the family’s understanding of her.