My iPhone urges me to mark myself safe after the Squirrel Hill synagogue shooting, but I won't do it.I was never in any real danger anyway. Not near the synagogue. Not a member of any of the congregations that worship there. Not even Jewish. Just a Squirrel Hill resident on my way to a home improvement store to buy a few rolls of insulation on a gray Saturday just before 10 a.m.It's almost noon now. The phone has been vibrating at regular intervals ever since I got home. Presenting me with the Facebook Crisis Response app. Insisting. Mark yourself safe in the Squirrel Hill Synagogue shooting. I can't bring myself to touch the blue button. It seems too—too what? Too flip? Too presumptuous because I wasn't actually there? I stare at the place where the blue circle pulses. Just barely pulses.On the phone's screen I see a list of neighbors who've used the app. Beth down the street. Elaine up on Darlington. Even friends from farther outside the city area are marking themselves safe. Text messages start coming in. First from a college friend in Florida: “Hey saw the news. Are you okay?” Then an old friend from Colorado. I open Facebook on my phone and type: “Safe here in Squirrel Hill—thanks for checking.” I refuse to name what has happened. My brain clings to what feels like the logical inverse of a Virginia Woolf axiom: “Nothing has really happened until it has been described.” So if I don't describe it, can that mean it hasn't really happened?The shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue had ended before I even knew it had begun.I had been driving home with 48 linear feet of pink fiberglass insulation and a three-pack of N-95 face masks when my phone rang through the RAV4’s speakers. I could see my daughter's phone number come up on the screen, and I answered with the steering wheel button.“Mom?” Her voice held something different. “Where are you?”“Just turned onto our street. I was at Lowes—”“There's been a shooting,” Aysha interrupted. “At Tree of Life.”“They said eight people are dead.” Her words spill out with the sparse news she has read online. I turn into the driveway and put the car in park just outside the garage. Because sometimes when I pull into the garage my cell drops the call. I leave the engine running and sit there, my phone resting on the steering wheel, tracing through the newsfeed on the small screen, Aysha still on speaker.Initial reports said four people killed. Then eight people. Then four again.That morning while I was waiting at a traffic light on Murray Avenue, I had seen a drab green Hummer, no identifying markings on its doors, blow through the intersection, heading up the hill, the siren bar on its rooftop flashing a mute red-and-blue all the more ominous for its silence. Minutes later, crossing the High Level Bridge to the shopping center on the other side of the Monongahela River, two cars marked “Homeland Security” had screamed past with full sirens—heading back towards Squirrel Hill. I had wondered what was happening—asking myself abstractly where the cars were coming from since I'd never seen a “Homeland Security” base in my neighborhood—but I was focused on picking up the insulation, getting home, getting it put up in the basement. October had turned cold suddenly and bitterly that week, an incessant slow drizzle dampening Thursday and Friday and loosening leaves from trees up and down the street, leaving the sidewalk lines blurry.My fractured sentences about the morning errand flood the phone each time my daughter pauses to take a breath.Tree of Life synagogue is a huge square cement and stone structure, with Hebrew letters across the top on one side and, on the other side, tall modern windows with cut glass shapes that look like tangled tree branches streaming in the wind. I have never been inside the temple, but as Aysha talks, I picture Tree of Life there on the busy corner of Shady Avenue and Wilkins, about a mile away from my home. Throughout middle school and high school my daughter often had joined her best friend for Saturday morning services at Tree of Life.An image of the pull-through drop-off space on Wilkins Avenue in front of the synagogue forms when I close my eyes, and suddenly I see both Aysha and Daniel as middle-schoolers—an awkward dress, a boxy blazer—climbing out of the dark green mini-van we had back then, excited and sometimes nervous, heading to a friend's bat mitzvah, a classmate's bar mitzvah. Suddenly my son's face is looking back through the car window on the passenger side as I drop him off for the kiddish luncheon, and he is reaching back through the car window as I hold out the gift he's almost forgotten—a book wrapped in shiny blue paper.“I'm pretty sure her family started going to a different synagogue a few years ago.”Aysha's voice pulls me back to October 2018, and I realize that my heart is pounding. She is calling from Chicago, where she has stayed on after graduating from college last June, working as a waitress and job searching. She repeats that she has texted but not yet heard back from her best friend from high school, who should be away at college. But what about her parents in Pittsburgh? Her little sister?“I don't think they go there anymore,” Aysha says it again, and her voice contains a kind of clutching, and in it I can hear my own voice 17 years ago. “Sometimes Cathy has meetings with clients in Connecticut and she doesn't even go into her office in the South Tower.”Aysha's father has been waiting on the porch to help me install the insulation, and he comes around to the driveway when he sees the car. I lower the passenger side window, and he leans in to finish the speakerphone conversation with our daughter.“I'll call you later,” I tell her as I pull the car into the garage. Her father and I unload the packages of insulation as we re-hash the few details we know about the shooting. When we sit down at the worn oak table in the kitchen, the blue button appears on my phone for the first time. Mark yourself safe in the Squirrel Hill Synagogue shooting. The crisis response app is advising people in Squirrel Hill to “shelter in place.” The phrase sounds so military and somehow menacing, and I wonder when “shelter in place” became some kind of common lingo on social media. The meaning is intuitive, but I look it up on my phone anyway, partly to find words for what nags at me and partly to avoid the pulsing blue button. “Finding a safe location indoors and staying there until you are given an ‘all clear’ or told to evacuate.”Not knowing what else to do, we put up the insulation: me on the step ladder, pushing the pre-cut four-foot sections of R-30 insulation into the bays between the joists of the basement ceiling as my former husband hands them up to me. I have tied an old olive-green bandana over my short hair and have fastened one of the white face masks over my nose and mouth. He wears a mask too. I secure the insulation by stapling the flaps to the joists with the staple gun I still have from my dad's house. Each time I push the staple gun against the craggy wood and squeeze the metal handle the jolt ricochets up through my tight shoulders.After we finish with the insulation, we sit at the kitchen table again, silently scrolling through our phones for updates, since I no longer have cable TV or even local channels. When the shelter in place order is lifted, I drive him back to his apartment on Forward Avenue. Nobody ever really says “all clear.”I know the names of the people murdered this morning will each be a punch in the gut, and back at my house I spend the remainder of the afternoon bracing for the blows. I know I will recognize some of them. Squirrel Hill is that kind of community. Every hour I look for a list on my phone's newsfeed. I follow links to “breaking” updates. The final death toll is eleven. But no names. I begin to recognize the pattern: Shabbat services were starting at 9:45 a.m. at the synagogue, described alternately as “conservative,” “traditional,” “progressive” and “egalitarian.” The synagogue houses three congregations. Tree of Life and New Light had begun their separate Shabbat services in the Pervin Chapel, and the third group, Dor Hadash, was beginning Torah study near the front door. The first gunshots came at 9:50. At 9:54 the first calls went out to 911 about an “active shooter,” and at 9:59 a.m. first responders arrived at the synagogue. “Breaking” reports repeat these few facts, over and over. Occasionally sprinkling in a new historical detail, such as the Tree of Life congregation was founded more than 150 years ago in downtown Pittsburgh but moved to the current temple in 1953. But mostly droning the same meager details. Dropping like a 45-record onto an old turntable where the needle sticks to stutter the same few lyrics and notes, broken down from their syntax and violently disjointed.At 8:46 a.m. American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the north side of the North Tower of World Trade Center, between floors 93 and 99. At 9:02 a.m. United Airlines Flight 195 ploughs into south side of the South Tower. At 9:37 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 smashes into the western side of the Pentagon. At 9:59 a.m. the South Tower collapses into itself and digs a hole into the entire world. At 10:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93 plunges to the ground 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh in Somerset County. The North Tower falls at 10:28 a.m.A sunny blue Tuesday back then. Today a cold gray Saturday. That 767 jet tracing its curled arc into the South Tower, captured on video for eternal curtain calls on the evening news each year, and now the regularly looping footage of police in military gear pounding down Shady Avenue, a silhouette of Tree of Life shadowed in the background.I had been bounding down the stairs into my living room, still toweling dry my short hair, on September 11, 2001, when my next-door neighbor called. I was preparing for my first day as a parent volunteer at my daughter's kindergarten. I wrapped the towel around my head as I walked to the wall phone in the kitchen, a chunky, cordless purple V-tech.“A plane hit the World Trade Center.” Maribel's voice was shrill. She didn't even say hello. She repeated the statement two more times before comprehension hit me in a flush of heat to the face. No one said “first plane” in that moment, because the world did not yet contain the knowledge and experience that there would be a second plane. Or a third. And a fourth.“My sister works in the World Trade Center,” was all that I managed in return—completely unnecessarily, because that was why Maribel was calling. By then my heart was beginning to pound. I slammed down the phone onto the counter.I grab the phone again and push the numbers for Cathy's apartment in Brooklyn. I hear her voice and exhale. But Cathy's phone message is long: “Hello, you've reached 212-867-4319. We can't take your call right now, but if you leave your name and telephone number, and a brief message after the beep, we will get back to you as soon as we can. Please wait for all the beeps before beginning your message. Thanks for calling. Remember to wait for all the beeps.” Cathy had added that bossy final part to her voicemail message because her answering machine sounded a long series of beeps before it began recording, and she kept getting frustrating phone messages from callers who started talking right after the first beep. The first part of their message wasn't recorded. All she could hear on the recording was a final fragment like “62987, please call me back when you get a chance,” which drove her nuts. So, she added that last part. Some people still didn't wait though.I know to wait for all the beeps, and then the words pour out, saturating the line.“Cathy it's me. I just heard about the plane. Call me as soon as you get this. Love you.” I push the off button and stare at the phone in my hand. Starting to shake, I push the “on” button to get a fresh dial tone. I am looking closely at the small van Gogh phone book that I have fished out of my black purse on the kitchen counter—I don't know Cathy's work number at Aon by heart. As I listen to the singsong numbers of the digital dialing, I become aware again of my pounding heart. And then it is there—the briefest connection of a ringing phone. And then it isn't. Instead, a screaming electronic screech wails through the line and jumps straight down my throat. I jam the off button with my thumb and with a jerk of my hand I drop the phone onto the kitchen counter like it's on fire.My cell phone vibrates again still nagging with the pulsing blue button. I picture front doors. On brick porches like mine. The families of the people killed at the synagogue this morning are opening front doors to kind strangers who bring them bombshells. Time will stop for them and that moment will pull itself into a tight knot, a black hole where all the befores from life up to that moment, and all the afters yet to come, will intersect into a tiny packed perplexity, absent of air. Years later they might remember the rough contours of the red bricks that suddenly became blurry on the porch. Or maybe they will remember the exact curve of their own hands as they stared down at their fingers, trying to focus.I push away the picture of the porch as the weak afternoon light of October 27, 2018, begins to fade, and I pull left-over Thai food from the fridge, scrape it into a Pyrex and put it in the microwave. I see a text message from my daughter, saying that she has heard back from her friend, who says her parents and her sister are all safe. Yes, they had joined a different synagogue a couple years ago. She telephones right after the text message comes through, and her voice breaks a little. She has no information about the identities of the shooting victims but names a number of Pittsburgh friends and families she has heard from who are all safe. As I eat the pumpkin curry and tofu pad Thai, the blue button nudges me again, telling me that 37 friends are marked safe, another 48 in the area have not responded. The Facebook crisis response app includes a map showing their locations.I move to my laptop to Google it.Announced in fall 2017, Facebook crisis response center is a new Facebook Center, “where people can find more information about recent crises and access our crisis response tools—including Facebook Safety Check, Community Help and Fundraisers to support crisis recovery—all in one place.” The app includes “links to articles, videos and photos posted publicly by the FB community to help people be more informed about a crisis.” The app was developed based on “what we've learned from our community,” according to someone from Facebook on a webpage, because people use Facebook to let their friends and family know they are safe, and to learn and share more about what is happening. The web page says that “Safety Check is featured at the top of each crisis page if you are in the affected area.”A Wikipedia entry describes how the Facebook app, originally named the Disaster Message Board, “was inspired by people's use of social media to connect with friends and family after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. It was renamed to Safety Check before its release in 2014 and was first used in 2015 during the Nepal earthquake, then later for the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015.” By 2016 Facebook had expanded to a new system that “would be activated based on a combination of a certain number of people posting about a particular crisis plus an alert from one of Facebook's third-party sources. Users would also be able to share and spread the word about the Safety Check once it was activated. Since then the app has been used around the world in crisis situations.“It is a way to let people know you are okay in an emergency.” But only certain kinds of emergencies, I find myself arguing back to the webpage. Events somehow socially sanctioned with the name “disaster.” Who gets to mark themselves safe and under what acceptably tragic situations? And what if—I stop myself and I am picturing strands of lights on a Christmas tree. All those colors, different sizes, some blinking on and off. In the 1970s our dad put one long strand of Charlie Brown lights up around the front porch and then together we all put something like 25,000 lights, all colors, all sizes and shapes, onto the gigantic tree that we had watched our father cut and tie onto the station wagon with his cousin Bill Mundy at Mundy's Christmas tree farm out past Salineville. If you sneak back downstairs like Cathy and I did, after everyone else is in bed, and if you lie on the floor next to the Christmas tree with all the other lights in the room turned off and stare into the lights long enough, you can lose track of where each light begins and where it ends.Facebook did not exist in September 2001. No texting, no twitter. The night of 9/11 even phone service was still spotty. But an internet list sprang up. A list of people whose sole message was their name. Marjorie Jenkins—safe and at home. Alonzo Martinez—ok at home. Franklin Smithfield—I'm ok at a friend's house for the night. That was how you marked yourself safe. I can't even remember what the website was called or how I found it. I still had dial-up service from Earthlink back then, and I just remember checking the list over and over again all night. Each time, I would touch the dial button and the modem would whine into action, followed by the metallic beem beem beem, that crackle sound and then the static-like snow noise that means connection.Each time that I dial in, I go straight to that page. People are self-alphabetizing by last name. Sure, not everyone respects the weight of the tragedy that has just unfolded, and some jerks write things like “suck my dick” instead of a name. But I just scroll on, plowing past A through G, then H through P, slowing down and scrolling more deliberately when I get to the Rs, prolonging the moment, the possibility. I know from my most recent search that if Cathy is on the list, she will be right between Salamanca and Saunders. As new names are added to the list over the course of the night, I revise her spot on the list: now she would be after Salpern, still right before Saunders.Uncertain sunlight is creeping along the back window as I finish another futile sweep of the list. This time I maneuver with the computer's mouse to put the cursor into the text entry box and position my fingers properly over the keys. I type C-a-t-h-y-space-S-a-l-t-e-r and let the letters sit there. Each one a tiny bulb of light that makes sense strung together. The cursor beating steadily. Then I re-position the cursor and start over. C-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e-space-S-a-l-t-e-r. I stare at the cursor blinking just past the final r, my right pinky finger hovering over the “return” key. She is there, right there. On the list. If I just push that key. If nothing exists until it is described, could describing something make it exist?The names of the people killed at the synagogue are released the next morning and their ordinary specificity knocks the air out of me despite all attempts to brace myself. First the ages: most are over 60 and how does a woman survive to age 97 only to be shot dead at weekend worship? Then the relationships: a married couple at service together, two brothers, who live in the apartment building of the research manager at my job. Finally the particulars: a physician who is a friend's PCP and used to be one of the preceptors training family medicine residents at Shadyside Hospital where I work. And one man, an 88-year-old who lives, lived, in the same apartment building as my kids’ father—I'd seen him just a few weeks ago sitting in the building lobby with a neat pile of papers stacked on a table in front of him, registering voters for the upcoming election.Among the wounded: an attorney who lives up the street in a rowhouse that sits behind a wildflower garden filled with feathery yellow coreopsis.I spend Sunday morning hiding; I can't leave the house. I know what is out there. The palpable love that oozes through communities when they grieve collectively, the delicate realization of how fragile life really is, the precious ache of life itself. I am not ready to bump into those again like I did when I visited New York for the Aon memorial service in St. Patrick's Cathedral after 9/11. And in Brooklyn, walking around Cathy's neighborhood—the way people moved more gently through the space around them—and taking the train into Manhattan to recreate my sister's route to work that last morning. An older man in a long dress coat and a Yankees baseball cap who said he could see I was sad but didn't ask why. Instead he said, You're visiting, right? and when I said yes I was from Pittsburgh, he said This next stop is 34th Street. You should go up to Macy's and look at the nice things. To cheer yourself up. Get yourself something pretty. Any other time I might have been appalled at the vacuous materialism that his reassurance implied. But I could see he was searching for something gentle to say—and he reminded me briefly of our dad—like an awkward and inadequate pat on the hand that falls so short but still matters.At one p.m. on Sunday I erase the to-do list on my phone, except for a trip to Sears on Butler Street to pick up filters—a fridge filter for myself and furnace filters for my neighbors. As I back the car out of the garage, the radio is playing a recording of a 1980 American Top 40, and Neil Diamond's “Love on the Rocks” is just ending. The song is one of those “extras” that Casey Kasem used to add. His voice is unmistakable as he moves on with the countdown, “falling to number two after three weeks at number one.” The opening beats of Queen's “Another One Bites the Dust,” pulse out, and I hit the seek button on the steering wheel. A sports announcer's voice is talking Steelers football, saying, “I don't mean this as a criticism or a negative statement about Ben.” When I push the search button again, a woman is talking about the Boston Red Sox being the only team to come back in a World Series Game after being down in the eleventh inning. Besides being the occasion of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in the United States, Oct 27, 2018, was the date of the longest World Series baseball game, when the Red Sox beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in five games.“This game is a record because it lasted eighteen innings,” a man's voice is saying. “We got there but it took us seven hours.” I switch back to the first station hoping to hear the number one song from 1980, expecting for some reason to be disappointed. Sure enough it is Barbra Streisand's “Woman in Love.” Cathy and I both hated that song.“The buildings here look like dribbly sand castles—like we used to make at the beach.” Back home I put my packages on the kitchen table and read the WhatsApp text message in confusion. It is from my son, who is a junior in college, studying in Spain this semester. I stare at the message, not understanding, until I see the previous text messages with photos of La Sagrada Familia and the Nativity Façade—a religious castle in Barcelona. So many soaring towers. The crevices and the curving of the stonework. I check the time and push the telephone icon on WhatsApp and although it's nearly ten p.m. there, he picks up right away. He tells me about taking the train to Barcelona for the weekend for “El Clásico,” a famous annual soccer match between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. On his way back to Malaga, where he is living for the semester, he bought a newspaper at the train station with a photo from the shooting in Pittsburgh.“It's weird,” he says, “seeing a picture of that street. I was there so many times. I knew exactly where that was.” I recount my talks with his sister and tell him what I know about the victims so far.“It's so weird,” he repeats, and we fall silent. He asks apologetically if he can tell me about his trip, and when I say of course, he can't contain his enthusiasm, describing the towers inside the basilica of the cathedral, which he says are like a complicated tree made up of changing shapes and full of lights and colors. “They've been building the cathedral for over one hundred years—it's still considered under construction.” Then he is talking about the sandstone, the granite and the reinforced concrete of the cathedral's exterior and searching on his phone for the architect's name that he can't remember.“Antoni Gaudí,” he says triumphantly after a couple seconds of searching. “It really is like gigantic dribbly sand, Mom” he repeats, and I am surprised to hear myself laugh. I feel my own deep exhale. Cathy was the one who introduced him—and his sister—to her custom concept of dribbly sand as a way to decorate beach castles. It was August 2001 at Rehoboth Beach when she and her boyfriend Jim drove down from New York to spend a week with me and the kids. It was the last time we spent with Cathy before she was killed. That first morning I found her sitting in a low beach chair on the damp shore somehow overcoming her usual aversion to getting sand all over herself, Aysha and Daniel running back and forth to the water's edge.“It's all about plunging your hand into the wet sand right where the waves have just retreated,” Cathy said, pulling forth a fistful of sand.“This is quicksand,” she told my mesmerized kids, “that you can dribble out through your fingertips onto your castle to make it magical.”Aysha was five, Daniel four, and they hung on her every word and copied her hand movements with impressive precision. Jim was architect of the structures; Cathy supplied the vision for decoration with stones and shells, strategically placed sticks and with dribbly sand. She showed the kids how to create delicate scrolls and scribbles as the sand dribbled and then dried. Daniel's hands were so little then.Once when they ran to the water's edge Cathy said that she had become pretty sure by that point that she didn't want to have kids—she was turning 37 the following week.“Babette has shown me that maybe I don't have the patience,” she said, referring to the black lab terrier mix dog she'd had since 1986. “I love that dog but jeez,” she drew out the last word, “the patience.”Thursday night at the beach Cathy and Jim took the kids into town to an old-time photo studio while I stayed home with a bottle of wine and a kitchen embroidery I was trying to finish, listening to music, reveling in the solitude. They surprised me with a black and white photo set in an old ship, Daniel a pirate with an eyepatch and Aysha, a tavern girl with a bandana wrapped low around her dark hair, both barefoot and perfect. Cathy bought them t-shirts as her time with us was winding down, a mermaid and a pirate, that I keep even now, tucked away like treasure.After my phone call with Daniel, I avoid thinking about the service planned that evening at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Oakland. I try not to search for the news announcements leading up to the service, try not to listen. But somehow as evening falls, I am sitting on the couch in my living room, holding my laptop while two newscasters, a man and a woman, recap the tragedy, reminding viewers that in addition to the eleven deaths, six people were injured, including four police officers. They cut to a sidebar about the UPMC doctors that treated the survivors and just a brief mention of the physical destruction of the synagogue, the implied bodies and blood. Finally, the newscasters read out the names of the eleven people, with their ages and their neighborhood. They take turns reading a name, and they leave just enough space between names that I can repeat each name under my breath just before the next name is spoken. I once read that on average each traumatic death leaves behind another nine traumatized people. I imagine stringing the names of the nine people, the loved ones left behind, into the empty spaces between the names of the people killed at the synagogue, between the names of the people killed on 9/11. When the newscasters finish saying the names, I turn off the broadcast, and I slip into the sound of my sister's name, spoken aloud at memorial services every year. In Manhattan, in our hometown in Ohio, in places where people don't even know her. What about families whose loss is not memorialized with a national pause, a televised remembering? I try to quiet the arguments in my mind. I think about the years when the sound of Cathy's name offer solace. And the years it doesn't. I think about the crowded spaces in between.Like the Christmas lights. A tangled mass of tiny bulbs and wire. Their sequence makes sense somehow. Lying on the floor staring up into the tree. The bulbs blur together. And sometimes your eyes get glued to one bulb. Or you trace one wire deep into the nest of knots until it becomes impossible to follow the line any longer. There is a whole science to Christmas tree lights—strands can be wired in parallel or series circuits. The flow of electrical current to each bulb follows rules related to the resistance in the circuit and the way that each bulb is connected to the others. In a series circuit, if one bulb burns out, the whole strand won't light. Our dad—he had the patience to check each bulb when a strand wouldn't light, testing a fresh replacement bulb in each socket until all the lights came back on again. Sense restored. Meaning managed. Neither Cathy nor I inherited that kind of patience. Sometimes your eyes get glued to one bulb. Years later, you might remember the lined face of a stranger on a train, or the exact curve of your hands as you stared down at them while a kind-faced Pittsburgh policeman pelts you with phrases like “remains with a DNA match” and “positive identification” right there on your front steps. Consonants and vowels so sharp and so cold they mix with the early November freezing rain. Maybe your clearest memory is swinging your four-year-old up into your arms and tucking his cold bare feet under your sweater, feeling his icy toes against your belly after he has come running outside without any shoes, pointing at the policeman on the porch.