33
Sorcery of Physics
I didn’t stay long on Buck’s Peak, maybe a week. On the day I left the
mountain, Audrey asked me not to go. I have no memory of the conversation,
but I remember writing the journal entry about it. I wrote it my first night
back in Cambridge, while sitting on a stone bridge and staring up at King’s
College Chapel. I remember the river, which was calm; I remember the slow
drift of autumn leaves resting on the glassy surface. I remember the scratch of
my pen moving across the page, recounting in detail, for a full eight pages,
precisely what my sister had said. But the memory of her saying it is gone: it
is as if I wrote in order to forget.
Audrey asked me to stay. Shawn was too strong, she said, too persuasive,
for her to confront him alone. I told her she wasn’t alone, she had Mother.
Audrey said I didn’t understand. No one had believed us after all. If we asked
Dad for help, she was sure he’d call us both liars. I told her our parents had
changed and we should trust them. Then I boarded a plane and took myself
five thousand miles away.
If I felt guilty to be documenting my sister’s fears from such a safe
distance, surrounded by grand libraries and ancient chapels, I gave only one
indication of it, in the last line of the entry: Cambridge is less beautiful
tonight.
Drew had come with me to Cambridge, having been admitted to a master’s
program in Middle Eastern studies. I told him about my conversation with
Audrey. He was the first boyfriend in whom I confided about my family—
really confided, the truth and not just amusing anecdotes. Of course all that is
in the past, I said. My family is different now. But you should know. So you
can watch me. In case I do something crazy.
The first term passed in a flurry of dinners and late-night parties,
punctuated by even later nights in the library. To qualify for a PhD, I had to