Mother said they had already booked their flights and would be staying in my
dorm room.
“Do you want a hotel?” I asked. They didn’t.
A few days later, I signed in to an old chat program I hadn’t used in years.
There was a cheerful jingle and a name turned from gray to green. Charles is
online, it said. I’m not sure who started the chat, or who suggested moving
the conversation to the phone. We talked for an hour, and it was as if no time
had passed.
He asked where I was studying; when I answered, he said, “Harvard! Holy
hell!”
“Who woulda thought?” I said.
“I did,” he said, and it was true. He had always seen me like that, long
before there was any reason to.
I asked what he’d done after graduating from college and there was a
strained silence. “Things didn’t go the way I planned,” he said. He’d never
graduated. He’d dropped out his sophomore year after his son was born,
because his wife was sick and there was a mound of medical bills. He’d
signed on to work the oil rigs in Wyoming. “It was only supposed to be for a
few months,” he said. “That was a year ago.”
I told him about Shawn, how I’d lost him, how I was losing the rest of my
family. He listened quietly, then let out a long sigh and said, “Have you ever
thought maybe you should just let them go?”
I hadn’t, not once. “It’s not permanent,” I said. “I can fix it.”
“Funny how you can change so much,” Charles said, “but still sound the
same as when we were seventeen.”
My parents arrived as the leaves began to turn, when campus was at its most
beautiful, the reds and yellows of autumn mingling with the burgundy of
colonial brick. With his hayseed grammar, denim shirt and lifetime-member
NRA cap, Dad would have always been out of place at Harvard, but his
scarring intensified the effect. I had seen him many times in the years since
the explosion, but it wasn’t until he came to Harvard, and I saw him set
against my life there, that I realized how severely he’d disfigured himself.
That awareness reached me through the eyes of others—strangers whose
faces changed when he passed them in the street, who turned to get a second
look. Then I would look at him, too, and notice how the skin on his chin was