mother—so the idea that he would fly across the country to see a
daughter he believed taken by the devil seemed ludicrous. Then I
understood: he was coming to save me. 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