CHAPTER 24

“Is it true Daddy didn’t speak to you for two weeks after I was born?”

“Who told you that?” My mother was sitting on her navy-blue velvet sofa having a cup of coffee. I’d just come in after being at the hospital all day.

“Aunt Vivian,” I said. “She said it last week when she came to Sinai. And the time I saw her before that. She always says it.” I threw my bag onto a chair and took off my coat.

“Aunt Vivian exaggerates,” my mother said.

“Is it true?” I said.

“Your father had a habit of not talking to me when he got mad,” she said. “He still does. Hang up your coat.”

I glanced down at her manicured toes squishing luxuriously in the shag carpeting. My commie mother fled the suburbs for a less bourgeois life downtown, but then she went and got pedicures and decorated her pad like a mafia wife—mirrors behind the velvet sofa, lime-green shag, chandeliers. “So then it’s true,” I said.

“Why bring up that old history? Tell me about the x-rays.”

“An MRI is not an x-ray,” I said. “And I told you the results on the phone. I’m bringing it up because I saw Liz and I was telling her how Da went bat-shit crazy because I wasn’t a boy.”

“Your father certainly doesn’t feel that way anymore.”

“The damage is done,” I said. I put my coat on a hanger and forced it into her packed closet. Her boyfriend Marty was keeping some of his jackets in there. I was grateful to Marty for staying away when I slept over. It was bad enough I had to deal with Brenda.

“What damage?” my mother said. “You look perfectly fine to me.”

“I can’t believe you’re a therapist,” I said.

“Now you’re going to insult me?”

“God, Ma. Can we stick to the subject of me for at least ten seconds?”

My mother and I could gossip together for hours—not really gossip, just laugh about the weird things other people did, hoping to make sense of it, knowing we were inclined to agree—and neither of us could do this with Susan. My sister wasn’t going to waste time on annoying people. So parsing personalities along with stories about the past was an important bond between my mother and me. But when we landed on the emotional landscape of my childhood, my mother shut down.

“You were an infant when Daddy went on that jag. You had no idea what was going on.”

I glared at her, not sure I wanted to get into an argument over infant cognitive development, a concept she didn’t believe in, apparently. I was always left feeling foolish for bringing up slights from the past and so I didn’t do it very often. My grievances were childish, both my parents said so. But they couldn’t keep the images from flitting through my mind: Susan’s fair curls in a velvet bow, her poufy party dress filling the frame and blocking me out, flashes of color, the smell of fresh paint, the woods, the lake, the blonde curtain of Nola’s hair blocking me out. After hours in the hospital at my father’s side, naturally my head filled with scenes from the past. “Why did you save Susan’s school projects and not mine?” I asked.

My mother tried to suppress a laugh, not expecting such a small complaint. “What, you mean the stuff from Ireland?”

She didn’t appreciate how much that year meant to me. I’d been a mere child, she said enough times. It was her adventure, her creation. She was the one who urged my father to apply for a Fulbright. But Ireland was significant for me in a different way. Being a mere child, it was the year I discovered the world. In America, I had known only the sleepy house and the windy yard. My mother would go back to bed after she got Susan off to school and I waited hours, it seemed, for her to wake up. Only then in the sunlit day she put a ruffled apron over her shirtwaist dress and ran into the street to stop the Rice’s Bakery truck calling “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” We sat at the red kitchen table with the wrought-iron legs dreamily eating white powdered donuts from the Rice’s man, watching the silky line of smoke snaking up from her cigarette in the ashtray. Then poof, without much notice, I was launched down the gangplank and into the rough, raw streets of Belfast under a coal-blackened sky to play among ragamuffin children with dirty knees, castles, and a queen. Ireland was a transitional place, both real and made-up. I was born yearning for the past and then I got on a ship and time-traveled to it.

“You’re talking about the stuff from primary school?” my mother said.

“Yes.” For other families—wealthier, well-connected families—living abroad for a year didn’t amount to much, but for us, it was a big deal, and everyone else on dinky Cedar Drive thought it was a big deal, too.

“Susan was older,” my mother said. “Her schoolwork was more interesting. You were only in first grade. Sit down. You want some coffee?”

“Coffee? Who drinks coffee this late? I should go to bed.” I doubted Susan ever looked at the workbooks they saved, or read the letters her classmates wrote and presented to her as a farewell gift. For Susan, Ireland was a nightmare best forgotten.

“I’ve got herbal tea,” my mother said.

“No thanks,” I said. She was wrong. My Nature Studies would have been interesting, even thrilling for me to look at. The children in the first grade at Orangefield Primary School gathered twigs, leaves, berries, and feathers from the boggy park to bring to class for Nature. We pasted the treasures into booklets and labeled the pages. I drew my T’s curled up at the bottom like the other children in Northern Ireland, and “to-day” with a hyphen, as I first learned to read and write there. We slithered on our bellies in the loamy bog on the wooded edge of the park and reached our jars into the cold pond water to scoop up jelly eggs from the muddy bottom, then watched the eggs grow into frogs in the back of the classroom. “There was plenty that was interesting,” I said. “Sums. Spelling. Religion.”

“Religion, yeah. We tried to get you excused from that but they wouldn’t have it. Look, Joanna, I had a lot on my mind over there. Things were going on you didn’t know about.”

I got a 92 in religion for correctly naming scenes depicting the life of Jesus painted on giant cards. “I was looking at the letters you wrote to Shana,” I said, “and you hardly mentioned me or Susan, as if we weren’t even conscious, when we were the ones who came home with Irish accents, not you. We were the ones who absorbed everything like a sponge, force-fed gruel, and hit with a ruler.”

My mother got up and brought her dishes to the sink. She let out an exasperated sigh. “What was I supposed to write? You were little kids. And you’re correct, you weren’t conscious. Children don’t come into consciousness until what? Nine or ten. I remember when you turned eleven, you started to be more interesting. You were funny, too.”

She waited for my reaction to her flattery and when I didn’t warm to it, she ran the water in the sink, rinsed the dishes, and put them in the dishwasher seemingly lost in thought. After she finished wiping off the counter with a sponge and washed and dried her hands, she came back to the sofa where I had stretched out. She lifted my legs and sat down with my stocking feet in her lap. “I’ll admit a lot of it was my fault,” she said. She sighed, sadly this time, and closed her eyes. I perked up. Did she just say a lot was her fault? Was my mother suddenly taking responsibility for her neglect? I was deluded for a second, soothed by her warm hand holding onto my foot. But she wasn’t referring to anything having to do with me, as I should have known. She and my father spoke about their lives in such epic terms, and I took this so much to heart, there seemed to be no way my own life could be as important as theirs. They lived through the romance of world war and radical politics. Their great love was forever entwined with history. My mother wasn’t thinking about me, she was thinking about her marriage. She meant Caitlyn Callaghan was her fault, and the affairs that followed. I had to admit, my mother’s story was a good one, and while I doubted she’d ever admit it, in some ways, it was my story too.

Caitlyn was her fault because my mother was the one who wanted to experiment. She was the one who wanted to live abroad. She wanted to lead an exciting life. She craved experience. She wanted Clyde and Evie Aronson to be like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, sitting in cafes all night discussing philosophy and literature, and most importantly, having an open relationship. It was my mother’s idea, one of her utopian schemes, and with it came the slow, steady demise of our family.

“You know, Joanna, I’ve told you this, but after you were born, I was sure my life would never be anything more than washing diapers, ironing Susan’s dresses, and oh my God, listening to the two of you fight. So I lobbied for going overseas. I got Daddy to apply for the Fulbright. He never would have done it on his own. I was adamant—we were going to live in swinging London for a year. It would be an adventure, and I figured in a far-away location I could apply my Marxist ideals, if not to society at large, then to my own marriage. Can you blame me? I was a virgin on my wedding day! I saved myself for your father, God knows why, but I was chaste for the three years he was away in the war.”

“Chaste? No other boys from the time you were sixteen?”

“Well, not exactly. I told you. I went to dances at the YCL, the AYD, the USO. I kissed boys. We fondled each other. But nothing more. And then as soon as Clyde comes home from the war, we get married, have children, I give up my political life, move to the suburbs, and Joanna, time was passing me by. I wanted to be a part of the world. I wanted the freedom men had. I thought if we lived abroad away from my judgmental family and our nosy neighbors, we could have affairs without the usual gossip. Unfortunately, there was only one option on the Fulbright application for exchange teachers requesting placement in London. What a joke. I brought your father a No. 2 pencil and I stood over him and watched as he filled in the bubble next to Great Britain. We waited weeks and weeks, and the letter finally came and he was accepted! It was very exciting getting that letter. But we were not sent to swinging London. Oh no, we’re sent to Belfast, a city celebrated for its shipbuilding.”

“I know. I was there.”

“You were six years old. You knew bubkas. Anyway, I figured even in uptight Belfast, after a year I would come home to the US with some experience, having changed in some way. But then—and isn’t it always this way for women? All I can manage is a one-night stand with that taciturn friend of Nora Trimble’s in the backseat of an Austin Seven. I can barely remember his name. Well, that’s not true. Jim Harkins. But I hardly even remember what he looked like. Whereas your father—what does he do? Your father goes and falls in love. Do you know how small the backseat of an Austin Seven is?”

My mother documented the year in letters, posting one to Shana Bloom in Baltimore every week. “We set sail on August 17, 1961,” my mother penned in her forward-leaning handwriting, the pages of which Shana typed up and inserted into a binder. “The passengers flung colored streamers off the SS United States into the milky green water of New York harbor and the band played and the foghorns blew and the people on deck were laughing and waving to the people on shore who were getting smaller and smaller until we couldn’t see them anymore and our attention turned to the Statue of Liberty.”

Occasionally my mother mentioned the kids in her letters to Shana, as in “we went to a cocktail party for the Lord Mayor of Belfast and found someone to stay with the kids,” but in over fifty-two letters, the name Jo or Joanna came up a total of three times. Fortunately, I kept my own travel diary in my mere child’s head. I remembered well how I stood on deck with my father after dinner that first day at sea, as we glided through the black waves of the North Atlantic.

“This is the fastest ship in the world,” my father said. “And the safest. You don’t have to worry about fire.”

I wasn’t worried about fire.

“You see,” he said, “there’s nothing on board made of wood. Except for two things that absolutely must be made out of wood. Can you guess what they are?”

I couldn’t guess. I hadn’t even started school.

“The piano and the chef’s chopping block,” he said. He tried to light a cigarette but the wind kept putting out the flame. “The chef insisted. Everything else that looks like wood, like the railings lining the corridors, that’s all made of a new substance called Neotex.”

“You mean the ballet bars?”

“Yeah, the ballet bars,” my father said.

The ship’s prow cut through the waves at record speed. I held my father’s hand, smooth and dry as always. “The stars go all the way to the edge,” I said.

“The horizon,” said my father.

Our house in Belfast was at No. 19 Orangefield Gardens and our school was called Orangefield Primary School. I thought the name had to do with orchards and sunshine, but I never saw an orchard and there was no sunshine. Everything was orange for William of Orange, the king who staked claim to the North for the Protestants way back in 1690 during the Battle of the Boyne. In 1961, the northern province of Ulster was mostly quiet, except for kids throwing rocks, and a bomb in a van parked at the border. At Belfast Technical College, my father was assigned a student teacher called Caitlyn. A boy hit her with a rock because she was Catholic, my father said, and she had to get stitches. But the Troubles wouldn’t fully begin again for almost a decade, with the Battle of Bogside in 1969.

Orangefield, where we lived, was on the rich, Protestant side of Belfast, but it didn’t seem rich to Susan and me. No trees grew on our block and we were the only ones with a car or a refrigerator and nobody, including us, had central heating. All warmth came from the fireplace in the sitting room. My mother didn’t take her coat off for a year. In the morning, Susan and I put on our red or black Danskin tights under the covers. Susan was eight, so it was her job to go outside to the coal bin in the morning and fill the coal scuttle. I sat halfway down the chilly stairs on the cabbage-rose carpet, pleasantly half-awake, waiting for my sister to restart the fire while our parents slept. On the way to school, boys taunted us because we wore exotic colored tights instead of white socks like Irish girls. “Licorice legs! Licorice legs!” they hollered every day as we hurried down the lane.

At primary school, the teachers hit us for missing sums or spelling. I didn’t mind. The system was fair. Whoever got one sum wrong was called to the front and we held our hands out and Mrs. Graham went down the line and slapped each open palm once with a ruler. Two wrong came up together and got two slaps, and three and so on. Same for spelling. She whacked us hard and it stung, it really did, but you knew what you were getting and why. I minded very much though, when she whacked our knuckles, arms, and legs for misbehaving, because that was like getting hit just for being a child, and what else could you be? None of the beatings, though, compared to the torture of lunch for Susan and me. The other children were grateful for the midday meal, but Susan and I lived in mortal fear of it. The teachers ordered us to eat every gristly scrap of funky mutton and lard-reeking lump of congealed mash, to swallow every spoonful of watery pudding from seemingly bottomless bowls. You weren’t allowed to bring a bag lunch from home.

“In America,” I said to the kids in the food line, “you get fried chicken for lunch at school.”

“Nay,” they said.

“Aye,” I said. “My sister told me so.” The line moved inside and I spotted Susan at the third-graders’ table. Her face was grim. She held an oversized spoon to her mouth and barely opened her lips. I tried to get her attention, but she wouldn’t look at me. If our eyes had met she might have cried. And she couldn’t cry, not in front of the thick-skinned Ulster kids.

I had only one friend, Hazel, who wore shabby jumpers and smelled like milk. “Hazel has no teeth,” I told my mother.

“Her baby teeth fell out?” my mother said.

“Her wee teeth, and the big ones, too. She hasn’t any teeth at all,” I said.

“She must be from a poor family,” said my mother. “Possibly Hazel ate too much candy and never went to a dentist.”

“It’s sweets, not candy,” I said.

“Sweets, then,” my mother said.

I didn’t want a poor friend with old clothes and no teeth. But no one else would play with me in the cement yard because I was a foreigner. Even though the primary school was built on the edge of the park with woods and a pond, and a little bridge over the Knock River, our playground was a prison yard out of Dickens. My mother said it was the Scotch Presbyterian influence and that was why at the park they tied up the swings on Sundays. I wanted to be friends with a girl called Polly Williams, who had teeth and wore bright clothes, especially a dress I liked made of dotted Swiss.

I thought about Polly Williams every night in bed and every day at my desk with its inkwell from another time. At last, I found my opportunity. Polly was absent from school and Mrs. Graham asked if there was anyone who lived near her who might give her the work she missed. She lived on Orange Avenue, Mrs. Graham said. My hand shot up. Orange Avenue had to be near Orangefield Gardens. The teacher handed over the workbook to take to Polly. On the way home from school, I had to beg Susan to search the street signs with me to find Orange Avenue. We passed Orangefield Green, Orange Grove, Orangefield Lane, and Orange Parade. When we got home, my mother said she wasn’t sure where the girl Polly’s street was with everything Orange this and Orange that.

“But I have to go there,” I said. “You have to find it.”

“Wait until Daddy comes home,” my mother said. She had been downtown all day with Nora Trimble and let the fire die and now she was sitting in the kitchen in her yellow leather car coat with the electric oven turned on and the oven door wide open. “You’re bugging me,” she said.

“In America, Daddy came home early,” Susan said.

I waited for my father and Susan was angry because I had held her up searching for the street and now Pamela next door had gone to the shops without her. Children in Belfast roamed the city freely. We rode the red double-decker buses, ran errands, and went to the baths (an indoor swimming pool with a balcony) unaccompanied. Susan slapped me and I hit her back. “Stop it! Stop it!” my mother screamed. When my father got home, he said he had a meeting and he had to go out again.

“Please,” I said. “I have to give Polly Williams the homework. I promised the teacher. Can you take me? Please. I’ll get in trouble. She’ll beat me with a cane.”

“The Colonel used a cane,” my mother said. “In the orphanage. Right, Clyde?”

“Never mind that,” my father said. “I survived. They’ll survive, too.”

I followed my father into the parlor. “I’ve got something for you two. You’re gonna love it,” he said. He took a record out of his briefcase and put it on the record player. “All the kids in America are listening to this.”

“C’mon, let’s twist again, like we did last summer,” Chubby Checker sang.

Susan started swiveling around to the music. “I know how to twist,” she said.

“Me too,” my mother said. “C’mon Joanna. Pretend you’re drying yourself with a towel and stamping out a cigarette with your foot at the same time.” My mother held out her arms and moved her hips and put out the imaginary cigarette with her square-toed high-heeled shoe, and I imitated her.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Susan said.

I stopped dancing and leaned back against the windowsill. “Daddy, please,” I said. “Let’s go. You have to take me. I’ll get in trouble. I swear, they’ll beat me with a ruler. Get out your map.”

“Who is Polly, anyway?” said Susan.

“The pretty girl in my class,” I said. “I told you. The one with the white dress and the wee red velvet dots.”

“All right, I’ll take you after dinner,” my father said.

I thought the meal would never end. My father smoked a cigarette with his coffee. I watched the ash getting longer and longer. It was late. “Pep your cigarette,” I said. He flicked the ash into the ashtray, took a last drag, then squashed the cigarette in the ashtray and lit another one. Polly would never get the homework and it would be my fault. My mother told my father a joke in Yiddish and he laughed his almost noiseless laugh, his shoulders moving up and down. He stubbed out the second cigarette and stood up. “Let’s go,” he said. “C’mon. What are you waiting for?”

We got into our little Renault that we pronounced with the “l” and the “t.” It turned out Orange Avenue was far away, over on the other side of the school. We drove silently through the night.

I stood at the door. Polly didn’t even come downstairs to see me. Her mother took the homework absentmindedly, staring out at my father in the idling car.

“So, you delivered the homework?” my father said.

“Aye.”

He saw that Polly had no use for me. I had caused trouble for him, and for Susan, for nothing. My father swung the car around and down a hill. He had an errand, too, he said. We parked on a street with trees and he took me up to Caitlyn’s flat, his student teacher. She stooped down in front of me like my mother when she tied the strings on my parka.

“Aren’t you a bonny wee one?” Caitlyn said. She had pale skin and a brown bouffant hairdo. I wondered if she would give me chocolate. The Irish were keen on chocolate. “What solemn eyes,” said Caitlyn.

“You should see the older one,” my father said. “A shayna maidel. That’s Yiddish. You wanna know something? I’ll tell you something. Yiddish is a lot like Gaelic.” He laughed and so did Caitlyn. “Go ahead. Say something in Gaelic,” my father said.

“Tha gràdh agad orm,” said Caitlyn.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“You love me,” she said. “In Irish.”

“I love you?” I said.

Caitlyn clapped her hands and laughed. “No. You love me,” she said.

“Lost tribe of Israel,” my father said. “The Irish.”

She didn’t offer chocolate and then we left.

“Porcelain, her skin. Did you see that?” my father said in the car.

“What’s porcelain?”

“You know what porcelain is. Sinks are made of porcelain, and toilets.”

“She has skin like a toilet?”

“Not like a toilet, stupid. White, smooth, flawless.”

We drove down the Grand Parade past the butcher, the baker, and the sweets shop. I had trouble getting to sleep that night. I thought of Polly upstairs in her dotted Swiss dress knowing I was there and not coming down to see me. The bed creaked in the next room. I could hear them talking through the wall.

“You started it with that Jim what’s his name,” my father said.

“That was nothing,” my mother said.

“You were the one who wanted this,” my father said.

My mother sighed. “You weren’t supposed to fall in love,” she said.

He stayed late at Belfast Tech two nights a week and on those nights I lay awake next to Susan with our wardrobe looming in the darkness until I heard the Renault chugging around the bend toward No. 19.

My sister was unhappy. She missed the USA. My mother didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to hear the screaming, so I went outside and kicked a wiffle ball around the front garden.

“I can’t believe you let them hit me! What kind of mother are you?” Susan cried. Flashes of color moved behind the window glass.

“We went to the headmaster. What more can we do?”

Susan wailed. “I wanna go home!”

“Stop it!” my mother shouted.

“Please, take me home! Please!”

Tommy from up the street stopped his bike in front of our house. “Get your cheeky sister out here,” Tommy said.

“What would I be wanting that for?” I said.

“Go back to America, you raving lunatics,” he said. His clothes were gray like Hazel’s.

“Why is your sister crying?” said Roberta from across the street.

“Susan doesn’t like Belfast,” I said. I threw the wiffle ball in the air and caught it.

“Why not?” said Tommy.

“She hates pudding,” I said.

“Hates pudding? You’re daft.” Tommy rode off. He skidded to a halt in front of Martin, who was kicking stones in the street.

“Martin, Yank says her sister hates pudding.”

“We’ll have to put an end to that,” said Martin.

“What do you mean?” I said. I moved inside our gate.

Roberta skipped off to the shops with a string bag. Martin bent down, gathered the stones he was kicking and stuffed them into his pocket. I ran into the house. “The kids can hear you crying!”

“Shut your gob, you little brat. Do you think I care?” my sister said. She brushed her tears away.

“They’re throwing rocks,” I said.

“They are not,” said Susan.

Clank.

“Oh shit,” my mother said.

Stones clattered against the windowpane.

“You dare-tee Jews!”

My sister gasped.

“How do they know we’re Jewish?” I said.

My mother gave me an impatient look. “Where the hell is your father when we need him?”

I raced to the kitchen. A crowd had gathered mugging at the side window. Martin made a hocking noise. A glob of phlegm hit the pane, then slid down to the sill.

“Dare-tee Jews! Dare-tee Jews!” the crowd chanted.

“That does it! Now we have to go home!” Susan said.

I was afraid. Not of the rowdy children, but afraid that Susan would have us sent back to America and spoil our adventure. My mother had a brilliant solution. She went outside holding her yellow car coat closed around her hand-knit jumper, and invited the neighbor kids to lunch on Saturday for American hamburgers.

“I don’t want those disgusting tinkers in here!” Susan said. “They spit on our window! They’re anti-Semitic.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“They hate Jews,” said Susan.

“And Catholics,” I said.

“Everyone loves hamburgers,” my mother said.

Everyone did love the hamburgers. On Saturday, we had seven kids squeezed around our kitchen table. My mother was pleased with her diplomacy.

“There’s a place in America called Burger Chef,” I said. “Sorry, Ma, but their hamburgers are even better than yours.”

“Don’t be disrespecting your mam,” said Tommy.

“Aye,” said Martin. “There are no better hamburgers than these here.”

As luck would have it, our adventure was not cut short. We stayed as planned until the end of June. In the weeks leading up to our departure, I lay in bed listening for my father’s car and I tried to picture home. Our bedspreads were blue in America and the walls of our room were pink. Girls wore cotton shorts and sleeveless blouses.

“What are you going to do?” my mother asked. “Stay here?”

Did my parents think Susan and I couldn’t hear them? That we were always asleep? Did they really believe we weren’t conscious yet, not thinking human beings? We were upstairs and they were downstairs, but the walls were thin and their voices carried. I sat up in bed.

“Stay here? In Belfast?” my father said. “I’m not staying here!”

“You don’t want to leave Caitlyn. What then?”

“I’m not staying here. It’s not for me. Anyway, everyone’s trying to get out. Both sides.”

He meant the Catholics and the Protestants.

“So you’re coming home with us?” my mother said.

“That’s right,” said my father. The poker clanked and scraped the hearth. My father stirring the coals. “But I want to bring her back.”

“Bring her back?” my mother said. Her voice rose. “What does that mean, bring her back?”

“To Baltimore,” he said.

“What? Are you crazy?”

“Susan,” I whispered to the next bed.

“Put the pillow over your head,” Susan said.

“Do you know what they’re talking about?”

“Go to sleep. They’ll be fine in the morning.”

There was another clank and rattle, the poker returning to its place. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She won’t do it.”

“Bring her back like a souvenir?” my mother said, not hearing him.

“Bitch.”

That word was just for girls, meant to cut them. The t-part in the middle stabbed my heart. The ch-part froze it. I looked over at Susan. She was sleeping.

“Bitch? Me?” my mother said. “The open-minded idiot who started this whole thing?”

“That’s right!” my father shouted. “You started it. You don’t care about me. You’re not even sad. You don’t love me.”

“I love you so much look at what I accept! But it’s never enough!”

They didn’t speak for a while after that but I couldn’t sleep. I was scared of the wardrobe in our room. My mother said I should remember it was just a place where we kept our clothes, but it loomed in the darkness. My father started talking again, but quieter: “She broke it off with me,” he said.

“Caitlyn?” my mother said.

“Who else?” he said angrily. The poker clanked again. I strained to hear. There was a loud crash and I jumped out of bed in fright, but a dull thud stopped me in my tracks. I listened. The sofa creaked and groaned under a shifting weight. I heard a gasp, and a strangled breath and a cry, and I ran down the stairs. I did not think about what I would do when I got to the sitting room. I wasn’t concerned with how I would stop a fight between two adults twice my size, one wielding a poker, or that I might be punished for getting out of bed. I was frightened, something bad was happening, that was all I knew, and so I ran to offer comfort to the people who were supposed to comfort me. I stopped short at the doorway not sure at first what I was seeing on the sofa—whose body was whose, what was happening, who had cried out and why. Coals glowed red in the fireplace. The telly was tuned to a news program with the sound off. My father was partly on top of my mother with one leg draped around the bottom part of her body possessively. Above the waist, though, she was in possession, cradling him in her arms. Her lips were pressed to his forehead tenderly. His glasses were off, he lay with his cheek against her breast. He was the one who was crying.

“Caitlyn doesn’t want to see me anymore,” he said.

My mother held him and kissed his tears away. “Poor boy,” she said. “Poor boy.”