was incensed that lunch wasn’t ready. Mother scrambled to serve the stew she’d left to slow-cook, but after the meal Dad seemed equally frustrated by the dishes, which Mother hurriedly cleaned, and then by his grandchildren, who played noisily while Mother dashed about trying to hush them.
That evening, when the house was empty and quiet, I listened from the living room as my parents argued in the kitchen.
“The least you could do,” Mother said, “is fill out these thank-you cards. It was your mother, after all.”
“That’s wifely work,” Dad said. “I’ve never heard of a man writing cards.”
He had said the exact wrong thing. For ten years, Mother had been the primary breadwinner, while continuing to cook meals, clean the house, do the laundry, and I had never once heard her express anything like resentment. Until now.
“Then you should do the husband’s work,” she said, her voice raised.
Soon they were both shouting. Dad tried to corral her, to subdue her with a show of anger, the way he always had, but this only made her more stubborn. Eventually she tossed the cards on the table and said, “Fill them out or don’t. But if you don’t, no one will.” Then she marched downstairs. Dad followed, and for an hour their shouts rose up through the floor. I’d never heard my parents shout like that—at least, not my mother. I’d never seen her refuse to give way.
The next morning I found Dad in the kitchen, dumping flour into a glue-like substance I assumed was supposed to be pancake batter. When he saw me, he dropped the flour and sat at the table. “You’re a woman, ain’tcha?” he said. “Well, this here’s a kitchen.” We stared at each other and I contemplated the distance that had sprung up between us—how natural those words sounded to his ears, how grating to mine.
It wasn’t like Mother to leave Dad to make his own breakfast. I thought she might be ill and went downstairs to check on her. I’d barely made it to the landing when I heard it: deep sobs coming from the bathroom, muffled by the steady drone of a blow-dryer. I stood outside the door and listened for more than a minute, paralyzed. Would she want me to leave, to pretend I hadn’t heard? I waited for her to catch her breath, but her sobs only grew more desperate.
I knocked. “It’s me,” I said.
The door opened, a sliver at first, then wider, and there was my mother, her skin glistening from the shower, wrapped in a towel that was too small to cover her. I had never seen my mother this way, and instinctively I closed my eyes. The world went black. I heard a thud, the cracking of plastic, and opened my eyes. Mother had dropped the blow-dryer and it had struck the floor, its roar now doubled as it rebounded off the exposed concrete. I looked at her, and as I did she pulled me to her and held me. The wet from her body seeped into my clothes, and I felt droplets slide from her hair and onto my shoulder.
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,