special obligations to kin against their obligations to society as a whole. Then I began to write, weaving the strands I’d found in Hume’s Principles of Morals with filaments from Mill’s The Subjection of Women. It was good work, I knew it even as I wrote it, and when I’d finished I set it aside. It was the first chapter of my PhD.
I returned from my sketching class one Saturday morning to find an email from my mother. We’re coming to Harvard, she said. I read that line at least three times, certain she was joking. My father did not travel—I’d never known him to go anywhere except Arizona to visit his 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 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 taut and plastic; how his lips lacked natural roundness; how his cheeks sucked inward at an angle that was almost skeletal. His right hand, which he often raised to point at some feature or other, was knotted and twisted, and when I gazed at it, set against Harvard’s antediluvian steeples and columns, it seemed to me the claw of some mythical creature.
Dad had little interest in the university, so I took him into the city. I taught him how to take the T—how to feed his card through the slot and push through the rotating gate. He laughed out loud, as if it were a fabulous technology. A homeless man passed through our subway car and asked for a dollar. Dad gave him a crisp fifty.
“You keep that up in Boston, you won’t have any money left,” I said.
“Doubt it,” Dad said with a wink. “The business is rolling. We got more than we can spend!”
Because his health was fragile, my father took the bed. I had purchased an air mattress, which I gave to Mother. I slept on the tile floor. Both my parents snored loudly, and I lay awake all night. When the sun finally rose