so severely that twice perfect strangers stopped me in the street and asked if I was having an allergic reaction. No, I said. I always look like this.
One evening, I got into an argument with a friend about something trivial, and before I knew what was happening I had pressed myself into the wall and was hugging my knees to my chest, trying to keep my heart from leaping out of my body. My friend rushed toward me to help and I screamed. It was an hour before I could let her touch me, before I could will myself away from the wall. So that’s a panic attack, I thought the next morning.
Soon after, I sent a letter to my father. I’m not proud of that letter. It’s full of rage, a fractious child screaming, “I hate you” at a parent. It’s filled with words like “thug” and “tyrant,” and it goes on for pages, a torrent of frustration and abuse.
That is how I told my parents I was cutting off contact with them. Between insults and fits of temper, I said I needed a year to heal myself; then perhaps I could return to their mad world to try to make sense of it.
My mother begged me to find another way. My father said nothing.
* The italicized language in the description of the referenced email exchange is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved.
I was failing my PhD.
If I had explained to my supervisor, Dr. Runciman, why I was unable to work, he would have helped me, would have secured additional funding, petitioned the department for more time. But I didn’t explain, I couldn’t. He had no idea why it had been nearly a year since I’d sent him work, so when we met in his office one overcast July afternoon, he suggested that I quit.
“The PhD is exceptionally demanding,” he said. “It’s okay if you can’t do it.”
I left his office full of fury at myself. I went to the library and gathered half a dozen books, which I lugged to my room and arranged on my desk. But my mind was made nauseous by rational thought, and by the next morning the books had moved to my bed, where they propped up my laptop while I worked steadily through Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
* * *
—
THAT AUTUMN, TYLER CONFRONTED my father. He talked to Mother first, on the phone. He called me after and related their conversation. He said Mother was “on our side,” that she thought the situation with Shawn was unacceptable and had convinced Dad to do something. “Dad is taking care of it,” Tyler said. “Everything is going to be fine. You can come home.”
My phone rang again two days later, and I paused Buffy to answer it. It was Tyler. The whole thing had exploded in his face. He had felt uneasy after his conversation with Mother, so he had called Dad to see exactly what was being done about Shawn. Dad had become angry, aggressive. He’d shouted at Tyler that if he brought this up again, he would be disowned, then he’d hung up the phone.
I dislike imagining this conversation. Tyler’s stutter was always worse when he talked to our father. I picture my brother hunched over the receiver, trying to concentrate, to push out the words that have jammed in his throat, while his father hurls an arsenal of ugly words.
Tyler was still reeling from Dad’s threat when his phone rang. He thought it was Dad calling to apologize, but it was Shawn. Dad had told him everything. “I can have you out of this family in two minutes,” Shawn said. “You know I can do it. Just ask Tara.”
I listened to Tyler relate this story while staring at the frozen image of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Tyler talked for a long time, moving through the events quickly but lingering in a wasteland of rationalization and self-recrimination. Dad must have misunderstood, Tyler said. There had been a mistake, a miscommunication. Maybe it was his fault, maybe he hadn’t said the right thing in the right way. That was it. He had done this, and he could repair it.
As I listened, I felt a strange sensation of distance that bordered on disinterestedness, as if my future with Tyler, this brother I had known and loved all my life, was a film I had already seen and knew the ending of. I knew the shape of this drama because I had lived it