After my father had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer but before he was
actually dying, a plant he’d never seen before appeared in the clearing in his backyard.

Though I was living in Manhattan then, I had embarked on a self-taught course of
nature study. Innocent of field guides or binoculars, I was trying to learn the ducks in the Central Park Reservoir, memorizing their shapes and markings, then racing to the natural history museum, half a mile away. In glass cabinets in a narrow side room, hundreds of bird skins hung like socks, their eye sockets filled with cotton batting. It took me several weeks to ID the common cormorant; I didn’t expect National Geographic’s legendary diver—the Japanese fisherman’s tireless aide—to be living so close to home.

Plants had presented an easier task; I was familiar with all the city trees by then,
down to their Latin binomials. So when I next went out to the house, my father and I stood together under the red oaks’ maculate shadows, sweat from the railroad trip still cooling on the back of my neck, and he showed me the specimen. It was only a couple of feet tall, a viny upstart with hunter-green leaves and tight red berries.

I had no clue what it was. Actually, I’d assumed that my inspection of it was bound to be futile: if my father didn’t know its name, I certainly wouldn’t.

*

My wall calendar, produced by a wildlife conservation organization, features stunning photographs of birds. One shows a whooping crane stalking through shallow water on stilt-like legs, the breeze ruffling snowy wings as magnificent as those of the angel Jacob wrestled with, as it plucks up a white crab. Or is it, I sometimes wonder, a photograph of the crab?

*

A few weeks after my fruitless inspection of my father’s unknown visitor, I was legging it down West Tenth Street, late returning from lunch, when I glimpsed the exact plant in front of a brownstone. I wheeled around. There was no one outside the building but, to my good fortune, a professional shingle hung from a wrought iron post. A psychiatrist had his office there. I committed the phone number to memory, and as soon as I got to my desk, I picked up the Merlin phone and left a message, telling the doctor I was sorry to bother him and asking if he knew the identity of the plant with the red berries.

*

It’s funny that it should have been a psychiatrist’s office: all his life, my father had
struggled with depression. For days in a row, he wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning—often, not until dinner was on the table. Though maybe, my mother told me years later, it wasn’t so much depression as anxiety; some doctor had once suggested that. But no one talked about these things back then.

*

To my surprise, the psychiatrist called me at home that evening, happy to be able to help, almost burbling with eagerness. Yes, he knew exactly what I was asking about. It was quite a tough character, he confided. “In fact,” he said, “it’s the famous tree that grows in Brook—”

Not that one, I interrupted. The small one with the red berries: did he know what
that was?

Oh, no, he replied, crestfallen. He had no idea. It had just appeared.

I was so grateful that he’d called, I said, feeling, just before he abruptly hung up,
sorry for having disappointed him.

But of course I already knew Ailanthus altissima, the “tree of heaven,” with its
pinnate leaves and winged seeds and its notorious vigor. In my apartment building’s
courtyard, one had even laid claim to a seam between slabs of concrete, its trunk oozing up over the cement—a survivor, just like in the Betty Smith novel.

That book portrays the immigrant experience: same city, different borough, a
decade before my father’s parents arrived and tried to find a foothold.

*

Like young parents everywhere, they doted on their new baby. They would have been watching in wonder and delight as he learned to crawl, right before the Crash wiped out the banks.

The three of them lived in a series of tenements on the Lower East Side. They
moved often—one step ahead of being thrown out for failing to pay the rent or,
sometimes, when the building got condemned.

As a boy, my father witnessed the eviction of other families, even children he
knew. They lingered on the sidewalk surrounded by their possessions, things strangers shouldn’t see: their threadbare bed-sheets, their dented pots and spavined tables. A sensitive child, he could never forget, never reconcile these scenes. They instilled in him a deep sense of compassion, but they also left a wound that never closed. He understood impermanence, caprice: how any step might be the one over the abyss.

*

I searched everywhere for anything that might resemble the mystery sapling, first
scrutinizing each photo in my Audubon Field Guide to North American Trees. In just a few years, the Internet would arrive, bringing with it Google and Wikipedia and wagon trains of information. Meanwhile, I turned the pages of gardening magazines, hoping for coincidence; I walked miles through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

*

In the gaps between the bouts of depression, my father was never melancholy. As a child, I had the habit of quietly insinuating myself into rooms to listen in on conversations between my parents and their friends, trying to plumb the mysteries of adult life. When someone said something funny, my father would throw his head back, laughing and nodding—conveying at once his own pleasure and his appreciation for the other person’s wit.

And sometimes when thunderstorms lashed our street, when even suburban Long
Island seemed like just a spit of sand abandoned to the ocean, walls of rain hammering down as if the entire Atlantic were being hurled against the land, my father would cast open the front door, relishing the fury, nature’s power and glory. As a kid, I never understood this next part, what it meant: as spray blew into the foyer and the sky sheared and cracked, he’d fling his arms wide and holler, “Zachariah!”

*

He never talked about the time he spent in a city orphanage after his mother had some kind of breakdown (also never spoken about) and his father was somewhere else (same deal). Except once, near the end, when he told me how if you—

Only it wasn’t if, and it wasn’t you.

Except once, near the end, when he told me how when he wet the bed, in the
morning they pushed his face into the soiled sheets.

*

Eventually, I got a lead on the plant; I wish I could remember how. I called from my
office and told my father that it might be some kind of viburnum. The word meant
nothing to me, but I thought it might to him, because despite his concrete jungle
childhood, he’d always known more about nature than any of us kids who’d grown up in the leafy suburbs.

It didn’t, though. One kind of viburnum, I might have said, was called “cranberry
bush,” though it wasn’t related to the true cranberries. At least that seems plausible now, because what he told me next was that while growing up in those Lower East Side tenements, he’d read about such things, “highbush blueberry” and “lowbush blueberry,” and he’d always wondered what that meant, wanted to understand what they were, but never had.

Did I know anything about them? he asked.

*

In Natural History magazine the other night, I saw a photograph of a hamerkop, a stocky sort of South African heron. It was hunting, and the camera froze the moment when a frog was suspended above the bird’s open bill. The hamerkop had tossed the frog into the air to position it for swallowing.

*

I didn’t know what “highbush blueberry” or “lowbush blueberry” meant, either. But I
never forgot those words.

*

After a while, my father was released from the orphanage, back to his parents. He grew up, got a job as a draftsman, and married the love of his life. They had children, four of them; not long after the youngest was born they took a big leap: to a new development on the North Shore of Long Island. It was still so rural that four houses down, the land opened up into potato fields, and acres of scrubby pines filled the evergreen farm behind our house.

Each home in the tract was outfitted with the standard landscaping, but my father
wanted more. He sought out specimen trees: Chinese elm, Carpathian walnut, silver
maple; pear, apricot, birch, dogwood; a duet of weeping willows and a tulip poplar,
which grew so tall that, he told me, its flowers were said to be only for God. Tiger lilies ran wild in the swale between our house and the neighbors’. We had almost a third of an acre, a lot he’d selected because of its size and because the backyard ended in woods.

With shovel and mower, he expanded a half-moon opening in those woods,
battling back the rampant huckleberry undergrowth, and he strung a big wooden swing between two red oaks.

It was in that clearing that the sapling with the red berries appeared.

*

Many of the mysteries of my father’s childhood—things he’d read about but never
seen—thrived in his backyard. Rabbits and woodpeckers and bobwhite quail, who,
calling their own name, marched their fledglings through the clearing. Years later, a little owl hooted nightly from the warm spot behind the porch light. Words transformed into bark and leaves, fur and birdsong.

*

In the same issue of Natural History magazine that showed the hamerkop about to gulp down the frog, there was an article about the transformation of an industrial wasteland in Ontario. One of the most damaged areas on the planet, it was healed, the subtitle noted, “by a lowly bush.”

Decades of logging and mining for copper and nickel had stripped the earth. In a
crude technique for removing sulfur from the ore, burning roast heaps released clouds of sulfur dioxide, which turned into sulfuric acid, which killed nearly all of the vegetation. When smelters were built, the devastation became absolute.

As the soil, no longer anchored by plants’ roots, washed off the hillsides, the acid
seared the exposed rocks. The reckless extraction continued to sour the ground and intensify the accumulation of heavy metals, until the toxic barrens stretched across sixty-five square miles. In summer, which should have been the fertile season, the blackened rock faces scorched at a killing 140 degrees.

Beyond this expanse of devastation, stunted birches struggled for life in a semi-barren zone with an understory, I was astonished to read, of lowbush blueberry.
Eventually, technological improvements and government legislation curbed the region’s most dire pollution, and mosses and lichens crept in. Then the lowbush blueberry, able to survive on this highly acidic substrate, followed, colonizing the barrens and the naked hills.

As they expanded, the blueberry shrubs’ wiry mats helped the earth retain
moisture and coolness, fostering birch seedlings, and as those seedlings matured, the birches’ leaf litter nourished the blueberries.

The forest had begun to repair itself.

*

The northern highbush blueberry, Vaccinium corybosum, is the kind grown for the green molded-pulp containers you find in the produce aisle. The nine-foot-tall plants are cultivated, the article explained, much like apple trees, in orchards.
Lowbush blueberries (V. angustifolium) resist such domestication. Commercial
growers maintain fields of angustifolium much the same way native peoples did centuries ago, harvesting the fruit every two or three years and periodically burning or mowing the shrubs to encourage new growth. When you see a label touting “wild blueberries,” that’s angustifolium.

So highbush blueberries, I could have told my father, are the grandiflora roses of
the berry world, lowbush the untameable wildflower meadow.

*

The hamerkop didn’t eat the frog right away. For a few minutes, while the photographer manipulated his equipment, it kept flipping its prey into the air, trying to get the angle right.

*

You know what they say about happy endings: it depends on where you end the story.

*

On the built-in shelves in the family room, my father kept an old book with a frayed cloth binding: Man-Eaters of Kumaon, about tiger hunting in India. At the base of the title page: “Oxford University Press, New York & Bombay.” A manila pocket partially obscures the back endpaper’s hand-drawn map of a mountainous swath of the subcontinent, and the pages are soft from having been turned by so many hands.

The Herald Square Macy’s—spanning a full city block, with basement corridors
long enough to let a miler to hit full stride—lent out that book; the stamp on the pocket reads, “Macy’s Employees’ Library.” My father, tall and skinny, once raced a champion runner through those halls. He was in high school and, working nights as a stockboy, his family’s only breadwinner. He’d have been seventeen the year the book was published, dreaming of something more adventurous than the grime of Rivington Street.

Although none of us kids read Man-Eaters, we prized it above all the dozens of
other volumes on the shelves. Between its pages was pressed an eastern swallowtail—larger, in that age of Raid and DDT and Shell No-Pest Strips, than any butterfly we’d ever seen. Sometimes, in the humid boredom of summer, my sister and I would carefully ease open the book and stare at the large dark wings, their blue and cream spots, the broken antennae.

We called it the “monarch butterfly.”

*

The lowbush blueberries that repaired the industrial barrens managed another remarkable trick. The first part of that magic occurred during an assault by gypsy moth caterpillars. That insect had also attacked our strip of woods one summer; when I stood quietly in the backyard, my ears filled with a continuous murmur, the munching action of thousands of mandibles.

In 1994, the caterpillars ate the blueberry bushes leafless. The next year, however,
the shrubs fully rebounded. Somehow, at the start of the onslaught, they had recognized the direness of the threat and moved food and water reserves from their leaves to their stems and roots.

Two decades later, an intense drought caused the bushes on the hills, where the
soil was thin and hot, to drop their small green berries. The bushes under cool shade, with sufficient moisture, then also abandoned their immature fruit—as if they had been warned of coming trouble.

This bit of wizardry astounds me. It’s so proactive: if the drought turned out to be
severe enough to kill the plants on the exposed slopes, because they’d sent a message to their relatives in the shade, those bushes would likely survive.

A plant-to-plant early warning system. Between members of a species with no
speech, no eyes to see or ears to hear. Deepening the mystery of “highbush blueberry, lowbush blueberry.”

*

After scrolling through hundreds of photographs on the Internet, then delving into the details of habitat and range, I’ve fixed on Viburnum lantana. The species originated in Eurasia, as did my father’s parents. For its tendency to grow along roadsides, it’s called the wayfaring tree.

My grandmother was fourteen when she and her sister, both of them barefoot,
squeezed into steerage. So I suppose that “wayfarer”—“a traveler, especially on foot”—could also be applied to her and my grandfather. As mere striplings, they made their way through a series of ports, journeying, respectively, from Smyrna and Istanbul to Ellis Island. It could even describe my father, who left Manhattan for Brooklyn, Brooklyn for Queens, Queens for Long Island, where he took root and, three decades later, came upon the wayfaring tree in his backyard.

*

All human stories go up and down, but they always end badly, because they end.

A decade before my father got diagnosed, his perpetually combative relationship
with his boss combusted. After more than twenty years with the firm, he was fired.
In an unexpected twist, a few months later, he found a better job. The new
position meant less driving and more money, and his boss became a good friend.

He flourished there. He relaxed.

*

The end came hard. The chemo and the radiation weakened and exhausted him. Having traveled out of depression, he now traveled back in. Retreat followed with it: the strings of days when he didn’t get out of bed until dinnertime.

But any end is always hard, isn’t it?

*

End the telling somewhere else, then: the good, happy years after he got the wonderful job, when he and my mother took vacations and walked on the beach.

Or the early years on the curving street across from the potato fields, a few of the
neighborhood men gathered at dusk in front of someone’s crescent of pink azaleas as a traveling Melnor swishes its way around the velvet lawn. All of them husbands with young children, new to the suburbs, a Levitt development, discussing when to apply lime, how high to set the mower’s blades. The air smells like cut grass and honeysuckle. Someone makes a joke—maybe the one about the insanity of fertilizing, because you just have to mow that much sooner—and they all laugh.

*

The hamerkop kept tossing the frog into the air, trying to turn it for easy swallowing. There’s nothing in the bird’s eye to suggest either frustration or compassion; what happened next is sealed in the vaults of mystery. The hamerkop let go. It released its prey back to the water. The frog got away.

*

The frog’s story looked like tragedy but ended in triumph.

Close your eyes—or, better yet, keep them open—and pretend the end is never
coming.

*

Or accept how it really ended, at least this time: at home, in his own house, on his land, with his family near. And, in a clearing in the woods, the wayfaring tree rising.

1.
I have no scrapbooks, no shoe boxes crammed with keepsakes. No stash of yearbooks, diplomas, theater programs or halves of torn concert tickets, the first dollar I earned or the stub of my first paycheck. I never saved souvenirs or tokens—seashells, pine cones, hotel ashtrays, Cracker Jack prizes, dried and faded corsages. I don’t save birthday, anniversary, valentine or mother’s day cards. I didn’t keep vestiges of my daughter’s infancy and childhood—I don’t have her baby teeth or a blond curl tied with a ribbon, her first shoes, report cards or schoolwork, drawings or scribblings.

2.
I don’t save clothes—no prom or wedding dresses fuzzy with mildew or perforated by moth holes in the back of my closet. I didn’t keep the matching lime green checkered sundresses I made for my daughter and me when she was little, though I recall them in detail, the ruffle at the shoulder, the sash that tied in back. I didn’t save her favorite dress with the wide flared skirt, soft pastels of yellow, blue and pink, but I have a vivid image of her at age four, outside our apartment, under a tree, arms spread wide as she twirled round and round, keeping the skirt in play like a hula hoop. I had a favorite pair of jeans, soft and worn, patched, pencil thin. A few years after I’d stopped wearing them—a few pounds heavier but still quite slim—I tried them on and couldn’t even get them over my legs. Out they went.

3.
I have no extant diaries or journals. I kept them on and off throughout my youth, less frequently as an adult. First the padded and patterned books with little locks and teensy keys and a blessedly small space for each day, graduating to notebooks that ranged from steno pads to Moleskines and museum store books with art works or quotes in the corner of each page. As each book filled or I abandoned it, I would squirrel it away, safe from prying eyes. A year or two or ten later I would exhume and reread it. Was that me, that girl/woman who wrote such drivel? He smiled at me, he ignored me, he called, he didn’t call. My mom is mean, my friends are selfish, no one understands me. Did I really waste precious weeks and words on trivial crushes, silly slights? When I encountered evidence of intelligent life and thoughtful introspection, I’d muse on it momentarily, nod or shake my head, chuckle or roll my eyes, and move on. I hand-shredded each book down to the cover, ripped out pages and tore them into narrow strips from top to bottom and side to side, buried them deep in the trash can. In my teens I burned a few books in the bathtub, page by page, to eradicate all remnants of revelations that might prove to be an embarrassment. I suppose the journals served some cathartic purpose in their time, but I don’t need concrete evidence of the person I was at age ten, sixteen, forty-two.

4.
I don’t save letters, whether from friends or family, past loves or present. My husband and I lived in different cities for the first four years of our relationship. Above and beyond regular visits and frequent, lengthy phone conversations, we helped support the U.S. Postal Service with a continuous barrage of postcards and letters. The cards were brief bursts of brilliance—we put considerable time and thought into amusing and impressing each other—while the letters were outpourings of purple prose and unexpurgated yearnings. He’s a saver and most likely still has mine (I’ve never asked), but some years after we’d merged and married I extracted the banded bundle of his letters and cards from the back of a desk drawer. I reread a cross section, smiled at some, winced at others. They met the same fate as the journals.

A friend with whom I’d once been close moved away thirty years ago. For several years we wrote to each other regularly, confided our innermost thoughts and feelings. We’re still in touch, but now we’re down to annual birthday letters. Last year she wrote that she’d saved my early letters and had been rereading them. She expressed delight at my outpourings of prose—candid, comical, cynical— narratives of my highs and lows that unfolded over the years like a long-running soap opera. She always knew I would become a writer, she says, and now she’ll keep my old letters for when I’m famous. I was horrified. I type and delete that word a few times, thinking it too strong. I substitute milder synonyms, but no, I wasn’t dismayed, disconcerted or perturbed. I was aghast. Horrified. I didn’t want an intact record of my past in someone else’s hands, but rather than admit it I resorted to subterfuge. In my next letter I told her I was planning to write an essay that would reconstruct my thirties self from letters. I asked if she would send me the ones she’d kept. I did think, fleetingly, that there might be something to it—at least that’s what I told myself. She mailed me a packet of letters, and I read just a few of them before rendering them into ribbons.

I’m sorry, Nancy. I lied.

5.
I don’t have my family history in photographs. I keep a couple of albums and a shoe box full of loose photos, but even these I weed through periodically, discard dozens at a time. I’ve given my daughter most of her baby and childhood pictures. People from my past can stay there, especially former beaux. I’ll remember what I value—and a horror story or two—without a visual record. I don’t need hundreds of views of the English countryside, quaint villages, and rustic pubs—I keep a scant sampling from my frequent visits. My brother passed on some old family photos after my father’s death. We weren’t a picture-taking family, so there wasn’t much to start with. I have a few of my baby pictures and rare remainders of childhood, but my teen years are a blank with the exception of two high school graduation pictures.

6.
People save stuff—it’s the accepted norm—but how much is acceptable? Where are the invisible and arbitrary lines beyond which lie the deviants? We non-savers are suspect, hiding skeletons—sordid secrets or criminal pasts—or just heartless in our lack of sentimentality. On the other side, hoarders are considered pathological. Books are written and movies made about them. In Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Sylvie saved tin cans and newspapers, stacked them up in her repurposed parlor. She believed accumulation to be “the essence of housekeeping”—hoarding was proof of her thriftiness.

Hoarding is listed in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as an offshoot of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. A website of “10 Horrifying Stories of Hoarders Who Died in Their Stuff” includes the Collyer brothers, whose bodies were found in the midst of their 130 tons of matter. Specialists of various cloths have hung out their shingles offering remedies, from medication to behavioral therapy to decluttering services. As I planned my retirement ten years ago, I considered becoming a professional organizer. I could capitalize on my “when in doubt throw it out” philosophy to rescue rampant accumulators from their fate. Minimalism was a burgeoning field then; now it’s all the rage, thanks to the teaching and preaching of Marie Kondo, who makes me look like a pack rat.

7.
My mother didn’t save things. She didn’t keep my childhood ephemerae, didn’t tuck things away for future reminiscence or to pass along to me. I would ask, from time to time, “Do you still have my ___ (fill in the blank—my ballet shoes, the poems I wrote in junior high, my rock collection),” and my mother would brush off my query.

“And haul it from house to house? Where would I have room for stuff like that?” “I wouldn’t have imagined that you’d ever want it.”

She had no keepsakes of her own, no photos from her childhood or before she married my father. Maybe they never existed, maybe her practice stemmed from her mother’s immigrant experience, leaving everything behind to come to the U.S. as a young woman.

Our family migrated cross country when I was six, then the length of California two years later. In the southern beach town we subsequently called home, we moved from one side of town to the other, from rental to rental, eight times in ten years. Last year’s memorabilia became this move’s dispensable clutter. After my brother and I left home, my parents moved to a small mobile home and shed any remaining residue of our childhoods in a final cut.

Is my behavior hereditary or dictated by circumstances? Frequent moves emerge as a theme, a rationale—for my grandmother, my mother, myself. I’ve spent all of my adult life in San Diego, but I relocated often within the city: from apartment to apartment to house and back, from roommate to roommate to solo to husband and child, and back again. My last apartment was less than 400 square feet, and my current home these past twenty-plus years just twice that. Belongings have had to be scrutinized and prioritized each time, anything superfluous relegated to recycling bags or trash cans. Most of it was superfluous.

8.
There are exceptions. My mother gave me some odds and ends for my first apartment when I was eighteen. Most are gone and forgotten, but I still use her cast iron pot, a wooden spoon and spatula. I have a tiny bracelet of pale pink beads spelling out my name that was put on my wrist at birth for identification. A beaded necklace and a macramé keychain that my daughter made as a child, a refrigerator magnet—a flower pot that says “Grandma”—from my grandson, a pencil drawing made by a house sitter of two beloved and long-departed cats in yin/yang position. I have a potato stamp—now shriveled—on my kitchen window sill, a heart inked in red, that my husband made for a long-ago valentine’s day.

My mother made exceptions too. I had a favorite doll, Baby Boo, from around age three. When I outgrew and abandoned it, my mother put it away and passed it on for a cousin who was born when I was ten. My aunt kept Baby Boo too and presented it to me in a new hand-made outfit when my daughter was born. Now my daughter has it in safekeeping for my great-granddaughter.

9.
For a time I saved political buttons. I had hundreds, going back to the sixties, peace and justice themed, anti-war and feminism: “Bread not bombs,” “Jane Wyman was Right,” “Shirley Chisholm for President,” “ERA Yes,” “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” They lived in a basket on a bookshelf, where I could toss in new ones, show them off to friends. When I stopped collecting buttons, I exiled them to a shoebox in the closet until even that affronted my anti-materialist sense of order. I gave them to the Peace Center to sell at a fundraising event. I kept a button from a Greek restaurant near the university that was being evicted from its space thirty years ago. It’s message—“Skatah Happens”—needs no translation and is eternally relevant.

10.
My mother died at sixty. My father and I went through her things together, and he urged me to take whatever I wanted of her clothes and shoes before he donated them. I took two hand-knit capes, nothing more. I’ve never worn them, but I can’t bring myself to consign her exquisite workmanship to the Goodwill bag. I kept her jewelry box, a white naugahyde case filled with cheap costume jewelry. I gave the necklaces, bracelets, and clip-on earrings to my daughter for dress-up play. They didn’t last long, but I’ve used the box these past forty years. I kept her wedding ring, but it was stolen when my house was burglarized. A lesson about the impermanence of material objects?

I kept a simple gold band, her only keepsake from her father, engraved with his initials. It survived the burglary—either I was wearing it at the time or the thieves missed it. Now it’s worn thin and smooth, the initials erased by time and wear.

11.
My past selves don’t signify who I am now. I don’t seek to deny them or run from them, but I harbor little nostalgia for the “good old days” and their tangible reminders. I understand why people save diaries, letters, and photographs, why they treasure keepsakes and talismans, but for me it would be false sentimentality. The past is past. What was, was.

When I started writing I mined my past for material, choosing what and how much I would explore and divulge. Very little as it turned out; that wasn’t where I wanted to go.

Virginia Woolf begins her memoir with her earliest recollection—“red and purple flowers on a black ground—my mother’s dress.” She could still visualize them, recall them as anemones, fifty-some years later. Proust’s reminiscences of childhood were evoked by taste and smell—a cookie dipped into a cup of tea. He didn’t need a relic to jog his brain, a wind-up madeleine on the mantel.

My memories don’t require palpable placeholders, strings tied around my finger. They pop up with a spontaneous prompt—a familiar taste or smell, a date on the calendar, a remark overheard—or out of nowhere, unbidden while I’m walking or gardening. I follow their trails of breadcrumbs, signposts to an as yet unknown destination; one thing leading to another and another. Or not.

My recall isn’t what it once was, and some day it may no longer be accessible at all. I hope I can accept that internal divestiture, the culmination of a life of not saving stuff, with equanimity. Or with smug satisfaction that I’ve cleared both physical and psychic decks of clutter and cobwebs from ages ten, sixteen and forty-two to make room for here and now. At seventy-four I’m as uninterested in recovering my past as I am my old “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” button.

We wanted to escape the family misery, and we were going to do it by moving out and getting our own place to live. That’s how we’d ended up here, walking from room to room and nodding our heads as Brian Covington, our potential new landlord, pointed out the big windows and high ceilings. “Isn’t it wonderful, the way the light pours in?” he said.

“Yes, very nice,” said my brother David, though it was obviously much more than nice. I kept silent, trying to play it cool.

“Come and see the view,” said Covington. He pulled open the door to the terrace, and the three of us stepped outside and lined up at the rail. Across the street was the East River, gray and muscular, like liquid stone. Cars slid down the FDR Drive like colored beads. To our right, the buildings of midtown looked almost close enough to touch. The scene was so absolutely, heartbreakingly beautiful that I felt a dull ache begin in my chest: this apartment, this terrace, I realized, could give us the strength we needed to break free.

“And you’re okay with fifteen hundred a month?” asked David, naming the amount we’d discussed on the phone.

Covington pressed his palms together and smiled. He was a peculiar sight: tall and very heavy—alarmingly heavy—dressed in a skin-tight undershirt and gym shorts about to burst. His voice was high and self-consciously cultivated; it sounded as if it were coming from an entirely different person, a movie actress from the 1930s, floating in a diaphanous white gown. “Well, I could get more, of course, but I just love having young people around. It’s such an exciting, inspiring, time of life.” With that, his expression turned delicate, almost a little vulnerable. “And to be completely honest, I need people who can work with me just a little bit.” He explained that he had taken this apartment and the one next door with the understanding that he would knock down the walls and combine them into a single unit, but after all the documents were finalized and all the permits arranged, management had changed its mind and blocked construction. Now he was suing the building in court. He lived in the other apartment and had decided to sublet this one out till the case was finished.

“How long will that be?” asked David.

“Their only strategy is delay, delay, delay.” Nevertheless, he didn’t want any
complications, so he needed us to use the building’s service entrance instead of the lobby. And if anyone asked, we were his cousins, here on a visit.

My hand shook with excitement as I wrote him a check. He gave us a set of keys, and David and I hurried out before he could change his mind. Safely out of sight in the elevator, we grabbed each other and began jumping up and down, too frenzied to contain ourselves any longer. I was twenty-three, David twenty-two, and we were going to live in an apartment with not one but two fancy marble bathrooms, where the water came out of silver spigots shaped like the necks of swans.

Only later, out on the street, did I consider. “Does the situation feel a little weird to you?”

It wasn’t just the idea of sneaking in the back entrance, or passing ourselves off as Covington’s relatives. Every other place we’d seen up to this point had been a dank and lightless walk-up somewhere deep in the boroughs. This was a two-bedroom-two-bath in a brand-new luxury tower by the river. It was worth four times what we were paying.

David shrugged. “We’re going to live in the kind of place we want to live in, the kind of place we deserve to live in. And we’re getting out of Hell House. That’s all that matters.”

Hell House was what he called our parents’ apartment, a four-bedroom duplex in
midtown that had once been every bit as grand as Covington’s, but in recent years had turned dark and sad. Our father was trying to pull himself back from a series of legal and financial disasters that had left him in a state of nervous collapse, struggling to keep his law practice open while taking a bewildering number of psychiatric medications. On many days, he wasn’t well enough to go to court and he lay in front of the television, smoking. When it was particularly bad, he played the radio at the same time, wrapping himself in a protective cone of noise that
nothing could penetrate. Unable to sleep at night, he went on hyper-charged eating binges, consuming absolutely everything in the refrigerator, even the mustard, the ketchup, the butter—licking soy sauce from the palm of his hand.

I’d like to say that we were kind to him, but the truth is that after so many years—six? seven?—we probably weren’t, at least not all the time. What if he jeopardized his law license and lost this second chance? What if he never got better? Our mother baited him and he yelled back, cruel exchanges that froze me in my seat, unable to move. I felt her pain and his like alternating blows of a hammer, and was therefore completely unable to feel my own. When the screaming was over, I ran upstairs to my bedroom and worked on my novel, which was about us, of course, with only the thinnest of disguises: how our father had gotten tangled up with a drug-dealing client and dragged into a DEA investigation that went on for years, till he was penniless and heartbroken. How he went to prison and came out crazy. Later in the night, overcome with guilt, I would erase the most painful parts of whatever I’d written, and the next day, I would look at the confused and listless material that was left on the page and castigate myself for being doomed to failure, to silence.

After getting back from Covington’s, David and I spent the afternoon throwing our things into trash bags and stuffing them into David’s old station wagon. A part of me wanted to acknowledge the moment—we were moving out; our childhoods were ending!—but everyone else seemed blithely uninterested. Our mother sat at the table in her nightgown, reading the Times, looking exhausted and preoccupied. Our father lay on the living room floor watching TV and eating ice cream from the carton in something like a trance. He had gotten slim in prison and was now really heavy again; not quite like Covington, but close. “Okay, we’re going,” I said to
him.

“So long,” he said now, not even looking up.

It was a disappointing moment, especially so because he had been the one to hand me the slip with Covington’s name and number. That bit of paper had felt like a temporary return of his old self, the father with a nearly magical ability to solve any problem, the father that cared. But now he was gone again.

Dusk was falling as we drove to Covington’s, purple and anxious. The doorman stationed at the back entrance watched with wry bemusement as we loaded the service elevator. We told him we were Brian’s cousins, and that seemed to amuse him even more. I shouldered a loose mattress; David carried another; we toted up our garbage bags stuffed with clothes. Once in the apartment, our possessions looked ratty and stained against the brilliant white walls, but I took solace in unboxing my notebooks, setting up the card table in my bedroom, putting together the desktop computer. I was wagering everything on the novel going better here, because I was wagering everything on the novel. In some sort of I had developed a confused belief that the novel was the door I would walk through into my real life, the life in which I was no longer angry or frightened or sad—the life in which I was a writer.

Just then, I heard Brian’s voice. “Is that you? Are you there?” I went out to the living
room and found David looking around, puzzled. “The intercom on the wall,” said Brian’s voice. “Press the button and speak.”

I walked over to the wall and hit the talk button. “Yes, we’re here.”

He let himself in a minute later, without bothering to knock—he held his own copy of the key unselfconsciously in his hand. He’d forgotten to explain the situation with the electricity, he said: he got the bill for both apartments, so when it came he’d tell us how much and we’d pay him. Sure, no problem, we said. Then he showed us the big multi-line phone system and told us we could use one of his lines, which would save us from having to deal with the phone company. The phone system and the intercom were all he’d managed to install before the conflict with management. Great, thank you, we said, but he seemed reluctant to leave. Barefoot, in the readyto-burst undershirt and gym shorts, he suddenly radiated a deep loneliness. “So, what is it you gentlemen do for a living, exactly?” he asked.

David was working in a lab and applying to medical schools; I was working as a tour
guide for a Japanese travel company so I could focus on my novel. Mentioning the novel put me in instant agony—only David and a couple of my close friends knew about it. But I wanted Brian to understand that we were artistic and cultured and thus worthy of the apartment, the big windows and beautifully finished wooden floors. I wanted him to like us.

“Oh, you’re a writer?” said Brian, looking delighted. “How wonderful! I’m a writer,
too!” He explained that he was working on a memoir of his experiences as the madam of a brothel here in town, a very exclusive place. The book was an explosive tell-all, catnip for the gossip columns; he had an agent, and there was a movie producer in the wings.

“Wait, a brothel?” asked David, slowly.

“A very high-class establishment,” said Brian.

David and I sat in silence, trying to fit the delicate pieces together. We had grown up around criminals, our father’s clients, and we were finding it a little scary to leave that world completely behind. And now here was Brian, from exactly the same planet of misfits, somebody we could really talk to. We looked at each other and burst out laughing at our brilliant luck.

Brian gave a theatrical sigh. “I ran it out of this apartment, actually. Not inside, it was all outcall. But I would work the phones here with a couple of girls to help me out.”

“It’s going to be a bestseller!” I said.

He kept going, obviously enjoying himself: the money, the stress, the incredibly delicate managerial problems. He sounded polished, as if he’d gone over this material before; I imagined him telling these same stories in the movie producer’s office, radiating the same enthusiasm and an odd sort of sincerity: unlike us, he was happy being himself; he wasn’t ashamed. “I have no time for moralizing hypocrites,” he said to us. “Sex is a business like any other. My clients were paying a lot of money for perfect service and I made sure they got it. We were so busy that I
couldn’t leave the phone to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t take a day off. We ordered in three meals a day and I ate while I was answering calls. Look how heavy I got.”

“I’ve always wondered who goes into that kind of work,” said David.

“My fucked-up children, the family I never had,” said Brian, suddenly wistful,
remembering. “I spoiled them rotten. I let them take complete advantage of me. And then, since I went to jail, not a word from any of them.”

It should have been obvious, but I hadn’t thought of it. A wire seemed to pull tight inside my chest; my smile disappeared.

Brian shrugged it off. “Really, it was a kind of vacation,” he continued. “They put me in the gay men’s section, and we spent most of the time vogueing.” He started to catwalk across the living room, massive yet surprisingly nimble, sucking in his cheeks, slitting his eyes, striking one ridiculous pose after another. There was no resisting the sheer silliness; our relief bubbled up, overflowed. We howled with laughter again, on and on, doubled up, nearly hysterical.

That night, I lay in bed, unable to sleep, feeling the strangeness of the new room press in on me. The place looked the opposite of a bordello—pristine white walls, blonde wood floors—but it still felt wrong, and I wondered if Brian was lying and something had happened here. Why would one man need two apartments, so many bedrooms? I thought I heard the front door opening, but when I padded out, the place was full of nothing but moonlight, glowing. I put the chain on the door. Then I used the big multi-line phone to call home and got my father. “How’s it going?” I asked, as if it weren’t midnight.

“Okay,” he said. The television was on in the background.

“So, we’re all unpacked,” I said. I wanted to tell him that we’d made a mistake, that we were coming home. At the same time, I wanted him to say that he missed us, that he was feeling better and the future would be bright. But the TV just got louder. He would do that sometimes, turn up the dial when he didn’t want to talk.

“I’m in the middle of a program,” he said.

“Okay, sure, maybe tomorrow.”

“Yeah, tomorrow.”

Tomorrow meant never, of course, but that was okay: he was still there, still my father. I went back to bed and slept, and in the morning, things looked better. The apartment was filled with light and a gentle silence utterly unlike our parents’ place. I pressed my hand against the wall, just to feel the calm in it, clean and white and solid. David was already in the living room, watching the sky through the window, fingertips to the glass. We drank our coffee on the terrace, looking out at the river and the tall buildings, believing once again in the extraordinary luck of it
all. Our lives were going to be purposeful and orderly and good. We were going to be happy.

***

Brian came over quite a bit to update us on developments with his memoir. He would walk in unannounced and stand in our living room barefoot, in the same grotesquely tight undershirt and shorts that he always wore, talking breathlessly in a bemused monologue that sometimes segued into a real monologue from a Bette Davis movies. His agent was pressuring him to name his big celebrity clients, but it was against the madam’s code of honor and he wouldn’t do it—only maybe hint, sort of. The movie producer was coming to town and wanted to take him to lunch. Everyone was pushing him to finish as quickly as he could, but he could only type so fast and no faster—which reminded him of this one time when a client, a very
famous actor whose name cannot be mentioned, called and said…

We loved these visits. Laughter felt like hope to us—though looking back, I can see that it was really sorrow that made us howl so hard. Brian had gone to prison and come out with a shrug and a book that was going to sell a million-gazillion copies, while our father had come out broken, able to do nothing but sit in the dark and cry. Our father never talked about his time behind bars, and I was too afraid to ask. Prison was the mysterious blank around which everything in our family revolved.

And yet there was something a little off-kilter about Brian, too. We were dimly aware that he never knocked, that he used his own key as if the apartment were still his own, but we didn’t really think about it until one night when we were sitting on our thrift shop couch in the living room, talking about nothing very important. Suddenly we heard Brian’s voice emanating from the intercom. “That’s a terrible idea!” he blurted, as if he couldn’t restrain himself. We laughed uproariously—it was like a sitcom, sort of—but when the implication sunk in, we fell silent: he was using the device to listen in. A couple of days later, he said something else that made us think he might be eavesdropping on our phone calls too: after all, we shared the phone system; all he had to do on his end was hit a button and lift the receiver.

David and I talked it over in my bedroom, a safe distance from the intercom. “I don’t
know. Maybe we should let it slide for now,” he said. We were getting an unbelievable bargain, and we didn’t have a lease, so we shouldn’t risk offending him. “He has boundary problems,” said David. “But that doesn’t make him a bad person.”

“He seems lonely,” I said.

Brian and I were alike that way. Fall was coming on, the summer tourism season waning, and I had more time to work on my novel, which meant that I paced the wonderfully peaceful apartment, a squeamish panic churning inside me. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I would pounce on the keyboard and type furiously, then reread, confused by the picture of my family that I saw there: childishly greedy, vain. I would spring up and start to pace again, thinking of my father when I was a little boy, how he smelled so sweetly of aftershave and hair pomade, and then I would go back to the computer and start deleting, just as I’d done back in Hell House.

So I was glad when Brian called to pass the time. He was having trouble writing, too. Chapter Twelve was killing him. Writing was so maddening, he sometimes wished he was back answering the phones, but then he remembered Rikers and began typing again.

After hanging up, I stood out on the terrace and watched the yellow taxis stream up First avenue, trying to psych myself up to go back inside and write. Life owed me this novel, I told myself. I just had to be more like Brian, more—I didn’t know how to phrase it, even in my innermost thoughts. Greedy was the only word I could come up with. More greedy.

That night, after dinner, I heard a knock on the door. Brian was in the hallway, dressed in khaki pants and a button-down shirt—the first time I’d seen him in anything other than the undershirt-and-gym-shorts combo. “I’m taking a little break, going to Atlantic City,” he said. The heliport was just across the street, by the river—it was one of the reasons he’d chosen this building. The casino flew him gratis. “The beauty of being a high roller,” he said, and walked off to the elevator.

I’d seen those helicopters rising from the little fenced in helipad, looking so incredibly urgent. Now I went out on the terrace to watch a succession of them landing and taking off into the patent-leather darkness. I didn’t know which was his, but I lingered on, suddenly full of a strange and convoluted hope. Brian liked us. Maybe he’d introduce me to his agent, or let me work on his movie, or get me a job with his producer. Maybe David and I could become his two latest fucked-up children, a new-and-improved version of the family he’d never had.

There was something oddly calming in this idea, and the writing started to go a little better. Whenever I began to panic, I would say to myself Greedy, more greedy, and think of Brian typing in the other apartment down the hall, and that would keep me from hitting the delete button. Slowly, very slowly, the pages began adding up. And then, one night, Brian knocked and said he was going to Atlantic City by bus.

“No helicopter?”

“All booked up.” He asked if I could walk his dog if he didn’t manage to make it home
by morning. He’d call to let us know, and he’d leave the door open so we wouldn’t need a key.

I’d seen the dog, a horrible little shih Tzu that he carried tucked under his arm like a handbag, but of course I said yes. And then David got back from the lab and we did the obvious: walked down the hall to Brian’s apartment to take a look.

I’m not sure what we expected; something luxurious and a little outrageous, probably. What we found instead was a weird mirror-image of our own place: a single cheap couch in the middle of the vast living room and a bare mattress on the floor of one of the bedrooms, and virtually nothing else. The undershirt and gym shorts were on the floor. There was an enormous walk in closet, but almost nothing hanging in it. We went back to the living room and stood in the middle of all that nothing, his little dog running around our feet.

“It’s creepier than finding a body,” said David, looking around at the bare white walls.

I can’t say why, but it took tremendous mental effort to make the obvious connection, a feeling like walking up a flight of stairs in complete darkness, backward. “He’s in Atlantic City trying to make money,” I said.

“Everyone in a casino is trying to make money,” said David. “That’s why you go.”

“No, I mean he has no money. He’s broke.”

We’d both seen the casino buses idling at the curb, a line of elderly retirees filing on. They took three hours to reach Atlantic City and gave you a boxed lunch and forty dollars in tokens to use in the slot machines. Brian was riding one of those buses at that very moment, the boxed lunch on his lap. David’s eyes widened. “I don’t want to go back to Hell House.”

“We could rent a real apartment,” I said.

“Yeah, a dump in Bayshore, maybe, with a ninety-minute commute each way.”

“We could talk to him.”

“What good would that do? He’s a fucking liar.”

We retreated back to our own living room and flopped on the couch to think about things, talking in circles for the rest of the night—we were good at those circles, the endless restatement of the same question over and over again till it felt less menacing. The one thing we didn’t really talk about was why Brian had given us access to his apartment in the first place. Maybe he was too panicked to give it any thought, or maybe he wanted us to know, so he wouldn’t have to pretend any more. He was saying he needed us as much as we needed him. We could work together.

He never called us about the dog, so when he came by a few days later to collect the rent we all pretended that we hadn’t been inside the apartment. He was his usual bemused self, back in the undershirt and shorts. “You boys are such a pleasure to have around, I just want you to stay forever,” he said, and then offered us a deal: we could prepay the next month and he would give us a discount.

“How much?” asked David, his expression turning shrewd.

“Oh, I don’t know. Say, twenty percent?”

“You’re on.”

We did it again a couple of weeks later, when Brian dropped by to say that he found
himself mysteriously low on cash, and then again, a few weeks after that. We were now three months ahead on our rent. Then a few weeks later, we were four. “No more,” I told David.

“What if something goes wrong? We’ll lose all our money.”

“For an apartment like this, I’ll take that chance.”

It was then that the lights went out, and we lived in darkness for four days. At first, Brian told us that it was a mechanical failure, and only later that it was a billing problem. We had been paying him our share every month, so what had happened? A terrible, ridiculous accounting error. We passed over the question of where our money had gone, and in return got to listen in on the phone as he negotiated with the electric company, a bravura display of what could only be called genius. Brian was the most persuasive, reasonable, likable, nobly aggrieved and simultaneously menacing customer on the planet. He somehow managed to jump out of customer
service and work his way up the chain of command to a vice president in charge of something or other, with whom he arrived at a settlement that would cost us only pennies on the dollar. But to lock in the bargain we’d have to pay the bill right away. Would we give him the money? If we did, he’d give us a free month’s rent, which was worth a lot more.

We had no choice, really. We were already paid up four months in advance and couldn’t live in the dark all that time. So now we had five months free living ahead of us, which was good because both our bank accounts were finally empty.
I stopped by my parents’ apartment soon after, looking for some reassurance that things would be okay. But my father was in the exact same place we had left him when we moved out, watching TV in his underwear, and I felt all the old emotions rush right back in: homesickness and unrequited love and hopeless sorrow, and something that I couldn’t identify as anger but nevertheless sucked the air from my lungs. Plus, I was a traitor for having moved out, and also a fool. I crouched down beside him. “So where do you know Brian Covington from, anyway?”

He didn’t look up. “Your landlord? I was telling someone how you were looking for an apartment and he said he had one.”

“And where was that?”

“An elevator in the criminal court building.” He held up a pill bottle. “Want one?”

***

Brian came to us with a letter from the building saying that management knew he was subletting to us, and that doing so was in violation of his lease. He told us that, given the delicacy of the litigation already underway, we’d have to go. It was almost a relief to me, but David looked upset, as if he’d never expected this day would come. “Well, at least give us back our money,” he said, his voice warbling with emotion. We still had a four month credit.

“I will,” said Brian, “but I’ll need a little time.”

“We need it now, or we can’t afford to move.”

Brian’s expression grew haughty. He drew himself up to his full height, towering over us.

“Listen, I’d love for you two guys to be the wonderful little brothers I never had, but I can’t afford you right now.”

“What’s that mean?” asked David, trembling with anger.

“It means that if you act like a brat, I won’t give it to you, ever.”

That was our out. I got David to agree that we would leave that weekend, provided that Brian gave us a letter committing to pay us back the six thousand dollars he still owed us. Brian was fine with the idea; he wrote the letter right then and there, handed it to me, and walked out.

Of course, it was ridiculous—deep down we knew he would never pay us, and we talked about it all night, letting the anger rise and dissipate and rise again. At our worst moments, we moved away from the intercom so we could scheme about revenge.

I thought we were just blowing off steam, but the next day, David came into my bedroom and told me he’d just heard Brian’s front door slam and the elevator leave. If the door was unlocked like last time, we could get in there.

“Why?” I asked, my heart starting to catch in my chest.

“Maybe he’s got our money somewhere.”

The door was indeed unlocked, and we slipped inside. The dog ignored us. We opened closets, pulled out drawers, careful but quick. Our concentration was total, even as our hearts skittered in our bodies. We found no cash, but we came across a couple of cardboard boxes, one of which contained Brian’s memoir. On top was some correspondence from a literary agent, saying that he might be willing to look at the manuscript again when it was finished, but not before. “That fucking liar,” I whispered.

“Take a look at this,” said David, who was sifting through the other box. Court papers: the legal battle with the building was an eviction over nonpayment, not a disagreement over construction—Brian had never paid his rent, from the moment he moved in. It turned out that he wasn’t finished with his other legal problems, either. He had been released from prison temporarily while the court decided an issue involving his medical treatment in jail. He had argued that he wasn’t getting proper medical attention as a prisoner. This led us to medical reports: he was HIV positive. There were test results with numbers that David seemed to appreciate: “Not great,” he said. “Pretty bad, actually.” Brian was sick, though you couldn’t see
it. He was going to die. And then finally we came on a letter addressed to the judge, asking for leniency. And it was from another judge, a judge in North Carolina, and he used a different name for Brian, Morris, Morris Guller, and he called him My brother. And he asked for mercy.

Brian had a family, a real one.

Before my father was sentenced, I had written a letter exactly like that, asking for mercy. I’d fantasized about writing something angry, telling how he had been persecuted for years by over-zealous prosecutors, our family destroyed by an investigation that was more like a one-sided war of attrition, a carpet bombing. But I knew that the judge wouldn’t want to hear any of that, so I wrote instead about what a good parent my father was and how much I loved him and would miss him if he had to go to prison. I wrote it in a sort of blank state, watching my hand move, as if I weren’t a whole person but just a collection of limbs. I did not understand mercy then. I was ashamed to ask for it, to need it. I was angered by my own desire to give it. To my father. To myself. And now to Brian.

We put the papers back in the box and moved on to the next room. In a couple of days, we would have to pack up the station wagon and drive back to our parents’ apartment in order to resume our lives, the ones we had left behind. But right now, we were burglars in an empty house, afraid to stay too long but reluctant to leave, looking for something good to steal.

I can hear Rips pounding on the living room window. “This will be the last time you lock me out of your house!”

“If you break that window, I’ll call the police!” my mother shouts.

He pounds a few more times for good measure, then leaves.

My mother finds me in my room on the computer, researching strategies for stopping different types of stalkers: simple obsessional, rejected suitor, resentful, delusional, erotomanic, narcissist, paranoid, those with false victimization syndrome.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I’m trying to figure out which type of stalker Rips is, but he sounds like all of them.”

“He is something else. I remember how he was so proud of himself for calling here every hour, on the hour. He told me how he followed my car one time from a bar up north to a certain house. But I had never been to that bar; he must’ve mistaken someone else’s car for mine.” She pauses. “What did I do to deserve this?”

I can’t think of anything. “I don’t know. You don’t deserve this.”

“I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment.”

“Why don’t you get a restraining order?”

“Who knows what he’d do in retaliation? I think he’ll stop if we’re patient.”

“Some Web sites say stalkers might not leave you alone until you move or until they murder their prey.”

She sighs. “You know what he reminds me of?”

“What?”

“The Cheshire Cat.”

“Why?”

“His smile.”

I search for a picture of the Cheshire Cat on the Internet. Sure enough, its wide, narcissistic smile resembles that of Rips. They are both jokers, except the joke is only funny to them. I’m a cat lover, but the Cheshire is one cat I’ve never liked, considering how it treats Alice in Wonderland—giving her wrong directions and framing her for things she doesn’t do. I’m beginning to suspect that Rips enjoys torturing us, like a cat playing with a mouse before eating it. I feel as though we’re trapped in a fairy tale like Alice in Wonderland, which has always been my least favorite fairy tale because Wonderland is not at all wonderful and the story is not really a fairy tale—it’s a waking nightmare.

****

Summer comes, my mother is lonely, and the stalking doesn’t quit. “I’ve changed,” Rips says, although he doesn’t say if it’s for better or worse. She finally gives in to his pleas and agrees to give him another chance. I point out that if this doesn’t work out, it’ll be even harder to try to break up with him the second time. She knows this, but is tired of him stalking her and knows he will stop if she goes back to him. “Do you really think this will work out?” I ask. She says no.

By the end of July my mother says he is having difficulty controlling his temper again. In early August I come home from work and listen to messages. My mother drives up in her car, looking upset. I go outside to meet her.

“Rips left a snotty message for you,” I say. “What’s going on?”

“Look what he did to my car.”

The first thing I notice is a large dent above the front passenger-side tire. Then I see scuff marks along the hood. “What happened?”

“I went to his house and he yelled at me for being late for our fishing trip,” she says.

“That’s when I told him, ‘We’re through. For good.’”

“You broke up with him again?”

“Yes. I got into my car to leave, but he leaped across the hood from the passenger side, reached through my window, and pulled the keys out of the ignition so I couldn’t leave. He threw the keys as far as he could into the woods.”

“Wow. That’s scary. Good thing you didn’t go on vacation with him. You might not have come back.” I am trying to stay calm, but inside I’m wondering how Rips is going to take this second breakup.

“I was freaked out, but I told him to go get the keys and he finally did, and I drove away. I turned around and went back to get my air mattress when I realized I had forgotten it. That’s when he pointed out the dent he caused when he leaped across my car.”

“You should report this to the police,” I say. “When he took away your keys, isn’t that false imprisonment? Weren’t you scared?”

“Of course I was scared. But now I’m more angry than scared because of this dent. I wish I could report it to my insurance company.”

“You mean your insurance doesn’t cover damage caused by out-of-control ex-boyfriends flying through the air?”

That’s when I see a familiar white car slowing down and pulling into the driveway. It’s too late to run inside, so we stand ground by my mother’s car.

“What are you doing here?” my mother demands as he gets out of his car. “I told you I don’t want anything to do with you. Especially after the dent you put in my car.”

He looks at her car in mock surprise. “Dent? What dent?” He laughs. “A deer could’ve done that.”

“You need to leave.”

“Hey, I brought your dog leash back.” He hands her a leash she had given him years ago. We don’t currently have a dog.

“Good, now go.”

“Rips, you’re not welcome here anymore,” I chime in, and eventually, with a smirk and a shrug, he leaves.

My mother reports the incident two days later. I expect that the police won’t understand why she didn’t report it right away, but I am surprised when the investigating officer, a young man about my age, tells her she needs to stop bothering the police about things like this.

When the deputy comes back to our house after getting Rips’s side of the story, he is businesslike, crisp, and cool. My mother is nervous and frightened.

“There are a few things you told me that are a little shady,” the deputy says. “It seems unlikely to me that he would be able to leave that dent and still leap over your car. The impact should have stopped him.”

She is upset that he doesn’t seem to believe her. “He did it, I am absolutely sure. I heard it. Then all of a sudden his face was in front of mine through the windshield.”

“And you said you went back to his house after he leaped over your car? You were unclear about that.”

“I went back to get my air mattress—”

“How long was it before you went back?” “Just a few minutes; I turned around.”

“And you didn’t notice the dent until then?”

He continues to question her about what happened, concluding she has no proof that Rips caused the dent. She grows more upset with each question.

“Were you afraid when he jumped over your car?”

“I—yes—of course I was.”

“But you drove back after he found your keys and gave them back to you. That’s not going to look good to the district attorney. And since you waited two days to report what happened on Saturday, that’s not going to look good either. I know you said you were afraid, but why did you wait so long?”

“Everyone reacts differently to fear….” she struggles to explain. She would explain it better to me later, when she wasn’t so upset: She was angry that he had her air mattress, and she stood her ground to get it back. Fear is an emotion. It doesn’t always yield actions that are reasonable or logical. If everyone had the typical reaction to fear, there would be no heroes in the world. Firefighters wouldn’t rush inside burning buildings. Police officers would run from criminals instead of racing to apprehend them. And not all women run away when they’re afraid.

She was also afraid of the stigma and other consequences of “tattling” on him.

“Survival mode,” I offer. “She was in survival mode.”

My mother is nearly crying now, and the officer says, “I wish I could understand, but I can’t.”

How could he understand? As a white male, 250 pounds and over six feet tall, in a position of authority, he has probably never been bullied in his entire life. He is dominant in every way.

“And on Saturday during the fight, was he swearing or being physical?”

“No, he wasn’t, not exactly— ”

“See, when I picture something like that, he would be swearing, threatening you, swinging his fists….”

“He wasn’t like that. He’s very controlling. He wouldn’t take no for an answer; he wouldn’t let me leave!”

The deputy’s point is that in the eyes of the law, Saturday’s altercation was just an argument. The police can only do something if Rips is physically violent or swears, we are told. Therefore, we can’t stop him from calling or stopping by. He can trespass, he can stalk, he can call incessantly—as long as he is somewhat friendly about it. We can’t do a thing about it, and neither will the police. Not unless there’s a restraining order. And never mind Rips’s history of previous stalking; we won’t be able to obtain a restraining order until we have recent documentation of his behavior.

So we have to wait.

The deputy says he has told Rips we want no contact with him, yet he has also explained to him that he has the right to call and stop by because there is no restraining order.

“We’re sitting ducks,” my mother says.

We barricade the doors that night.

****

The phone calls start two days later, and by Thursday Rips is driving over two or three times a day. We ignore the phone calls and hide when he knocks on the door. He leaves after a few minutes but returns within the hour.

He leaves so many messages the mailbox becomes filled. The content is all the same: “I love you, I miss you, I’m sorry; want to do something later?” Like nothing has happened. Like they haven’t broken up. Just kiss and make up.

Things don’t escalate to terrifying until Friday night.

I am scheduled to work late, and by the time I get home, a thunderstorm is building. Rips calls at 11:00 p.m. but doesn’t leave a message. I figure he will be done for the night—even stalkers need their downtime—and my mother has opted not to go out, so we don’t have to worry about Rips driving to all the area bars searching for her like he usually does.

The storm starts after midnight and sounds like a bowling alley overhead. I wish my mother goodnight—she is watching the storm out the back window, sans lights—insert earplugs and lie down. But I can’t sleep; the storm is too rowdy. Every time I drift off, I have nightmares that someone is breaking in.

I’ve been trying to sleep for half an hour when my bedroom door opens and my mother tiptoes in.

“What’s the matter?” I ask as she goes to the window. At first I think she wants a better look at the storm.

“Nothing,” she whispers. “Lie back down.”

Realization. “Someone’s out there?” I crawl out of bed and join her.

Rips’s truck is parked in the driveway. We can see it during the flashes of lightning, rocking in the wind and lashed by shots of rain. I begin to quiver. “What the hell is he doing here?”

“I don’t know. I was downstairs unplugging my computer, and when I came up I thought I heard a knock on the door. All the lights were off. Then I heard it again. I saw him walking around outside. I think he went back inside his truck.”

Then why doesn’t he leave? My mother has pulled a corner of the blinds away from the window, but we can’t see inside his truck. The lightning paints the windows of his truck black, like the contrast of an x-ray. I hope he cannot see us looking through the window.

My mother is frightened, too. “Go back to your bed,” she whispers.

I am too scared to go to bed. I stand by the landline phone in my room. If Rips breaks in, I want to be ready to call.

“Is he still here? Should I call?”

“He’s still here…don’t call yet.”

I stand in the dark, shaking, and wonder how many other times he has parked in our driveway at night and sat there while we slept.

The minutes go by and he doesn’t leave. “Please let me call,” I beg.

At least ten minutes after my mother came into my room, she tells me to call 911. I explain the situation to the dispatcher. When we look back into the rain, Rips has gone.

****

Rips is awake right away Saturday morning, leaving a message for my mother asking if she wants to go for a bike ride and “discuss some things.” When she doesn’t return the call, he drives over. The pattern continues on Sunday: phone calls and visits. He brings his Harley to tempt her. She used to love riding with him.

By Sunday night I am beginning to crack from the stress of being a prisoner in my own home. My heart is racing, my muscles are in knots, I am craving chocolate and chicken noodle soup, and I feel as though I’m having a heart attack every time the phone rings.

Monday is my day off from work and Rips works until 3:00 p.m., so I enjoy a few golden, worry-free hours.

My mother and I have plans to go to town right after she gets done with work at 5:00 p.m. I am walking past the living room at ten minutes to five when I see Rips’s truck pull in.

I dive for the stairwell and check the time. 4:53. I hear him knocking at the door. My mother works from home and has told him many times not to bother her while she’s working, that she doesn’t even get upstairs from her basement office until after 5:00. Even when they were together, Rips would often call or show up around five to check up on her.

I return to the top of the stairs and discover that by peeking at the reflection on the television screen, I can verify that his truck is still there. Through the leaves of a bushy houseplant on the ledge, I can see there is no one at the door. He must’ve gone back to his truck to wait.

But he doesn’t knock again. His truck still sits in the driveway when my mother finishes work and meets me on the stairs. We decide we have no choice but to wait him out. A standoff.

By 5:20 he is still there, and we are weighing our options. We are afraid that if we call the police, Rips will be gone by the time they arrive.

At 5:30 Rips has been here almost forty minutes. I call our neighbor and explain the situation. She says she will take her dog for a walk and take her cell phone along. Ten minutes later, she calls back to inform us that she called the police and they are already in our driveway talking to Rips.

My mother and I go upstairs and see Rips leaning against the police car. Casual, like he has every right to be here. I half expect him to light a cigarette.

Another squad car arrives, and then two officers come inside to talk to us. Not the deputy from last time. These officers have friendly faces and don’t make accusations as they listen to our side of the story. One of the officers says, “Rips kept telling us, Oh, she wants me here. We’re boyfriend and girlfriend. I said to him, ‘Does she know that?’”

These officers say Rips has no right to be on my mother’s property, no right to call, no right to even be on our road. What he’s been doing is considered trespassing, harassment, stalking.

“You should have no problem getting a restraining order after this,” one of them says.

****

Rips’s days of blatant stalking are over. Within forty-eight hours my mother and I have filed for temporary restraining orders against him. The following week is the hearing at which we will try to obtain long-term restraining orders.

Rips comes to the hearing. He objects to the injunction but doesn’t put up much fight. When the court commissioner asks if he’s had any contact with my mother after she and the police told him not to, he mumbles and finally answers, “I might’ve, I guess.”

“For me, this is a no-brainer,” says the court commissioner. “If someone tells you to leave them alone, you leave them alone.” He grants my mother the restraining order.

My restraining order request isn’t granted because I am not the primary target of Rips’s stalking. As the court commissioner puts it, I am “collateral damage.”

He talks to my mother and me after Rips is gone. “I’ve been doing this for thirty years, and I could tell right away that Rips was lying. He has Little Orphan Annie eyes.”

I am intrigued. “What does that mean?”

“Have you ever seen the comic strip Little Orphan Annie? Her eyes are tiny; there’s nothing there.”

“That’s what Rips’s eyes are like,” my mother agrees. “Most of the time he won’t even look at you. Maybe that’s why I didn’t know what color his eyes were when I filled out the paperwork asking for his physical description.”

He explains, “Domestic abuse is about control. Most of it has nothing to do with physical violence. It’s about telling you what to do, what not to do, what to wear, isolating you, keeping financial control. Be careful. Rips will do anything to try to fuck with you.”

****

At first Rips stays away from the house, but my mother has no such protection when she goes out to bars. The restraining order’s rules are unclear about protection at public places, although the court commissioner has told him he is supposed to leave when she is there first. But he doesn’t. He arrives at the bars after she does and tries to buy her drinks and talk to her. When this happens, she is forced to leave. Every time she leaves, he wins. Every time he startles her, he wins.

I am beginning to realize that a restraining order is truly just a piece of paper.

Over the next two weeks the stalking becomes more brazen. My mother is reluctant to call the police. I cut my hair short and paint my nails, then find myself wanting to bite them off. I want to disappear. I want to hide and not come out until this is all over. I want to go somewhere I’ll be safe, but I don’t want to leave the house because he strikes more often when I’m gone.

I fear for my own safety, but I fear even more for my mother’s.

After all, I am just collateral damage.

****

I know it’s just a matter of time before something bad happens. A week before Halloween, I come home from work at 9:30 p.m. excited to tell my mother that I sold three diamonds at my job as a jewelry salesperson. When I turn off the highway, there is a car sitting by the side of the road with its lights on. As I drive past, I look to see who it is—one can’t be too careful these days—and am surprised to see it is a sheriff’s car. I figure he is waiting by the corner to catch speeders, but as I turn into the driveway a half-mile down the road, I see his car turning around and coming my way.

I cut the engine, sit in darkness, and watch the police car drive past. It’s almost as though he was waiting to see that I got home safely. Something must be up. I look at the house, but the lights are on, my mother’s vehicles are in the driveway, and all seems quiet.

I unlock the house door and hear her talking on the phone. She sounds upset. When she sees me standing there, she interrupts her conversation and says, “Rips has been arrested.” She is telling her sister what happened, and from what I can hear, he has been charged with four counts of stalking. Count one: telephone message. Count two: He walked into the backyard where she was raking, and when she ran for the garage, he left a plastic bag hanging from the front door. The bag was filled with light bulbs.

It gets stranger. Count three: He returned when she was taking a bath. Wrapping a towel around herself when she heard him knocking, she opened the door as he was walking away and threw the bag of light bulbs into his open car door, then locked herself inside the house and finished her bath.

Count four: He returned a third time, leaving the bag of light bulbs in addition to another package filled with pill bottles. It was dark outside and when she opened the screen door, it felt as though someone was blocking it. She thought it was him, but then she realized he had moved her pumpkin in front of the door. That’s when she called the police.

My mother gets off the phone with her sister and tells me that the deputy who had originally handled her case in August had responded to tonight’s call.

“I explained to him the consequences of his actions back in August, and he actually apologized. He said I did a good job of reporting the restraining order violation. He waited here while another officer looked for Rips. He just left about ten minutes before you came home, after they found Rips at the bar.”

“Rips has already been arrested?”

“Yes. He’ll spend the night in jail and see the judge tomorrow to enter a plea.”

So right now he is property of the county jail. I shake my head when I realize a cop has followed me home on the one night I’m safe.

****

The restraining order is protecting us, all right. The phone calls, knocks on the door, white cars and blue trucks in the driveway have all stopped. I can walk around the yard without gauging how many steps it will take to run back to safety.

Winter slowly loses its grip. Scabs of brown grass appear from under a bandage of melting snow.

Twice the ashtray in my mother’s locked car is pulled out. The gears in her truck are out of sync once, twice, three times. Her automatic fog lights are turned off. Little things. Things that happen overnight. Things that can’t be proven, things that would make you think you were losing your mind if you didn’t know better.

Bigger things: A week before Rips’s hearing in March, her truck tire becomes so loose it nearly falls off as she is driving. The hearing comes, passes. We learn he has taken the plea bargain and must pay a fine. Two counts of restraining order violations; two dismissed but will count against him if he is arrested again. Still, not even one percent of everything he has done to us.

The brakes in my mother’s truck begin leaking; her car tire goes flat after a night out. She finds a large, sharp rock wedged into the tire.

The air conditioning in the truck stops working; under the hood, a tube connecting to the air conditioner has been pulled apart.

Sometimes, at exactly 3:25 p.m., I see a white car driving past, the figure inside a silhouette.

One night at a bar she sees him come inside, dressed in black with a skullcap pulled over his blond hair.

We find cigarette butts in the driveway, innards pulled out, just the way my mother had taught him. That way, she always said, it couldn’t possibly start a fire. He had changed the way he disposed of his cigarette butts; he had changed for her.

Which is worse, brashness during daylight or shadows in the dead of night?

****

I don’t believe every relationship has a fairy-tale ending.

I don’t believe every wedding ring I sell will last forever.

I do, however, believe that even the most potent love spells can be broken. My mother gets over him, not because she wants to, but because he’s so atrocious she can’t love him anymore.

He has a harder time getting over her. He needs help—an incentive—and I give it to him.

I buy an outdoor security camera when the Cheshire Cat won’t stop playing tricks, when my rose-shaped solar light is removed from its stake in the ground and laid across the picnic bench one night; when the three main branches of the fledgling apple tree outside my bedroom window are snapped and pointed directly at where I sleep at night. Seeing my camera working, seeing its tiny red LED lights glowing in the dark to tape images of driveway, vehicles, sidewalk, and lawn, empowers me. The camera is equipped to swivel itself like an owl’s head to get different views, and it has the superior night vision of an owl. I name it Hoot—a shortening of its brand name, Hootoo.

I don’t have a dog to help me feel safe, but I do have a night owl. I turn it on before I go to sleep at night; I turn it off only when dawn breaks, when stars and moon fade to light. Hoot is patient; Hoot doesn’t take naps or breaks. Hoot is an ideal protector. Within the first week of installing Hoot, the nighttime occurrences stop.

Nothing shows up on film. A person would need to be at close range to trigger Hoot to begin taping; a person would need to be careless to overlook Hoot’s red eyes burning through the night. A Cheshire cat would never be careless enough to get caught. Still, I would’ve liked to see his face when he walked up the driveway, or the lawn, or wherever he came from—he’s not a ghost, after all—when he looked into eyes colder and tinier than his own and realized someone had beaten him at his own game, claimed a small victory.

Sometimes the only way to get rid of a stalker is to outlast. He’ll stop when he pleases, not when someone tells him to. You can impose boundaries—obtain restraining orders, call police, and buy security cameras—but ultimately no one can make him stop except himself. It might never be completely over. As for Rips, he disappears from our lives slowly, the way the Cheshire Cat disappears from Alice’s view: first his tail, then his body, then ears and nose and eyes, until all that’s left is a crooked wedge of smile hanging in the night.