“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 I stayed on the floor, eyes closed, breathing slow, deep breaths, while my parents ransacked my mini fridge and discussed me in hushed tones.
“The Lord has commanded me to testify,” Dad said. “She may yet be brought to the Lord.”
While they plotted how to reconvert me, I plotted how to let them. I was ready to yield, even if it meant an exorcism. A miracle would be useful: if I could stage a convincing rebirth, I could dissociate from everything I’d said and done in the last year. I could take it all back—blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.
My father wanted to visit the Sacred Grove in Palmyra, New York—the forest where, according to Joseph Smith, God had appeared and commanded him to found the true church. We rented a car and six hours later entered Palmyra. Near the grove, off the highway, there was a shimmering temple topped by a golden statue of the angel Moroni. Dad pulled over and asked me to cross the temple grounds. “Touch the temple,” he said. “Its power will cleanse you.”
I studied his face. His expression was stretched—earnest, desperate. With all that was in him, he was willing me to touch the temple and be saved.