* * *
—
“Still awake?” Calvin whispered hesitantly one night as they lay in bed. “Because I wanted to run something by you. It’s about Thanksgiving.”
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s coming up and I wondered if you were going home, and if you were, if you were going to invite me to tag along and”—he paused, then rushed ahead—“meetyourfamily.”
“What?” Elizabeth whispered back. “Home? No. I’m not going home. I thought we might have Thanksgiving here. Together. Unless. Well. Were you planning on going home?”
“Absolutely not,” he said.
* * *
—
In the past few months, Calvin and Elizabeth had talked about almost everything—books, careers, beliefs, aspirations, movies, politics, even allergies. There was only one obvious exception: family. It wasn’t intentional—not at first, anyway—but after months of never bringing it up, it became clear it might never come up.
It’s not to say they were incurious of each other’s roots. Who didn’t want to dip into the deep end of someone else’s childhood and meet all the usual suspects—the strict parent, the competitive siblings, the crazy aunt? Not them.
Thus the topic of family was like a cordoned-off room on a historic home tour. One could still tip a head in to get a vague sense that Calvin had grown up somewhere （Massachusetts?） and that Elizabeth had brothers （or was it sisters?）—but there was no opportunity to step inside and sneak a peek at the medicine cabinet. Until Calvin brought up Thanksgiving.
“I can’t believe I’m asking this,” he finally ventured in the thick silence. “But I realize I don’t know where you’re from.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth said. “Well. Oregon, mostly. You?”
“Iowa.”
“Really?” she asked. “I thought you were from Boston.”
“No,” he said quickly. “Any brothers? Sisters?”
“A brother,” she said. “You?”
“None.” His voice was flat.
She lay very still, taking in his tone. “Was it lonely?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said bluntly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, taking his hand under the sheets. “Your parents didn’t want another child?”
“Hard to say,” he said, his voice reedy. “It’s not really the kind of thing a kid asks a parent, is it? But probably. Certainly.”
“But then—”
“They died when I was five. My mother was eight months pregnant at the time.”
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry, Calvin,” Elizabeth said, bolting upright. “What happened?”
“Train,” he said matter-of-factly. “Hit them.”
“Calvin, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It was a long time ago. I don’t really remember them.”
“But—”
“Your turn,” he said abruptly.
“No wait, wait, Calvin, who raised you?”
“My aunt. But then she died, too.”
“What? How?”
“We were in the car and she had a heart attack. The car jumped the curb and slammed into a tree.”
“God.”
“Call it a family tradition. Dying in accidents.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“How old were you?” Elizabeth pressed.
“Six.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “And then you were put in a…” Her voice trailed off.
“A Catholic boys home.”
“And…，” she prompted him, hating herself for doing so. “What was that like?”
He paused as if trying to find an honest answer to this obscenely simple question. “Rough,” he finally said, his voice so low she barely heard him.
A quarter mile away, a train whistled and Elizabeth cringed. How many nights had Calvin lain there and heard that whistle and thought about his dead parents and his almost sibling and never said a word? Unless, perhaps, he never thought about them—he’d said he could barely remember them. But then who did he remember? And what had they been like? And when he’d said, “Rough,” what did that mean exactly? She wanted to ask, but his tone—so dark and low and strange—warned her to go no further. And what about his later life? How did he ever learn to row in the middle of Iowa, much less make his way to Cambridge to row there? And college? Who’d paid for it? And his earlier education? A boys home in Iowa didn’t sound like it provided much in the way of learning. It’s one thing to be brilliant, but to be brilliant without opportunity—that was something else. If Mozart had been born to a poor family in Bombay instead of a cultured one in Salzburg, would he have composed Symphony no. 36 in C? Not a chance. How, then, had Calvin come from nothing to become one of the most highly respected scientists in the world?