These events occurred during the palm-tree years, as we’d come to think of them, when our mother was so removed from academic life that she barely registered the controversy. But on returning to her studies, she rejected every suspicion of her former professor with a vehemence that intrigued us. Fortunata appeared quite striking in the black-and-white jacket photo on his famous book: thick hair, barbed teeth, a nose that clearly had been broken more than once. He looked like a man who’d been pummeled, accidentally, into handsomeness. We snickered that our mother had been in love with him, but she claimed barely to have known him when she was a student; although Fortunata was charismatic in public, she said, he’d been agonizingly shy one-on-one, incapable of small talk. It was the mystery of Professor Fortunata that captivated her. She read everything he’d written, including the handwritten notes from his original fieldwork. At night, surrounded by sheets of the professor’s spidery cursive, she used an eight-track player our father unearthed for her to listen to Fortunata’s recordings of the tribe’s song cycles: deep, rich vocals arising from a mesh of ambient noise that suggested trees and rain and muttering beasts. We listened raptly, gazing at the professor’s beaten-looking face.
* * *
Our mother stepped deeper inside this mystery in 1991, in our sophomore and junior years of high school. She was forty-one. Her goal was not （she insisted） to locate the descendants of Fortunata’s original subjects but to test and strengthen a theory she was developing about human “affinities,” or what made people like and trust one another. She needed to spend time inside a community whose members’ histories were mutually known in their entirety, and that mass media had never touched.
We moved into our father’s house two days before our mother flew to Brazil to begin what she projected would be eight or nine months of fieldwork. We were excited and nervous, having never spent a night with our father, but our mother was deeply hesitant to leave us. She called each night from S?o Paolo and we tried not to cry on the phone. When had we ever been without her? She was like the palm tree in our old apartment complex, and her absence gaped like the void that uprooted tree would have left.
You’re strong girls, she told us on the phone in those first days. Stronger than you know. Be strong for each other, and for your father.
Then the calls stopped, and she was lost—that was how it felt after a week, two weeks, without her voice. We had lost her. Anticipating our bereavement, she’d written a series of fifty letters addressed to “My Jellybeans,” intending that we open them at weekly intervals. But we were too old to be comforted by such a ploy and stopped reading after the first three. The letters reminded us of the warm circle we’d shared with our mother all our lives. Reading them made our longing for her unbearable.
* * *
Rolph’s suicide had taken place several months before our mother left for Brazil. We learned of it when we found her weeping inconsolably in our apartment one evening. Weeks passed before we saw our father again. Rolph was twenty-eight when he died. If there was a funeral, a memorial—any of that—we never knew.
We’d seen less of our father in the months since Rolph’s death, and he had seemed much the same as before. But he wasn’t the same—nothing was the same, as we came to understand within days of moving into his house. The parties had stopped, the visitors were gone, and Jocelyn had taken off for good. Rolph had shot himself in our father’s house. We weren’t sure how we knew this, didn’t want to know it, but his violent extinction hung over the place like a curse. We looked at the water fluttering in the gray swimming pool （which our father had ceased to use） and asked each other, Did it happen there? Did it happen in the kitchen? In the TV room? In the exercise room? In one of the halls? In one of the bedrooms? In the room we shared? Amid the pounding, dreadful silence, the grim truths our father had concealed from us began to crawl into view.
One night, Charlie got drunk and screamed at our father that it was his fault Rolph had done it. She locked herself in a bathroom with a pair of freshly sharpened shears, and our father, thinking she would slit her wrists, hurled himself against the door until his shoulder dislocated. Shrieking in terror, we called 911. Before the police arrived, Charlie opened the bathroom door and emerged with her head shorn like a prisoner’s, her white skull bleeding where the shears had nicked her. Her long golden hair, the same that our father had spun into a glittering bun years before, lay streaked across the bathroom floor.