Jon was dead, but nothing had changed. School operations continued, and my father’s business empire kept growing. It was as if the suicide had occurred in a vacuum or a snow globe. The dust settled into an eerie silence, and, from the outside, everything appeared still and contained. 

My thoughts, on the other hand, were a constant and violent disturbance. For a year, I had been living in a state of internal conflict, driving endlessly around Philadelphia, trying to summon the courage to turn my father into the authorities, but the only hard evidence I had was self-incriminating. What if they blamed me? Worse yet, what if I was crazy, imagining the whole thing? What if my suspicions were true, but no one would listen? I didn’t know how to contact the federal authorities, and my father was very well connected in the Philadelphia Police Department. Even to think these questions felt dangerous. 

Then, one day, I turned a corner. I don’t remember where I was going, but I do remember precisely the moment of surrender. I was stopped at a traffic light. My mind was racing, and then it stopped. My vision narrowed down to a point, and suddenly everything became very clear: I wasn’t going to tell anyone. I can still see the orange lights on the dashboard and feel the sense of relief in my body. I wasn’t going to do it; I had made a decision.

I didn’t have the strength to stop him, but I could at least stop taking his money. I called the insurance company and canceled my coverage. I went to the bank and closed all the accounts to which he had access. Then I went to the store and bought a new phone. At the post office, I put my old company phone in an envelope and mailed it back to him with a note. My father never spoke of it, never openly acknowledged that I was pulling away, but it was clear from his action that he wouldn’t let me go. He could no longer make direct deposits to my accounts, so instead, he gave me diamond earrings at Christmas and black pearls for my birthday—and I, in my shame, accepted the gifts. Thus I lived in perpetual anticipation, and every time I turned on public radio, I listened for my father’s name.

Days bled into weeks, and the months collapsed into a year. I moved out of my mother’s house into a shared apartment in Philadelphia. I got a job waiting tables at an Italian restaurant in Center City, where I spent my nights taking orders and carrying plates to and from the kitchen in a haze of Frank Sinatra. After work, I walked alone through the dark streets with my wages tucked into my shoe. At home, I put a potted rosebush by the window and a desk on the landing at the top of the stairs. While my roommates were at work, I read the high Modernists and wrote bad short stories. I was sure that this was my function: to make sense of a world I couldn’t quite grasp and commit it to words, but it was as hard to write then as it is now. I often found myself staring off into space for hours on end. Always in the back of my mind, I could hear the strange tenor in my father’s voice when he called to tell me the news and feel the cool, inquisitive pressure of Rebecca’s gaze after the funeral. Often, I felt as though I was living underwater, looking out at the world through a curved glass distortion. 

There was nothing to do but try to move on. That year I wrote a handful of applications, and I was miraculously accepted back into Brown—this time with a full fellowship to the graduate program in Literary Arts. It felt like a cosmic gift; I would have two years to read and write and study with great poets, but I was quite sure that I didn’t deserve it, and I was torn between immense gratitude and debilitating shame. 

When I moved back to Providence in the fall, I resolved this time to do it right. I registered early and made it to class on time. I met regularly with my advisors and spent countless hours in the rare books library, studying and trying to write. Still, the words would not cooperate. My mind would short-circuit, and my thoughts came out fractured. I was there at my desk, but I wasn’t there because when I looked up from my books and surveyed my life, everything was stolen, ballasted by crimes that no one else was able to see.

At the end of the first semester, something unexpected happened: I fell in love. We met at a Christmas play, and I was struck by his shock of black hair and smooth, delicate features. He was a Turkish graduate student on a one-year exchange in the Department of Economics, and his name meant “the chosen one.” He was intelligent and spontaneous and wrote with his left hand. On our first date,  he picked a piece of tinsel out of my hair and kissed me on the roof of a lecture hall. On New Year’s Day, we met in Manhattan, rode the ferry to Staten Island, and saw the Statue of Liberty rise above the cold, frothing waters. Within a few weeks, he was my boyfriend. It happened quickly and effortlessly, and I couldn’t understand why this beautiful man would choose me.

I was hopeless, insecure, enamored, and out of my depth, so I went to Health Services and got a referral. 

The therapist’s office was a small, squat building with a glass atrium. I sat in the waiting room until a slight man with a great head of hair opened the door and said my name. I followed him into a long rectangular room. Everything was white, and there was a white noise machine in the corner. He gestured to a chair and said gently, “So, what brings you here today?”  

When the hour was up, I went to the bathroom and wept. Then washed my face and let myself out into the diminishing wintry light. 

I liked the therapist and kept going back. It was a tidy space, both intimate and impersonal. He maintained clear boundaries, but I could tell I amused him, and he was interested in what I had to say. I felt safe to open up about my debilitating anxieties, but some things remained off limits, beyond the capacity of what that warm little room could hold.

For example, the therapist did not seem very concerned about the money my father gave me. “All parents help their children,” he said. 

“But I think what he’s doing is illegal,” I said. “When I graduated from college, he put me on the payroll even though I wasn’t working for him. There were $8,000 in deposits that I didn’t earn.”

“That’s not that much money, Christine,” the therapist said patiently. “If you wanted to, you could easily pay that back.” 

My graduate stipend was $16,000 a year. $8,000 seemed like an impossible amount of money. 

“What he’s doing is wrong.” My voice was shaking. 

The therapist was ethical, but he was also a realist. “If my daughter needed something, and I could give it to her, I would.” 

In one session, he suggested that my father might be bipolar, given his grandiosity and great bursts of energy, followed by bouts of lethargy.

“My mother thinks he’s a narcissist,” I said.

The therapist chuckled, “It’s common for women to see their ex-husbands as narcissistic.” He did concede, however, that my father sounded “very controlling.” The word echoed inside me. I’d never thought of my father as controlling before.

When I told him I had tried to kill myself when I was twelve, he corrected me. Mine was not, he explained a suicide attempt, so much as it was suicidal ideation. 

I didn’t press the issue, but I knew he was wrong: I had tried to kill myself. For months, I had planned it to jump from the eighth-floor balcony of my grandparents’ oceanfront condominium. I rehearsed it a thousand times in my mind. When the moment came, I waited until everyone was asleep and slid the glass door open. It was a windy night. The sky was red-gray, and clouds rolled in over the waves. I climbed onto a chair and lifted one leg over the edge of the glass railing. I hovered there for a long time, but in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to do it—not because I wanted to live, but because I could see what would happen after I died. I heard the sound of something hitting the concrete and saw the man who worked the night shift in the lobby run out to the pool, where he would find my body. Then I saw my mother’s face contorted in grief—my little brother, with all his sweetness ripped away—and my father standing behind them. I didn’t throw my other leg over the ledge, not because I wanted to live—or because I didn’t want to die—but because I knew, on some level, that my death wouldn’t solve anything. I went back to bed disgusted—I wasn’t even strong enough even to die. 

But something must have died within me that night on the ledge because, after that, I tried to die in a thousand other ways. I walked alone through dark alleys and barefoot on the shoulder of country roads. I picked up hitchhikers and ate acid and wept in graveyards. As a teenager, I never could see past twenty-five, and now here I was, confounded that I was still alive—and woefully unprepared to live as an adult.  

The therapist suggested that I suffered from an organic form of depression and recommended pharmaceutical intervention. 

I took the pills for four or five weeks until my boyfriend reached over and took my hand. “These pills are not helping you,” he said. I knew he was right: the pills were draining the color out of my vision. On some level, I knew that I needed to feel the pain I was so desperate to escape. That night, I flushed the remaining pills down the toilet. 

Every day, I sat dutifully at my desk and tried to write. Small scenes and sketches came out, but it always felt like I was hovering on the edges of something—as if I was afraid to go all the way in—as if I was keeping secrets from myself. I didn’t dare ask the question, What happened to Jon? Let alone write what I knew. I read endlessly and etched out one little poem after another. My professors told me that I had “no lack of talent” but that I was “procrastinating” and “hadn’t yet figured out what I was doing.” In short, I couldn’t find my voice, couldn’t make myself heard, and wherever I went, I felt that I was looking out at the world through panes of frosted glass. 

Then the inevitable happened. The boyfriend left the country. I drove him to the airport. He told me he loved me and boarded a plane to Berlin. A few weeks later, he stopped taking my calls. 

I was devastated. The encasements shattered, and the floodgates opened. 

I wrote. Feverishly. Delinquently. All through the night. In the morning, when I read over my notes, I found that most of what I had written wasn’t about young love or heartache; it was about my father.  

For the next six months, I wrote in a state of suspended animation. My poems seemed to know things that I did not: how violence could be financed by the threat of violence, how definite the present disappearance of our aims. Then, as now, the writing was a critical excavation of the subconscious—it brought to light all the things I could not bear to see. I avoided it all day, pacing desperately like an iridescent beetle caught between the window and the screen. Then at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I sat at my desk and let it leech out. It was a terrible relief.  At last, something was moving, something was happening. It was an all-consuming process, and I lived for those long nights when I could observe the bloated questions floating to the surface of our answers. There was a quiet terror in those poems as if I were writing the inevitable in order to prevent it.