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them a call anyway. I haven’t called for a while, so maybe they won’t get so pissed off this time. They might have heard something, figured it wasn’t important, that it was some crank, but it might be something. We were lucky, you know, that some researcher even remembered what had happened to me, decided it was worth a look back.”
    I turned her gently, lifted her chin so that our eyes could meet. “Okay, whatever you want to do, do,” I said. “I love you, you know.”
    “I love you, too,” she said. “I—I know I’m not easy to live with about this stuff. I know it’s hard on Grace. I know my anxieties, that they kind of rub off on her. But lately, with that show, it’s made it all very real for me again.”
    “I know,” I said. “I just want you to be able to live for the present, too. Not always fixate on the past.”
    I felt her shoulders move. “Fixate?” she said. “Is that what you think I do?”
    It was the wrong word. You’d think an English teacher could come up with something better.
    “Don’t patronize me,” Cynthia said. “You think you know, but you don’t. You can’t ever know.”
    There wasn’t much I could say to that, because it was true. I leaned in and kissed her hair and went to work.

3
    She wanted to be comforting
in what she had to say, but it was just as important to be firm.
    “I can understand you might find the idea a bit unsettling, really, I do. I can see where you might be feeling a bit squeamish about the whole thing, but I’ve been here before, and I’m telling you, I’ve given this a lot of thought, and this is the only way. That’s the way it is with family. You have to do what you have to do, even if it’s difficult, even if it’s painful. Of course what we have to do to them is going to be difficult, but you have to look at the bigger picture. But it’s a bit like when they said—you’re probably not old enough to remember this—that you have to destroy a village to save it. It’s something like that. Think of our family as a village. We have to do whatever it takes to save it.”
    She liked the “we” part. That they were a kind of team.

4
    When she was first pointed out to me at the University of Connecticut, my friend Roger whispered, “Archer, check it out. That is one seriously fucked-up chick. She’s hot—she’s got hair like a fire engine—but she’s majorly screwed up.”
    Cynthia Bigge was sitting down in the second row of the lecture hall, taking notes on literature of the Holocaust, and Roger and I were up near the back, close to the door, so we could make a break for it as soon as the professor was done droning on.
    “What do you mean, fucked up?” I whispered back.
    “Okay, you remember that thing, a few years ago, there was this girl, her whole family disappeared, nobody ever saw them again?”
    “No.” I didn’t read the papers or watch the news at that time in my life. Like many teens, I was somewhat self-absorbed—I was going to be the next Philip Roth or Robertson Davies or John Irving; I was in the process of narrowing it down—and oblivious to current events, except for when one of the more radical organizations on campus wanted students to protest something or other. I tried to do my part because it was a great place to meet girls.
    “Okay, so her parents, her sister, or maybe it was a brother, I can’t remember, they all disappeared.”
    I leaned in closer, whispered, “So what, they got killed?”
    Roger shrugged. “Who the fuck knows? That’s what makes it so interesting.” He tipped his head in Cynthia’s direction. “Maybe she knows. Maybe she offed the bunch of them. Haven’t you ever wanted to kill off your entire family?”
    I shrugged. I guessed it crossed everyone’s mind at some point.
    “What I think is that she’s just stuck up,” Roger said. “She won’t give you the time of day. Sticks to herself, you see her in the library all the time, just working, doing stuff. Doesn’t hang