I was also moved by some better impulses, unrevealed to me despite my self-probings. I now know that our lives are moved equally by the lash of circumstance and the pull of unrecognized longings, and both can steer us true. Both were required to lead me to Brassard’s farm.
At the time, I had an ordinary neo-Freudian way of looking at myself: I was a product of my parents’ personalities, our domestic life, my early social experiences, and so on. Now all that seems surficial. I don’t mean irrelevant, just shallow—the outer skin of a more robust and profound onion.
But here’s how the narrative would have gone. My name: Ann Turner. My age: some years before the onset of menopause and the end of the choice of having children. The proverbial clock was ticking, but I wasn’t counting the beats, because the idea of having kids had never loomed large in my life’s agenda.
I was my parents’ second child; they had lost their first in a late miscarriage. I didn’t come along until seven years later, because it took them that long to muster their courage and try again. My survival gave them more confidence, so two years later I was joined by my brother, Erik.
We lived just outside Boston, where my father worked as director of facilities at a prep school. My mother taught photography at a community college, but only part time, so she was at home enough to maintain a reasonably ordered domestic life. Our house was full of conversation, benign commotion, humor. With their combined income, they paid off our house, I took dance lessons, and we went on vacations to Maine or Vermont. But they worried about our cars’ repair costs, rising property taxes, and my college tuition. We lived a reasonably secure life, not affluent but by no means poor.
I mention all this because, with loving, attentive parents and a stable, happy home, I had no obvious failures of nurture or genetic inheritance to blame for my becoming a quirky, desperate woman prone to bad decisions.
My brother was what, as a child, I called a little rat, and he later morphed into what I called a stoner, Mom called a rebel without a cause, and Pop lovingly called a ne’er-do-well. But I adored Erik, and we played a typical sibling duet: sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant, sometimes competing for parental attention, sometimes in league against them. He was “brilliant but an underachiever,” his teachers said—a fast learner who picked up any skill quickly but usually lost interest just as fast. He finished high school a year early and headed off to the West Coast and a life we didn’t hear much about.
I went to college, graduating with a degree in education that didn’t prove especially useful for the waitressing jobs I took afterward. For a couple of years, I shared an apartment with my dearest friend, Cat, then moved in with my boyfriend.
Four years after I graduated, my mother died of breast cancer. That was a dark time. Her absence wounded us all. Erik came back and cried hard with Pop and me at her funeral. Grief pulled the three of us close for a week before Erik left again.
Eventually, we got as over her death as anyone gets. My father soldiered on and remarried when he was in his midsixties. I got along well with my new stepmother, Elizabeth, but I had a life of my own and no great interest in developing a deeper relationship with her. That was reciprocal, given that she had two adult children from her first marriage, who, reasonably enough, took emotional precedence over her husband’s daughter and invisible son.
My father and I grew closer as he aged. After he retired, he acquired by degrees a certain gravitas and a stillness that made him a good listener for his daughter’s rants and confessions. When he died at seventy-three, I missed him terribly. Erik came for the funeral, but he returned to California far too soon, and anyway he had been remote for a long time. I felt very alone in the world, untethered. My stepmother inherited my father’s house and much of the money he had put aside, leaving me with no geographical axis for my life and not enough means to establish another. Besides Erik, my only relatives were an aged aunt in Schenectady and some distant cousins whom I’d barely met.
Pop’s death made me realize how spare a landscape of familial security I lived in, how meager my connections. Suddenly aware of the importance of blood relationships, I began calling Erik a lot. Crass-sounding girlfriends or male buddies answered the phone, clashing rock and roll played in the background, and Erik often sounded distracted, in the style of a druggie. He spoke evasively of his personal life, and I got the sense his work involved something illegal. Still, he was always sympathetic in his way: Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, Annie. I gotta get out east sometime, but work here, business … you know how that is.
At some point, I called Erik to find that his phone had been disconnected. I contacted old friends of his and did online people searches, but couldn’t find him. I didn’t think he was dead—surely somebody would have let me know, some sixth sense would have whispered the awful truth to me. I figured maybe he was on the lam from the law or women or bill collectors, or had gone back to the land and off the grid. I even searched the online inmate database for the California Corrections Department, but there was no record of his arrest or incarceration. Eventually, I gave up trying to find him. Either I would hear from him when he wanted to be heard from, or I wouldn’t.
Yes, I felt orphaned, but it wasn’t really so bleak. While my parents’ deaths and Erik’s vanishing act made a hollow in me, they
