By senior year, for the first time in my life, I had more friends than I could count on my hand, and Nicole and June and I went out with these friends nearly every weekend. We stood around kegs in their basements. We got high with them for the first time. We went to nightclubs downtown, where I learned how to dance in the dark. Sometimes, I brought a guy home, and when I was drunk like that, when I was in bed with a boy from my fiction class, I thought about how confused you’d be to see me there—my face pressed against a bedsheet of pizza crumbs. A random boy on top of me. A body I could hardly feel. And that’s always when I started to cry. I cried hard—deep, heaving sobs, the way I had started crying ever since that night at Jan’s.

  “What’s wrong?” the guy asked. “Am I doing something wrong?”

  I tried to explain. I tried to tell him my story. I tried to tell him about my beautiful older sister, who loved me so much, who told me secret things late at night, but my pants were off, and he was hovering above me, and all I could bring myself to say was, “I don’t know, my sister is dead,” and then I pressed my face into the pillow and cried some more. The guy was always very understanding, whoever he was. But in the morning, as he put on his jeans, I hated him for all that he had seen.

  * * *

  I went through a lot of guys like this in college. A soccer player from Georgia who impressed me by adding Coke to his red wine. A guy from Iowa who kept trick boxes on his bookshelves. A guy in my Modern Poetry class just because he agreed with me that the grieving woman in Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial” had no right to be upset with her husband, even if her baby was dead.

  “I don’t understand why the woman is so upset,” he said to the whole class. “He’s just trying to help out.”

  Neither did I. The woman just sits in the house all day and watches her husband from the window as he digs a tiny grave in the ground. The woman can’t stand it—the way her husband makes the gravel “leap up! Like that, like that, and land so lightly.” And the way he comes in the house after to say, “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day will rot the best birch fence a man can build.”

  The woman doesn’t understand: How can you talk like that, at a time like this?

  And no, it didn’t seem like the right time for spewing agricultural proverbs. But I remember wondering what else she thought the man was supposed to be doing? I mean, at least he is doing something!

  “Somebody had to bury the baby, no?” I said.

  We both hated the woman, and the baby needed to be buried. That was the last thing we agreed on before he came to my room and we did everything-but.

  Nicole thought I was a slut but was careful never to say so. Nicole knew she had her own problems. As we got ready to go out at night, she always turned the lights off. She didn’t want to see herself in the mirror, and I didn’t understand. How can you see yourself then? I asked. She pressed her nose up very close to the mirror, put on her mascara.

  “I can see all I need to see,” I told Valerie. “That’s what she says.”

  “I knew she couldn’t be normal,” Valerie said.

  And I was glad for it. I loved Nicole, and I loved college, and felt depressed when I had to go home for some holiday. But I went home, and I walked into our old house, which no longer felt like our house. Said hello to Mom, who seemed less and less like Mom.

  “Your mother is not herself,” Dad always warned as we drove home from the train station.

  I understood. Her memory was bad from the medication. What medication? I didn’t even ask after a certain point. I just sat on the deck with Mom, while Mom said things like this: “They were going to put me in an institution, Sally. I just about had it. But I wanted to be here for you when you got home from college. I just wanted to see you.”

  Who is they? Dad?

  Dad was always doing something then. Walking around the lawn, moving dead branches from the woods into a pile. Mom was on the porch, smoking a cigarette. Mom was a smoker now.

  “But how can you want to die?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m a bad mother.”

  “Don’t you want to be at my wedding one day?”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to get married,” she said, and her eyes lit up for a second, like maybe she would just stick around after all!

  “Why did you think I didn’t want to get married?”

  “Because you said, and I quote, ‘Mom, I don’t ever want to get married,’” Mom said.

  “Well, that’s not the point! I just mean, don’t you want to be here with me for the rest of my life? Don’t you want to know your grandchildren?”

  “How are you going to have children if you don’t get married, Sally?”

  “I could have one out of wedlock,” I said. “People do it all the time.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Mom said.

  “Well, if you’re dead, you won’t be able to stop me,” I said.

  The thought of missing the rest of my life, of not being able to hold my bastard child, made Mom cry.

  “If you die, you’re dead. That’s it.”

  “I know that. But I can’t explain it,” she said. “But I’m trying. I’m just trying to be honest, Sally.”

  Then Mom went inside to take a nap, and Dad sat down next to me in the chair, legs spread wide, admiring his work.

  “Do you think she’ll do it?” I asked Dad.

  “Do what?”

  “Kill herself,” I said.

  “Nah,” Dad said.

  “How do you know?”

  “When she says that, I say, go ahead!” Dad said. “Do it!”

  “You tell her to do it?”

  “Because she won’t do it. She won’t. If she really wanted to do it, she would have done it.”

  Dad still spoke with the confidence of a man who had been alive forever, as though he shook hands with Jesus on his way to the cross. When I read my history texts at school, it was still sometimes Dad I imagined signing the Declaration of Independence. It was Dad, fighting in the Civil War. Dad claimed he was born in the wrong century. I could have been a Spanish fisherman, he said once. Or a cowboy. I would have been a great cowboy. Which we all agreed was true, because sometimes he sat out on the deck with a dark drink and just stared through the trees like he was waiting for a message arriving on horseback.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “I really don’t think you should say that to her.”

  Dad kissed me on the head. He told me he loved me. He told me he loved me a lot. He knew it was important to say this to children and so he did it. It made me feel better. Like things might be okay, as long as we loved each other deeply.

  But then I woke up the next morning to a pamphlet on the kitchen counter that said “Electroconvulsive Shock Therapy.”

  “What is this?” I asked Mom.

  “Oh,” Mom said. “That’s just something I’ve been thinking about.”

  As if it were yoga. A new yogurt flavor from the store.

  “You’ve been thinking about this?”

  “A little.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it sounds like a good idea.”

  “A good idea? How is this a good idea?”

  I read from the sheet. ECT: a treatment for severely depressed patients who have exhausted all their other options. It was used sometimes for patients who were imminently suicidal.

  “They attach electrodes to your brain,” I read.

  “Honey, that was fifty years ago,” she said. “It’s much safer now.”

  That’s what it said on the sheet of information. That the procedure was completely safe now because they used muscle relaxants to paralyze the patient and calm the jerking motions, because it’s the wild jerking that broke the patients’ bones.

  “Grandma had this done. She was catatonic and she had a real improvement.”

  “She was?” I asked. “And you aren’t catatonic.”

  “I swear. If I didn’t have to feel like this, I wouldn’t.”

  * * *

  I did my research. ECT.

  It was used to treat mania, catatonia, and schizophrenia.

  Side effects: confusion, memory loss, cognitive impairment.

  Famous people who had done it: Kitty Dukakis. Lou Reed. Sylvia Plath. Ernest Hemingway. I printed out the information for Mom. Two out of four killed themselves. Plath put her head in the oven. Ernest Hemingway shot himself after his treatments. “It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient,” Hemingway said.

  But most days, a mother’s grief was a child that could not be reasoned with. At some point, it could only be put to bed.

  “Good night,” she said.

  It was only noon.

  * * *

  “Do you think this is a good idea?” I asked Dad.

  “Something has to be done,” he said. “It can’t go on like this.”

  “How do you deal with all of this?”

  I wanted to learn from Dad.

  “I compartmentalize it,” he said. “I put it in a box, in some tiny corner of my brain.”

  I imagined this little box, a tiny, practical coffin. One the Amish might use.

  “Because you have to go on,” he said. “You have to find a way.”

  He went into his office, where he sat under a photograph of a famous golf course in Scotland. It’s the most beautiful golf course in the world, he said, but he would never visit because he still insisted he was too tall to go to Europe.

  “Dad, you have to stop saying that,” I said. “You have to just go to Europe.”

  “No way!” he said. “I can’t sit on a plane like that for six hours. No way.”

  “Will you go when you get old and shrink?” I ask.

  “I am old,” he says. “That’s what I keep trying to tell your mother. I say, Susan, we’re getting old. It’s time to live, before we’re dead.”

  * * *

  During my senior year in college, Mom went to the hospital a lot. Mom had repeated doctor visits to get clearance. The tests and tests and tests. They needed to know if she was sane enough to undergo this therapy.

  Some doctors thought she was too sane. Some suggested estrogen pills, because they might make her happy, but all they did, Mom claimed, was make her cry, then give her a period.

  “No fifty-eight-year-old woman should still be having monthly periods, should they?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t.

  She began her first ECT treatments just after I graduated, and before I took off for Europe. I was scared to go home for a month. I was afraid of all the progress that going home would erase. I arrived armed with facts about very sad people who did very impressive things.

  “Robert Frost,” I told Mom and Dad at the dinner table. “He lost all his children. And then he won a Pulitzer.”

  “Is that so?” Dad said. Dad was always impressed. But Mom was never listening. Mom had the TV on very loud.

  “John Edwards, too,” I said. “He lost a son and now he’s running for president. What are you doing?”

  “I’m running for the Golf Commission,” Dad said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Run budget stuff for the course,” Dad said.

  Dad was doing okay. Dad had new knees. Dad was getting involved in things for the first time in his life—he wanted to move, too. Somewhere warm. Somewhere he could play golf every day. He kept asking Mom about it, but Mom refused to even have a discussion about it.

  “Are you listening, Susan?” Dad said. “I just asked you a question.”

  But Mom was not responsive.

  “I can’t say weal world,” Mom said.

  “What?” Dad said.

  “Why do you need to say ‘real world’?” I asked.

  “It just seems like a thing I should be able to say,” Mom said. “Weal world. Weal world. Weal world. See?”

  After her third treatment, everything hurt. She could pick up the remote, but she couldn’t hold it above her head.

  “Why do you have to lift the remote above your head?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t,” she said. “It’s just good to be able to do a thing like that.”

  After the fourth treatment, she had stopped crying. But she was skeptical.

  “I don’t think it’s working,” Mom said. “I feel the same.”

  “Give it some time,” Dad said.

  “I just don’t feel any different. I feel the same, but I just can’t remember anything anymore,” Mom said.

  “Give it time.”

  “I’m going to call the doctor.”

  As the days went by, she forgot more and more.

  “How do I get to the Stop and Shop?” she asked.

  “It’s just down Main Street.”

  “I know, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to remember that.”

  So many questions. What did we do last weekend? she asked.

  Mall, movies, and dinner, I said.

  Mom couldn’t hold on to memories, and I wondered if this was how ECT worked. She couldn’t be sad if she couldn’t remember what was making her sad. She wouldn’t cry through dinner if her mind wasn’t flooded with images of you. Though the literature said it’s more complicated than that. The electricity sparks the building of brain cells. These new brain cells, as I understood it, become happier than other brain cells.

  “I’ll go to Stop and Shop,” I said.

  “Can you get some prosciutto?” Mom asked.

  “And some wine?” Dad asked.

  * * *

  And that’s where I finally saw him again: Billy, walking out of the liquor store with a box full of wine. It stunned me to see him like that, in his bright white robes, outside the tiny coffin I had built for him in my head.

  “Sally,” he said.

  And isn’t this how it always happens with Billy? I try not to think about him. I try not to wonder what he is doing or who he is with and how he is touching her. I manage to decide that he is nothing, just a figment of my imagination. A mythological creature from our past. But then he appears.

  “Billy,” I said. He was standing there, in front of a liquor store, holding a giant box of liquor, as real as anything. “A priest robs a liquor store. Isn’t there a joke about that?”

  “If there’s not, there probably should be,” Billy said.

  For a moment, I wanted to cry. I wanted to hug him. But then I stamped out the fire in my head. I put Billy back in his tiny coffin.

  “I didn’t know you could drink booze as a friar,” I said.

  “It’s about the only thing you can still do,” he said. “And technically, I’m not a friar yet.”

  He was going to take his final vows at the end of that year.

  “What are final vows?” I asked.

  “They’re final,” he said. “You make them and voilà. You’re a friar forever.”

  “But what if you change your mind?”

  “You can’t. I mean. It’s forever.”

  “But not if you change your mind.”

  “That’s not really how it works…”

  “Well,” I said. “That all sounds nerve-racking. No wonder you need so much booze.”

  He laughed. “Oh no,” he said. “The booze is for my father. I mean. He just died. We’ve got a bunch of people at the house.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “It’s hard. But it’s been coming for a few years now. Lung cancer. Diagnosed just after I left for the seminary.”

  We paused.”Oh,” I said. “Still sad though.”

  “Yeah. But the good thing is, he had a long time to make peace with it.”

  “Right,” I said. “Good for him then.”

  He cleared his throat. “What about you? How are your parents?”

  “My dad is alive,” I said, which suddenly sounded like bragging. So I told him about Mom. “My mom is not well.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “Why don’t we get a drink?” he said. “You can tell me your long story.”

  “I guess it’s not that long a story,” I said.

  In the parking lot, I told him all about Mom. About the ECT. About how Mom couldn’t lift up her arms anymore. About how she fell the other day holding a laundry basket, all the way down the stairs. Because Billy was a friar now. I could tell Billy all the worst things.

  “I’ll say a prayer for her,” Billy said.

  “One prayer for Mom, coming right up!” I said. But he didn’t get the joke. He wasn’t joking. Billy was really going to go home and say a prayer for Mom. “Well. I should go.”

  But we stood there. Even though there wasn’t anything to say. For the first time since you died, I had nothing to say to Billy.

  “Hey,” he said. “Maybe sometime, if you’re around, we can grab a coffee.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I won’t be around. I’m leaving for London in a few days.”

  “Oh, wow,” he said. “London. That’s great. What for?”

  “Just traveling,” I said. “With my college roommate.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “Should be,” I said. “Well, I need to be off. Good luck with your final vows, Billy.”

  “It’s actually not Billy anymore,” he said.

  Billy didn’t have things anymore. He didn’t have a phone or a car or a computer. He didn’t even keep his name. He had taken a new name his first year. Gabriel Thomas.

  But I refused to use it.

  “See ya,” I said, and I hope it hurt him as much as it hurt me.

  * * *

  When I got back from the grocery store, Mom couldn’t remember what prosciutto was. She swore she never heard of it before. I said, You told me to get it at the store. I reminded Mom of its ham-like texture. How she used to wrap it around cantaloupe and we all sat around the kitchen counter and ate it.

  “Oh, okay, now it’s coming back to me,” she said.

  Everything was always suddenly coming back to Mom, and I felt jealous of her memory loss.