And so it remains a secret reverie. It is a little jackal that sits crouched in the back of her skull, hungry and ridden with fleas, stalking the gray wet bloom of her brain and saying feedmefeedmefeedme. She coddles it, it’s true. She likes to tend to that little beast, the ridiculous festering vision that sinks its teeth into the tissue of her daydreams and refuses to let go until she believes again in its possibility—A Vargas girl! Helen! Her portrait scotch-taped to the underside of bunk beds and tucked inside miniature bibles—studied and pored over and illuminated by the light of countless matchbooks: a vision for the GI boys; a false idol here on earth. It is the end of August. It is 1943.

So when he pulled me down into the cane fields, I sunk my teeth into his neck and tasted the salt of his sweat under the high noon, in the dirt, among the wiregrass that scratched at my bare skin, and I thought, Okay, here I am. Okay, here we are. Okay, here comes the thing my mother said I must be watchful for. Here was the dark creature, coming out, breath by long breath, pushing itself out through our wet mouths and my hands that grabbed at his hair and we rolled between the rows of sugarcane that stretched high above our heads. I was sure. I was determined. I was the girl who felt the water drip down from my chin to my neck and pool in the bowls of my collarbone, the wells of lust, the thirst of fifteen and fucking, for the first time, outside in the windless heat. He moaned and whimpered like a puppy, just a kid, trying to contain the thing but not able to keep it still. I touched his earlobe, soft and still covered in fuzz, as a trio of vultures circled over the field, marking the stink of a rotten body, a cage of ribs, a feast for the taking. He came and fell on me, in a heavy fall, until my whole self was covered with the weight of his self, and the only thing uncovered was my face still staring up above me towards the spot where the cane parted and the sky loomed in a white hot burn. He sighed, because it was over, and so it was over, and it didn’t seem so hurtful or so wrong, and as I lay there thinking of the way my mother might be wrong, to listen was good, to follow the pull of the heat could be saving, a pair of faces came and crowded my view. Two men looked over us then, spit tobacco juice from the corners of their mouths. They winked and smiled their smiles of crooked teeth and long pink gums. They loosened their belts. They said, Well, well, well.

Imagine it from the beginning: before myself and my sister, before the house and the gardens and the quiet wedding, before the happy long-lived marriage and my father’s death, before anyone else in the world had ever even imagined they might exist together: my parents held each other in some dark and unknown room and fell from a startling height.

Imagine them! My mother walking down the hallway of the college, still in her twenties, in a pencil skirt and violet blouse—wearing turquoise eyeshadow in stark contrast with her dark brown hair (permed beyond comprehension). It is 1977. There is some undetected but primeval electricity in the air. My dad stares at her ass. He is married and fifteen years older, but he dreams of that ass, in the coming days and weeks and months, as they become closer and closer as friends. He is not exceptionally surprised at this desire; he has lusted (treacherously) for other women since his marriage; he has kissed others; he has not been an ideal husband. But no, no, it is something else this time—something more dangerous, more transformative and it catches him offguard; he finds himself dreaming of her brain: its gray folds and bundled nerves and all the invisible signs and semiotics that pass between their pathways, and he wants to know them. He wants to stay awake all night just talking to her, as if he is the first explorer to come upon some wondrous unimagined world. Valuable, inexhaustible, marvelous, arousing; perpetually beautiful; it is as though a match were struck in the furnace of his soul—a soul that had, until now, cast only a pale anemic light in the cave of some peaceable but ordinary life. But now, now, she laughs and it fills the universe and the sun itself is a whimpering ridiculous flame compared to this—this—affair.

My parents exist together in secret for as long as they can, but it is not enough. My father would tell me later, years later, how wrecked and awful those first destroying days had been when they unlocked the nuclear truth of their love; he told me how his teenage daughter sat on his lap and begged and begged and begged for him to stay. But he had already glimpsed a life of happiness. He had already been carried away. He chose to love my mother. And thirty years later I would watch my parents together and know how much that meant.

• My parents at their wedding
• My favorite picture of them, gray and kissing in a photo booth, a few months before my father’s death
• Our family all together

Remember the day. Your mother bent-necked over the kitchen counter, two letters side by side, one to you, one to her. A telegram, the black star, smell of collard greens and your little brothers playing in the backyard (walled). Laundry blowing on the line. Your mother’s tears dimpling the paper, making it age already, just born, just opened. The letter to you was postmarked weeks before, before he died, yet here it was, alongside the telegram with the black star saying he was dead and you were the man now and nothing would be the same.

Remember the night, early morning, that strange twinge of daylight just coming up. The fight in the sidestreet, by the cigar shop, who knows how it starts. We never know how it begins or ends or what the reasons are. Just a lot of anger you don’t know what to do with; you were avenging your father, maybe, and I wanted to help and fight for my own, because it’s crazy, but I felt like if I put up a good fight he might come home safe—and fuck the bastard, I hated him, but I wanted him to come home safe, to my mother, so I didn’t have to see her leaning over the kitchen table, so I didn’t have to look around and see my brother opening up his arms to me. We fought and glass flew and names called and we thought it was over, when a kid came flying at you, with a piece of bottle glass—shaped like an arrowhead, his own teeth gleaming with pink thin blood, running at you like a mad animal, a starved thing, and I saw you looking past me, at someone else, not seeing him, not, and I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t shout, and I jumped in front of you and felt that cool blade sink into my thigh. Then everyone seemed to disappear. I don’t remember how it ended, it just seemed like everyone fluttered away like ghosts, except for me and you, leaning against the wall, holding our wounds, blood running hotly into my hands. Strange because it didn’t hurt, and we looked at each other and laughed nervously, our first real cuts—wounds that would scar. And the sun was starting to rise, and we just leaned up against the wall. Trenches, cold eyes in the trenches, mud splattered on boots, your fathers dead eyes closed somewhere in a black bag at the bottom of a ship, and we were just two dumb kids in Philadelphia.

There is a river that runs in my head that knows no destination, no springwell or determined terminus, but I am always looking outward for some sign of the welcoming sea; you know that murky belt where freshwater merges with the salt of the ocean, brown and surging in and out with the tides that are turned by that fat winter moon. I am certain there is an inlet, an outlet, somewhere in the globe of my brain—replenishing salts, mixing and moving, reaching out to the new world at the same time it sighs and carries her inward, again, back and forth, against the current and then towards the future—renewing the water of my soul.