In the early summer of 1988, and for many years after, I dreamt I heard the sound of tires running over the gravel driveway at Longstreet. In the dream, I fly from my bed and run to the sliding glass door. I pull hard on the handle and race barefoot onto the back porch. There it is. Dad’s green Jeep pickup with the rusty wench. The Eagles “Take it Easy” plays on the radio, and I catch the barest glimpse of the driver. He’s home.

In my waking life, I hated that truck. To me, it told the whole story of who I was to a world that could not possibly understand. But in dreams the shabby pickup was the color of a green Heineken bottle, Dad’s favorite beer. The noisy tires against the gravel became a signal—a clanging gong that peace had returned at last. It’s funny the way we fear nightmares, when a happy dream born in a sad reality does much more to crush one’s spirit.

A month earlier, I had barreled off the back porch, the wind lifting the panel of my hair-sprayed bangs as I ran for the bus. Bell arrived beside me, and together we tilted our bodies left, catching the tail lights as the yellow school bus turned right onto Longstreet Cemetery Road. It was too far to sprint, even for two teenage girls armed with gossip and full makeup. We shuffled back to the house, knowing our fate now required a confession—we had missed the bus again—and a willing parent. Dad shook his finger, then sat his coffee down on the kitchen table. Bell stretched her right arm toward him and popped up her thumb. Dad grinned. “Need a lift?” he asked.

Dad driving us to school was unusual but welcome, like the sound of his baritone when he woke us for school, singing “Good morning to you” to the tune of “Happy Birthday.” That morning, the old pickup blocked the other cars in the driveway, and Dad thought nothing of driving us the five miles to school in the raggedy truck. I took one sobering look at it, then died a small death, the kind teenagers do when they feel their life is over. The interior smelled like Dad of Longstreet—sawdust and tobacco with just a hint of gasoline. The frayed, saddle-blanket seat cover was torn where I sat, and the rough material scratched against my bare legs. Half balanced on the seat, I applied acrobatics to shutting the door, stretching my arm for the handle and using the weight of my whole body to slam the creaky metal door closed. Dad revved the engine, a thunderous rumble unfit for polite society. “Ladies, your chariot awaits.”

Ahead on Campground Road, I saw the bus back on route. My first thought was “Good, we won’t be late after all.” My second was “Oh God, what if they see us?” The fear had barely registered, when Dad sped up. Soon, we were right behind it, no cars between us. The Jeep’s front windshield and the bus’s back window lined up, as the kids in the backseat turned around. For a moment, our eyes met, like goldfish whose glass bowls had been put together, only to stare and blink. In a flash, Bell and I dove under the hulking dashboard, desperate for invisibility or time machines or a quick death. “You care what they think?” Dad huffed. “Don’t you know?” he said. “What they think doesn’t matter.”

At 13, embarrassment was my primary emotion. Suddenly, everything my parents did or said was humiliating, or worse, gross. Mom and Dad had never bothered with too much clothing—a fact more than a declaration. But now, when I found Dad drinking coffee in his open silk robe, spare parts dangling, I cringed. “Dad! Put some clothes on!” He’d shrug and turn the other way. Neither bothered to close the bathroom door when using the toilet, and it wasn’t uncommon to walk past the bathroom and find one of them doing their business. “Mom! Shut the door!” I’d call out. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you, Queen Victoria.”

Our family had begun to feel normal again. Mom and Dad were together, and Dad worked on finishing the house, or rather, extending it. Contractors came and dug out a new foundation, nearly as big as the current house. The addition would have two floors—a full basement and additional bedrooms. Fitting the spaces together required some engineering. Dad tore down the exterior wall between the house and the addition, planning to install double sliding glass doors between the new and old spaces. For a few days, he balanced the heavy, metal frames upright in the kitchen, as he waited for another set of hands for installation.

One afternoon, as Mom cooked and Dad tinkered with the woodwork, I poured a glass of cranberry juice from the fridge and turned around. I heard the noise before I saw it. A 7-foot tall frame began falling toward me. At first it fell slowly, the way a tree in a forest lingers before it hits the ground, and then suddenly, bam! The top of the frame crashed onto my right shoulder, landing in the L-shape just below my ear. Dazed, I looked around the room. There was Mom. There was Dad. “Are you okay?” someone asked. Tears stung my eyes. “I’m fine,” I said. The heavy frame had just missed my head.

As do-overs go, our return to Longstreet seemed more of a crossroads than a restart. There had been other times, when Dad had given in to Mom’s ultimatums and quit smuggling. He started other businesses—a movie rental store in Roswell, a Burlwood furniture gallery in Helen, a tourist town in North Georgia. No one explained exactly what we were doing this time or why Dad was home more—still I sewed the clues together and formed a simple story. We were all together again, and Dad was home. I would never have admitted it at the time, but I had come to accept that living at Longstreet was a fair price to pay for whatever this was. Decades later, I would berate myself for accepting less than someone’s best, baffled at my willingness to wade into murky waters when I had plenty of self-belief. A difficult diagnosis—it turns out that my problem was not a lack of self-esteem but a high tolerance for scraps.

Mom had good days and bad ones. Like a rainbow, I learned to enjoy happy and fun Mom when she appeared. Even as she blared “Dixie Chicken” and showed us, again, how she could buckdance, something learned from her girlhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains and performed when drunk, it was not too bad. Or rather, it wasn’t too sad. Because this time, it wasn’t Mom dancing alone. Dad was there too.

Sometimes Dad, a 6-pack of Heineken down, would join in with his rooster strut. Mom would clog a few sets, then slowly push her right foot outward for three beats before snapping it back in place. Dad would put his hands behind his back, his neck jutted forward dramatically, strutting left, then right. “If you’ll be my Dixie chicken,” Mom sang loudly, “I’ll be your Tennessee Lamb.” She kicked her leg out, “And we can walk together,” she crooned, “Down in Dixieland.”

In some ways, my parents were still the hippies they’d been when they’d first met. Marijuana, nudity, and loud music made daily appearances, and whenever they counted down for photos, Dad still smooched Mom on the lips at the last second. Long before I understood sexual innuendo, I knew something adult was happening behind their occasional snickers and bug eyes. “You’re too young to understand,” Mom would say, when I’d beg for an explanation. And for a long time that satisfied me, but now I was 13 and it wasn’t just Mom and Dad telling dirty jokes. So, when I finally understood what the kids on the bus meant when they said “blow job”— having previously thought it was something to do with a hairdryer—once home, I jogged down the stairs and ran inside to find Mom.

There was no way a girl would put her mouth on a boy’s penis. Mom, a blunt speaker of the truth, would know better than anyone. I found her in the kitchen, getting an early start on dinner. Her perm had begun to grow out, and her soft blonde hair fell to one side. She looked happy in her blue jeans and tank-top, bra-less per usual. With one hand, she stirred a small pot of freshly snapped green beans, in the other, she smoked a Marlboro Menthol. I dumped my book bag on the floor and began the investigation.

“Mom, have you ever given Dad a BJ?” I demanded. A dozen bus-ride conversations later, I was now fluent in the language of teenagers. “What did you say?” Mom shot back and stubbed out her cigarette. “Well did you?” asked Bell, who now stood beside me in the kitchen.

“What? Absolutely not!” she said. Now she was laughing and snorting, her hand swinging the wooden spoon. The water overboiled on the stove, and she grabbed the pot with her bare hand. “Dammit!” she said, and rubbed the burn against her blue jeans.

Mom slumped down at the table, limp from the pain and laughter. She lit a new cigarette, then blew smoke from the side of her mouth. “Did I ever give your father a blow job?” she repeated. “I’ll tell you this much,” she said, ash forming on the tip of her Marlboro. “If I ever did,” she said, “It was only out of love.”

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There’s that feeling of being asleep, when you’re gone into the blackness of space and time and dreams, and then, a light comes on. It’s time to get up. Or is it?

Mom was standing over my bed, already talking. She held something in her hand—was it paper, a pen? I removed the herd of stuffed animals I’d tucked under my covers, trying to put events into the right order. Outside my window, the world was dark and quiet. “What time is it?” I asked. But Mom didn’t answer. She tapped her right foot against the hardwoods, chattered away, too fast for me to follow. “Get up!” she said. “You have to write a letter.”

The urgency in Mom’s voice told me not to argue. If I ever wanted to go back to bed, I must do this now, whatever it is. There was no time to go downstairs, to plant myself at the kitchen table. I glanced over at my vanity, where I kept my curling iron and jewelry box. It would have to do.

Two paces from my poster bed, I sat down on the antique bench that paired the vanity. The furniture had been my grandmother Bobo’s, and it made me feel historical, like I lived in both the present and the past. The dressing table had four spindly legs, with two sets of small drawers and a slim desk in the middle. Each drawer opened with a braided, iron pull, and contained a mashup of childhood and budding adolescence—hairbands and jelly bracelets, sample lipsticks and old finger nail polish.

A few weeks earlier, I’d sat in the exact spot as Bell trimmed my hair for the last time. In the span of five minutes, she’d given me a ragged, asymmetrical cut and snipped off the tip of my right ear. “Ouch!” I screamed, as blood dripped down my earlobe. She grabbed a tissue, then inspected the damage. My ear would be fine. My hair, however, would require the help of a professional. Following mom’s instructions, a friendly hairstylist tried to make something from the mess Bell left behind, but it was too late. For days, my reflection startled me—an eleven-year-old girl with a boy’s haircut and a mouth full of braces.

Mom placed the pen and lined paper beside the curling iron. For a moment, I worried about a fire, then remembered that it wasn’t morning, that it wasn’t hot, that I was writing a letter to someone, and it was night. Mom stood over my shoulder, ready to dictate. She scripted the first few lines, insisting on their importance. “Dear Rosemary,” Mom instructed, then waited for me to finish. “Dear Rosemary,” she repeated with emphasis. “Please don’t kill us.”

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Standing on the front lawn of our house in Roswell, I made my big announcement, “I shaved my legs!” I said with finality. Mom was headed to Hartsfield International Airport, bound for San Diego to visit my Aunt Maggie, and I had timed my confession perfectly. There was nothing she could do now. Bell had learned to shave two weeks earlier, but Mom said I had to wait. At nine, I wasn’t old enough to learn, so I taught myself.

“Lord, Viki,” Mom said, shaking her head and inspecting my handiwork. I smiled back, knowing I had won this round of silly rules applied to younger children. “You missed some hairs,” she added and flicked my left calf. Oh. So you’re supposed to shave the back of your legs too.

A car horn blared. “Let’s go, Martha!” yelled Aunt Susan. She mashed the horn in five short bursts, and Mom danced a little jig. The girls’ trip had begun.

We’d gathered outside to wish them farewell, waving along as if they were going on a grand adventure. “What about us?” I had whined. I could not remember a time when Mom had left us. “I never go anywhere. All I do is take care of everybody else!” she huffed, beating her chest. Mom thumped her chest whenever she got fired up. “I’m a person too!” she said, thump, thump. Now here was logic I understood. I’d shaved my legs because I too was a person. Couldn’t she see that? But as the car drove away, my protest felt empty. A tear shaped cut on my left calf began to bleed, and I ran inside for a dab of toilet paper.

The Roswell house was like nowhere we’d ever lived. Three floors, six bedrooms, a tucked-under garage. Mom designed our bedrooms to match our interests and personalities, complete with hand-sewn bed coverings and drapes. On the walls of my bedroom, Mom installed beautiful linen wallpaper, with a texture like corduroy and interspersed with swirls of multi-colored ribbon. At night, I traced my finger over the smooth satin and picked away at the corduroy paper. I kept the vandalism secret by limiting the damage to the space where my bed leaned against the wall.

Fancy bedrooms, screened-in porches, backyard swimming pools—there were many nice houses in our neighborhood. Later, in middle school, I would visit friends who lived in the Polo Golf & Country Club Estates, and I would come to understand the difference between middle class and wealthy. But compared to Longstreet and the modest rentals we’d lived in along the way, the Roswell house felt rich. And for a little while, that’s how we lived.

For the almost three years we lived in Roswell, I experienced what it was like to come from a family with money. During this time, Bell and I spent two weeks in an exclusive gymnastics camp in central Pennsylvania, where I trained with coaches from all over the country. Camp Woodward had a menu of activities that campers could add to their stay, so I booked myself an overnight horseback riding trip.

Up the trail I went, singing softly to the brown dappled mare named Windsong. “Wind song, wind song, whinny, whinny windsong,” I chanted, making the words up as I went along. At night, our small group gathered beneath a canopy of stars, the moon round and bright, and we warmed ourselves by the open fire. The other girls giggled when I confessed to tasting my very first s’more. I laughed too because with no Mom in sight, I planned to grab my independence with two hands and fall asleep without brushing my teeth.

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“Twirl around,” said Mom, “and hold your breath. This stuff is toxic.” I spun slowly in a circle, as Mom dosed me with glitter spray from an aerosol can. “Now,” she said. “Let me look at you.”

Mom leaned back to admire her creation. There I stood in my white and pink pageant dress, tied expertly with a rosy, starched bow. Unlike the floor-length, fitted ballgowns that women wore in the Miss America pageant, dresses for my age group were frilly and iridescent, turning little girls into life-sized baby dolls.

Mom enjoyed directing our transformation and went to great lengths to make Bell and I shine, adding not one but two crinolines beneath our skirts, making them fan out at full-attention. And then there was the glitter spray. Late one night, Mom had been struck by a sudden epiphany. Aha! She would make us sparkle and catch the judge’s eye. It worked. Thankfully, we received only a warning. Bedazzling your daughters in glitter may have been permitted at the local level, but Birmingham, Alabama’s Little Miss Cinderella State pageant had standards.

I received my invitation to Birmingham a few months earlier, after competing in my very first beauty pageant. It was my 8th birthday, which I interpreted as a lucky advantage. But at the end of the 4-hour contest, it was Bell who became Little Miss Cinderella. Technically, I had not lost to my sister, as I was placed in a junior division, or what pageant authorities referred to as the Mini-Miss competition. But how I envied her. When they placed the glittering tiara on her hair-sprayed head, Bell sobbed like the newly anointed Miss America did on TV. Then, she straightened her crown and strode the catwalk with her bouquet of red roses, posing expertly at the taped x’s marked on the stage. She was nine.

It was not the first time the universe had let me down. I had also not advanced into the next level of gymnastics earlier that year, and there too, Bell had zoomed ahead of me. How I wanted to be named prettiest and best. Instead, I qualified for state by becoming Little Mini-Miss Cinderella’s talent winner. That afternoon, when the mixed tape played, I began my tumbling routine on the stage, a blend of choreography and gymnastics performed wearing a blue leotard, two silver sequined leg warmers, and a matching headband. The sequins provided more than added bling but turned each round-off backhand spring into a light show.

Mom would like you to know that the leg warmers were her idea, that she’d found a woman in the yellow pages to make them and to sew my sailor-themed leisure wear. And if it wasn’t for her, Mom will tell you, Bell and I would never have developed as gymnasts. Because who enrolled us at Anniston, Alabama’s best gymnastics academy, and later, at Atlanta’s finest gym, where we took dance and ballet classes and paid for private lessons? And who baked the homemade banana bread and snuck us wedges slathered in peanut butter during our breaks? It was Mom.

“Why don’t you tell those stories?” she sometimes asks me. “Why do you always focus on how I screwed up?” she says. “I didn’t know any better,” says Mom. “Nobody ever taught me how to be a parent,” she says and throws up her hands in exasperation because I have always been an impossible child. “But go ahead,” she says. “Tell everyone how I am the worst mother that ever lived.”

The worst mother that ever lived is probably someone else’s mother. Because my mother, even with her fistful of flaws, did love me. Not just in her own way, as we sometimes say to soften when someone tries and fails, but in a way that I have always known. We could debate what love is and whether or not her actions and counteractions qualify. On those counts, you might win.

But in the way mothers make their small children feel about who they are and if they’re glad they’re here, Mom gave that to me. In the way my mother has admired me, calling me the new-and-improved-Martha, a cringy phrase she uses instead of giving me an actual compliment. I have never liked the way it erases my originality, the work of remaking myself from ashes, and yet in it, there is a childlike wish for me to agree with her, to say we are alike. “Surely, there is some of me in you?” she whines, willing me to say yes.

Even the guilt Mom piles on top of me, for my inability to love her more, give her more, to visit her more—even this has invited me into a philosophical conversation about being offered what most people crave: to be wanted by someone you love. And maybe that’s why her unwillingness to be with her contributions to my story and her retaliations when she feels unloved or left out—not because of who I am but because of the hole in her bucket—have hurt so much. To know someone loves you, but cannot be trusted with that love, is one of the saddest parts of being human.

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I’d never met anyone named Atlanta. It thrilled me to know that a girl in Anniston, Alabama could be named after my birthplace, and I told Atlanta this much. “It’s Alana,” she repeated, the way one does for slow readers. The letters rolled inside my brain, snagging on the t’s I’d missed in two places. In my house, these words were pronounced the same.

The two of us were enjoying the empty school playground on a Saturday. Alana sat at the bottom of a teeter-totter, watching me. My legs gripped the playground bars, while I swung upside down and gathered momentum. “One, two, three!” I said, then landed with my two hands up. At eight years old, I knew that a well-timed penny drop could fix a faux pas. “Wow!” said Alana. “Show me how.”

My family lived in a little bungalow on the other side of 10th Street Elementary’s chainlink fence. Earlier that morning, I had spied a girl alone at the playground through my bedroom window. I raced over, not bothering to inform anyone of my whereabouts. What did it matter, I thought, since I got myself ready and walked the same distance to school everyday.

Each weekday morning, I’d sit at the breakfast table, spooning plain Cheerios sprinkled with granulated sugar into my mouth, then throw back the candied milk like a shot of whiskey. Next, I’d sling my knapsack over my shoulder, slip my feet into clear jellies, and fly out the door. Our closest neighbor was the school itself. Still, I approached the walk like a grand adventure, a daily test of stealth and courage. At the driveway’s end, I took the first sharp right and followed the sidewalk to the fencepost. The final turn I performed on my back heel, a dramatic maneuver enacted to amuse only myself. From there, I tramped ten paces to a patch of lumpy concrete, hopscotching over a large elm’s tangled roots sprawled out like the tentacles of an enormous octopus. Two minutes later, I strode inside the building, finding my way to Mrs. Jones’s third grade class before the bell rang.

At Longstreet, I had enjoyed freedom and nature, but in Anniston, I discovered urban living and responsibility. The combination of the two was exhilarating—I could do things by myself, as long as I was careful. “Look both ways,” Mom would say. “And remember your code name.”

Code names came with the move to Anniston. Mine was “Kitty” because I snuggled like a cat. Bell’s was “Ding-a-ling” because it made us all laugh. Jake’s was Jake-Bake because it rhymed, and CJ’s was CJ-5, after Dad’s old jeep.

On my walks to school, I ran through our code names, in case my siblings forgot. Mom had instructed us to keep the names top secret. “But what if Memaw comes and doesn’t know my name?” I asked. Memaw had never done school pick up, but I found she provided the perfect object lesson. She was a no nonsense granny, and I doubted she could be bothered with the added security. “Well then you can’t go with her,” said Mom. This was an exciting prospect. Refusing to go with Memaw would infuriate her, which I feared but felt willing to risk. If the code names were going to work, we could not pick and choose when to apply them. Plus, I knew my siblings would cave under threats of whoopings or promises of candy, but I would not be so easily persuaded. I alone would protect the family. At school, I imagined scenarios where Memaw drove from Jasper, Georgia to Anniston—a three hour journey—but I refused to get into the car. “What’s my name?” I’d demand. No hints.

In 1983, stories circulated about men in white vans kidnapping children and selling them on the black market. “They love to snatch blonde hair and blue-eyed children,” Mom said, looking us up and down, as if we might be a plate of bacon. Our code names were our first line of defense. But 1983 was also the year my family fled Georgia for Alabama, following a frightening hotel robbery that nearly put Dad out of business. In the big story of who I am, the event closes out the first act of my childhood with a bang.

No one knew about our stay at the Marriott in Atlanta, a detail that will soon become important. Longstreet was under construction, and we spent our days playing sharks and minnows in the hotel pool, a city vacation from our country lives. But on this day, while we ate hamburgers and french fries nearby, a thief busted the lock on our door and stole $250,000. That alone would have been devastating, but to make things just a little worse, the money did not all belong to Dad.

The economy of smuggling worked like this: the supplier fronted the smugglers the goods, who then fronted an allotted amount to the dealers, who then marked up the sale, and payment came due at the end of the season. The robbery occurred in the space between Dad’s final collection and before he’d paid off his supplier. Dad, who had been so careful and was so good at deflecting attention, was reminded of another danger that day. It was not only the police who posed a threat to him and his family, but his associates as well. Because clearly he had been followed. Years later, I asked my father what would have happened if he himself had been inside the hotel room—did he carry a weapon, and what if the other man had one too? “It depends,” said Dad, explaining the complex math of being an outlaw. “It depends on who would have pulled their gun first.”

The funny thing about traumatic experiences is that everyone remembers them differently. Dad will tell you that I wasn’t there that day, that I could not possibly remember the scene, that I was at a little friend’s house, and he knows this because they picked me up after. It doesn’t matter if I remember it—the open hotel drawers, the tipped lamp, the sound of Mom sobbing, and the hot, red anger that radiated from him. It doesn’t matter that, as I have gently countered, he may have confused me for Bell, an honest mistake. But no, he will not budge in his remembering. Because he insists that it was Bell and Taylor, Dad’s best friend who was also like an uncle to us, who had discovered the break-in first. He is firm on this account, having revisited the memory many times and having added this event to the stacks of terrible things that happened to my sister in her lifetime. Case closed. And what can I say to this? At 80, perhaps it is too painful for my father to imagine that I too experienced the weight of terrible things.

In my child’s memory of that night, we travel separately from Dad, and it is Mom who drives us across the Alabama/Georgia state line. Her hysteria includes, but is not limited to, telling us that we are broke, that we can forget Christmas, and there is no Santa Claus. I cry and kick at the backseat. “You’re a liar!” I scream. Because either way, it’s true. But in Dad’s telling, he drives us all to Alabama in the Cadillac he bought from Mrs. Venable, the mother of one of his friends. This is how it was, he says, because under the circumstances, there’s no way he would have allowed us from his sight.

Which story is true? I don’t know. I only know that an hour after Mom outed Santa Claus, and her mania deflated, we stopped at a gas station for fuel. “If you’re good and stay together,” she said, “you can go inside and pick one treat a piece.” She folded the front seat forward, and Bell and I climbed out from the deep pocket of the ride, waiting. But Jake did not follow us. He was asleep. In fact, he’d been asleep for a long time.

Like the hand of God, a sudden knowing passed over us. Bell and I looked at one another, then back at Mom, and in that way that families can communicate without any words, each of us knew what to do next. To protect Jake’s innocence and perhaps rewind our own, we would all pretend. Santa was real again. Not long after, we got the code names.

“Entrepreneur,” said Mom. If anyone at 10th Street Elementary asked what Dad did for work, we were to say entrepreneur. Mom loved big words, but she pronounced them in her own way. She said entrepreneur the way she said manure, with too much flourish at the end. I worked over the syllables in my mouth, wanting the word to flow easily from my lips. Mom had not explained the rules, but I knew we were being asked to play a game. Like Mary Poppins, she knew how to make hard things fun.

In small ways, I already understood what Dad did for a living. I understood he came and went, and we would not hear from him until he was back. I understood the robbery had been bad. I knew Mom worried and shopped and drank too much when he was away. I knew my parents smoked pot every day. And all of it, like our code names, was secret. But like most children, I really did not understand how my father’s job fit into the wider world or what that meant for our family. It was Alana who helped with that.

We’d made our way to the swings. Alana pushed me higher and higher, as if my feet might touch the clouds. I sprang from the seat, nailing another two-feet landing. “It’s my turn now,” said Alana.

It was nice to have a friend, and I felt dizzy with gratitude. She plopped down in the bucket seat, and I drug the swing backward. “Wanna know a secret?” I whispered, then ran fast under Alana’s outstretched legs. “Yes!” she squealed, and dismounted onto the bark chips. “My parents smoke pot,” I said, then sprinted toward the merry-go-round. The leap aboard, spun me around in a circle. “You mean marijuana?” Alana called across the playground. “No!” I yelled back. “But that’s what pot is,” she said. “Marijuana is a drug.”

A drug? Mrs. Henderson, our school’s principal, had just taught us about these. Drugs caused people to do terrible things, even to the people they loved. We had to be careful, she said, because bad people might trick you into tasting them and then you could get addicted. When that happened, you went berserk, crying and begging, willing to do anything for drugs. A drug addict could steal his grandmother’s pocketbook. The only way to prevent this horrible outcome was to just say no, she said, and held out her hand like a stop sign. At the time, this seemed such a simple choice. Don’t start, and you’ll have nothing to regret. But if Alana was right, it was too late for my family. Her words pin-balled inside my head, ricocheting between the love and logic regions of my brain, presenting me with an impossible story problem. Because if pot was marijuana, and marijuana was a drug, and drugs were bad, what did that make Mom and Dad?

The merry-go-round stopped, and I crouched low, unsure of my next move. Across the playground, I saw our house filtered through the metal pattern of the fence. It looked like the other houses in the neighborhood—a simple front yard, window shutters, a chimney. “I have to go,” I lied and jumped down. “See you tomorrow?” Alana yelled. But I didn’t answer, and ran faster and faster for home.

With no way to make sense of Alana’s lesson, I did what most people do with unwanted truths. I buried it. Or rather, I pretended. Like Mom’s Santa Claus confession, I rewrote the afternoon, and poof, the revelation was gone.

Pretending is a powerful trick. It lets you go back to how things were without needing to process, much less integrate, what happened. In my case, that meant Dad went on being Dad and Mom went on being Mom—no need to decide if they were heroes or villains. Those calculations would come later, and I would sort events in a way that ensured my psychological survival, allowing myself one of each. Dad would be the hero, and Mom would be the villain. Perfect.

From the two-story window, the ocean barely seemed to move, the waves masquerading beneath the deep blue when suddenly a frothy peak revealed itself in a slight of hand. I watched the show from my bedroom window, waiting for a grown up to wake up, to get up, to go. Mom had outlawed crossing Beachview Drive unchaperoned, and so I languished, obedient and on high alert for the gurgling of the coffee pot downstairs.

We’d stayed in other houses on the island, but this trip Mom had rented a beach villa with an ocean view, the one the Crawford ladies from Jekyll Island Realty had identified as perfect for a large family and their friends. The Crawford ladies were identical twin sisters, with glossy, platinum hairdos and bright red lips. They wore polka dotted skirts and tall high-heels, low-buttoned blouses and extra black mascara. Two toy poodles trailed behind them wherever they went, their furry heads affixed with tiny bows, their toenails scarlet. “She’s so cute,” I said once, leaning down to pet one. “He,” said Crawford Lady A. “They are baby boys.” She cooed at the small dog, then bent down to scratch him under the chin.

“Good Lord, ladies. Ya’ll have outdone yourself,” Mom said, the first time we toured our vacation home. The architect had designed the first level around a wall of floor to ceiling windows, giving all of the living spaces an ocean view. The narrow dining room was outfitted with a large walnut-lacquered table, and on a patch of carpet in the living room, a burnt-orange sectional and two rattan chairs hovered around a TV console. The fully-equipped kitchen, an essential for Mom, was designed in mustard yellow and gray florals—and as if this all was not marvelous enough—a glinting, spiral staircase grew upward from the tile.

Each time we trotted up and down the stairs, Mom hollered cautionary tales from below, stories of children busting their heads, or worse, breaking their necks. Mom’s parenting relied heavily on dramatic news clips, sad stories about children who suffocated when they selected a car trunk for hide-and-seek or a child who strangled because their sister, who loved them, pressed the automatic button for the car window after they’d stuck their head outside. The former I had yet to try, but made a note to avoid, the latter seemed like an embellishment from a common argument we’d had in the car. Who won the privilege to push the button up and down was based typically on seat placement, but occasionally the unlucky middle passenger would go rogue, mash a button, and thumb wrestle for total control. Mom would swat at our legs from the driver’s seat, “Don’t make me turn this car around!”

Had I run up the spiral staircase the night before? I could not recall. I knew only that I waited—not exactly patiently—on the top bunk of a spacious bedroom. The upstairs of the Crawford House, which is what we had decided to call it, had three rooms, and this one was the biggest, a bunkhouse that provided sleeping quarters for at least eight children. Waiting, I sniffed the air hoping for the familiar scent of morning but no coffee smells wafted from below. Strings of tiny shells jangled from a dream catcher that hung outside on the balcony. I listened to its enchantment, the clink clink quavering a soft and watery lullaby.

Somewhere between wakefulness and dreams, I saw the Spanish House Mom rented on Jekyll the year before, its stucco walls and the red tiled roof—and the locked room. That time, we’d come to the island for a month, each day taking the dunes two paces at a time, running back and forth from the shore, exploring all of the great wide world. But not that room. Mom, having grown up with ghosts, said she felt a cold, dark energy from beneath the door. Whenever I went by, I licked my finger and held my breath, a practice borrowed from my aunt Lita who insisted on this when passing by a graveyard. I never learned what was in the room or why the door was locked, but my child’s mind closed around it like a secret, a door I could touch then run away, a room I knew existed but could never enter.

The Spanish House was connected to the beach by way of a sand dune. A pathway led from the house to the ocean, but the walk there could be treacherous on little feet. At Longstreet, we ran tiptoe around the fire ants but here burs hid in the tufts of grass that jutted up from the sand. Mom lectured me about going barefoot, but wearing shoes just slowed me down. I liked the feel of the sand under my feet. “You’ll find out,” she said like a fortune teller who’d already seen my future. On unlucky days, a bur would rise up and get me, and I’d hop on one foot and howl over my terrible misfortune. “Hush,” Mom hissed. Then, she’d plant me in the sandy path, bottom first, and pluck the sharp plant from between my toes. “Why don’t you listen?” she scolded. She looked up at the heavens, as if asking God to confirm that yes, these unruly children belonged to her.

Like other trips, our aunts and uncles and cousins came and went from the Spanish House, appearing on their own timelines and leaving whenever the groceries ran out. Dad’s friends and their wives and children came too, staying for late night dinners and sleeping on the couch. There was no schedule for arrivals and departures. No calendar on a wall, something I might have liked, especially since it could have predicted Dad’s comings and goings. The island instead formed my sense of time and possibility—the daily rhythm of the tide, the discovery of sand dollars in the early mornings, the sudden arrival of sea turtles at night, and the time we brought flashlights to the moonlit beach and watched as the mothers covered their eggs with sand, crawled back to the ocean, and swam away. These visions provided all the information that mattered, a universe of knowing for a child. At night, we left the window open, and I fell face forward into my dreams.

Jekyll was our special place—an island that was, and is, part heat, part jungle, little pockets of sulfur, and the wide open sea. When the sticky breeze blows, the world feels ancient and thick with Jekyll’s stories. Holding a conch shell to my ear, I could hear faraway music from inside. The sounds came from a great distance and in a language almost familiar but that I did not know.

Even a rumor of Jekyll would cause us to jump up and down, running around the yard like a dog with the zoomies. Mom and Dad had to plan our journeys like sneak attacks, capturing us asleep in our beds and snuggling us into the backseat of the car. Five hours felt like eternity. But when you’re half asleep, the hours can melt away like magic. One minute we were leaving Longstreet and the next we were waking up to the Golden Isles, the air whipping through the car, the smell of egg farts. After a while, my nose adjusted to the swampy odor, and the sea breeze swooped in to save us.

The thing about a double life is that you don’t always know you’re living it, and that’s especially true for lives that you are grandfathered into. To me, our time on Jekyll, and later on Hilton Head, were trips orchestrated by Dad and supervised by Mom. It took time for me to understand that our family vacations were also a cover because who would expect a young father of four children, the oldest brother of a large extended family, a man who welcomed his friends and their families to visit him at the beach, to be running a complex smuggling operation up and down the Georgia coastline?

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There was always lots of arguing when the cousins visited Longstreet. But not when we played our favorite game, Statue. To play, all you had to do was run around the front yard like a headless chicken, then wait for a boss-cousin to yell, “Somebody’s coming!” Next, you’d race to your spot down by the road then freeze like Medusa had turned you to stone. Standing absolutely still was especially important and separated the serious from the bored. At the height of my gameplay, I had perfected the art of telling a story with my face. Sometimes I’d aim my eyes at something faraway or frame my lips into a bewildered gasp so someone might ponder my bitter end.

Statue was a noble cause, and we believed in it. Becoming a statue protected Earth, and the only way to lose was to unfreeze too soon or to be too slow for the passerby to see you. If you failed to fool the driver, something might blow up and then your parents might die or your dog. Our mission was that none should perish, so we played Statue on the very edge of our property. “They think we’re real,” we’d say and high five, after a car whizzed by. Then, we’d run around the yard until it was time to do it again.

It was a secret game, of course. The adults had been quite clear about the dangers of the old country highway, and playing near the road was forbidden. But since the grownups scarcely checked, relying mostly on tattle-telling, we adjusted the rules to fit our thrill level. We decided that playing in-the-road was off limits but racing across it didn’t count. “Ready, set, go!” someone would holler, and we’d dash across Campground Road with extra courage, reaching for the all-time Payne Gang record like it was something you could pick up and carry around.

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A few days ago, Kyle and I commemorated the night we met…10 years ago.

Same place, same drinks—I even wore the same raincoat, a green, belted number that I had splurged on after ending it with an off and on again love interest.

Love on. Love off.

That was pretty much my grown-up, post-divorce dating experience before I met Kyle. I would meet an interesting man, spend a few months together, then something about it would not be quite right. Sometimes it was me, sometimes it was them. But a lot of it was just how online dating worked.

In this space, you meet someone boiled down to just the basics: appearance, job, location, and acceptable hobbies. But people don't arrive at dating apps whole — they arrive having already edited themselves, presenting the version they hope someone will choose. And as you already know, it's the quirks, habits, communication style, and lived values — not what they say they believe but what they actually practice — that forms the relationship.

Oh. And of course, there's all the baggage everyone brings to dating. Me? I was on the lookout for secret emotional criminals. People who seem kind and caring at first, but go dark and silent when life gets hard, or worse, blame their stress on you. If I had to guess, that made me slightly neurotic as a love interest — a lapse in communication, a missed text…oh buddy, I am watching you.

This was something I had to work through with Kyle, too. The first time I panicked, I sent him what I can only describe as a manifesto. I told him how much I had enjoyed getting to know him, how certain I was that he had felt it too, that even if he didn't see me as a romantic prospect I would have at least considered him a friend — and here he had gone and ghosted me. Yes, I used that word. I laid it all out, every feeling, every fear, every implication. Within seconds, I received this response: an image of a dog that had chewed through a door with the caption: "I thought you were never coming home."

Of course I laughed. It is one of my best qualities — anger, sadness, fear, joy…I am always good for a laugh.

But something else stood out. He had used the word “home.” Yes, that was what our relationship was starting to feel like, what he was starting to feel like. We talked after, which was nice, but here’s what I remember most: without taking it personally he called me out. In my fear of abandonment, he had reached for me, just as I was ready to jump ship.

It would not be the only time he would gently reach out and take my hand — or rather, offer his arm, elbow crooked, waiting for me to slip mine inside. And the first time it happened was the night we met.

It was magical — the kind of night you'd have to invent if it hadn't actually happened. First, we met for drinks. Next, we went hat shopping, trying on hats and laughing like kids. Then, he bought me one — a gorgeous, red cloche hat with an asymmetrical brim. Afterward, we walked across the street for dinner in Northwest Portland. But the night still wasn't done.

He invited me to come along to hear live music, and along the way, he did this thing I will never forget. Hands in pockets, he bent his left elbow toward me and made a little cubby. We walked three blocks to Al's Den on Burnside arm-in-arm.

Live music turned out to be standup comedy. We didn't care. Instead, we scooted closer in our chairs, and he leaned in for a kiss.

In the background, the sounds of Death Cab for Cutie played. "A Lack of Color," "Soul Meets Body" — I wish I could remember which one. But I supposed it doesn't matter because each title could be applied to our love affair, or rather elements of what it means to find someone who helps you become more and more of who you are.

We kissed goodbye at my car, and my new hat — red, perched over the green raincoat, because apparently I had dressed for Christmas in February — began to fall. As it sped toward the wet pavement, Kyle reached out his hand and caught it.

The next morning I woke up smiling, a little hum playing in my heart. I checked my phone and to my surprise, I had a text from Kyle. My hand shook with excitement as I opened the message that read:

"Do you want to see a sexy pic?"

Oh no! I threw my phone off the bed.

How had this happened? He seemed like such a great guy, but this? This would ruin everything. Because the only 'sexy pic' I had ever received after a date was not one I asked for or would ever want to see.

A man, who I will call Kevin, had invited me out for a drink. We had a flirty conversation and a little too much chemistry, but it was fun — it could easily have gone the other way. I enjoyed smart men, but sometimes a guy who seems fun and witty online turns out to be an actual nerd. But not Kevin. He was a smart dresser, with a good job, and a young daughter with a pet frog, and when she was at her mom's, he took care of it. To me, this made him not just fun and smart, but sweet and quirky, some of my favorite qualities in a man. We made plans to go to a party that weekend.

Until.

After our date, I received a follow up message and video from Kevin. The thumbnail was dark and it looked like maybe, I don't know, a blurry frog? It was not.

Hadn't I told Kyle this story on our date? Didn't we have a big laugh about this? Why, oh, why would he think I wanted to see a sexy pic?

I picked my phone off the floor and decided to write back fast. Maybe I would never see him again, but maybe there was still time to clarify that no I did not want to see anything like that.
But it was too late.

The picture was already in our message thread. And it was not a pet frog.

It was a picture of me—mugging at the camera, as I tried on a baseball cap at the hat store emblazoned with a drawing of a rooster and the word "cock."

Once again, I laughed. Because I had to hand it to him. That was a very clever joke.

I had no way of knowing that 10 years ago I was meeting the person I would go on to spend my life with. We have already seen the highs and lows life can bring, but my love for him has never dimmed and his love for me has kept me going.

Kyle often looks at me and says, "You are more beautiful today than when we met." My vanity reminds me that I have dozens of photos that would say otherwise. But maybe he is right. Maybe we all become more beautiful with love.

A few nights ago, when we toasted our good fortune in the very place we'd met 10 years earlier, I cheersed our former selves for being so smart. We are not the same people who met on that night — but we are more than just older, we are more interesting and more complex. And above all else, we are more loved.

What about you? Is there a moment from a fated first encounter that stands out to you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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They say our memories are painted in black and white. But my early childhood is the color of fire, shaded in by the red hot flame of a very bad temper. My outbursts had a life of their own. They went up, up, up and got hotter and hotter, until eventually a wildness erupted and took full possession of my body. I threw things, broke things, stomped, hollered, sobbed, pulled at my hair.

“She’s sensitive,” my parents whispered, to each other, to strangers, to the Sunday school teacher. Mom threatened a Granny Special if I did not behave. A Granny Special was a two-part spanking, passed down from generations of Mom’s people who sprang from the Blue Ridge Mountains. It began with the indignity of having your pants pulled down and escalated to a righteous whack, whack, whack on your naked behind. She threatened this ancestral beating often and especially when I’d completely lost my mind. But I can’t recall a blaze that ended in a spanking, and for that, I am grateful. Mostly, I remember no help, no aid. Just the feral rage that burned feverish and fast, then reduced me to a heap of exhaustion and ash.

I was an otherwise happy, creative child. Roaming Longstreet, our 10-acre property, in bloomers and cowboy boots, I spent my days searching for rollie pollies and bullfrogs. At dusk, I cupped the gray dark with two hands and beheld a lightning bug, opening and closing the space between my thumb and forefinger, the twinkle of a star. Once, I picked a bundle of lacy wildflowers and delivered them to my mother. “Lord, Viki,” she cried and shook her head. “Take that outside. That’s a chigger plant.” I smashed the bouquet into the ground, grinding the petals with the heel of my boot. Sometimes I sat alone at my great grandmother’s upright piano and banged my head against the black and white keys. At last, relief.

At school, I learned to be good, to walk in a straight line, to gather gold stars. Gold stars meant a strawberry ice cream bar after recess, and the only thing I loved more than strawberry ice cream was a smattering of gold stars. And so, I learned to hold my breath, pinch the soft underbelly of my forearm, and to practice my Memaw’s sworn antidote to anger—counting. Forward and backward I counted, testing the limits of my willpower. There was so much I could control when I was good—the hot feelings, the accumulation of prizes and praise. Still, I suffered sneak attacks. As a teenager, Mom told me, “It’s a good thing you’re for Jesus because if you were for the devil, ha! The world would be in a hell of a lot of trouble.” I stomped off, slamming the door of my bedroom.

It was my high school cheerleading coach, Mrs. J, who eventually got through to me. I was a senior, an A-student, a model resident, at least to the unknowing, when one afternoon my pet dragon surprised everyone and materialized at practice. It was humiliating. It was one of those moments when the part of you you’ve worked so hard to disguise crashes the party, drunk as ever. And you’re standing there, as both you and the one who holds the bag where you stuff the other you, and now everyone knows there’s two.

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“Little biddy?” asks Caroline. “Do you know someone with a name like that?”

After two weeks of triple-checking my time zone conversions, I had called Reverend Caroline at 11am Pacific Standard Time on New Year’s Eve. She greeted me warmly and explained how the whole thing would work.

First, she would lead me through a guided meditation, where I would create a peaceful, mental landscape. Then, she would join me there, where her higher consciousness and my higher consciousness would mingle. The next part, the most important part, said Caroline, was where she received the big download about my life. This required no words—just me asking my questions in silence while she bent her ear to the universe. Her particular gifts allowed her to commune with loved ones gone by.

“I’ll hear a name, or the first letter of a name,” she told me. “The first letter is always correct, but sometimes we figure the rest out together.”

At almost any other time, I would have scoffed at the notion of calling a spiritual counselor in North Carolina to ask about my life. These were the superstitions of my family, of my artsy friends. Besides, maintaining the faith of my ancestors in a time of great confusion supplied me with enough mystery. What peace I found came from the cold comfort of research studies, the lofty goals I scribbled onto brown craft paper and hung on my office wall, the square cushion I squeezed on my therapist’s couch. My identity felt sold, if a bit bossed around, when I used a big fat crayon to color inside the lines.

But at 50, I felt the tug of an invisible thread jerking me toward the unknown. And what did I know, anyway? I had been working for two years on a book about my life, and I was lost. How does a writing teacher get lost telling her own story? A good question—and it’s the one I’d been asking myself for months.

Caroline had received glowing recommendations from three close friends. “She’s the real deal,” said one, a successful marketing consultant. A retired professor friend who left the US for Spain marveled after her session, “She even knew my grandmother’s name!” But when the third friend, an art therapist, told me the story of her hyper-religious father showing up early in a spirit world he did not believe in, I burst into tears.

My friend, blessed with a big, soft heart, was born into a family of unwilling participants. Her mother left when she was a baby, which only made her father grip the Bible harder. Somehow between her mother’s abandonment and her father’s old testament rigidity, she remained compassionate, devoted to babies, animals, and all wounded souls. It didn’t matter if she was love-starved herself—she trudged on, a guardian of discarded hearts. But like most woeful tales, her father’s detachment left a mark, and she’d spent a lifetime sorting the damage. And yet here he was, having crossed fields of gold to ring the celestial doorbell over and over, begging Caroline to let him in. He’d come to say he was sorry, to solicit forgiveness. I booked an appointment the next day.

“Are you ready?” Caroline asks. In the bright yellow chair of my upstairs office, I close my eyes and begin. Without much effort, I find myself on a winding path in the red rocks of Sedona. The sky above is a dusky purple and ahead is a peaceful stream. A large stone juts out into the water, and I wander down to the edge. The impossible colors of the high desert swirl around me, as I cast my questions into the current—my very own message in a bottle.

Unlike my friend’s father, none of my angels show up early. Instead, they wait patiently, as Caroline calls them in. “Little Biddy?” she asks again, saying it slowly, as if sounding it out. But I do not know anyone by this name.

“Maybe someone with an L name?” she asks.

Suddenly, I feel a wave of excitement. “Is it Lettie Sue?”

“Just a minute,” says Caroline. She listens. “Yes, thank you,” she says. “Lettie Sue is here. Is she a firecracker? Like a big personality in a small body?”

I laugh. My 5 ‘2 grandmother, with her legendary, tiny waist and DD bust has arrived. Bobo, the name we called her, loved to talk and talk. When there was nothing to say, she read the road signs on the highway aloud.

“There’s someone else here. Do you know someone called Bobby?”

I do not.

“Someone with a B name?”

I shiver. “Is it Bell?”

“No, hang on,” says Caroline.

Three thousand miles away, I feel her leaning in, tilting her ear to the voices.

“Ah, thank you,” she says. “She is trying to tell me something. She is saying something like Bono. Do you know who that is?”

I am fairly confident that the lead singer of U2 is still with us. “No, sorry,” I say.

“It’s alright. Just write it down. Maybe it’ll be important later,” says Caroline.

“Wait! Is it Bobo? Is the name Bobo?”

Caroline confers. “Yes! That’s it. Who is that?”

“Bobo is Lettie Sue’s grandmother name.”

“Oh, that is what she is saying. She is saying you know her as Bobo.”

Caroline explains that I am doing it. I am fine-tuning myself as the souls came through. And to keep going, to trust myself, and here is the proof. Because how many grandmothers call themselves Bobo?

“What was the other name you said?” she asks. “Was it Bell?”

“Yes.”

“Bell is here too. Who is that to you?”

“She’s my sister,” I say, my voice breaking.

“Has she passed?” asks Caroline.

“Yes.”

“Ah,” she says. “They are together. Lettie Sue takes care of Bell.”

Surely, the afterlife is a strange and foreign land. Who could have predicted my maternal grandmother, who loved playing cards more than giving hugs, would be the one looking after my wild sister?

“Did she pass as a young woman?” asks Caroline.

“Yes. She was 37.”

“Okay.” Caroline sighs. “Hold on, please.”

She listens.

“Were there some challenges with addiction? Do I pass from that?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Does Bell pass from addiction?”

“Yes.”

Between Caroline’s questions and my answers, there are volumes of stories. In the absence of telling all, I say almost nothing.

“Oh my,” Caroline laughs. “She could not be more excited. She is saying, yes, yes, yes. This is all correct. Who is Viki?”

“That’s me. That’s my nickname.”

Caroline begins talking fast. “She is so happy you are here. This is her talking, she is talking to you.”

Bell tells me that she wanted to get it right, to figure it out. She tried everything she could think of, she says. She wants me to understand this.

“Do you want to say something to her?” Caroline asks.

Something? Yes, so many things. But I don’t know where to start.

“She wants you to know that she tried so hard. She is saying ‘I had secrets inside me that other people didn’t know or couldn’t understand.’”

I breathe in, then out. All I want is for her to keep talking.

“Who is the other sister? And someone else?” asks Caroline.

“Yes my sister and my brother,” I say. “There are four of us.”

“Ah, beautiful. She is trying to put you in her arms, to put you together,” says Caroline. “Was she separated from the family?”

“Yes. When she was 14,” I say. At least that was the first time. But I do not say this part out loud.

“Listen, there is so much in your beautiful depth,” she says, and her voice trails away.

“Did you write her off? Do you have unresolved anger?”

I’m not sure if I should address Caroline or Bell. I explain that yes, there was a time when I had written her off, but before she died we came back together. I’m not angry anymore. Tell her, I’m not mad.

Bell is imploring me now, says Caroline. She is saying, keep going, don’t give up. When you understand, I will understand. You will understand for both of us.

“Did you go through something hard?” asks Caroline.

I listen for an answer. But no, she is talking to me.

“Did you go through something difficult? Did you have to become reliable?” asks Caroline.

Yes. At 13, I was the most reliable person in my family.

But she’s not done. “Did you try to become normal?”

It was hard to explain—what choice did I have really? When people act crazy, you can beat them or join them. My victory was no less than becoming a hard working, reliable, productive member of society. A good person that everyone could count on. Was that normal? I didn’t know.

Caroline tells me that they’re giving me an important message. There is this thing that they want me to know, to understand. Not every soul has the energy in a lifetime to overcome hard things. Not every soul has this. You have it, they’re saying. You have the energy to do it. You have a very big soul. This thing you are doing, they say, this project you’re working on, they say you are waiting, it’s like you are waiting for something.

“Do I understand?” asks Caroline.

Maybe? I’m not sure.

“What do you want to know?” she says. “Ask them anything.”

This feels like a dare. I take it.

“Can they give me a map?” I beg. “I’ve been so lost. Can they just say, ‘go this way or that way?’”

Caroline asks me to wait, to hang on the line. She consults Bobo, the grandmother whose chest I banged with my head as a baby, when I wanted down. Lettie Sue, the grandmother who had just enough room for me after Mom left but not enough for my other siblings, the grandmother who sat with me after supper and played hands of gin rummy while we listened to Julio Iglesias sing cover hits in English. “Why don’t you laugh?” she asked me, as we watched episodes of Golden Girls. “You’re supposed to laugh when it’s funny.”

Bell too is still here, thrilled to finally announce herself as my fairy godmother. My sister who had jumped off the school bus her first day of kindergarten, raced into the house with wide-rule paper and pencil, put her small hand over mine, and showed me how to spell my name, V-I-K-I. Bell, the 18-month older sibling, who until I was four or five years old, I believed I would catch in age, only to have the gap widen each year on her birthday. Ding-a-ling, my big sister who would, without fail, clown around and get us into trouble on the school bus or during the Christmas pageant at church. Or was that me?

Caroline is talking again. But for the first time, she sounds confused.

“They’re laughing,” she says. “Do you know why?”

I do not. Here I am doing what Caroline said to do. Asking anything, hoping to cash in one of my three wishes.

“Hang on,” she says. And then, she is laughing.

Ha, ha, ha. They’re all having a big time with their little joke. Hoping they can see me, I roll my eyes —a great, cosmic eyeroll in their direction.

“‘She wants a map?!’ ” says Caroline, who now has a runaway case of the giggles. “They are saying, as if she would follow a map!”

I laugh too. The joke really is more than on me. It is all over me. My great stubbornness has transcended space and time.

My iron will had been one of my best tricks, the thing that made me different from my family, the rickety bridge I crawled over to escape the twin inheritances, chaos and addiction. And I had almost done it. But here I was, back at the start, asking my dearly departed to show me the way. No, I would not be getting a lifekit from the great beyond. Not because they didn’t love me, and not because they didn’t know the way, but because I had no history of following their instructions.

It is not good or bad, I tell myself, a maneuver I learned in therapy. But Caroline interrupts my disappointment. “It’s like you still don’t understand,” she says. “What you’re like, how you’re made. You were not designed to follow maps. Once, you were wild, they say. Not reckless, but wild. To finish this book, you will have to relearn that.”

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It took time for the trick to wear off—a few minutes, a few hours, maybe a day?Eventually, someone felt sorry for me and told me the truth. Great. I was related to them after all.

Ah, family. Can I get a witness?

Hi, I’m Victoria. And I am writing a book about the things we throw away to be good and why we need them back.

And what does that have to do with Star Wars? I’m glad you asked.

Being girl-Yoda terrified me. It felt like a curse, a thing that would make me different forever. Of course it is normal to want to be like everyone else when you’re five, or at least not be the only alien in the family, but life, in the way that it refines and sharpens you, has shown me that my difference is good, my difference is wow.

That is a lesson my siblings and the world of good people never intended for me to learn.

Why I’m here

For 25 years, I’ve helped other people tell their stories, as a writing professor, story coach, and Guided Autobiography instructor. Two years ago, I started sharing stories on stage at the Moth in Portland, including one night at the historic Aladdin theatre, where I told my story to 1000 beautiful people, who laughed and sighed and cried and cheered, and I thought: This. This is what I want to do.

Okay, maybe not the stage part. Because that’s really nerve-wracking and takes weeks of preparation. But the telling-stories-to-an-audience part. I fell in love. Or maybe, I remembered who I am.

Writing a book can be a lonely experience, but I have decided it doesn’t have to be. Not if I invite some friends to come along.

So I’m releasing my memoir one story at a time, every Friday at 8pm, before it’s finished. Wanna come? Below is a preview of my book, which for now I am calling Back Pocket.

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Book Preview

Secrets.

I loved my father. He was a good man who happened to be in prison.

But if I could barely understand this, explaining it to others felt impossible. What I did understand was the judgment—what people would think about him and his marijuana smuggling enterprise, about my alcoholic mother who left when I was 13, about our chaos, about me.

And I already had questions about me. I was imaginative, sensitive, but mostly, fiery. My feelings, my outbursts, my fury—these were especially unattractive qualities for a young lady in North Georgia.

So in an act of great self-discipline, I shoved the bad stuff in the basement and became someone far less complicated. Someone hard-working, pleasing, sunny, resilient. Little Orphan Annie. I basically became her, minus the billionaire adoption story and red hair.

I thought I was so smart. But I was wrong.

Because you can’t disappear the parts of yourself that don’t work, the parts that cause trouble. There are side effects.

Exhibit A: sword-swallowing your rage will lead to more lost feelings. Love, pain, joy, heartache—they all became harder for me to access, and I found myself an observer of my own life. This won’t do, I thought, this is not the life I want, and I banged hard on the glass, jiggled the doorknob. But it wouldn’t budge.

And maybe I would have stayed like that, sad and sorry, but midlife came along and handed me a fresh shit sandwich. Oh, I tried eating it, of course, because that was what I had learned to do. But for the first time in what felt like forever, I could not choke it down.

This is the story of what I did instead. How I stopped trying to be good and became something much more interesting. This is the story of how I became real.

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Founding Member Offer (Limited Time)

My first 100 paid subscribers get:

• 50% off - Just $2.50/month (regular $5/month)

• $30 workshop credit - Apply your entire Year 1 subscription cost ($30) toward any of my online Guided Autobiography workshops (regularly $250)

• Signed first edition of the book when it’s published for annual subscribers

That’s $280+ in value for $30.

Plus: You help shape what makes it into the final book, and when it’s published, you can brag to your cat about having been there the whole time.

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