Faces of Denial: A Memoir

By Jill B. Root

In a remarkable memoir that reads like a novel, Jill Root's mind shattered without warning one morning, and a strange child's voice crashed like a stone through the surface of her apparently normal life. Beneath that surface lay an abyss of confusion and denial that ripped Jill's consciousness into unrecognizable pieces that would take years of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jill B. Root
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087970592

Jill B. Root

For forty years Jill Root was an editor and publications manager for environmental consulting firms, government contractors, and academic publishers. She is the author of Play Without Pain: A Manual of Playground Safety; Interstate 90: A Guide to Points of Interest You Can See Without Stopping; and scripts for three educational multimedia CD-ROMs: Lewis and Clark Rediscovery; Centuries of Scenic Byways; and El Camino Real. She enjoys a busy retirement near her children and grandchildren in a Northern California suburb with her husband and her English Labrador Retriever.

Book preview

PART 1

Texas Panhandle / Maine

The Voice

Hearing voices no one else can hear

isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.

—J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and

the Chamber of Secrets

RRRRRRIPP! SUDDENLY I heard—or was it a feeling?—something tear in my brain. The sensation was the sound that Velcro makes when the two sides are ripped apart. That’s odd, I thought; I wonder what that was. My head felt woozy, so I fumbled back to my work cubicle and sat down at my desk to gather my wits. Could brains tear? Was that what a stroke felt like? I wiggled my arms, my fingers. No, I seemed to be functioning fine. When the weird sensation didn’t happen again, I shrugged to myself and plunged back into paperwork. I had no inkling then, of course, or in the days that followed, that the strange tearing sound was the door opening into the rest of my life.

That January day in 1988 had begun like any other, brimming with upheaval and uncertainty. Tension had been my norm for the past half year, ever since the Company, then the world’s largest nonprofit scientific research organization, had transferred me; my husband, Bob; and 250 other mostly unwilling scientists and staff from its Ohio headquarters to the Texas Panhandle for a five-year US Department of Energy project. Our choice had been straightforward: move or be fired.

The project, part of the national search for a place to dispose of the most dangerous kind of radioactive waste, had dumped employees and their families into a quagmire of unfamiliar culture, negative media coverage, hostile Texans, and federal politics. My trouble had begun in Ohio even before our move, when I was given my Texas assignment: to manage publication of a massive document required by the US Congress. Armed with the totally inadequate budget I’d been handed, I sought out my pudgy new boss. When I walked into his office, he asked without preamble, Would you like to see my photo collection of Middle East bathrooms? His lip curled in what seemed either a sneer or a smirk.

Annoyed, I ignored his question and got right to the point, my tone a tad short of shrill. Do you realize that according to the budget you gave me for Texas, I’m $1.5 million short and I haven’t even started? Only one editor—and no one at all to type twenty thousand pages?

Secretaries will do that in their spare time, he answered, proving his ignorance of the job at hand and cementing my decision to avoid him at all costs. I pounded him with facts and figures until he finally caved and revised the budget. That fight took a toll, but my challenges were just beginning.

The morning after that strange Velcro tear in my brain, I slumped into my chair, nursing a mug of coffee, trying to forget the struggle to keep my staff—and myself—from sinking into panic or depression. Absentmindedly I brushed a doughnut crumb off my mouth. A bored hydrologist was clubbing a golf ball down the hallway to his tipped-sideways trash basket. A quality assurance specialist leaned over a partition to complain to one of the accountants. From the geologists’ section came quiet voices, sometimes a chuckle. Clearly no work was getting done. As I set my mug down, I heard a child’s voice beseeching, Out! Out, please!

I glanced over the top of my cubicle to see who had brought their child to work, but didn’t see anyone.

Out! Out please!

Where was the child? Where did it need to get out from? It sounded like a little girl in trouble. I walked out into the hallway to get a better view.

Out! Out please! Out, pleeease!

The pleading tone was heart-wrenching. The voice seemed to be coming from behind my right shoulder, but when I turned, no one was there. I must be dreaming, I thought. Or maybe I’d been drinking too much caffeine. Now that I was forty-three, perhaps I should cut down on caffeine. Or maybe the tension of the past six months had finally tipped me into lunacy.

Hurriedly I tallied justifications for the stress overload explanation. As publications manager for the newly formed Texas office, my job had been to hire editors and text processors, to coordinate with eighty scientists, and—between June and December—to publish four drafts of the ten-volume scientific report for Congress under federal quality assurance requirements. The authors and reviewers were either scattered around the United States or, transplants like me, trying to work in temporary trailers and ramshackle offices all across the Texas Panhandle.

My first task had been to find Texas staff. Among the Ohio editors, only one—Jean—had agreed to move to Texas. I needed more editors, and Human Resources could find me only two in the entire Panhandle. One was a tall, freckled, fervently religious mother of three small girls who had once done minimal editing for a law office. The other was a gangly young man who had recently graduated from a small college with a degree in English and a smattering of proofreading experience. The thought of turning either one loose on technical subject matter terrified me.

The thought terrified upper management too, so they allowed me to split the workload between experienced editors in Ohio and the neophytes in Texas. My combined staff of sixteen, separated by more than a thousand miles from each other in that time before e-mail, cell phones, or laptop computers, became so stressed by the mixture of unrelenting deadline pressure and task complications that they started to unravel emotionally if I didn’t travel back and forth between Texas and Ohio every two or three weeks to cheer them on. I brought them jelly beans in glass jars I labeled Sanity Pills. My exhaustion level skyrocketed.

Jerry-rigged office space had upped the pressure too. We were working in the tiny town of Hereford because of the Department of Energy directive to set up shop near the proposed waste disposal site. Facility options were few. At first my section was assigned a corner of a former furniture store. There my computer equipment kept blowing the building’s fuses. The printer caught fire, scorching two chapters down the middle of each page on the day before they were due—and the nearest repairman was three hundred miles away. During a wild rainstorm, the roof leaked onto a stack of ready-to-mail text.

When the scientists needed more space, we editors were shunted down the block to the musty Hereford Motor Motel and Liquor Store, where desks quickly replaced beds in the minuscule rooms. The only way anyone could reach me there was through the phone line in the motel office, answered by a Middle Eastern couple who spoke little English.

When we editors needed to communicate with each other, we popped out of our rooms into the asphalt courtyard like meerkats emerging from their holes. When we had copy ready for text processing, we scurried through the tall weeds behind buildings to our two text processors in the furniture store. After a couple of months at the motel we were moved again, to featureless, windowless cubicles in a former Lo-Mart building on the other side of town.

On the strength of the five-year contract, Bob and I had decided to build a new house in Amarillo, an hour’s drive from our offices in Hereford. But the new house wasn’t finished when we arrived, so we camped in a motel for two months. Tiger cat bit the maid. Our kids, Cindy and Mike, eleven and fourteen, rode to their new schools in a taxi so that Bob and I could get to our Hereford offices on time. More stress.

A stay-at-home mother for most of their lives, I worried about the effect on Cindy and Mike of my long workdays. Late one afternoon when I phoned home to say I’d be late, Mike picked up the receiver.

Hi, it’s Mom.

Mom who?

Ouch! Clearly I had reason to worry—my priorities might be seriously skewed.

Although I tried hard to be present for the children, my attention was too often focused on the headlong, warp-speed effort to manage the writing, editing, and production of twenty thousand pages of technical jargon, twisted sentences, mathematical tables, engineering drawings, review comments, inconsistent editing, and thousands of references. My staff and I worked day and night. We worked on July 4. We worked on Labor Day. We worked on Thanksgiving morning. I accumulated more than 250 hours of unpaid overtime. I checked references in my sleep. Serenity became a forgotten dream.

Home? This? Never! I often sputtered to myself as I drove through Hereford toward the Lo-Mart building. This godforsaken place would never be home. Home was Red Point, an eighteen-acre, spruce-covered peninsula that jutted into Maine’s Penobscot Bay. My family’s summer home since my mother was a child, Red Point had formed my identity. Its daily rhythms of wind and tide were my security, its kaleidoscope of sun and rain and fog my comfort, its rugged natural beauty and barefoot simplicity my validation. My blood was the mingling of salt water with the drip of sea fog, and my soul was the soul that I heard in the mewling of gulls, the soul that I saw in the play of sunlight on ruffled waves or in the silhouette of tough old spruces against a mackerel sky.

The Texas Panhandle, on the other hand, left me feeling as though I’d lost myself. Its restless winds never hushed. I had no time to get acquainted with native plants or animals. I missed trees. Open windows carried the stench of stockyards crammed with cattle waiting to be slaughtered. That’s the smell of money, a stockyard owner told me when I asked how she could stand living in the stink. To me it was the smell of despair.

Eight days before our first Texas Christmas—a Thursday, I think it was—I was at Company headquarters in Ohio, snug in my gray Pendleton power suit, my green-and-red Christmas-tree earrings, and my professional demeanor. We’d achieved the impossible. Nine of the ten fat volumes were already printed and bound; volume 10 was ready. Standing in the doorway of the Fish Bowl, as my five remaining Ohio editors called their desk-to-desk room, I was trying to remember if the Olentangy Freeway was the best route to the printing company when Robert came striding down the hall clutching the last five hundred pages of camera-ready copy in his arms. "We did it! We did it!" sang a jig in my head when I saw him. Back in Texas, Panhandle editors and text processors were readying a holiday celebration. I was gleeful. No more sky-high stress! No more sacrificing myself and the well-being of my family for a nebulous corporate goal. Little did I dream that my stress level was about to get worse. Much worse.

Before Robert could reach the doorway, my former boss, Lynn, barreled around the corner from the other direction, yelling Stop! Stop! Her thin face looked bleached. Congress has just voted to shut down the Texas project! We’ve been ordered to stop work at once. You can’t take that to the printer, Jill!

I didn’t hear you was my knee-jerk reply. Adrenalin surged through my veins. I didn’t hear you and I don’t know about it. I grabbed the stack of pages from Robert, thrust it at Dorie, who happened to be nearest, and hissed through clenched teeth, Get it to the printer. Get going! NOW!

That last volume was the triumphant culmination of shifts in scope, shortened deadlines, software glitches, review cycles, interventions by the Department of Energy, and bureaucratic tangles. As Jean quipped, No amount of incoherence could possibly describe the incoherence of this experience. I refused to abandon the document that was at the heart of such turmoil as though creating it had never mattered. And so it was printed.

Within days the Department of Energy issued an order to destroy every copy of the ten volumes. Weeks later, political winds having shifted, we watched Department of Energy personnel combing through Hereford dumpsters in an effort to retrieve whatever pieces of the report they could find. No one confessed to having saved a copy. I hid one ten-volume set and kept it for years, letting it accumulate dust in a storage shed until it no longer mattered.

We transplants—who had finally found housing, helped our kids adjust to new schools, and become resigned to the idea of five Texas years—spent Christmas 1987 absorbing the reality that most of us might soon be unemployed. Time dragged. Rumors circulated. We would be jobless. We would not be jobless. We were to be moved back to Ohio. No, we were to be abandoned in this alien flat land. We would be helped. We would not be helped.

In the end, just twelve people, including my Bob, were transferred to a one-year Company project in Springfield, Illinois. The rest were out of jobs, stranded a thousand miles from familiar territory.

Out! Out, please! the voice pleaded again, and then again, sounding louder and more desperate each time. I felt too overwhelmed to think straight and didn’t know what to do. So I tried to ignore it.

Bob moved alone to Springfield by the end of January. To allow Mike and Cindy to finish their school year, I convinced upper management to keep my Texas staff on the payroll for an additional six months in order to write résumés for the project scientists and to salvage, catalog, and ship to a national laboratory hundreds of unfinished draft reports that disgruntled employees had begun throwing out. With Jean, my quiet, unflappable senior editor, I was pawing through wastepaper baskets in search of those draft reports on the January morning my brain unzipped.

Jean had been a godsend during the past nightmarish months. She’d helped me hire staff, patiently and capably edited hundreds of pages of technical material and references, borne every crazy-making shift of scope or schedule with wry resignation. We’d made brief escapes from turmoil for nature-restoring hikes at Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge and breakfast picnics along the Prairie-Dog-Town Fork of the Red River in Palo Duro Canyon. More than a staff member, she had become a friend.

Well, you handled the big move to Texas so well, I guess you won’t need me for the next move, Jean commented to me the morning I heard that child’s voice. I was bending over to rescue a few pages of Draft: Effect of Brine on Corrosion Rate from the trash. You remember, of course, she continued, that I’ve planned right along to go from here to look after my mother in California.

I nodded, even though my heart sank at the thought of having her disappear from my life. I’m fuming about having to move again, I confessed to her. During the past seven years we’ve lived like nomads, transferred from Chicago to Australia to Maine to Ohio to Texas. I didn’t want to leave Chicago. Didn’t want to leave Australia. Didn’t want to leave Maine. Didn’t want to leave Ohio. Now I don’t want to leave Texas and I don’t even like Texas. I glanced at her, hoping she didn’t think I was whining. I felt like whining. The rest of the day seemed never-ending.

That afternoon, as we made the long drive back to Amarillo together, she exclaimed, Look! There’s a hawk.

I think it’s a red-tail, I responded, pulling over to the shoulder and stopping to get a better look.

You’ve started to enjoy some things about Texas, haven’t you—like hawks? she smiled, looking back at me.

Yeah, I admitted. Look at that view. I do love the way the prairie is pressed flat by sky so vast and so close that it could expand souls. But mostly I long to live near my father and mother and brothers, to sit on the Red Point porch shelling peas, to watch Mike and Cindy scramble along the Point’s rocky beaches with their cousins.

A sharp-edged, heavy box of pain settled into my chest. I ached for things whose names I knew: birches, hermit thrushes and white-throated sparrows, lupines and lady-slippers, sea urchins and quahogs. The Panhandle offered none of those treasures. Neither did Illinois. The thought of being transferred again after one year in Illinois knocked the hope of belonging anywhere right out of me. Even though the pressure-cooker project was ending, my anxiety churned.

As I dragged through the weeks of sorting and packing, I began hearing that child voice regularly. Out, please on the highway driving home after work. Out. Please out while I was getting dressed in the morning. Out, please in the middle of a management meeting. There was no child. Perhaps I was crazy. Schizophrenia was when you hear voices, right? I was terrified that I was sinking into insanity, because the voice seemed to be coming from inside my head—and yet it was not my voice. I knew myself: I was well grounded and self-assured, and, given my lifelong acquaintance with transitions, disruptions, and general chaos, the high-pressure Texas experience was at least familiar if not particularly welcome.

One evening when I’d stopped by Jean’s house for a precious hour of respite, the Out! Out! wailing became too loud to ignore. Some little girl’s talking in my head, I blurted in desperation. I held my breath, waiting for her to recoil in horror or to tell me to find a therapist or to drive me to a hospital.

Jean’s response surprised me. It was immediate, simple, and without dither: Well, why don’t we listen to her? she asked. See what she has to say.

I started to protest, but without warning—Oh my god! This is so weird!—I was looking down from the ceiling. Whatever it was that was me had been shoved aside. My body was no longer mine. The child whose voice I’d been hearing was taking over my muscles and most of my consciousness, ignoring me on the ceiling and speaking only to Jean, hesitantly and shyly. Although I could see that Jean was talking to her, I couldn’t hear a word. Looking down from the ceiling at the top of Jean’s head and at the items on the mantelpiece made me feel like giggling, and I found myself wishing I could fly up like that on purpose. Again without warning, though, I was back in my body on the chair, sputtering confusion. Jean was quiet, and I didn’t dare ask her what had just happened. Jumping to my feet, I made some feeble excuse about having promised to help Cindy with her homework and fled home through the dusk. For a brief interval later that evening I noticed that the pain in my chest had let up, the way you only notice that the wind was blowing by the silence when the wind stops.

The next morning at work, after a sleepless night, I risked asking Jean what had happened, floundering through embarrassment, especially since she was an employee as well as a friend. I don’t know what happened last night at your house, but I’m amazed you didn’t kick me out or call the men in white coats, I began. I snuffed up the aroma of the hot ginger tea she handed me and tried to calm my clenching stomach.

That was a real child, she said. How could I not respond to a child in distress? She seemed completely real. I asked how old she was, and your right hand began carefully unclenching fingers, one by one. Five fingers. She’s five. And she seemed terrified.

I squirmed deeper into the chair. Well, that’s nothing like me when I was five. I was a happy kid. I don’t understand how she got into my head. I’m scared. Really scared, because I keep hearing that voice. Honestly, could I be . . . do you think . . . is it possible I’m crazy? Like getting . . . schizophrenia? What else could it be?

Clearly you’re not crazy, or you wouldn’t be functioning so well, she reassured me. But you’re under a lot of tension, you know. It could just be the stress. When did you first hear her?

I wanted to protest that saying "her" made her seem too real. I wanted to keep thinking the voice. As I tried to answer Jean, I realized I’d first heard the voice the day after that Velcro feeling. I told her about feeling my brain tear.

Something obviously happened in your brain, Jean mused, but I don’t think science has reached the point of understanding the kind of experience you’re describing. She paused, went to the staff kitchen, and came back with a tin of biscotti and hot water for more tea. That little girl seemed to be looking for her mother.

Well, that lets me out. It’s not my voice. I’ve got a perfectly good mother, and she’s definitely not lost. I hadn’t ever thought of Jean as motherly and didn’t now. So how come a little girl’s voice spoke to Jean? And how come I couldn’t hear what she said?

I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, Jean continued. But I still think perhaps you should find out what would happen if you tried to listen to the voice instead of trying to shut it out.

I shuddered. I don’t want to. It’s too unnerving. Not to mention being ridiculous. What I need to do, I emphasized, is figure out how to get the voice out of my head. With that decided, I walked away, resolving never to mention the voice again and hoping that Jean would forget the whole topic.

By late spring, Bob had been living in Illinois for five months. I missed him. Jobs ended, people disappeared. The two Texas editors quit, and Jean left for a long-planned trip overseas. The Department of Energy callously doubled the scope and therefore the pressure of my section’s closeout tasks. Our remaining text processor was carted off to in-patient alcoholism rehab at Palo Duro Hospital.

I was trying to sell our newly built home while more than one hundred other houses were for sale in our subdivision alone. My car’s windshield shattered, and the car’s air conditioner broke. So did the house air conditioner. So did the dishwasher. The new basement wall was cracking and the contractor wasn’t returning my calls. The realtor scheduled an open house, canceled it at the last minute, and then held it on the day the house reeked of burnt cinnamon because I’d forgotten to turn off the stove burner.

When Jean returned from her trip, we managed an early Saturday morning escape into Palo Duro Canyon for respite, savoring the cool greenery of the quiet valley protected by immense, Spanish-skirted red cliffs. We found a picnic spot beside the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, I laid a small fire in the cook pit, and while Jean laid bagels with cheddar cheese onto the grill and set out our thermoses of coffee, I filled her in on the tragedies that had been unfolding almost daily as the Company’s entire Texas contingent struggled to cope with loss of income, loss of job, loss of home.

It’s been hell, Jean. You have no idea. Wives who hadn’t wanted to move to Texas in the first place are filing divorce papers. Substance abuse is spiking. So is rage. Oh, and remember Joseph, one of the nuclear engineers? He died of a heart attack last week.

Jean looked shocked. Thank goodness I have a plan for my own next steps, she said softly. Those poor people.

There’s more, I went on. Ralph attempted suicide—I don’t know what’s happened with him—while Larry threatened suicide and is in the hospital. Jim had a serious stroke. And even the good news is stressful. Daniel and Tony both got multiple job offers and are agonizing over which to accept.

After we’d eaten, we didn’t linger long in the canyon; we both had too much to do in the days remaining before we headed on to new lives. In my haste to ready our house for the movers, I mistakenly threw away the $20,000 certificate of deposit we needed for our next house’s down payment. Then I lost the title insurance papers. My stomach protested constantly; I couldn’t eat. Bob was impatient with me. I hadn’t told him about the nagging voice. How could I, when it made no sense, and anyway, I was too busy. Besides work, I had to help Mike and Cindy adjust to another move; welcome my fifteen-year-old niece, who arrived to spend the summer with us; and try to keep my head above my own surges of confusion and despair. I told myself I was faring quite well, better than most. The stress of project shutdown wasn’t more than I could handle; surely I could handle anything. Bob had a job, and I expected to be rehired for the Illinois project, which involved a similar search for a disposal site for less dangerous radioactive waste.

On the day the Mayflower crew came to pack our belongings for the move to Illinois, the voice shocked me awake at four am, screaming, sobbing, flinging my body out of bed, across the dark room and into the bathroom. Finding myself hurled from a sound sleep onto the floor beside the tub, I couldn’t avoid listening.

Please, out . . . let me out, please. . . . No! Don’t keep me in here anymore! Please, come get me! Don’t let them put me in here anymore! . . . I don’t like it in here. I can’t help it, please don’t be mad. . . Just hurts and hurts . . . Don’t want you! Want Jean! Need Jean be here!

I curled into a tight ball on the cold tile, helpless before the onslaught. Stop! Just stop! I implored.

You don’t hear me! Can’t stop, please don’t stop me, please don’t shut me up anymore, I don’t wanna be all alone and I can’t stop, please, can’t help it. Let me outta here!

I gritted my teeth. Okay, okay, I’m not shutting you up. I can’t believe I’m talking as if . . . as if . . . as if you are somebody.

I is somebody! it cried. I hurt now! Right now! People coming to take me away and shut me up! And you might not let me say how I feel. If you don’t, I’ll wake you up again by yelling at you so you listen to me.

The voice had never said so many words. As Jean said, it seemed so real. So not-me. And how had I come to be lying, sobbing, on the bathroom floor? I didn’t remember getting out of bed. I now saw what Jean meant when she said she couldn’t ignore a child in distress; the pain I was listening to was searing. Where did this child come from? Wherever it was, and however it had been teleported into my head, I had to get rid of it. Fast.

Later that morning as I pulled out of our Amarillo driveway for the last time, my ears still ringing with the little child’s voice, I’d managed to gather my wits enough to cram last items into suitcases, give the kitchen floor a cursory mopping, and herd Cindy, her cousin, and Tiger cat into the station wagon. Mike had left earlier to join Bob. Ahead lay yet another new life, another chance to begin again, another guarantee of dislocation. But at least the journey might be a way to leave the voice behind.

I’m not psychotic, I reassured myself as I ramped onto I-40, heading east. I’m not imagining FBI agents behind every tree, not thinking the TV is spying on me or that men from Mars are manipulating my mind. I’m fine—just tired. Tired and sad. I don’t want to like the house Bob bought in Illinois. It’ll only be ours for a year. It won’t be home.

Gripping the steering wheel, I began mentally tossing my manager persona out the open window, letting the East Texas wind sweep project responsibilities, impossibilities, tragedies, and moves out of my mind and body. Good-bye, little voice, I hope you find what you’re looking for, I whispered into the rush of air. In the backseat, Cindy and her cousin were engrossed in twisting long, thin balloons into fanciful shapes and listening to Guns & Roses tapes. In between them, Tiger was yowling protest in his crate.

By the time we reached the Oklahoma border, I sported a blue balloon hat and wondered what our new house would be like. I hadn’t heard the voice since that awful early morning awakening, but I still hadn’t been able to shake the sense of an alien wariness lurking behind my conscious mind.

At Oklahoma City I veered north onto I-44, negotiated the Oklahoma Turnpike system. Tulsa flashed by. In Springfield, Missouri, as the sky turned blue-black and tornado sirens began wailing, I veered into the Coach House Motel parking lot, desperate for escape from tornados inside and out. The sirens stopped. The girls begged for their own room and got it. In mine, I flopped onto the bed, curled up on my side, and shut myself out of thought.

Unmoored

Once entered, we never entirely depart the

homes we make for ourselves. They follow us,

like shadows, until we come upon them again,

waiting for us in the mist.

—ARI BERK, Death Watch

HATE HERE! No stay! No stay! The voice, which had been mercifully silent on our drive through Missouri and southern Illinois, began harassing me off and on as soon as we pulled into the driveway of what I was now supposed to call home. My chest ached. Never before this year, in a lifetime of disruptions, had I ever heard a voice in my head. Job stress and moving, job stress and moving, I kept repeating to myself. Rest was all I needed.

Where’s my green sweatshirt? Bob demanded that afternoon, frustration smeared like jam across his face. He was impatient with the unavoidable chaos.

How the hell should I know? I snapped. He didn’t have to put up with a nagging alien.

I tried not to notice the hurt in his eyes. He stomped out the door without another word, while I stumbled into the kitchen with an armful of plates.

Bob had been looking forward to my delight in his choice of a home, the first time he’d bought a house without my input. He was sure I’d like the acre of mature hickories, black walnuts, oaks, red maples, and redbuds sloping down the lawn to a lakeside dock, where a sleek-looking motorboat was waiting to surprise us. The old white house, with plenty of space on three levels, seemed comfortable, and I knew I’d enjoy the vast picture window in the family room with the view through trees toward the lake. He’d made a good choice. But given the short duration of this new Company project, I found no pleasure in what normally would have pleased me, and he was disappointed at my lack of enthusiasm. Instead of acceptance, I was girding myself for the inevitable transfer.

Twenty-four hours after the teens, the cat, and I had burst out of the car at the end of our long drive from Texas, my brother Allen and his wife, Ann, arrived from Ohio with their two small children. I loved them, and their familiar presence felt homelike, but it was an effort to raise myself to hostess-level functioning. Late that afternoon I collapsed wearily onto the living room floor amid the diapers, shoes, dolls, and action toys they had added to our jumble of half-unpacked boxes. Our furniture was helter-skelter, heaped with the brown paper grocery bags into which Bob had stuffed all the contents of his temporary apartment. Getting the place in order felt like another impossible job.

As I cut contact paper for cupboard shelves, my memory touched past homes like a tongue worrying the hole where a tooth had been pulled. Of my quartet of deeply loved childhood homes, now only Red Point remained.

I mentally ticked off the places I’d lived after college, justifying to myself yet again why I wasn’t going to call this current place home. In the first summer of our marriage, Bob and I had renovated an old thirty-eight-foot trailer, which we parked in an isolated Pennsylvania meadow where morning dew on timothy grass tickled my legs on the way to the outhouse and water came from a hand pump outside the door. At the end of that summer, heading to graduate school, we towed the trailer across eight states to a Missoula, Montana, trailer park with snow-capped peaks as background to a pasture behind our lot.

That trailer was our first home, but it wasn’t home for long. Instead we sold it, moved to Oxford, Ohio, for more graduate school, to a bland, featureless apartment with a view of a parking lot next to a railroad track where freight train whistles blasted us awake in the night. Too loud. Too crowded. We moved to a quieter apartment. Too confining. We escaped to a sagging brick building in rural Indiana that had once been a stagecoach way-station. Access to our second-floor apartment was via the fire escape. The country location suited us fine, but that home became past history as soon as we graduated the next year.

We knew our next home, the little gray rental bungalow in Urbana, Illinois, would be temporary while Bob finished a post-doc appointment. Eighteen months later a real job came with a brick rental house just outside Chicago city limits, magnolias in front and thick evergreens behind. When we scraped together the down payment for a small house of our own in an outer Chicago suburb, with apple-tree parkland and a creek behind us and lilacs lining the backyard, I dared to believe in belonging. We made friends, joined groups, watched our young children play and grow. I found work and began trying to stitch my New England heart to the Midwest.

Hate it! Let me out!

Shut up! Who are you, anyway?

No answer.

Thrown back into the unpleasant present, I groped into the packing box beside me, came up