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CHAPTER 2

Origin Story

I don’t really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus.

—Eric Erlandson and Courtney Love, “Gutless”

The sound of hangers scraping woke Sam up. It was a familiar sound, one he had heard through the thick haze of sleep on weekday mornings for as long as he could remember. Sam’s father was a businessman—a manager of some kind—at a paper mill in the next town over, so he started his day sooner than the rest of the family, pushing and pulling his suits and shirts along the metal bar in his closet as he chose what to wear. By the time Sam got out of bed to get ready for school, the only evidence his father had been in the house at all was a nearly empty cup of coffee that sat at the head of the breakfast table. Cold when he got to it, the coffee was sweet with sugar and rich with cream and Sam loved to start his mornings by drinking it up.

This time when Sam heard the hangers, it was different. It was too dark to be morning, and the screeching and scraping went on for longer than usual. Plus there had been that fight—one that seemed worse than usual—between his parents the night before. When he heard his father walk out of his bedroom and start down the hall, Sam knew he was leaving—not for work, but for good. He padded to the doorway and peeked out, just in time to see his father moving through the last few feet of the shadowy corridor, his brown hard-sided suitcase in hand. As he watched his father go, Sam thought about calling out and saying something: maybe Wait, don’t go!

Instead, he said to himself, It’s for the best.

Betraying his more complicated feelings, Sam tiptoed to his sister’s room where he knew his mother would be sleeping, and he shook her shoulder until she grunted a groggy “Huh . . .”

“Dad’s gone,” Sam whispered to her, feeling someone should be informed of this significant turn of events.

“Go back to bed,” was all she said.

Sam did.

He was nine years old and it was a school night.

***

Every resilient child has an origin story. This is a story that does not begin with “I am born”; instead, like Superman’s being sent away from his home planet Krypton or like Spider-Man’s spider bite, there is an event or a circumstance that places the child on his desperate and courageous path. In the words of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, “a change occurs which alters the whole life of the child.” Something happens that is so consequential that life simply cannot go back to the way it was, and the way it is now feels broken somehow. “My seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again,” writes Maya Angelou about being raped as a child. Sometimes, though, there is a circumstance that is not like a spider bite at all in that it is there from the start, such as when a baby is born into extreme poverty or to a parent who is mentally ill. For the supernormal child, in one way or another, continuity and connection are splintered: There is a before and an after. Or a then and a now. Or a me and an everyone else.

Most often, changes that alter the life of the child take place over months or even years—such as when a sibling becomes ill, when a town deteriorates, or when a parent starts drinking—but the changes feel abrupt and cataclysmic nonetheless. “No one hired a skywriter and announced crack’s arrival,” rapper Jay Z remembers about growing up in Marcy Houses in Brooklyn. “But when it landed in your hood, it was a total takeover. Sudden and complete. Like losing your man to gunshots. Or your father walking out the door for good. It was an irreversible new reality. What had been was gone, and in its place was a new way of life that was suddenly everywhere and seemed like it had been there forever.”

For Sam, his father’s leaving was that total takeover, that origin story. When he thought about his life, the story always started there. That night was not Sam’s earliest memory, but it was his first memory—the first moment—of his irreversible new reality. It was the change that rearranged Sam’s family and the roles his family members would play for decades to come. And as he stood there in the doorway and watched his father walk away with his old life, Sam tried to be reasonable—and strong—by telling himself that it was for the best: Mostly his parents seemed miserable together. Yet as he tiptoed off to find his mother, Sam had the foreboding feeling that things were about to get worse.

***

One-third of marriages end within the first fifteen years, making divorce the most common adversity children face. An estimated one million children watch their parents split up each year, yet the fact that divorce is widespread does not mean it is without consequences for the child, any more than the fact that an estimated 350,000 babies are born each day makes childbirth any less painful or momentous for the individual. As commonplace as it may seem, divorce has the potential to, as Winnicott said, change the whole world of the child because, usually, parents are the child’s whole world. Divorce shows a child that his world can be torn in two, not just by rare, extreme acts of abuse or terror, but by something as ordinary—and sometimes even as well intentioned—as two parents going their separate ways.

In 1969, California governor Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault divorce law in the United States. Prior to no-fault divorce, to be freed from marriage, one spouse had to prove that the other was clearly to blame for the breakdown of the union, with adultery, abuse, desertion, insanity, and lack of intimacy among the most common grounds for dissolution. To many legal scholars and advocates for women’s rights, these conditions made divorce unnecessarily complex and adversarial, and the burden of proof seemed too heavy, especially for wives who may have had less access to money and other resources to support their case. After California, no-fault statutes swept the nation in the 1970s and 1980s as men and women embraced the prospect of being able to liberate themselves from dysfunctional, loveless marriages. By 1985, no-fault divorce was available in forty-nine of our fifty states. Freedom and choice, it seemed, would help partners and parents make healthier decisions and lead more joyful lives, and this appeared to be in the best interest of children as well.

Without a doubt, sometimes divorce is necessary and in the best interest of all parties—parents and children included. Not every divorce is an adversity. But not every divorce is a “good divorce,” either, and sometimes, even when “it’s for the best”—as Sam said in the doorway that night—there is change and loss. Large national studies report that, after divorce, about 20 to 25 percent of children experience emotional or behavioral difficulties—such as depression, anxiety, aggression, disobedience, or academic problems—compared with about 10 percent of children in intact families. While this means that children of divorce are twice as likely as their peers to have noticeable and even diagnosable troubles, such data also suggest that 75 to 80 percent appear to do just fine. “The kids are all right,” we may be relieved to conclude, but the absence of disorders is not the same thing as the absence of distress. “The key,” says psychologist and divorce-expert Robert Emery, “is to separate pathology from pain.”

Clinical and empirical research over the past four decades suggests that children of divorce are “resilient but not invulnerable.” From the outside, many seem to adapt gamely, taking on more chores at home, keeping up with their own homework, looking after siblings and themselves, and being go-betweens for their parents; yet they may do so as they live with unspoken struggles that are not revealed for years and even decades after the breakup of their families. Psychologist Judith Wallerstein argues that “divorce is a cumulative experience. Its impact increases over time and rises to a crescendo in adulthood.” This may not be the case for every young adult whose parents have divorced, but many live with painful feelings and memories.

According to research by Robert Emery and colleagues, compared with those from intact homes, adults from divorced families are three times more likely to feel they had “harder childhoods than most people.” About half agree that their parents’ split relieved tension in the family, while the other half do not, instead feeling that one set of problems was traded for another. Adult children of divorce tend to have more negative feelings, memories, and beliefs about their families, and they are three times more likely to wonder if both of their parents love them. Unable to don the rose-colored glasses they see some others wear, they view life and love through the “filter of divorce.” This sort of filter was what brought Sam to therapy as an adult: “I feel like a piece of Scotch tape that has been stuck and unstuck and now I’m not sticky anymore. I have relationships that look like everyone else’s but there is no naïveté. If your own parent can leave you, then anyone can leave you. Life happens. Things change. Things can start off good and wind up bad. I can’t pretend I don’t know that.”

Many children seem to take divorce in stride, even though later they may say that their parents’ split was the formative event of their childhoods—the origin story of their lives. Three-quarters of children of divorce say they would be different people today had their families not broken up. They are twice as likely to feel that their childhoods were cut short, and some say they lost the ability to play. Their happiest days, it seems, were before their families fell apart. Their best days, they worry, are behind them.

***

Sylvia Plath’s father passed away when she was nine years old, and she later remembered that time like this: “My father died, we moved inland. Whereupon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.” Sam’s father was still living, but much as in Sylvia Plath’s case, the nine years they had spent together now suddenly seemed like something in a bottle, maybe not something as fancy or as put-together as a ship, but perhaps something like a few old pennies that clinked around inside. Those old pennies were the happy memories Sam had of his father and maybe even of his life so far, and while he once thought he would keep dropping pennies in that bottle year after year, now it seemed like those few red cents were all he had.

Sam’s father hailed from Brooklyn—which, in Virginia in the 1970s, was more foreign than it was hip. He was a Yankee, which Sam understood to be bad, but he always had the feeling his father had been exposed to some special things that maybe those around him did not know. This seemed deliciously possible on Saturdays, when they would spend lazy days clicking through his father’s old slides of Coney Island or poring over the stamp collection that once had belonged to his father’s father. Sam loved how important and official the smooth, plastic-covered pages felt under his fingertips, and the crackling sound they made when he turned them. Sam marveled over all the old-fashioned pictures and prices—1c! 3c!—on the stamps, and how the dates went way back.

Other Saturdays, “the boys” made the short drive to the tidewaters where Sam’s father taught him to ride ocean waves on a red-and-blue canvas float. For the biggest ones, they kicked out and bodysurfed, Sam riding on his father’s back with his arms around his neck. Sam’s father taught him how to dive under the waves that scared him, and to hold his breath until the swell rolled over his back past his ankles. When the tide was low, they hunted for clams by looking for little air bubbles along the wet sand and then digging as deep and as fast as they could. When the tide was high, Sam and his father went crabbing, tying chicken necks on nets and lowering them over the side of a pier. Sam’s job was to hold the string and wait for a nibble; when he felt a tug or two, he hopped foot-to-foot in excitement as his father swooped in and pulled the line up hand-over-hand, quickly closing the net around the unsuspecting crabs.

Once they had a dozen or more crabs scratching around inside their Styrofoam cooler, father and son triumphantly took them home to boil them alive. Sam’s father dropped the scrambling crabs from the cooler into a tall pot of steaming, bubbling water, and they made a hissing sound when they hit the surface. Sometimes, when a crab managed to jump out of the pot and scamper across the kitchen floor, Sam fled and watched from the hall, shouting while the disoriented crab scurried sideways, this way and that, banging into the cabinets or the refrigerator, free for a few seconds until his father could step on its shell, pick it up by its back two legs, and pitch it again into the pot, this time for good. Sam was the kind of kid who made faces at the thought of hurting animals but he was his father’s favorite and his father was his, so Sam figured, those crabs—with their sharp, jagged claws that once drew blood from his father’s big toe—they got what they deserved.

***

Psychologist and renowned family therapist Virginia Satir suggested that “most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” As an adult, Sam did not think he would have preferred for his parents to have remained in a miserable marriage, but the uncertainty that followed had been difficult, too. When parents break up, foundational assumptions about love and family and order and permanence are shattered, and children begin to ask themselves devastating questions about bedrock: Is it my fault? What will happen next? Who will take care of me? If my parents can stop loving each other, can they stop loving me? Where will I live? Who is going to take care of the parent who lives with me? Who is going to take care of the parent who lives alone? Who is going to buy our food? Will my marriage break up one day? As comforting as one or both parents may try to be, reassurances that everything is going to be fine—or even better than before—are not always backed up by reality.

Children fare well when their newly single moms or dads fare well, too, but sometimes parents and parenting deteriorate after divorce. As difficult as it is for modern families to juggle careers and children, single parents tend to struggle even more. Parents who once shared homes, bills, cooking, bath times, bedtimes, weekends, and sick days feel overloaded as they try to go it alone. Nearly two-thirds of adults live in a community other than where they were raised, which means that reinforcements in the form of Grandma and Grandpa and aunts and uncles may be miles or even an ocean away. Almost half of adults report they have only one person—at most—with whom they discuss important matters, and because this one person is usually a partner or a spouse, divorce leaves parents alone not only with their logistical needs but with their emotional ones as well. As some children become the shoulders for their parents to cry on, they are confronted with grown-up problems they are helpless to solve, such as who will drive the car pool or pay the bills.

About half of custodial parents receive all the child support they are due, while about one-quarter receive some and one-quarter receive none; support is especially unlikely to be paid if there is not shared custody or regular visitation, or if one parent leaves the state. Yet even when parents both pay their fair share, finances are still likely to become strained. According to bankruptcy expert Senator Elizabeth Warren, in the twenty-first century, when two-income families who pool their money struggle to stay in the middle class, “today’s newly divorced [parent] is already teetering over a financial abyss the day [he or she] signs the divorce papers.” About one-third of single-parent families live in poverty, and because women are seven to eight times more likely to raise children after a divorce, they and their children are especially at risk. “Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse,” Warren writes. And she should know. Though Warren’s parents did not divorce, her own origin story begins when her father lost his job and she and her mother went to work to keep the family solvent: “I know the day I grew up. I know the minute I grew up. I know why I grew up,” she recalls.

Sometimes even more wrenching than the day-to-day worries about where the childcare or the money is going to come from is wondering where the care will come from. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor suggest that “today it is only between parents and children that kindness is expected, sanctioned, and indeed obligatory,” and whether or not this is a sweeping truth, it does tend to be how children feel. One of the most robust findings in research on resilience is that a leading factor that protects children against hard times is the number of high-quality relationships in the child’s life, and divorce can cut this number in half. Sometimes the number is halved because where once there were two parents, now there is one. Other times the number feels halved because, even though both parents remain committed to the child, they are now preoccupied with new jobs, new lovers, new stressors, new responsibilities, and their own feelings about the divorce, and each parent may be only half as available as before. In an effort to cheer up their children and themselves, parents may tout the benefits of growing up with two bedrooms, two families, and two sets of everything. Life will be twice as good, some may say, but children are not fooled. “Even a good divorce restructures children’s childhoods and leaves them traveling between two distinct worlds,” says author Elizabeth Marquardt. “It becomes their jobs, not their parents’, to make sense of those two worlds.”

None of this is to say that unhealthy, unhappy families ought to stay together. There are no easy answers to troubled partnerships. This is simply a recognition of something that as adults we may be pained to acknowledge but that children already know: Like marriage, divorce is for better and for worse. In one study, 80 percent of young adults agreed that “Even though it was hard, divorce was the right thing for my family.” Children do best when parents are willing to talk about breakups from the other side, too: that even though divorce may be the right thing, it is hard. Otherwise, adolescents are left alone with their grievances and young children are left alone with their grief.

***

On the October morning Sam’s father left, no one in his family spoke of it. As odd as this may seem, it is not unusual. Twenty-three percent of children report that no one talked to them about divorce as it was happening, and 45 percent recall only abrupt explanations such as “Your dad is leaving”; just 5 percent of children report feeling fully informed about what was happening between their parents and being encouraged to ask questions. So off Sam went to school that day—and on all of the days that followed—as if nothing had changed. This was easy to do because, unlike home where he simply pretended nothing had changed, school was a place where this was actually true. Mornings still began with the same Pledge of Allegiance. At snack time, Sam still ate cheese crackers and drank chocolate milk from little cartons. Playing soccer at recess was still the best hour of the day. School was still where new things came in the form of fun and faraway facts, like about weather or Egyptians, and these new things were presented thoughtfully and stepwise, making them understandable and never overwhelming or personal.

Then, not so long after Sam’s father left, his fourth-grade class was learning about the mail: how to write letters with proper salutations like “Dear So-and-So” and “Sincerely, So-and-So” and how to prepare envelopes with addresses and return addresses in the right places. For practice, Sam’s teacher asked each student to write a real letter to a real person who did not live at home. Sam sat at his desk and stared at his paper. He rolled his pencil in its pencil holder. He could not begin. After a time, Sam walked up between the rows of desks to where his teacher stood writing on the blackboard, her back to the class.

“Miss Leonard . . .” he started.

She turned around.

“I can’t write the letter,” Sam continued, blankly.

“Why not?” she asked, leaning toward the boy, ready to get back to her task.

“I don’t have anyone to write,” Sam insisted, before he broke eye contact to study the chalk in her fingers and the powdery smudges on her roomy round-cut skirt.

“Surely you can think of someone,” she pressed.

“I can’t. There isn’t anybody . . .” Sam insisted again. Rigidly.

Mrs. Leonard looked at Sam and then blew him away with nonchalance: “Why don’t you write a letter to your dad?”

Sam stood there—stunned, shocked, breathless. Then, without a word, he walked back to his desk and wrote a letter to his cousin who lived in Texas.

In November, Sam’s mother gave him a full-size Bible with a floppy black cover. They did go to church every Sunday, but Sam had never had his own Bible before. Unsure of what else to make of it, Sam took this to mean that, with his father gone, he was going to need all the help he could get. At night, he flipped and fanned his way through the flimsy see-through pages, and to his surprise he discovered that the Bible was more helpful than he expected. It went into some significant detail about topics that everyone else took great pains to avoid. Sex. Love. Marriage. Even divorce. When Sam came across passages that described people who divorced as adulterers, he read and reread those night after night, trying to make sense of the strange language and of his strange new life. One afternoon in the car, Sam worked up the courage to ask his mother a question. “Did Dad leave because he’s an adulterer?” Sam inquired casually as he hunched down in his seat and forced himself to stare straight ahead. Sam’s mother slowed the car like she was waiting for her son to continue, so he said, “You know, was there some other woman?”

Sam’s mother put her foot back on the gas and exhaled quickly. “God, no,” she scoffed. “No one would want him.”

Sam did not read the Bible anymore after that.

That December, Sam thought Christmas would never come. Christmas was something so special, so magical—and so wonderfully scripted and ritualistic—that it, and now it alone, seemed untouched by his new circumstances. Santa Claus brought the presents and Santa Claus had not changed. On Christmas Eve, some time after going to bed, Sam needed something—water, maybe—so he tiptoed down the hallway toward the kitchen. When he closed in on the den, it took a moment to understand what he was seeing, but soon he recognized that his mother was wrapping and arranging presents that were supposed to be coming from the North Pole. Sam turned around and sneaked back up the hall, and as he crawled into bed, he realized that all of the men in his life were gone: his father, God, and Santa Claus.

***

Sam recalls these moments so vividly because they are what are sometimes called flashbulb memories. Flashbulb memories are recollections that feel illuminated and frozen in time, like snapshots in the mind. Harvard psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik introduced this term to the scientific community in a 1977 paper in which they suggested that when we find out about events that are shocking or significant, we permanently imprint those surprises in memory, like photographs. Prototypical flashbulb memories are those of iconic, culturally newsworthy moments, such as the way almost everyone can recall where they were and what they were doing on the morning of September 11, 2001. We probably all remember with great clarity and brightness how we found out that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, as well as what we did just next.

While Brown and Kulik were interested in how we remember shocking public events, their findings revealed that the cultural and the personal intersect. In their survey of white and black Americans, equal numbers of respondents reported flashbulb memories for hearing about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, while far more blacks than whites also reported such memories for learning about the assassinations of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. This underscores the fact that flashbulb memories are not simply a catalog of events that are objectively important or out of the ordinary. Most crucial is how relevant or consequential an event feels to the individual. That is, flashbulb memories are emotional memories, and such memories have long been known to carry special significance in our brains and in our lives. In fact, the power and permanence of emotional memories was one of the founding—and remains one of the most enduring—questions in the study of the mind.

In 1890, the father of American psychology, William James, wrote that some memories seem indelible because “an impression may be so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues.” Though in the nineteenth century no one understood quite how this scarring might work, many of James’s contemporaries were reaching similar conclusions. The French neurologist and founder of modern neurology Jean-Martin Charcot puzzled over how memories of shocking events were not only persistent but could also be all-consuming, functioning as “parasites of the mind.” In Austria, the neurologist and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud similarly posed that his patients “suffer mainly from reminiscences,” from memories of moments when they felt unbearable feelings such as fright, anxiety, shame, or pain. Back in France, pioneering psychologist Pierre Janet suggested that such “vehement emotions” caused patients to have “the evolution of their lives checked.” Although much of what was first known about the force of emotional memories came from studies of stress and trauma in women’s lives, two world wars soon brought male patients into the fold. American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner’s writings on the “neurosis of war” are considered by many to be the seminal work on post-traumatic stress, setting the stage for the study of combat stress or the impact that war has on the psyche. “It is not like the writing on a slate that can be erased, leaving the slate like it was before. Combat leaves a lasting impression on men’s minds, changing them as radically as any crucial experience through which they live,” wrote American psychiatrists Roy Grinker and John Spiegel in 1945.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that we take special note of people, places, or situations that seem to threaten or benefit our survival; that there is enhanced memory for emotional experiences. Sometimes these emotional moments are especially happy ones, like sunny days spent riding the waves at the beach, or exciting ones, like watching crabs scamper around on the kitchen floor. Other times, they are distressing or frightening events, like watching a parent walk down the hallway and out of our lives. But while happy and exciting events enrich our experience of being alive, frightening events provide important information about staying alive, and so negative emotional memories tend to be more firmly installed in our minds. As psychology researcher Roy Baumeister summarizes in his often cited paper, “Bad Is Stronger than Good”: At least in our minds, “bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good.” This is because our brains are wired to keep us alive, not happy, and I doubt a single paper has been written about, nor a single therapy session devoted to, a client’s being unable to forget an extraordinarily joyful time. It is our shockingly upsetting experiences that are most deeply etched in our minds, and only in the last few decades have we come to better understand how the brain makes it so.

In the chapters ahead, the region of the brain we will hear about again and again is the amygdala, or the part of the brain neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls the “hub in the wheel of fear.” A small almond-shaped region deep in the brain, the amygdala is a complex structure with many functions, but overwhelming evidence suggests it plays a central role in managing danger. When our senses detect disturbances in the environment—any potential physical or social threat—the amygdala is alerted, and within milliseconds it reacts. The amygdala is, again according to LeDoux, “where trigger stimuli do their triggering.”

One key response that the amygdala triggers is the activation of the HPA axis, or the chain in the neuroendocrine system that consists of the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and the adrenal glands. When the HPA axis is stimulated, the adrenal glands release epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol, hormones once commonly called adrenaline because they are produced by the adrenal glands and now more popularly and descriptively known as stress hormones because they help us adapt to stress. In our bodies, stress hormones prepare us for fight or flight, and in our brains, they heighten arousal, attention, and memory. Stress hormones tell our brains to wake up and pay attention, and tell our bodies to get ready to take action. They also tell our brains to remember what we see.

Brain imaging studies show that when we look at intensely emotional material, such as slides of highly pleasant or unpleasant scenes, activity in the amygdala increases; and to some extent, the greater the activity in the amygdala, the better the recall is weeks later. Very low emotional arousal suggests there is nothing significant to pay special attention to, and so to protect our brains from overload, mundane events like showering or driving to work are not likely to be remembered in great detail or for very long. Our brains protect us from another sort of overload by sometimes failing to remember times when we are too emotionally aroused, especially those times that involve the utmost terror or helplessness. This is why victims of shark attacks or violent crimes, for example, may not remember such traumas at all; the events are too overwhelming to assimilate. Moderate stress, however, alerts us to threats in the environment that we perceive we can and should do something about. “There is nothing like a little stress to create strong, long-lasting memories of events,” says neurobiologist James McGaugh.

Emotional learning is powerful and it needs to be efficient, too, because when it comes to survival, there isn’t a lot of room for repeated trial and error. It is for this reason that the amygdala is “quick to learn and slow to forget,” it is said. “Emotional memory,” says LeDoux, “may be forever.” Just as Sam did not need to see his father walk away with his suitcase more than once to remember it decades later, many of us needed to live through only one 9/11 to be haunted by that morning always. Emotional memories stand stronger and longer than everyday recollections, and their vividness makes them feel more real and more central to who we are than the piddling day-to-day. The problem is that when these remembrances are negative, harking back to Charcot, Freud, and Janet, our emotional memories can function as “malignant memories.” They are bad memories that do bad things. The tyranny of the past rules the present and the future as these outsize, tenacious reminiscences take over our autobiographies, and even our lives. Although Sam surely went to birthday parties and rode his bike and ate ice cream and played at the park when he was in the fourth grade, he hardly remembers anything about that year other than the losses and the shocks.

***

After Sam’s father left, shiny silver dead bolts appeared on the front and back doors of his house. His mother did not mention them but she had the keys, so—as with many other things—it went without saying: The locks had been installed so Sam’s father could not return. In the months and years that followed, the dead bolts only served as reminders that not once did Sam’s father ever even try to come home. He did call to come get a long wooden table he had bought when he was a bachelor, and although Sam and his mother cleared it off and got it ready to go, his dad never showed. Nor did he come get his slides of Coney Island or his stamp collection, though Sam did not lie on the floor and thumb through its pages on Saturdays anymore. Catching sight of the black leather-bound binder on the bookshelf made Sam feel embarrassed and exposed, like seeing an old teddy bear he felt he could no longer pick up.

Sam’s father did not come back for Sam, either, although one time he took the boy to a matinee. Sam had never been picked up by his father in the driveway before—it was strange—and as he walked to the car, he squinted in the glare of the sun. He could not tell if it was the bright light or the fact that he was working very hard not to cry, but as Sam climbed into the passenger seat he could not unscrunch his eyebrows. He shifted around in his seat not knowing what to say, disturbed by the fact that he had lost control of his face. Sam cannot recall what movie the two saw and he hardly watched it as he sat there gripping the armrests, distracted by the fact that even in the dark theater, he could not unscrew his forehead. What Sam did not know is that those brow muscles are called Darwin’s Grief Muscles because they betray confusion and sadness, even when we try to hide them. As trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk explains, “The body keeps the score,” especially when we have feelings our conscious mind cannot or will not register.

Sam’s parents officially divorced on Valentine’s Day—yes, really—just over two years after his father left. Later Sam would learn that, after the judge ordered his father to pay child support, Sam’s father grumbled to his mother on the way out of the courthouse that he would kill them all first. That evening, Sam’s mother went straight from work to a bar to celebrate with a friend, while Sam kept busy with sixth-grade homework. Around eleven o’clock, she walked in through the back door and let her purse fall on the floor, instead of placing it on the counter as she usually did. Then she rushed to the kitchen and threw up in the sink.

Most children of divorce go from seeing a parent every day to seeing the now absent parent between four and fourteen days a month. About a quarter of kids have little or no contact with the noncustodial parent, usually their fathers, within three years, and that was the case for Sam. Like many children, Sam wished he could see his father more, and he told his best friend that maybe he would go live with him in the summer sometime, that his dad was lonely and wanted him to come. “What in the hell is that about?” his mother asked after hearing the news from the friend’s mother. “Your dad isn’t lonely and you’re not going to live with him. You never even hear from him except for getting cards on holidays.”

For Christmas and Valentine’s Day, Sam’s father tore a ten-dollar bill into two pieces and sent half to Sam and half to Sam’s sister, each tucked into a generic store-bought card. Known more for his cynical wit than for his symbolic gestures, Sam’s father probably thought he was being clever and it was, indeed, a clever illustration of the fact that Sam and his sister’s lives now felt torn in two and unusable. Worthless. Sam and his sister tossed the torn bills into the trash because they did not know what else to do with them.

Maybe Sam was angry or hurt about those cards, but all he remembers feeling is guilt: guilt because he never sent his father anything at all. Sam knew better than to ask his mother to buy stationery or presents intended for his dad, and besides, Sam no longer knew where his dad lived. Once, a nonprofit sent a membership card to Sam’s house with his father’s name printed on the front. Sam tucked it into his wallet and pretended—even to himself—it was an emergency contact card, a way of reaching his father if he needed him, until one of Sam’s friends called bullshit: “My dad got one of those cards in the mail, too. That’s junk mail!”

Sam’s father made good on his promise, not of killing them but of not paying child support. His family stopped taking vacations to the beach. They stopped playing sports. They stopped being sure if they could buy clothes or stay in their house. Once when his mother sat in the car and cried over her tax bill, Sam offered bravely, “We could sell Dad’s stamp collection . . .”

Her sobs became bitter, choking laughter. “That stamp collection isn’t worth anything,” she said through gravelly chuckles. Now Sam was the one who felt like crying.

Sam’s father moved back to New York. Sam knew this because, inside the holiday cards he still received every year for a while, instead of half a ten-dollar bill was a New York Lottery scratch-off ticket. Virginia did not have the lottery yet, so in a way the tickets seemed exotic and exciting. Sam would hunt a penny out of a drawer and sit down somewhere in private, ready to scrape away the gray powdery goo. Each time he scratched and lost, he felt tricked.