PRELUDE

Mrs. Macintosh picked up an acorn from the schoolyard and confronted our second grade class with her own version of Aristotle’s famous question. Mysteriously lifting her eyebrows, she asked us, “If this acorn falls to the ground in the middle of a forest where there are no human beings or animals to hear it, will it make any noise?” Always inquisitive, I stood chewing on this puzzle and on a wisp of hair that had escaped my braids. I conjured up a picture of the empty forest and watched the acorn tumbling to the ground as our teacher moved more deeply into the question. “Do you think sound can exist without at least one ear drum for it to bounce off of?”

I was disturbed. If there was no sound without ears to receive it, was the acorn’s plop something else entirely? Or nothing at all?

The question haunted me more than Mrs. Macintosh could have imagined. By second grade, I was already uncannily familiar with that soundless forest. My whole being trembled with a story that could not be heard. And I wondered, though never with words, if the story could not be heard, had it ever happened? And if the story was me, then had I ever happened? Was I something else entirely? Or nothing at all?

It was no use trying to separate us from each other, me and the tragic tale that had befallen my family, as long as we were both stuck together in silence. The facts, of course, were no secret, but the utter havoc they had wreaked in my family’s life could never be voiced. I felt compelled to wrap myself inside this story that could not be told. For decades that’s how I saved it and some version of myself as well.

It was not a good era for families like ours. There was no traditional community to keen with us over the death of my older brothers and sister—one, two, three, all in a row—no tolerance for weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, no period of mourning. And there were no support groups, no grief counselors, no five stages of grief. We would not have dared to let the lonely inward cries of our anguish reverberate through our home, with nowhere else to go, no ears to receive them beyond our own. They would have shattered us. So we had no choice but to muffle them.

Decades later, when I began to indulge vigorously in wishes about my past, believing the universe had cheated me of life as it was meant to be, I created a fantasy, a different version of the story that would have allowed me to leave it behind. I imagined that after the third death, on February 6, 1959, after our parents drove the station wagon home from their fruitless vigil at the Chicago hospital, both of them refusing to glance back a