Eventually, my grandmother woke feeling such intense pains that she knew the end had come. She asked a neighbor to drive her to the hospital and fifteen hours later, a perfectly healthy little girl was born. That is the way my mother arrived into the world—disguised as a cancerous growth. There was no secret in the selection of my mother’s name. My grandmother, grateful that she wasn’t dying after all, named her new child Therese, after Teresa of Avila, Patron Saint of bodily ills.

A nurse called my grandfather to share the exciting news, but he wanted nothing to do with my grandmother, deciding that she must have betrayed him to conceive. That night, he packed his things and disappeared for good. My grandmother bought a bag of Hershey’s kisses, had a good cry, and got down to the business of raising her daughter. I had heard the story of my mother’s birth so often I knew it by heart. It was my story I was more interested in—and the one that my mother kept secret from me.

My mother kept many secrets from me. Like why she treated my sister and me so differently, and why our father’s name was one that could never be spoken, and why on one sunny afternoon in October she decided to pack up all our things and leave our grandmother’s house. I remember watching as she frantically dug through drawers, gathering our things, while Franny and I stood in the middle of the room—mostly because we didn’t want to get in her way. I knew I needed to do something to make it all stop, but I couldn’t and I didn’t and then it was too late and the next thing I knew we were driving away in her car. I turned to look back and watched the house where I had grown up shrink away. She held the steering wheel tightly and focused with such intensity that it made her look angry. After what seemed like hours of driving, we pulled up beside a little white house that was so dainty, dolls might have lived inside. My mother used a key she wore around her neck to let us in, and when we walked through the doorway a woman appeared and I suddenly felt overwhelmed by a sense of familiarity. But the harder I tried to remember, the deeper the memory hid. She led us to a green room with fairies and I just held on to my sister because I didn’t know what else to do.