In those frightful, horrible flashes of seizure, I apperceived what it would be like to finally lose, surrender my daughter. The episodes were small destructions, and I withered alongside her each and every time. Mere seconds. Infinite seconds. I felt bad, guilty even, for feeling a perverse happiness at having witnessed the seizure alone. I wanted all of my daughter that I could get, and I wanted her selfishly. I wanted to cache moments and freeze them for parceling out over the balance of my so-called life.

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When I was seven, I watched my father get crushed by the weight of a failed tenure bid. I of course didn’t understand what was going on at the time, but I remembered a change in his posture, how he went from saying, I thought proudly, that he was a professor at the University of Chicago to uttering, almost under his breath, that he was an adjunct professor at Roosevelt. I didn’t know until years later how he had struggled to piece together a life for us, that the unfinished book on Ralph Ellison that had been a passion, that lost him tenure, was now an unfinished book that meant nothing good to him. He took other jobs on occasion, among them driving a taxi, and fell hopelessly into himself. When I was just fourteen, I was the one who found him in the basement with only most of his head intact. My mother and I were not close after that, but I never felt a sense of loss, something I always chalked up to a failure in my character. She took a job at a travel agency after my father’s failed tenure bid and never seemed too happy about it. I always imagined that she left for exotic places every morning, sunny places with palm trees that somehow also failed to make her happy. I left her to join the Marines and she hated that. She died of stomach cancer gone undetected when I was in college. I held her hand while she died, and it felt strangely emotionless, I think for both of us. I was, in fact, quite sad, but she seemed so thankful for her end that I had to respect it. I had been an only child, and with her death I was completely without family. I never felt that aloneness, or at least acknowledged it, until I learned I would lose my Sarah.

I never told my daughter stories about my parents, my childhood. She was surrounded with stories, very good ones, of Meg’s parents, Meg’s siblings, Meg’s childhood. But I never shared much, my belief being that I didn’t have much to share, that I didn’t remember much, which was true enough. In my mind, in my heart, I had not come into full existence until the birth of my daughter.

I had taken to working in my office late, or at least starting out there before finding myself at a near-campus tavern. I was in my office at ten one evening when Hilary Gill stopped at my open door.