Joe Brown Hall was built in 1932 to serve as a boys’ dormitory. One Thanksgiving holiday in the ’70s, all the young men left except one. No one found him until after the break, and well—you can imagine. The smell was awful; the other boys complained. There were rumors the janitors couldn’t clean the blood off the floor—never mind that the boy hung himself. So they sealed it up, including the stairwell that led to the boy’s room. A dozen or so steps are now called “The Staircase to Nowhere” with a charming door-sized painting that makes it look like the stairs keep going. As a girl, I’d run up the steps to knock and then run away and hide on the opposite end, waiting for this invisible boy, this long-forgotten brother, to appear. No one ever came looking for me, but it didn’t escape my attention that for all my banging, the sounds reverberating behind the wall were hollow.

My mother’s office is lined with books, interspersed with student projects, framed snapshots of Germany, and quotes by Goethe—she’s been a professor at the university for thirty years, and one look at her walls lets you know what she teaches.

You might think that with all the photos of Bavarian hillsides and German newspapers strewn about, she misses her homeland. But as far as I know, she’s never been back—not after she graduated summa cum laude from Berkeley, not during the summers for research, not even to bury her parents. Outside the classroom, she refuses to speak German. Maybe she feels guilty for not visiting her parents before they died. Maybe speaking in German would blur the lines she tries so hard to define between work and home, or maybe after hours and hours of teaching eighteen-year-olds, she didn’t have the energy or patience to teach me. Whatever it was, despite all the years I spent in her office, I never learned to speak German.

Now she’s behind her desk, a book in one hand, pen and paper in the other. Her whole person is neat and tidy, every inch buttoned, straightened, and tucked into place, but she looks deflated. In the summer, she’ll regain some of her buoyancy, the years will drop from her shoulders, and whatever internal demon it is that drives her will soften its grip. But in the middle of fall semester, everything about her seems squeezed tight.