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can’t stop thinking about McCarthy’s knives. He likes to show me how he can skin a rabbit with his army combat knife. His evasion knife is the most menacing, thin, black, easily hidden.
    I somehow convince him that we need to see my parents together, to show them we’re serious. The fight starts when we pull off the Saw Mill River Parkway. I know, he knows, once I go back home and think about sacrificing college to be Mrs. Tree Surgeon, our elopement will lose its allure. It is almost five in the morning. We are turning off the Boston Post Road onto the avenue leading to my house.
    â€œLet me off before Claflin Avenue, okay?”
    â€œI’m not letting you off anywhere,” McCarthy says. “I love you and we’re getting married, just like you said on the phone.”
    â€œBut my father—”
    â€œForget your father. I’m going to take care of you now.”
    As his truck grumbles into the long climb up our hill, I am overtaken by nausea.
    â€œStop the car, let me out, I have to puke.” He refuses. I beg. He reaches across me to try to lock my door. I grab his hand. “Don’t make me bite you!”
    He slows down and I bolt out. Jackknifing up from the fall, I start running, streaking across backyards, scrambling over fences; spilling out two driveways from our house, I feel my skirt catch on something, a bush? No, a hand. His big hand, he’s trying to clutch at me! I feel the rush of adrenaline. I’m little but I’m fast. There’s a light on in our living room. I sprint for the door.
    It is my mother’s arms into which I fall. I hear the swoosh of a window sash sliding up. My father’s voice: “Crazy McCarthy! I’ll give you a count of three to disappear—you hear—or I’ll point my weapon right at your pecker!”
    His truck spits gravel as he tears off. My mother nudges me to the sofa, covers me with a quilt, and brings me tea. It isn’t useless to expect help from my mother, after all.
    â€œMom, I’m pregnant,” I choke out.
    â€œI know.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œI’m your mother.”
    We sit for a long time in the dimness of a slow dawn, hands clasped. My mother begins to pray: “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.”
    I repeat with her: “He restoreth my soul.” I start to sob. “My soul”—the shame chokes me—“my soul has no scruples.”
    â€œLet’s pray to the Lord to take away your sins.”
    We pray. Time passes.
    â€œDon’t cry,” she says. “You do not have to have this baby.”
    It takes time for the enormity of her gift to sink in. Gone is the cloudiness in her eyes. The whites glare like searchlights. She has stopped spinning out of the present and coalesced around the memory of a moment she lived before, the memory of a father who foreclosed her own future. Later that morning she dials doctor after doctor, then phones McCarthy and commands him to drive us in her car to New Jersey, that is, if he ever wants to see me again. She sits with me in the backseat and keeps up a pleasant pretense of conversation with him, the way people do when humoring a kidnapper.
    The anesthesia of fear has robbed from my memory where exactly we went, except there was no back alley, just a normal doctor’s office. Of the procedure, I remember nothing. What I will never forget is my mother’s voice, singing to me in the backseat of the car as she cradled my head in her lap on the way home . . . Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s going to sing you a lullaby . . . her soft hand stroking my forehead, dabbing at my tears, mothering me. Hush little baby . . .
    THE DEAN WAS NOT HARSH. She told me I could return to the University of Vermont but only if all of my professors agreed. I called them, one by one, and