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clenched tightly around the steering wheel as Isaac told me this.
    That night Isaac had a bad dream.
    “I was on a ship with my dad, and it was sinking, and I was afraid I would never see you again.”
    He crawled into my bed and huddled close to me, his body trembling. I put my arm around him and blinked back tears. Onlytoo vividly did I remember my own dreams of abandonment as a child. Would it be like that for Isaac? Would he never be granted the security of knowing that someone would always be there? I had never left him unattended, nor would I, but repeated attempts to convince Eli to do the same had failed. I couldn’t bear to see my son endure even the smallest part of the fear and anxiety I had grown up with.
    It seemed so clear to me what that dream meant. I had to send him off most weekends to be with his dad, while I remained helpless at a distance. I had not been able to save him when he was abandoned in that car; I had not been there to advocate for him. I could only be in control of his life with me. It was terrifying to consider that things would always be this way. That I would never be there when his father lost his temper, or simply his judgment, that Isaac would have to navigate those situations for himself.
    Eli expressed no remorse for his decision to leave Isaac in the car on his own. He reacted angrily when I asked him to sign an agreement saying he wouldn’t leave his son unattended again. I was beginning to understand that the fight was far from over. I would be battling for my son until he became an adult, until he could decide for himself. I was forever tied to the man I had not chosen, to the fate my family and community had chosen for me. I would always be only half-free. This knowledge drove me wild with frustration and anger. How could it have come to this, after so much struggling? Would I always be dragging my chains around, swallowing the bitter remorse surrounding the irrevocable decisions that had been made for me in my youth?
    What was it they said about that heedless charge down the hill to freedom? That it would inevitably end in destruction. The price I seemed to have paid for my escape still didn’t seem as high as theone I would have paid if I’d stayed, but I struggled now with a new enemy: perpetual exhaustion of the spirit. I wondered if I’d emptied an unrenewable resource in my dash toward freedom, if I’d somehow exhausted a store of psychic capital designed to last me for a lifetime.
    It might have seemed to some that I’d whittled my life down to the bare minimum, but for me, it became just enough. Living in the middle of nowhere was what I wanted. I needed a life that reflected what I felt on the inside: a profound sense of alienation from the society of my origins and the society I had transplanted into, a sense of being in limbo and therefore of being nowhere.
    Ironically, I’d found myself unable to create a sense of home, or identity, in the city where I’d been born and raised. Now, here I was, in a place that seemed just quiet and empty enough for the outline of my spirit to take shape. Here I might become visible, the way a cul-de-sac might merit a spot on a map of a barren locale. And even if it could do nothing for me in the end, certainly it was the place for Isaac to figure out who he was and what kind of person he might want to grow into.

    A month after my surgery, we celebrated Isaac’s seventh birthday. The weather was unseasonably warm that week; we planned to have a shindig at our house so the kids could all run around outdoors. My mother took the regional train up from New York, loaded with party favors and balloons she’d found in a 99-cent store. I bought the snacks and cupcakes.
    The day of Isaac’s birthday happened to be Grandparents’ Day at his school, so I dropped them both off in the morning andreturned home to blow up the balloons. When I picked them up at lunchtime, they’d created a wreath together, Isaac being the designer and my