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was concerned and tasted the cat food to make sure it was okay for them toeat. Another time she took in a baby bird that was injured and tried to nurse it back to health. Then cried for a day before giving the small bird a funeral next to the tree it had fallen out of.
    Nancy joined the 4-H Club when she was old enough, which was where she learned how to ride horses. And every year when the agricultural fair and circus came to town, she would furiously plot with her older brother Donnie on how they were going to free the elephants. When that didn’t work, they would sneak them extra hay. (Interestingly, by the age of thirteen, Adam had adopted a vegan, organic lifestyle out of a moral concern, Nancy told friends. “He did not want to be the cause of animals suffering,” she had explained.)
    Nancy was known by her friends as a brazen child who had an adventurous streak. She would always speak her mind and was assertive about what she wanted. As a mother, she tried to project a confident and calm demeanor on the outside but, if she ever sensed her younger boy might be in danger, another side to her personality was quick to surface. While her oldest son, Ryan, was allowed to run and play by himself in the forest on Marvin’s New Hampshire property for hours at a time without supervision, if Adam was out of her sight for even a moment a “switch could flip.”
    “Nancy was an intense personality; she could go from being mellow and soft-spoken to very upset, very quickly. Adam was associated with that side of her,” Marvin recalled. “Some part of her became active if he was in distress.”
    Marvin experienced the darker side of Nancy’s personality just once but it was a memory that forever stayed with him. On April 15, 1998, they had traveled together to Boston with the Boy Scouts’ pack to see the Celtics in action at the FleetCenter. The group hada relaxed, enjoyable time during the first half. Nancy and Marvin were sitting together in the tenth row of the balcony, while Adam, who was days away from his sixth birthday, sat in the row directly in front beside his brother and Marvin’s son, Jordan.
    At the halftime intermission, with the Celtics trailing 57–48, Nancy asked Marvin to keep an eye on Adam while she went to use the restroom. Marvin turned his head momentarily and when he looked back, he realized that the boy had slipped away. When Nancy returned ten minutes later, she saw Adam’s seat empty, and erupted.
    “She was hysterical and screaming, ‘My God, where is Adam?’ ” Marvin recalled. “I had no idea where he had gone, but I knew he couldn’t have gone far and that there was no reason to panic.”
    Marvin looked at Nancy. She was hyperventilating; her face was beet red. She was so distressed it flashed through his mind that he might need to seek medical attention for her.
    “It wasn’t just a meltdown. It was an enormous panic attack,” Marvin said. “I was tremendously worried. I didn’t know what was happening. I had never seen her like that.”
    A few moments later, Marvin spotted Adam’s scruffy red hair several feet away in the tunnel near the concession stands. “Little Adam was touching the walls with his fingers. I walked up to him and said, ‘What’s up, dude? You know you weren’t supposed to leave your seat. Do you know what you just did to your mother?’ ” Marvin said.
    But Adam was unmoved by the chaos he had caused and barely acknowledged Marvin’s presence. He calmly turned around and returned to his seat as if nothing had happened.
    “He just had this blank look in his eyes, as if he didn’t know who I was or something. He didn’t say a word. It kind of scared me.”
    With Adam safely back in his place, Nancy regained her composure and returned to watching the rest of the game, but her reaction that day resonated with Marvin years later.
    “It hurt me terribly. I really felt like I let her down. I never saw that side of her before and never wanted to see it