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and I think now that the world was named for her, too. Pretty petals, but watch out for the thorns. Red hair, pale skin, as short as my father was tall, five feet to his six, yet she seemed taller than him, taller than anyone I knew. I was tall, too—eventually even taller than my father—but I hunched to make myself smaller.
    Years later a fellow self-help author got at that. He told me, “On every page of your books there are two things battling for space—faith and doubt. Your faith, as it comes through in your words, must be stronger than your reader’s doubt. Your faith must be stronger than your own doubt. Just as long as you never forget that doubt is faith’s friend, the very thing that makes faith stronger.”
    A motivational speaker motivating a motivational speaker.
    â€œIt’s always two stories battling for space in your mind, in your heart,” he’d say, as if he knew my parents and my childhood intimately.
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    The story my mother would have had me believe was that my father, though she loved him, was a little strange. She never used the word crazy ; she knew I would have rejected that word. But that he was strange was true; I know that now, though I should have known—and probably on some level did know—then.
    Even so, I believed every word he said.
    My earliest memory, as remembered for me by my mother, was the time my father went away. For how long, I can’t be sure, especially since it’s not really my memory, only what I’ve been told. I was four and didn’t stop crying when my father was gone except to sleep. So my mother says. My father went fishing and there was a storm and he couldn’t get home.
    I had never known my father to go fishing. He didn’t own a pole, a tackle box; he didn’t even eat fish.
    So the questions left to me now, years later, long after he’s gone, questions to which I have no answers: Where did he go if not fishing? Where does one go when one goes away?
    Add to this story the story my mother told me about my grandfather, my father’s father, dead long before I was born—drowned, as I’ve been told, and even my father never denied this.
    My grandfather was an alternately devout and lapsed Catholic who decided he could walk on water. Whether he made this decision during a period of devotion or not is unknown. He was out fishing, so the story goes, and walked off the boat into choppy waters and disappeared into the sea.
    Whenever my mother wanted to use the word crazy for my father—if she looked out the window and saw him showing me and my friends magic tricks, coins from behind our ears, a dollar bill folded again and again and again, then gone in his palm—she’d use it for my grandfather. She’d tell the story of how he believed he could walk on water, how foolish, and one was to understand—I was—that the same might be said about my father: that he was a good man, a good provider, but had misguided beliefs about how the world works. By which my mother meant: my father didn’t care much for church, didn’t see the point of grace at table, and meant by the word God something entirely different from what my mother, from what most people, meant.
    When my mother was upset with my father, her temper heightened by his unwillingness to raise his voice and engage her, she’d say, “They’re going to send you away to you know where.” Or, “Careful, you’ll end up like your father and the rest of the Newborns.”
    I wasn’t ever sure what my mother meant. Maybe other Newborns had tried to walk on water and drowned. Maybe they’d all gone crazy, and my father was next and, after him, me.
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    One is supposed to learn from stories, whether true or not, especially stories about one’s forebears, but years later I tried to walk on water.
    I was seventeen and trying to save my first girlfriend, who had no intention of being