were concentrating on the sidewalks, pretending they did not know those dorks ahead of them in the unfortunate mom jeans—who, I want to point out, included many of the dads. It didn’t help when I knocked over an entire row of bicycles, domino style, at one of the recreation centers.
“Sorry!” I kept saying as I tried to put twenty-five bikes back on their stands. “Sorry!”
When I looked around, Dan had vanished. I didn’t blame him.
But Zoë was with me all the way. She was making me miss her before she even packed the first of the sixty-three boxes of stuff she took with her the next year. All of this made me feel unexpectedly buoyant. I had loved everything about college, especially the going-away-from-home part. I even skipped my senior year in high school to get there a year early. The University of Minnesota was where I found myself and my tribe, that day I walked into the subterranean offices of the Minnesota Daily, the college paper, and asked for a job. Half the staff was in the darkroom, smoking a joint. The rest of them were sitting around talking about Hunter S. Thompson. Everyone wanted to do his gonzo journalism that year, or imitate Tom Wolfe’s new journalism, and since the students controlled the paper, a lot of them did. It made for unusual coverage of the Board of Regents meetings.
The rain started just as Zoë and I pulled into the visitors’ lot at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, a college best known for its psychology program, which she had decided was where she wanted her life to go. When Sigmund Freud made his first and only trip to America, in 1909, he went to Clark to deliver his famous lectures. A life-size bronze statue of Freud, deep in thought, sits on a bench on the campus.
Inside the admissions office, a cluster of parents at the windows murmured about whether to do the tour in the rain or skip it. Zoë wanted to see the campus, so when the tour guide called out that it was time to start, we buttoned up our jackets, opened our one umbrella, and fell in with the swarm of parents and seniors.
Our guide, a skinny boy with fogged-up glasses, walked backward and ignored the rain, which had started as a drizzle but now came down steady and cold. We stopped to see the same things we’d seen at the last campus: a dorm and a dorm room, the cafeteria, the gym. By this point, the tour had sustained several dropouts.
“Now we’ll head over to the library,” the guide said.
At the back of the crowd, Zoë and I held the umbrella between us, the rain dribbling down her right side and my left. We lurched along, like mismatched partners in a three-legged race.
“Listen, I’m prepared to take it on absolute faith that every university does, in fact, have a library,” I said. “I don’t need to see to believe.”
Zoë smiled, but she also sighed. I recognized that sigh as my own when I was seventeen, a sign that the mother-daughter bonding was coming unglued.
I was about to suggest cutting away from the group and going for coffee when the guide stopped on the path. Freud sat nearby, awaiting what had been building up inside me for two decades to emerge. He knew more than I did.
The guide gestured to a glowing light and said, “You’ve probably noticed these blue lights around campus. They’re safety stations. If you’re walking alone at night and you think someone is following you, or you might be in danger, you get to one of these blue lights, call, and help will be there within five minutes.”
All the parents nodded, reassured.
Those parents were idiots.
“Five minutes?” I whispered to Zoë. “Who are they kidding? Five minutes is too late. Way too late. You could be dead in five minutes.”
Zoë, who remembers it now as a stage whisper that everyone heard, looked at me for a long pause, shook her head, and went on with the group, leaving me standing alone beneath the blue light.
I watched her walk away, the hem of her jeans dragging on the wet pavement. I felt the same way I always feel when I look at her: amazed that this girl, so unlike me, is my daughter. Zoë was like the girls I envied at that age, the girls who blazed through the halls of my high school, while I thought only about cutting class and going anywhere else. She was strong, confident, smart, beautiful. She was funny. She was not afraid to speak her mind and ask for what she wanted.
I looked at my daughter and saw a young woman who was ready to go out into the world and make it her own. But now I saw something else, too.
She was prey.
I was sending her to a campus. I could see her standing in a pool of blue light on a dark path, scared, alone, calling for help, watching a man walk toward her while she waited for someone to come save her.
She had five minutes.
The venomous snake returned, slithering through my body. Panic dropped from my chest to my gut so fast I thought I might throw up. My vision blurred and narrowed, dark at the edges. The ordinary campus sounds around me turned into a muffled roar in my ears. I dropped the umbrella and grabbed the post with the blue light with both hands, willing myself to keep standing.
Then I felt myself float up into the air like a balloon escaping from a child’s fist. I saw the middle-aged woman below, rain dripping off her hair into her face.
I was back at that other campus, twenty-one years before, suspended high above a stage and looking down at myself.
That was our last college tour. I couldn’t walk any more blue-lighted pathways that week. As we drove west, back to Cleveland, we didn’t talk much.
I clocked the miles asking myself the question: Should I tell them? One mile I would think, Yes, now they are old enough. The next I would think, No, no matter how old they are, it’s too much for children to think of their mother with a knife at her throat. A few miles on, I would think, But I need to warn Zoë. I can’t let her go by herself to a college campus without knowing what can happen there. This was several years before campus rape became a widely discussed and reported issue, and I was not thinking of the dangers she faced by simply going on a date, or to a party at a fraternity house—dangers that, statistically, were far more prevalent than encountering strangers in empty buildings.
And so it went, through Massachusetts and New York, along Lake Erie into Pennsylvania and finally Ohio, Zoë listening to Modest Mouse and singing along.
How do you tell your children a story you never want them to hear? How do you explain how it made you the mother you were?
This is why I hovered over you. This is why my internal alarm clanged constantly, why I treated every tumble and scrape as an emergency, and every sleepover party as a potential kidnapping situation. I wanted you to embrace the world and live boldly, but I worry that my actions taught you to fear the world and not trust anyone. I hope this will explain my thousand-yard stare, the one you hated because it meant I was not paying attention. I hope it explains all those times I vanished into myself and you waved your hands in front of my face, saying, “Mom!”
Can you forgive me?
The pendulum swung from yes to no for two weeks. When I finally stopped it on a yes, I should tell them, I decided to do it in the car. A friend once told me that that’s the best place to have difficult conversations with your kids. “They’re trapped with you,” she explained. “So they have to listen. But you aren’t facing each other, so it’s easier. Less confrontational. Let them pick the music, too.”
I wanted to tell them separately, so on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I talked Zoë into driving to Cincinnati with me to pick up Dan from school. I would tell her on the way down. I would wait and tell Dan on another car trip.
We left early, driving south under a low, leaden sky. Rain hit the windshield in icy splotches that would turn into sleet, and then snow. All of Ohio seemed to be going the same direction, the holiday traffic forming a funereal procession on the slippery highway. The car felt like a cozy refuge as we drove through the open farmland and fog-shrouded valleys. South of Columbus, we came to the black billboard that looms over the highway going south, announcing “HELL IS REAL”