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My family believed in Dickens, root vegetables, ignoring difficult truths, and Louis Kahn. They believed in making fun of the fat, the unintelligent, the poorly read, the conservative, and God. We believed in Ireland and scorned the Brits but loved England and adored the Beatles and hated The Monkees. I had no idea what was morally correct as a child, except you should suffer for everyone and not show off. You should tell a good story, and when your parents drank, go to bed, and hold your breath and hope morning comes fast. You should swim in the ocean as frequently as possible, not expect praise for mediocre effort, and remain aware that mediocrity would be determined by two incredibly talented and impressive people who both graduated from Harvard. You were fucked.

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Luke started screaming in the middle of the night. I swam up towards the light, towards the air, a dream pulling me back, but Luke's cry made me surface, and I opened my eyes to his eyes, my eyes because we had the same eyes. But his were full of tears. He was sobbing.

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It was eleven hours of driving to get to where Luke was staying with Kevin’s brother and sister-in-law. If you went in a straight line, it was eleven hours. I would have made it before dark If the highway wasn’t under construction if I hadn’t stopped for gas and water and the bathroom and called Scott to yell at him for the mixed tape that featured song after Canadian Irish love song featuring a male vocalist with a heartbreaking voice. These instrumentals expressed longing, regret, grieving, and lust. I should have stayed in a motel and finished driving the next day. I didn’t listen to Scott’s tape until I had listened to a call-in radio show for the relatives of drug addicts, my tapes which included The Cranberries and Enya, but Enya was the soundtrack of my birth, Seventy-two hours of labor with Enya chanting unintelligible Gaelic words. I pulled into a general store to get gas.

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