Over the next few months, Preston met three times a week with Charlie, while also searching message boards and blogs dedicated to adults who had been raised using his parents’ method. He started reaching out to them, discussing his own methods for dealing with the fallout from that particular childhood experience. He began traveling around the Southeast, meeting with people, inviting them to become part of a new study that he was only beginning to outline. It wasn’t going to focus on the effects of the Constant Friction Method, which had been done numerous times by researchers better than him; the results of these studies were tainted by biases and improper methodology. What Preston was interested in was creating a method to deal with the aftereffects of the Constant Friction Method, a way for adults to find their way clear of that upbringing, a support system that would override what their parents had done to them.
Now two years into the study, Preston had amassed data from more than 350 adults, had developed a network that covered most of the Southeast. He was also, as a way of funding his work with this new project, writing a memoir of his childhood, an examination of his parents and how he fit into their lives. He had retrieved a good deal of his parents’ journals and notes from his childhood, and was discovering just how conflicted they were about the method the longer it progressed. “We can’t stop now,” his mother had written in one of her journals, “we can only hope we’ve done the right thing. And if not, we pray that Preston is strong enough that none of this sticks.” The book, A Constant Fiction: A Portrait of a Normal Family, had sold in the high six figures, and Preston was working on a second draft, the pages of which he read to Izzy each night, Izzy learning details about her husband, and the in-laws she had never known, the sensation like discovering a sealed-up room in a house you had lived in for years.
As the food was served, Izzy finally took a seat beside her husband, who called the kids over to the table. “To family,” he said, raising his glass, and everyone happily shouted, “Family!” in response. They ate and talked and it felt like, though it would never be the same as it had been at the complex, a close approximation that allowed them, if they tried hard enough, to pretend that things had never changed.
After lunch, the makeshift bluegrass band played songs and the parents and children danced on the porch, twisting and twirling. Izzy danced awkwardly with Mr. Tannehill, who had become the closest thing to a grandfather for Cap, and who, most nights, enjoyed dinner with Izzy and her family.
Cap, only nine years old, sang in a high lonesome voice, and the other players struggled to keep up with the virtuosic way he played the banjo. Mr. Tannehill then handed Izzy off to Preston, who swung Izzy around the porch, neatly avoiding the other families. And, not for the first time and not for the last time, Izzy marveled at the sheer luck of her life, the family she had prayed for and somehow received.
It wasn’t always easy, life away from the complex. Cap, along with the other kids from the Infinite Family, was way ahead of the other students in their grade, but Izzy didn’t want him to skip ahead and be surrounded by older kids because he was, still, so naive in social situations. A life lived around only nine other children, his brothers and sisters, had left him wide open to the world, so trusting that it nearly ripped out Izzy’s heart each time he learned, once again, that not everyone wanted to be his friend, that not every child was his sibling.
Izzy herself felt overwhelmed in the grocery store or waiting to pick up Cap from school, so many people swirling around her, people she did not and would not ever know moving in and out of her life. And then, alternately, there were nights with Izzy and Preston and Cap, the three of them at the dinner table, when Izzy wanted to scream; how strange it seemed that their family, which had been legion, had shrunk to this final iteration. It would never again be how it once was, she understood that, and though she was happier than she had ever imagined, she knew that those years in the complex had been a magic trick, and it was only natural to want to see the trick performed, again and again, until you truly understood how it worked.
Now, however, surrounded by her loved ones, every person she needed in the world, she danced with Preston. She listened to her own son’s voice sing, “‘there’s a better home awaiting,’” and she spun away for a brief second, everything blurry and unsure. And then, falling back into proper alignment just before she broke free and lost her way, she spun right back into Preston’s arms. And she was home again.
acknowledgments
Thanks to the following:
Julie Barer, my friend and agent, who has made this writing life for me, for which I am eternally grateful, and who shaped this book in so many important ways.
Zack Wagman, for championing this book and helping me find out what it was and what it should be.
Ecco, with special mention to Allison Saltzman and Emma Janaskie, for all their work in getting this book out to the world and for continuing to support my writing.
Kelly and Debbie Wilson, the greatest parents, the earliest supporters of my work; Kristen, Wes, and Kellan Huffman; Mary Couch; John, Meredith, Warren, Laura, Morgan, and Philip James; and the Wilson, Fuselier, and Baltz families, for their love and kindness.
Ann Patchett, for reading an early draft of the novel, for a lifetime of good advice, for her constant support and friendship.
The Rivendell Writers’ Colony, which provided me, several times, with the space to continue my work on this novel. Thank you to Carmen and Michael Thompson, and with gratitude to Mary Elizabeth Nelson.