If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir by Jessica Hendry Nelson

like we’re still kids.” Eric begins to gather plates. “As if we’re not going to do it anyway. Besides, it’s Eric’s turn. I did it last time.”
    But she is older now. We all are. I notice her slower gait, the slight hesitation when she rises from a chair, the unsteady first steps. The constant Marlboro burning like an extra appendage. We are not a team anymore. “What we are” is the problem in general, since what we are is only a vestige of where we have been, the clunky manifestation of an abstract set of memories, and even these are made up, an experiment. When we come together, it is partly an effort to cling to something shared from long ago, even while we know these memories are as varied and variable as the people we have become. The shadow of the familiar is still just a shadow, and yet we’ll never stop hunting it down. It is the only thing that makes us feel real.
    “Go get Mommy another glass of wine,” she orders.
    This is the point Eric and I know too well, the time of evening we have come to dread. She will begin to slur and stroke our heads too lovingly. She will ride a conversation to unintended heights and then watch the thoughts tumble over an unforeseen precipice, bewildered.
    We bring the bottle. We have learned to just bring the bottle.
    And so we all settle back into our chairs. We watch the dogs wander through the yard, the gray one clawing new holesin the ground, the yellow retriever stamping at fireflies and then bellowing into the night. The azalea bushes next to the patio are shrunken from a late-summer heat wave, while the untended roses, having long since given up, lie flat atop the dirt. It is near midnight and a couple of cars sit idling in the parking lot behind the fence and the bushes, up to no good. I feel tired and heavy-lidded. There is dew collecting on the glass table and sweat in the crooks of my elbows. For a while, the only sound is the hum of the cicadas or the electric buzz of the telephone wires; I can’t tell which. This is the sound I’d been hearing all summer right before I fell asleep, though it had been the sound of my dreams taking shape, the sound of letting go. Many nights, I was afraid. I was further away from my family than I had ever been and I thought it meant I had relinquished some measure of control over our collective fate. Sleep was a devastating reminder, a small death, and it made breathing difficult. I fought it. I paced the hostel lobbies and empty dining rooms in Scotland. I sat in the window of my dorm room in Oxford, watching the lines of people swerve around the late-night french fry stand. I’d thought to bear witness was to stave off disaster and by leaving I had done irreparable damage, not just to the three of us as individuals, but to the vital organ that bound us and kept us safe. I didn’t yet understand that we were like conjoined triplets. What happens after surgery is yet unknown, but we’ve no shot if we mean to keep on sharing the same heart.

    “Okay, Jess, tell another ‘ye old weary world traveler’ story,” says Eric.
    “Oh no, forget it,” I say, exhausted.
    “No, really,” he says, filling my glass with wine.
    “Please,” says Mom. Her words are thick now, eyes red and dangerous. There is always this moment, when the wine and pot reach the point of saturation and reveal a second of startling regret. She is ready for bed.
    I want to tell them a lovely little story about green and undulating landscapes, about skies soft as cotton and faces old as dirt.
    I want to say, “We’ll go, let’s go.”
    I want to tell them about Vernon Lee and Freud and the uncanny, about sheep and whiskey and Scottish folk songs. Could I explain that to return home is not a return from the uncanny, but a return to it? Who would I be if I said that I don’t belong here, don’t belong anywhere?
    Or . . .
    But what could I possibly say of churches?
    Instead, I tell them this:
    For three days, we kept a steady vigil over the baby