He doesn’t remember if he called for his folks, or how they arrived, or how it came to be that both were home at the same time, but he does remember their reaction: a calm recognition in his father’s eyes, the sudden seriousness in his mother, this absolute reversal of their natural states. The lasting shock from that day was not the seizure—no surprise his sister might succumb to a contorting madness, what with all the erotic chaos, the trembling energy, the too-muchness of that home, of childhood itself—but he was surprised to find his father even capable of that kind of terrible calming
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