My mother said I came out of the womb with eyes as bright as jade. My father would tell me, “Every time you looked at her, she would mark herself with an X to ward off evil.” He was boasting, of course. But that wasn’t how ten-year-old me took it. Ten-year-old me believed that the reason his mother threw herself off a cliff was because she couldn’t stand to exist beneath the gaze of her eldest son.
