Darla Ferrell. Age forty-nine. Her estranged husband the apparent gunman. After shooting his wife, he’d turned the gun on himself. Both of them were dead at the scene.
Eleanor must have let out a cry, because the taxi driver turned around to ask if she was all right. She couldn’t answer.
When Eleanor got home, she didn’t unpack. She had been a young woman who lost both parents in a single night. She knew that story, though this one was worse.
She needed to find Kimmie, and when she did, she would tell her the only thing a person can offer at such a moment, that nobody had said to her all those years back.
“I’m here.”
87.
I Won’t Be Coming Home
Three years earlier, when Al was a senior in high school, she’d applied to MIT, CalTech, and Stanford and got accepted at all of them. She chose Stanford for its proximity to Silicon Valley but most of all for its affiliation with her longtime hero, Dr. Winograd. That September, when Eleanor brought her to the airport (one suitcase only), had been the moment when her daughter had first indicated the changes that were coming, but at the time, she hadn’t understood their magnitude.
“You might not be seeing me for a while,” Al told her that day. “I need to be on my own to figure everything out.”
By second semester she had designed a program in a language she’d created. Before school got out, she’d been hired on at a gaming company in Menlo Park and because they were working on some huge deadline, she’d written to say she couldn’t come home to New Hampshire for the holiday. Or to Brookline.
The year Al left for college was the start of her gradual disappearance from their lives. When spring semester ended, she touched down at the farm—and, for an afternoon, in Brookline—but then she was back on a plane to San Francisco for the rest of the summer. She’d been hired on by a different company this time.
For the rest of her years at college, Eleanor saw Al only once or twice a year. She doubted Cam did much better. They did not speak again about what Al had told her that day at the airport, when Eleanor put her on the plane for California that first time. But slowly, she came to understand.
All her life, Al had felt she inhabited the wrong body. After years in which Eleanor had totally missed all the abundant indications Al offered them concerning her feelings about her sexual identity,Eleanor understood this, finally. When she thought back to Ali’s struggles—as a six-year-old, presented with dresses she didn’t want to wear; as a second grader cast in the role of a dancing princess at Cinderella’s ball; as a high schooler, secretly in love with another girl and unable to speak of it—Eleanor felt the deepest regret and shame. How could she have failed to notice? Her child must have been in great pain. And she, the mother, had been so consumed with her own sorrows—the disappearance of the old Toby, the end of her marriage, the loss of the farm—she’d failed to notice.
When Al graduated from Stanford, she returned to the farm for the longest stretch of time since she’d left for California that first time—two weeks. After, she’d be heading to England to begin a program in—weirdly—medieval studies. Nothing to do with computer programming and engineering. Al’s studies wouldn’t begin for a couple of months. The idea was she wanted to settle in, get comfortable in this new place.
“Could you have chosen any graduate program farther away?” Eleanor said, when Al announced the choice of Oxford over Harvard and Yale.
“Maybe that was the point,” Al said.
Eleanor drove Al to the airport. On the sidewalk in front of the airport, the two of them faced each other for a few moments. Even Al—who had remained, over the course of their brief visit, more evasive than at any other time in their relationship—appeared to recognize this as a moment in their lives that needed to be honored.
“I won’t be coming home for a long time,” Al said. Not for the first time. “I mean, not back to the farm or anything.”
She barely ever came home anyway, Eleanor pointed out. This was nothing new.
“I mean, you won’t see me for a long time. A really long time, possibly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t take it personally,” Al said. “I just have some things I need to work out. It’s easier without my family around.”
They were standing together at the departures drop-off at Logan airport. Cars pulling up, passengers getting out. Young motherswith babies and strollers. Grandparents with golf clubs or walkers. Teenagers carrying surfboards, carrying backpacks. Couples in love, or thinking they were.
“I need to be around people who didn’t know me before.” Al’s face looked, suddenly, both very young and at the same time much older.
“Before what?” Eleanor asked her.
“Before I transition.”
It took a moment for Eleanor to understand what Al was saying.
“This isn’t some quick decision, Mom,” Al told Eleanor. “I’ve been thinking about this a long time. I’ve done the research. I won’t be doing it all at once, but I know what I want. What I need to do takes some time.”
Later, Eleanor would remember this moment. She was not just sending her daughter off on a plane. She was saying goodbye to her daughter.
“I always knew I was meant to be a boy,” Al said. “It’s not like you did anything wrong. It has nothing to do with our family. It has nothing to do with you.”
