As I drove to Bartley, which was about a three-hour journey east and a little north from Shakespeare, I tried to drum up some sort of pleasurable anticipation about the coming visit.

It would have been more straightforward if I hated my parents. I loved them.

It was in no way their fault that my abduction, rape, and mutilation had made such a media roar that my life, and theirs, had changed even more than was inevitable.

And it was in no way their fault that no one I’d grown up with seemed to be able to treat me as a normal person, after that second, public, rape in the spotlight of the press and the TV cameras.

Nor was it my parents’ fault that my boyfriend of two years had quit seeing me after the press turned their attention away from him.

None of it was their fault-or mine-but it had permanently altered the relationships between us. My mother and father couldn’t look at me without thinking of what had happened to me. They couldn’t talk to me without it coloring the most commonplace conversation. My only sibling, Varena, who had always been more relaxed and elastic than I had, had never been able to understand why I didn’t recover more swiftly and get on with my life as it had been before; and my parents didn’t know how to get in contact with the woman I’d become.

Weary of scrambling through this emotional equivalent of a hamster exercise wheel, I was nearly glad to see the outskirts of Bartley-the poor rickety homes and marginal businesses that blotch the approach to most small towns.

Then I was rolling past the filling station where my parents gassed their cars; past the dry cleaner where Mother took their coats; past the Presbyterian church they’d attended all their lives, where they’d been baptized, married, christened their daughters, from which they would be buried.