Don't Let Yourself Drown

Byrn wouldn’t have it any other way, which always strikes people as odd, considering that he is (usually) referring to having only one eye, his right one. No surprise that his difficult childhood sounds like the stuff of fairy tales: there’s an evil stepmother, a weak and uxorious father, a confederate sibling, a lake with a legendary resident beast, and quite possibly an immortal cat. There were abuses, attempted cover-ups, and the ingenuity of children to solve a riddle. Except most fairy tales don’t end with Protective Services being called by extended family, with the stepmother (Charlene in this story) convicted of assault and battery and child endangerment for burning, beating, and all-out terrorizing the children. They don’t end with a sorrowful father allowing his children to pass into foster care, deemed unfit anyway since he was unwilling to give up the travel required of a pipeline engineer, which he refused to do with clear relief. He did, however, faithfully visit Charlene in prison, and once she’d served her time they disappeared off-grid.

The foster parents, who became the adoptive parents, were excruciatingly kind, and every neglect and cruelty visited upon Byrn and his sister Melba they counteracted with the spells of patience, care, and love. Thanks to years of therapy, rehab, and a string of churches she chewed through before settling down a Unitarian, Melba ended up well-adjusted enough, a bit OCD with doors and windows and a rule for perfect symmetries, but capable of sustaining relationships well enough and a day-to-day life, sufficiently stable. Her bar-bet trivia answer is that she makes a tiny residual on “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” for which she was hired as a script consultant after a blog post went viral.