Freedom

To their Ramsey Hill neighbors, the Berglunds were the first pioneers of gentrification, the kind of super-guilty liberals who seemed to need to forgive everyone so their own good fortune could be forgiven. Patty was the neighborhood's sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee who remembered everyone's birthday and was famously averse to speaking ill of anyone. Walter was greener than Greenpeace, a kind man who biked to work at 3M through February snows. They had renovated their Victorian on Barrier Street with their own hands, raising two children who seemed, at first, a credit to them. But there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds, a quiet friction beneath the surface of their progressive, conscientious lives.

The first visible cracks appeared around their son, Joey. While his older sister Jessica was a model of quiet achievement, Joey was the golden-haired boy Patty could not stop talking about, her stories a strange mix of complaint and adoration. “He is being such a little shit,” she'd confide to other mothers, describing his philosophical bedtime wars with Walter, yet no one doubted she adored him. Her world seemed to revolve around his defiant precociousness, a fixation that left little room for anyone else, including the grave, silent neighbor girl, Connie Monaghan, who watched Joey with an unnerving, singular focus that only Patty seemed not to notice.

The trouble accelerated when Joey and Connie, in their early teens, went into business together selling personalized watches, a scheme that ended when the nuns at Connie's school closed the loophole they were exploiting. “You were benefiting from an artificial restraint of trade,” Walter tried to explain. “Making money is not a right.” But Joey only saw injustice. The true crisis came after Walter's mother died, an event that seemed to unmoor Patty completely. She grew sarcastic and angry, lashing out at neighbors, particularly Connie's mother, Carol, and her new boyfriend, Blake, who were building a hideous “great-room” addition next door. Patty's world shrank to the size of this grievance, her days consumed with a frantic helplessness that culminated in her slashing the tires of Blake's truck in the dead of night.

The family's life in Ramsey Hill ended when Joey, at sixteen, announced he was moving in with Connie next door. The confrontation was brutal. As Carol Monaghan later recounted with relish, Walter, his face streaked with tears, lost control completely. “YOU ARE SIXTEEN YEARS OLD AND YOU ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE,” he roared, before finally screaming, “GET OUT, GET OUT, I'M SICK OF IT, GET OUT!” Patty, shattered, retreated to her late mother-in-law's house on Nameless Lake, and soon the family disintegrated. They sold the Victorian for a loss and moved to Washington, D.C., where Walter had taken a new job, leaving their neighbors to wonder at the wreckage.

The truth of Patty's life was a story she kept hidden, a litany of mistakes she composed only years later. If she hadn't been an atheist, she would have thanked God for sports, which saved her from a childhood in Westchester County where she was the family's resident jock - larger, dumber, and less unusual than her brilliant siblings. Her mother, Joyce, was a professional Democrat who found more fulfillment in politics than motherhood, and her father, Ray, was a lawyer whose humor ran to cruel mockery. Her life was defined by a yearning for approval she never received, a yearning that curdled into a morbid, all-consuming competitiveness. This vulnerability led to the defining trauma of her youth: at seventeen, she was raped by a boy named Ethan Post. Her parents' response was not protective but political. Fearing scandal and the loss of powerful friends, her father advised her to simply forget it. “You shake it off,” he told her in the high school parking lot. “Move on. Learn to be more careful.”

She fled to college in Minnesota, escaping into the insular bubble of “Total Jockworld.” It was there she met Eliza, a disturbed, half-pretty girl with a preemie's chin who became her stalker and then her best friend. Eliza drew Patty out of the gym and into a world of art films, Patti Smith, and cheap Chablis, governing her with a set of bizarre, controlling rules. “You're completely unprotected!” Eliza had cried upon first meeting her, and then spent two years ensuring Patty's only protection was Eliza herself. The friendship was a dark, obsessive folie à deux, a refuge from a world Patty felt ill-equipped to navigate.

Through Eliza, she met two men who would define the rest of her life: the musician Richard Katz and his roommate, Walter Berglund. Richard was tall, dark, and difficult, a self-absorbed guitarist who resembled Muammar el-Qaddafi and possessed a dangerous magnetism. Walter was his opposite: a heartbreakingly responsible country boy with a fierce intelligence, a nervous giggle, and an inexhaustible niceness. While Patty felt a raw, unnerving pull toward Richard, it was Walter who pursued her, who saw through her jock exterior to a person he found endlessly interesting. He was her admirer, her fan, the first man to seem truly safe.

Her basketball career ended with a catastrophic knee injury, and in the void that followed, Walter's steady devotion became her anchor. Yet the ghost of Richard remained. After a date with Walter, she found herself in their apartment, accepting a pinch of Richard's chewing tobacco, her heart racing as she negotiated a ride to New York with him for her parents' anniversary. “You need to fish or cut bait here,” Richard told her in his car, speaking of Walter. “It's not fair to him otherwise.” The road trip was a disaster of unspoken tension, ending with Richard abandoning her in a squalid Chicago apartment. In a moment of clarity and exhaustion, Patty took a Greyhound bus not to New York, but to Hibbing, Minnesota, where Walter was mourning his own father. In the damp, scoured room of a roadside motel, she threw her arms around his neck and chose him.

For years, the choice seemed like the right one. They married, bought the house on Barrier Street, and had their children. But as Walter poured his energy into his work - first at 3M, then with the Nature Conservancy - Patty felt a growing emptiness. Her love for Joey became a suffocating obsession, a substitute for a life she felt she'd lost. After the family's collapse and their move to Washington, her depression deepened. Walter, now the director of a conservation trust funded by a right-wing billionaire, was consumed by his crusade to save the cerulean warbler, a project that involved a troubling alliance with the coal industry. Alone and adrift, Patty finally acted on the desire she had suppressed for two decades. At Nameless Lake, she and Richard began an affair.

The discovery of that affair, through a long, confessional manuscript Patty had written, was the final cataclysm. Walter, finding the pages on his desk where Richard had left them, felt the sun turn yellow and mean in the sky. “I don't want to see you again,” he told Patty, his voice a crow's caw. “I just want to be alone so I can contemplate having wasted my entire life loving you.” Patty left for Richard, a doomed arrangement that quickly soured. Walter, unhinged, delivered a rambling, suicidal screed against humanity at a West Virginia press event, shouting “WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET!” before being beaten by the crowd. In the aftermath, his young assistant, Lalitha, with whom he had fallen in love, was killed in a car crash. Walter retreated to Nameless Lake, a hermit nursing his grief and his anger at the world. Years passed in silence, a cold void between them, until one October evening, he returned to his dark house to find Patty sitting on the front step, frozen nearly to death, waiting for him. He carried her inside, lay down beside her under a pile of blankets, and held her shivering body to his, warming her back to life.