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“Yes, and then, I guess, to the stove. Then he moved her bed into the kitchen, all her books and school materials. The chain was long enough that she could move about pretty freely. She could even take a shower,” Stan adds, as if to hold up the father's excellent calculations of the length of the chain in deference to his daughter's needs.

Stan watches as I imagine the scene—a girl dragging her chains into a shower stall, turning on the faucets. A girl in chains cooking supper, reading a book, doing math, or writing a paper. In chains, yes. Doing drugs. No.

“Did it work?” I say.

“He kept her from going out for more than a week. But one day he forgot to unplug the phone and put it out of reach and she called the police.”

“Rats,” I say. “Busted.” We look at each other, then gaze, baffled, out into the dark.

We are no longer surprised with ourselves for our mutual consent to behaviors such as the father's, or of any parents we hear of whose desperate attempts at control are meant to keep their children from harm.

As we linger in our new kitchen, I'm noticing how thin Stan has become, his shirt and shorts loosely fitting his frame. Who could have told us, when we married seven years ago, that our lives would descend into this hell otherwise known as Stephen's adolescence, into one crisis after another with this child, at first just little things, complaints now and then from his teachers, his grades dropping in one subject, then another, then another.

Then the move to the Park School, where at first he appeared to apply himself, renew his hope and pride in things as we renewed our hopes in him and in ourselves as parents, only to have them dashed as street gangs infiltrated our world, as charges were brought against him, restraining orders brought to our door, cops to our door, guns.

When Stephen's own terror took hold of him now and again, when he wept in despair in our arms—just when we thought he might turn around now—he'd run away, disappear, come home, weep, threaten suicide, run again.

Sweeping his hand through his hair, Stan leans against the sink. We can hear the cicadas in the back trees as the late September night smells drift in the kitchen—wet wood and the first downed leaves.

Something in Stan has given up. I know it beyond my own dim sadness. As we move through the house now, shutting doors and turning off the lights, I try to remember the last time Stan woke me in the middle of the night to read me a poem he had just written, or I woke him to read a passage I'd just found in Keats's letters, or a passage from Hopkins or Akhmatova.

What had we thought, anyway? What had we believed our lives would be like after our marriage? I suspect we thought, like many parents, that my sons would grow up under our enlightened care and everything would be fine.

We believed that our parenting was superior, that we were, without a doubt, better parents than our own had been to us. We'd vowed not to make the mistakes they did, mistakes we often picked out and highlighted and discussed so rationally.

And we believed that our lives as writers, lives punctuated by travel, by liberal, ecumenical notions of culture and society, by our moves to this or that university to teach, by our stays in Europe, the boys attending school there—that all these experiences would have positive effects on our children.

Though Stephen's behaviors were hard on everyone, what was hardest on Stan and me these days was the fact that rationale and reason seemed trivial now, dizzyingly earnest. Our once sacred belief in the honor system had become a joke. Now, instead of judging our parents, certainly culture at large, for old-fashioned—indeed we'd often called them cruel—approaches to child rearing, we were looking to those approaches for answers.

Neither of us raised an eyebrow when one or the other fell into the doomed cadences of that's the way my parents did it…

As recently as two years ago Stan would likely not have paid much attention to the article in the Times, or if he had, he would have noticed it only to shake