“Kids five and up get in free the first Sunday of the month,” Matt said. We were at Barcade in downtown New Haven, across from Elm City Games, for a date night in late February. Matt was my neighbor in the suburbs, a former bassist in his late 40’s, with agate ear plugs from his band days.
“That’s so awesome,” I told Matt. “Free childcare.” Matt and I were taking turns playing a shooting game, while our spouses played Pac-man nearby, the stench of popcorn and grease between us. I didn’t play video games usually. I was along for the ride, pretending to fit in, while Matt moved his controller up and down and sideways, tapping at a shooting button for explosives.
Growing up, my father loved arcades almost as much as he enjoyed gambling on sports. He used to poke fun at how bad I was compared to him. It was true: I lacked my father’s laser focus when it came to gambling. He used to slide one token after the other into the eyelets of the machine to kill time with my sister and me on a Sunday.
When we were 11 and 13, he moved to Ocean City, New Jersey—three hours from where we lived in Lancaster. We visited him every other weekend, spending Sundays at the boardwalk arcade, in dark rooms, buying tokens in cash, playing more games than we could count. Afterward, we drove back to Lancaster, where there was dinner at six and homework to finish. Where we weren’t allowed to play video games or watch R-rated movies.
My husband Jared, like our neighbor Matt, grew up in the countryside. Matt in rural Vermont, Jared in Waterville, New York, north of Utica. They’d both grown up riding dirt bikes to the point of near-death experiences. Cavalier youth, adrenaline junkies–the way of teenaged boys. Dirt roads in the scintillating sunlight, near crashes, the cold crisp breeze of early spring, a breath of air in the summer heat. The kind of thing some people never grew out of.
Like my dad, who relished his post-divorce life in proximity to Atlantic City. He used to stop at gas station pay phones to make calls to his bookies. As a kid, it seemed necessary, getting gas, some Swedish fish and the road, a few phone calls. But sometimes he ended the calls furious, other times euphoric—a sudden whir of generosity: stuffed animals or sweets, an extra string of raffle tickets for boardwalk rides later. Usually, after we crossed the Ninth Street Bridge, we had pizza at Mac ‘n Manco’s, with a large pitcher of Birch Beer. We liked the Tilt ‘a Whirl best, all three of us. My dad liked to drop money on the guy who made him guess his age—my father who was in his forties, but he looked twenty years younger—because he dressed that way, was tall and thin in Bruce Springsteen style jeans, with curly, wild hair, who left the top buttons of his Hawaiian shirt undone while we handed over our raffle tickets for more rides.
When a parent dies young, especially your father, they say it’s like losing a moral compass. But my answer to that is: what if the compass was backwards to begin with?
Nothing more fun than this—I had always thought as a child—a weekend with dad at the beach, without rules, only games and more games. Saturdays we often woke up to him already gone—slipped away in his Bermuda swim trunks to play volleyball on the ocean front, off first street. “You’ll know where to find me,” he always said, when we were kids. He left a twenty-dollar bill on the table for me to buy Entenmann’s donuts from the corner deli, saving enough change for cheese fries from the beach stand for lunch. We used to lounge by the volleyball court, sunburned while my father played, and played more games, drinking from his red Igloo cooler filled with ice, careful to leave enough for him when he took breaks. If we were lucky, he’d take us to ride the waves between games; play shark with us on his back under the riptide, this thrill that kept us wanting more, hoping for more.
When I lost, though, which was often—on a horse race, on a game, or when I failed at cards, in calculating the kinds of probabilities my dad was obsessed with—I was ashamed. A kind of lack filled me that little could abate. Not Kohr Brothers frozen custard or saltwater taffy or watching Dorothy clicky her ruby heels in The Wizard of Oz. When I lost, my dad said it was because I was bad at math. Or that I lacked the right amount of fine motor dexterity. Every time I played a game—especially an arcade game—it was like I was watching my hands move over controllers, rather than simply move them. I can’t drive stick shift. I struggle, even, to drive straight along the road.
Once, I asked Jared how you knew the car was centered. I was thirty-three.
I’ve never been able to read a compass; in fact, north, south, east, and west have always seemed arbitrary. How to choose a starting point for basing the other directionals?
“You go by the sun,” a friend said, recently over coffee. “The sun sets in the West, right?”
“I guess,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It sets in the west. So, if that’s west, then east is the other way.” I told her I still didn’t get it, which I didn’t. I still don’t.
When a parent dies young, especially your father, they say it’s like losing a moral compass.
But my answer to that is: what if the compass was backwards to begin with? When you had a father who told you to lie wherever you went, telling you to say you were younger than you were, to get into sports games for free, you stopped believing that the “rules” or “instructions” and the things they signified were real. When you had a father who took you to the beach on the weekends without beach tags, yelling at you to the run into the water to swim with him, when the inspectors came, you assumed there was something wrong with people who enforced the rules. Not the other way around.
*
After we’d had one to many drinks at Barcade that night, Matt and his wife Dianna closed out their tab, and Jared and I did the same. Matt was a sober driver for us. I don’t know at what point it came up on the car ride back—the question of owning guns—but it did. Both Matt and Jared grew up in gun-owning families; they grew up hunting. They also grew up ready in case of an attack, knowing the nearest police station or hospital was a good drive away.
Just weeks before, the murders in Minneapolis had happened. In the car, Jared started speculating where ICE was headed next. Rumors of Cincinnati, of Maine, of anywhere.
The whole point of chaos theory, I might have said, was being predictably unpredictable, right?
“I think we should go to the shooting range,” Matt said, glancing back at Jared and me in the rearview. “To practice.” Matt worked in medical research at Yale, adopting animals in captivity on a regular basis, at the cost of being able to travel freely. His wife, Dianna, also worked in medical research; she was an animal lover too, one who loved her children fiercely, someone I didn’t imagine capable of violence.
“I agree,” Jared said. I kept my gaze fixed out the window. I knew he believed in owning guns in the case of an emergency. It was how he’d grown up; I didn’t agree.
But then Dianna, as if sensing my discomfort, turned to look at me. “I’m thinking about going,” she said, “We should try it together.”
I paused, not sure what to say. And then: “Do you really think it’s necessary? I mean, how bad can it get?”
“It’s already bad,” Jared said. “Just look around. We should be ready.”
Later that night, when we were home again, I told Jared I never thought we’d have this conversation. That we’d have to.
In the morning, I took Advil, went for a long run, but the images persisted. I found myself re-watching video footage from Minneapolis, as if to prove that it was real—that the stakes were, for all of us. Once more, I watched Renee Good, innocently, non-combatively, trying to move her car after an ICE officer threatened her, after her partner held up her phone, maintaining that they were free to protest.
Then, in the blur of a toppled phone camera, in the dark of the car, the swerve and spin before silence ensued, filling my room in the afternoon light, as if twelve miles in the cold, running, running, running, would be enough to forget.
Same with Alex Pretti, owning the right to bear arms while he looked out after a neighbor during the protest. There was no running from this violent murder either: the kind of image that stands still, detached from its center into perpetuity; the kind you can’t forget, never will, for what that moment means, for our nation, for the world.
*
The child of a gambling addict, I’d witnessed firsthand what it meant to lack impulse control, to be obsessed with risk-taking to the point of constant loss. A state of pre-determined restlessness in trying to make up the difference in your bank account—this impossible pursuit; meanwhile everyone else in your path—your children, a store clerk, a bank teller, your bookie, was to blame. A flash of my father yelling at the local teller at a bank in Lancaster, before he moved, that he had over a million dollars in his account. As I watched him calling her a fucking moron, I thought it must be true: my father was brilliant; this woman, like me, couldn’t count. I still see her pale face from behind the glass, watching like a prisoner, not reacting, only watching. I see the little jar of lollipops she still offered us, the kids, in consolation after my father drove off, enraged. “Are you really a millionaire?” I asked my dad. A pause, and then he laughed. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I guess I am.” At the time, it didn’t make sense. If my dad was rich, why were their holes in his clothes? Why did he berate us when we needed new retainers at the orthodontist? Or new glasses? What was my mother using his money for? Where was it all going, just beyond his reach, between trips to the beach?
In the mind of a gambler, restlessness is the addiction—the holding onto thousands—even just for a moment, coming so close, only to lose just enough to return to reclaim what you almost had. Like almost winning a race, almost shaving a second off my time for the 3200m run, my event in high school, the one that got me into college, a recruit for someone else to gamble on.
Over the course of my life as a runner, I’ve experienced seven stress fractures. Three in college, and four later, gambling with the delicate calibration that exists between a meager bone density—after four years of iron deficiency, amenorrhea, and a propensity for fracturing—and a need for running like breathing, like air. I need to hear my feet hit road in measure with the cadence of my breath, the same way I need to hear my finger over keys typing, or my hand gripping a pen until my wrist aches. I need to go until I know I can’t anymore, until I hit failure. Something gives or breaks.
I lose something, when I thought I was about to gain something.
*
Jared and I left Brooklyn for the suburbs in 2019, just months before my stepfather died. I wasn’t in touch with my dad then. I hadn’t spoken to him in years. He had asked to see Leland on FaceTime, his first grandchild, when the pandemic was peaking as if it might be his last chance. I allowed him this, detached from the camera. Still, my dad said, “I was a terrible camera man.” Shaky, he suggested. Off-center.
We didn’t have much to talk about. Leland was a buffer—that he might crawl soon or say his first word. My dad knew I was writing a second book; he wanted to know how soon until it was published. When he asked what it was about, I told him—hearing my voice speak through the phone like it was someone else’s—Nickel Mines, I said. The Amish schoolhouse shooting. I told him it was about a survivor who decided to leave, a young girl who wanted a different life for herself after the Happening.
The child of a gambling addict, I’d witnessed firsthand what it meant to lack impulse control, to be obsessed with risk-taking to the point of constant loss.
“I know how it should end,” my dad said. I paused, not wanting to know, but not feeling like I had a choice; he was going to tell me anyway. “They should try to stop her,” he said. “I can see it, a swarm of black buggies crowding her in. What a great scene,” he said, “for a movie.”
“Oh,” I said, “that’s interesting.”
“I just thought of that,” he said, through the phone, clearly proud of himself.
Later, when the book didn’t sell, not through traditional channels, and my agent wrote a note to say she was abandoning the project, I received a text from my dad. “Let’s get that Amish novel out there,” he said. “Find someone with a voice like David Attenborough to narrate. Make the audio version available on your website for free and market it like crazy.”
I didn’t take my father’s advice. Instead, I kept it tucked in a drawer. I couldn’t look at the material for four years. I started working on something else. A novel about a woman isolated in suburbia, a woman sent to a sanatorium for hysteria after her father dies, a woman in the late 1800s who has internalized the violences of her father: of sport and guns and war.
*
Since 2024, sending Leland to school on the bus feels like a gradual gamble. Any phone call home—a scrape at the playground, an incident with another student—felt charged, my phone shaking in my hands when I answered. Lately, my imagination circled worse case scenarios I was too ashamed to admit out loud: this fear that something terrible could happen to him, to our children, when I least expected?
Lately, Sandy Hook didn’t feel so far away. Increasingly, I found myself haunted by that day: the faces of my colleagues crying, before our computers, at our office job in New York City, eighty miles from suburban Connecticut. I was twenty-eight that year—in 2012—working at a literary agency full of working parents; that day, we’d all plummeted into a state of unfathomable shock; what did it mean that something like this could happen, despite every precaution every parent assumes, every teacher and administrator, that schools were a place of safety?
When I was a junior in college, Nickel Mines happened, just outside of where I’d grown up in Lancaster. In October of 2006, a local milk truck driver, Carl Roberts, entered a one room Amish school house in my hometown, taking ten girls hostage: shooting and killing five, severely injuring the others. For years, I’ve tried to understand why; I’ve read everything I can find on the topic with, meeting with an Amish woman who knew one of the survivors, along with a local Amish doctor who had treated survivors and their families.
I learned that Roberts blamed Amish innocence—particularly female innocence—for the death of his stillborn daughter years earlier. He thought Amish faith was a lie—that God could be so good, so true in their eyes—when the same God had allowed his child to die.
The Amish have an open-door policy for their schools, welcoming strangers, outsiders, into their community. The day of the shooting, after Roberts took his own life at the scene, while the victims were flown to the nearest hospital, an Amish elder publicly forgave Roberts before the news cameras. “Let us think no evil of this man,” the elder said, on behalf of his people. When I tried to understand how the Amish could forgive an atrocity like this so quickly, so easily, I learned that the logic came from Martyrs Mirror, a text as sacred as the Bible in Amish homes.
Martyrs Mirror told the story of countless individuals who had sacrificed their lives for their faith; when they were murdered as anabaptist dissenters of the Church, they forgave their perpetrators to stop the violence from continuing. Amish didn’t believe in war, in revenge or retaliation; they believed in living peacefully and separately from the modern world. They relied on gas lamps and stoves; they only kept telephones in case of emergencies. The light of technology, they believed—the light of modern warfare—went against God’s light, God’s glory and the promise of salvation.
*
For most of my life, Amish culture affirmed that the narrative of self-sacrifice stopped bad things from happening, allowing for a code of reason, one with clear liturgical underpinnings. Though I had not grown up Anabaptist, Amish forgiveness has always informed my sense of faith in face of wrongdoing. Be the bigger person. Say sorry even if you weren’t first to commit wrong. Forgive, because forgiveness was acceptance; it was kindness; it was love. Protection, in my mind, was a form of pacifism. Just as running from my problems was, clearing my mind over the course of many miles, or racing hard, until the adrenaline cleansed me of feeling pain, sadness, disappointment, or rage. It protected me from my father’s unpredictable mood swings—even brought me closer to him. When I ran well, or fast, he paid attention.
Over the years, my spatial disorientation, my openness, has has sent the signal that a stranger can enter my space, doing what he likes, without consequence.
A 5K he might make money on, after betting on my finish time with his friends. For most of my teens, I submitted to his addiction because it was easier than rebellion. It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college, when my dad wanted me to sign away the college payments that he was responsible for to alleviate his gambling debts, and I refused, that I began to see things differently. My father’s approval—his sense of happiness and security, bent as it was on constant-winning—came at the cost of my own safety and protection.
Over the years, my spatial disorientation, my openness, has come at this cost too. It has sent the signal that a stranger can enter my space, doing what he likes, without consequence. Only in moments of saying no—in refusing to comply—have I realized there is another way. That resistance, by holding a given boundary, is possible. But in those years, protection came in the form of pushing myself too hard, testing my endurance to the point of breaking; only then did I know my body’s boundary, how far it could go to survive pain, willfully from within.
At that time, my eighteen-year-old self-couldn’t imagine seeking protection some other way—by taking self-defense classes, for instance, or rewiring my behavior to be kinder to myself, in taking my needs into consideration—my body’s need for food or rest—before tending to another. Never would I have imagined going to a shooting range to learn how to hold a gun to protect myself from the world. To protect my child, my family, the way Jared had learned how. Jared, who had grown up on a farm, not Amish, but religious; he knew how to protect himself and still be kind. Kind, but still prepared.
What did it mean to join my neighbors in Madison, Connecticut, at a shooting range on a weekend, while our children played soccer in the yard, unaware of our choices, our desperation, our need?
One day, I will return to Lancaster. I will run along the same roads when I do—through the covered bridges on Pine Ridge and Hunsecker. I will run not so much for a faster total time around this four-mile loop I know by heart—in all weather, all seasons—but to take solace in what is left, in what has survived. In the laundry wavering in the pre-dawn light, blue-hued and wet with spring dew. And yet, I doubt I’ll see it the same. Just as I couldn’t after Nickel Mines. I am still learning to see—accept— the cows grazing, the collies, and horses, the past-perfect-tense of open fences, open fields.
____________________________________________
Butter Road by Jaclyn Gilbert is available via Acre Books.