Utica, New York, is Roberta “Bobbi” Anderson’s childhood home and the place she had to leave before she could begin living on her own terms. In the novel, it is at once a concrete point of origin and a persistent family geography: the city she escapes, the people she leaves behind, and the old bonds that continue to reach after her from a distance.

Home and departure

Bobbi left college one year before the events of the novel, with only two months remaining before she would have earned her degree, and moved to her uncle’s property in Haven. By the time the story opens, she has lived there for thirteen years. That long absence is not merely a change of address. It marks her effort to become a writer and to separate herself from the family life she associates with Utica.

The distance becomes measurable through Peter, the aging beagle Jim Gardener gave her in 1976. When he arrived, he was a puppy; in the present, blind in one eye and eighty-four in dog years, he makes the years since Bobbi left Utica visible. His aging also unsettles Bobbi’s earlier sense that growing up might somehow be corrected or deferred. The life she made away from home has lasted long enough for both dog and woman to grow old.

The remembered Leighton Street

For Gard, Utica’s deepest hold on Bobbi is not simply its streets but the version of home she carries within her. In his recollection, Leighton Street was the place where she grew up and the name for a constricting family world she needed to escape before she could become the writer she wanted to be. He understood her talent for writing simple stories, and believed she might also do braver work once she had moved beyond the mental landscape of her childhood.

That landscape was populated by Bobbi’s sick but beloved father, her weak but beloved mother, and Anne, her defiant sister, whose power in the family seemed unending. The image makes departure psychologically more complicated than putting miles between oneself and a city. Bobbi could leave Utica, yet still carry its conflicts with her; the remembered street functions as a private geography of obligation, affection, and domination.

Gard’s memory of their early connection sharpens that picture. In the year he met Bobbi, he wrote “Leighton Street” and dedicated it to her, recalling that she had first smelled sage in New York. He also remembered a moment in freshman composition when she fell asleep in class, exhausted by sleepless nights. She told him that she would almost fall asleep and then hear Anne. The family bond that Bobbi was trying to escape thus appears not as a simple dislike of home but as an intimate pressure that followed her into school and into sleep.

Bobbi’s account of escape

Bobbi’s own perspective insists that leaving Utica improved her life. When she doubts her sanity, she compares Haven favorably with both Cleaves Mills and Utica, and judges herself much saner in Haven than she would have been had she spent several more years in Utica around Anne. Her sharp private assessment of her sister is that Anne treats driving close relatives to madness as a kind of sacred mission.

This judgment gives the move to Haven the force of a self-preserving break. Bobbi does not regard her willingness to entertain strange possibilities as evidence that she has simply lost touch with reality. She fears the certainty of what she has discovered in Haven, but believes that refusing to consider possibilities merely because they are unsettling would itself be a limit on thought. In the argument she imagines directing at Anne, the escape from Utica becomes an escape from a family definition of sanity as well as from a place.

Yet the need to talk to Gard when the discovery frightens her reveals that separation has not erased attachment. Bobbi reaches for an old confidant associated with the period when she left home and began imagining a different life. Utica is absent from her present surroundings, but the relationships formed around that departure remain active in the choices she makes.

Anne and the pull of return

The conflict becomes explicit after Bobbi’s father suffers a stroke and dies. Anne tries repeatedly to contact Bobbi during the final day of their father’s life, but receives no answer. She calls again after his death, at 1:04 a.m. on August 2, from the lobby of Utica Soldiers’ Hospital, where her mother sits among weeping relatives. Anne asks to speak to Roberta and presses for an immediate response.

The call does not bring the assurance Anne wants. Bobbi will not commit to coming home for the funeral; according to Anne, she says she is glad their father is dead, laughs, and hangs up. The refusal turns grief into a renewed contest over Bobbi’s departure. Anne interprets her sister’s attempt to escape as an act of defiance, and tells herself that Bobbi has won only one battle, not the war.

Anne buys a ticket from upstate New York to Bangor, along with two return tickets, intending to bring Bobbi back. Her journey is delayed when their mother falls down the back stairs and breaks her hip. By the time Anne can leave, on August 9, she has stopped trying to contact Bobbi and allows a lull to form, while privately maintaining her plan to draw her sister back to Utica. The practical details—hospital call, funeral, purchased tickets, and delay—show how the family’s claim on Bobbi is renewed through crisis, even after years apart.

A home that remains contested

Utica’s significance rests in this double role: it is the home Bobbi had to leave, and the family center from which Anne tries to reclaim her. For Bobbi, distance makes possible a life and a writing identity that the remembered world of Leighton Street constrained. For Anne, that distance is an intolerable refusal of family duty, and the effort to reverse it becomes part of a continuing struggle between the sisters.

The novel therefore treats escape as real but incomplete. Bobbi has made a home in Haven and understands the move as a route toward sanity and independence; nevertheless, the people and memories attached to Utica remain powerful enough to shape her present. The city endures less as a setting she revisits than as a pressure carried across distance: a home she has left, but one whose claims have not ceased.