Charles Marlow is a Seattle English teacher who instructs his students to expand their worlds through language. Lately, however, with one child off to college and the pressure from his ex-wife to make plans for their severely autistic son, who's about to age out of the system, he prefers the company of the ghosts he turns up in the storage boxes in his crawl space. There he finds the totems that betray the darker moments of his youth- memories that were buried for decades when he met the ambitious and sparkling Alison LeFevre. But the complications of parenthood proved fatal to their marriage, and Charles has been stagnant ever since.