Was I? I wanted to believe I was. Tyler had said I was special once, years before. He’d read me a passage of scripture from the Book of Mormon, about a sober child, quick to observe. “This reminds me of you,” Tyler had said.
The passage described the great prophet Mormon, a fact I’d found confusing. A woman could never be a prophet, yet here was Tyler, telling me I reminded him of one of the greatest prophets of all. I still don’t know what he meant by it, but what I understood at the time was that I could trust myself: that there was something in me, something like what was in the prophets, and that it was not male or female, not old or young; a kind of worth that was inherent and unshakable.
But now, as I gazed at the shadow Shawn cast on my wall, aware of my maturing body, of its evils and of my desire to do evil with it, the meaning of that memory shifted. Suddenly that worth felt conditional, like it could be taken or squandered. It was not inherent; it was bestowed. What was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured me.
I looked at my brother. He seemed old in that moment, wise. He knew about the world. He knew about worldly women, so I asked him to keep me from becoming one.
“Okay, Fish Eyes,” he said. “I will.”
—
WHEN I AWOKE THE next morning, my neck was bruised and my wrist swollen. I had a headache—not an ache in my brain but an actual aching of my brain, as if the organ itself was tender. I went to work but came home early and lay in a dark corner of the basement, waiting it out. I was lying on the carpet, feeling the pounding in my brain, when Tyler found me and folded himself onto the sofa near my head. I was not pleased to see him. The only thing worse than being dragged through the house by my hair was Tyler’s having seen it. Given the choice between letting it play out, and having Tyler there to stop it, I’d have chosen to let it play out. Obviously I would have chosen that. I’d been close to passing out anyway, and then I could have forgotten about it. In a day or two it wouldn’t even have been real. It would become a bad dream, and in a month, a mere echo of a bad dream. But Tyler had seen it, had made it real.
“Have you thought about leaving?” Tyler asked.
“And go where?”
“School,” he said.
I brightened. “I’m going to enroll in high school in September,” I said. “Dad won’t like it, but I’m gonna go.” I thought Tyler would be pleased; instead, he grimaced.
“You’ve said that before.”
“I’m going to.”
“Maybe,” Tyler said. “But as long as you live under Dad’s roof, it’s hard to go when he asks you not to, easy to delay just one more year, until there aren’t any years left. If you start as a sophomore, can you even graduate?”
We both knew I couldn’t.
“It’s time to go, Tara,” Tyler said. “The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave.”
“You think I need to leave?”
Tyler didn’t blink, didn’t hesitate. “I think this is the worst possible place for you.” He’d spoken softly, but it felt as though he’d shouted the words.
“Where could I go?”
“Go where I went,” Tyler said. “Go to college.”
I snorted.
“BYU takes homeschoolers,” he said.
“Is that what we are?” I said. “Homeschoolers?” I tried to remember the last time I’d read a textbook.
“The admissions board won’t know anything except what we tell them,” Tyler said. “If we say you were homeschooled, they’ll believe it.”
“I won’t get in.”
“You will,” he said. “Just pass the ACT. One lousy test.”
Tyler stood to go. “There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.”
—
THE NEXT DAY I drove to the hardware store in town and bought a slide-bolt lock for my bedroom door. I dropped it on my bed, then fetched a drill from the shop and started fitting screws. I thought Shawn was out—his truck wasn’t in the driveway—but when I turned around with the drill, he was standing in my doorframe.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Doorknob’s broke,” I lied. “Door blows open. This lock was cheap but it’ll do the trick.”
Shawn fingered the thick steel, which I was sure he could tell was not cheap at all. I stood silently, paralyzed by dread but also by pity. In that moment I hated him, and I wanted to scream it in his face. I imagined the way he would crumple, crushed under the weight of my words and his own self-loathing. Even then I understood the truth of it: that Shawn hated himself far more than I ever could.
“You’re using the wrong screws,” he said. “You need long ones for the wall and grabbers for the door. Otherwise, it’ll bust right off.”
We walked to the shop. Shawn shuffled around for a few minutes, then emerged with a handful of steel screws. We walked back to the house and he installed the lock, humming to himself and smiling, flashing his baby teeth.
In October Dad won a contract to build industrial granaries in Malad City, the dusty farm town on the other side of Buck’s Peak. It was a big job for a small outfit—the crew was just Dad, Shawn, Luke, and Audrey’s husband, Benjamin—but Shawn was a good foreman, and with him in charge Dad had acquired a reputation for fast, reliable work.
Shawn wouldn’t let Dad take shortcuts. Half the time I passed the shop, I’d hear the two of them shouting at each other, Dad saying Shawn was wasting time, Shawn screaming that Dad had damned near taken someone’s head off.
Shawn worked long days cleaning, cutting and welding the raw materials for the granaries, and once construction began he was usually on-site in Malad. When he and Dad came home, hours after sunset, they were nearly always cussing. Shawn wanted to professionalize the operation, to invest the profits from the Malad job in new equipment; Dad wanted things to stay the same. Shawn said Dad didn’t understand that construction was more competitive than scrapping, and that if they wanted to land real contracts, they needed to spend real money on real equipment—specifically, a new welder and a man lift with a basket.
“We can’t keep using a forklift and an old cheese pallet,” Shawn said. “It looks like shit, and it’s dangerous besides.”
Dad laughed out loud at the idea of a man basket. He’d been using a forklift and pallet for twenty years.
