Dwain was shouting, “Let’s go!” but I barely heard him. I was lost to panic. My thoughts wandered wildly, feverishly, through a fog of resentment. The state was dreamlike, as if the hysteria had freed me from a fiction that, five minutes before, I had needed to believe.
I had never thought about the day Shawn had fallen from the pallet. There was nothing to think about. He had fallen because God wanted him to fall; there was no deeper meaning in it than that. I had never imagined what it would have been like to be there. To see Shawn plunge, grasping at air. To watch him collide, then fold, then lie still. I had never allowed myself to imagine what happened after—Dad’s decision to leave him by the pickup, or the worried looks that must have passed between Luke and Benjamin.
Now, staring at the creases in my brother’s face, each a little river of blood, I remembered. I remembered that Shawn had sat by the pickup for a quarter of an hour, his brain bleeding. Then he’d had that fit and the boys had wrestled him to the ground, so that he’d fallen, sustained a second injury, the injury the doctors said should have killed him. It was the reason Shawn would never quite be Shawn again.
If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?
—
I’D NEVER BEEN TO the hospital in town, but it was easy to find.
Dwain had asked me what the hell I was doing when I flipped a U-turn and accelerated down the hillside. I’d listened to Shawn’s shallow breathing as I raced through the valley, along Fivemile Creek, then shot up the Bear River Hill. At the hospital, I parked in the emergency lane, and Dwain and I carried Shawn through the glass doors. I shouted for help. A nurse appeared, running, then another. Shawn was conscious by then. They took him away and someone shoved me into the waiting room.
There was no avoiding what had to be done next. I called Dad.
“You nearly home?” he said.
“I’m at the hospital.”
There was silence, then he said, “We’re coming.”
Fifteen minutes later they were there, and the three of us waited awkwardly together, me chewing my fingernails on a pastel-blue sofa, Mother pacing and clicking her fingers, and Dad sitting motionless beneath a loud wall clock.
The doctor gave Shawn a CAT scan. He said the wound was nasty but the damage was minimal, and then I remembered what the last doctors had told me—that with head injuries, often the ones that look the worst are actually less severe—and I felt stupid for panicking and bringing him here. The hole in the bone was small, the doctor said. It might grow over on its own, or a surgeon could put in a metal plate. Shawn said he’d like to see how it healed, so the doctor folded the skin over the hole and stitched it.
We took Shawn home around three in the morning. Dad drove, with Mother next to him, and I rode in the backseat with Shawn. No one spoke. Dad didn’t yell or lecture; in fact, he never mentioned that night again. But there was something in the way he fixed his gaze, never looking directly at me, that made me think a fork had come along in the road, and I’d gone one way and he the other. After that night, there was never any question of whether I would go or stay. It was as if we were living in the future, and I was already gone.
When I think of that night now, I don’t think of the dark highway, or of my brother lying in a pool of his own blood. I think of the waiting room, with its ice-blue sofa and pale walls. I smell its sterilized air. I hear the ticking of a plastic clock.
Sitting across from me is my father, and as I look into his worn face it hits me, a truth so powerful I don’t know why I’ve never understood it before. The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter. I am a traitor, a wolf among sheep; there is something different about me and that difference is not good. I want to bellow, to weep into my father’s knees and promise never to do it again. But wolf that I am, I am still above lying, and anyway he would sniff the lie. We both know that if I ever again find Shawn on the highway, soaked in crimson, I will do exactly what I have just done.
I am not sorry, merely ashamed.
—
THE ENVELOPE ARRIVED THREE weeks later, just as Shawn was getting back on his feet. I tore it open, feeling numb, as if I were reading my sentence after the guilty verdict had already been handed down. I scanned down to the composite score. Twenty-eight. I checked it again. I checked my name. There was no mistake. Somehow—and a miracle was the only way I could account for it—I’d done it.
My first thought was a resolution: I resolved to never again work for my father. I drove to the only grocery store in town, called Stokes, and applied for a job bagging groceries. I was only sixteen, but I didn’t tell the manager that and he hired me for forty hours a week. My first shift started at four o’clock the next morning.
When I got home, Dad was driving the loader through the junkyard. I stepped onto the ladder and grabbed hold of the rail. Over the roar of the engine, I told him I’d found a job but that I would drive the crane in the afternoons, until he could hire someone. He dropped the boom and stared ahead.
“You’ve already decided,” he said without glancing at me. “No point dragging it out.”
I applied to BYU a week later. I had no idea how to write the application, so Tyler wrote it for me. He said I’d been educated according to a rigorous program designed by my mother, who’d made sure I met all the requirements to graduate.
My feelings about the application changed from day to day, almost from minute to minute. Sometimes I was sure God wanted me to go to college, because He’d given me that twenty-eight. Other times I was sure I’d be rejected, and that God would punish me for applying, for trying to abandon my own family. But whatever the outcome, I knew I would leave. I would go somewhere, even if it wasn’t to school. Home had changed the moment I’d taken Shawn to that hospital instead of to Mother. I had rejected some part of it; now it was rejecting me.
The admissions committee was efficient; I didn’t wait long. The letter arrived in a normal envelope. My heart sank when I saw it. Rejection letters are small, I thought. I opened it and read “Congratulations.” I’d been admitted for the semester beginning January 5.
Mother hugged me. Dad tried to be cheerful. “It proves one thing at least,” he said. “Our home school is as good as any public education.”
—
THREE DAYS BEFORE I turned seventeen, Mother drove me to Utah to find an apartment. The search took all day, and we arrived home late to find Dad eating a frozen supper. He hadn’t cooked it well and it was mush. The mood around him was charged, combustible. It felt like he might detonate at any moment. Mother didn’t even kick off her shoes, just rushed to the kitchen and began shuffling pans to fix a real dinner. Dad moved to the living room and started cursing at the VCR. I could see from the hallway that the cables weren’t connected. When I pointed this out, he exploded. He cussed and waved his arms, shouting that in a man’s house the cables should always be hooked up, that a man should never have to come into a room and find the cables to his VCR unhooked. Why the hell had I unhooked them anyway?
Mother rushed in from the kitchen. “I disconnected the cables,” she said.
Dad rounded on her, sputtering. “Why do you always take her side! A man should be able to expect support from his wife!”
I fumbled with the cables while Dad stood over me, shouting. I kept dropping them. My mind pulsed with panic, which overpowered every thought, so that I could not even remember how to connect red to red, white to white.
Then it was gone. I looked up at my father, at his purple face, at the vein pulsing in his neck. I still hadn’t managed to attach the cables. I stood, and once on my feet, didn’t care whether the cables were attached. I walked out of the room. Dad was still shouting when I reached the kitchen. As I moved down the hall I looked back. Mother had taken my place, crouching over the VCR, groping for the wires, as Dad towered over her.
—
WAITING FOR CHRISTMAS THAT year felt like waiting to walk off the edge of a cliff. Not since Y2K had I felt so certain that something terrible was coming, something that would obliterate everything I’d known before. And what would replace it? I tried to imagine the future, to populate it with professors, homework, classrooms, but my mind couldn’t conjure them. There was no future in my imagination. There was New Year’s Eve, then there was nothing.
I knew I should prepare, try to acquire the high school education Tyler had told the university I had. But I didn’t know how, and I didn’t want to ask Tyler for help. He was starting a new life at Purdue—he was even getting married—and I doubted he wanted responsibility for mine.
I noticed, though, when he came home for Christmas, that he was reading a book called Les Misérables, and I decided that it must be the kind of a book a college student reads. I bought my own copy, hoping it would teach me about history or literature, but it didn’t. It couldn’t, because I was unable to distinguish between the fictional story and the factual backdrop. Napoleon felt no more real to me than Jean Valjean. I had never heard of either.
* Asked fifteen years later, Dwain did not recall being there. But he is there, vividly, in my memory.
PART TWO
On New Year’s Day, Mother drove me to my new life. I didn’t take much with me: a dozen jars of home-canned peaches, bedding, and a garbage bag full of clothes. As we sped down the interstate I watched the landscape splinter and barb, the rolling black summits of the Bear River Mountains giving way to the razor-edged Rockies. The university was nestled in the heart of the Wasatch Mountains, whose white massifs jutted mightily out of the earth. They were beautiful, but to me their beauty seemed aggressive, menacing.
