Educated

by Tara Westover

  Now, when I reflect on my mother’s words, remembering the way they appeared as if by magic on the screen, one detail stands above the rest: that Mother described my father as bipolar. It was the exact disorder that I myself suspected. It was my word, not hers. Then I wonder if perhaps my mother, who had always reflected so perfectly the will of my father, had that night merely been reflecting mine.

  No, I tell myself. They were her words. But hers or not, those words, which had so comforted and healed me, were hollow. I don’t believe they were faithless, but sincerity failed to give them substance, and they were swept away by other, stronger currents.

  I fled the mountain with my bags half packed and did not retrieve anything that was left behind. I went to Salt Lake and spent the rest of the holidays with Drew.

  I tried to forget that night. For the first time in fifteen years, I closed my journal and put it away. Journaling is contemplative, and I didn’t want to contemplate anything.

  After the New Year I returned to Cambridge, but I withdrew from my friends. I had seen the earth tremble, felt the preliminary shock; now I waited for the seismic event that would transform the landsape. I knew how it would begin. Shawn would think about what Dad had told him on the phone, and sooner or later he would realize that my denial—my claim that Dad had misunderstood me—was a lie. When he realized the truth, he would despise himself for perhaps an hour. Then he would transfer his loathing to me.

  It was early March when it happened. Shawn sent me an email. It contained no greeting, no message whatsoever. Just a chapter from the Bible, from Matthew, with a single verse set apart in bold: O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? It froze my blood.

  Shawn called an hour later. His tone was casual, and we talked for twenty minutes about Peter, about how his lungs were developing. Then he said, “I have a decision to make, and I’d like your advice.”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t decide,” he said. He paused, and I thought perhaps the connection had failed. “Whether I should kill you myself, or hire an assassin.” There was a static-filled silence. “It might be cheaper to hire someone, when you figure in the cost of the flight.”

  I pretended I hadn’t understood, but this only made him aggressive. Now he was hurling insults, snarling. I tried to calm him but it was pointless. We were seeing each other at long last. I hung up on him but he called again, and again and again, each time repeating the same lines, that I should watch my back, that his assassin was coming for me. I called my parents.

  “He didn’t mean it,” Mother said. “Anyway, he doesn’t have that kind of money.”

  “Not the point,” I said.

  Dad wanted evidence. “You didn’t record the call?” he said. “How am I supposed to know if he was serious?”

  “He sounded like he did when he threatened me with the bloody knife,” I said.

  “Well, he wasn’t serious about that.”

  “Not the point,” I said again.

  The phone calls stopped, eventually, but not because of anything my parents did. They stopped when Shawn cut me out of his life. He wrote, telling me to stay away from his wife and child, and to stay the hell away from him. The email was long, a thousand words of accusation and bile, but by the end his tone was mournful. He said he loved his brothers, that they were the best men he knew. I loved you the best of all of them, he wrote, but you had a knife in my back the whole time.

  It had been years since I’d had a relationship with my brother, but the loss of it, even with months of foreknowledge, stunned me.

  My parents said he was justified in cutting me off. Dad said I was hysterical, that I’d thrown thoughtless accusations when it was obvious my memory couldn’t be trusted. Mother said my rage was a real threat and that Shawn had a right to protect his family. “Your anger that night,” she told me on the phone, meaning the night Shawn had killed Diego, “was twice as dangerous as Shawn has ever been.”

  Reality became fluid. The ground gave way beneath my feet, dragging me downward, spinning fast, like sand rushing through a hole in the bottom of the universe. The next time we spoke, Mother told me that the knife had never been meant as a threat. “Shawn was trying to make you more comfortable,” she said. “He knew you’d be scared if he were holding a knife, so he gave it to you.” A week later she said there had never been any knife at all.

  “Talking to you,” she said, “your reality is so warped. It’s like talking to someone who wasn’t even there.”

  I agreed. It was exactly like that.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD A GRANT to study that summer in Paris. Drew came with me. Our flat was in the sixth arrondissement, near the Luxembourg Gardens. My life there was entirely new, and as near to a cliché as I could make it. I was drawn to those parts of the city where one could find the most tourists so I could throw myself into their center. It was a hectic form of forgetting, and I spent the summer in pursuit of it: of losing myself in swarms of travelers, allowing myself to be wiped clean of all personality and character, of all history. The more crass the attraction, the more I was drawn to it.

  I had been in Paris for several weeks when, one afternoon, returning from a French lesson, I stopped at a café to check my email. There was a message from my sister.

  My father had visited her—this I understood immediately—but I had to read the message several times before I understood what exactly had taken place. Our father had testified to her that Shawn had been cleansed by the Atonement of Christ, that he was a new man. Dad had warned Audrey that if she ever again brought up the past, it would destroy our entire family. It was God’s will that Audrey and I forgive Shawn, Dad said. If we did not, ours would be the greater sin.

  I could easily imagine this meeting, the gravity of my father as he sat across from my sister, the reverence and power in his words.

  Audrey told Dad that she had accepted the power of the Atonement long ago, and had forgiven her brother. She said that I had provoked her, had stirred up anger in her. That I had betrayed her because I’d given myself over to fear, the realm of Satan, rather than walking in faith with God. I was dangerous, she said, because I was controlled by that fear, and by the Father of Fear, Lucifer.

  That is how my sister ended her letter, by telling me I was not welcome in her home, or even to call her unless someone else was on the line to supervise, to keep her from succumbing to my influence. When I read this, I laughed out loud. The situation was perverse but not without irony: a few months before, Audrey had said that Shawn should be supervised around children. Now, after our efforts, the one who would be supervised was me.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I LOST MY SISTER, I lost my family.

  I knew my father would pay my brothers the same visit he’d paid her. Would they believe him? I thought they would. After all, Audrey would confirm it. My denials would be meaningless, the rantings of a stranger. I’d wandered too far, changed too much, bore too little resemblance to the scabby-kneed girl they remembered as their sister.

  There was little hope of overpowering the history my father and sister were creating for me. Their account would claim my brothers first, then it would spread to my aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole valley. I had lost an entire kinship, and for what?

  It was in this state of mind that I received another letter: I had won a visiting fellowship to Harvard. I don’t think I have ever received a piece of news with more indifference. I knew I should be drunk with gratitude that I, an ignorant girl who’d crawled out of a scrap heap, should be allowed to study there, but I couldn’t summon the fervor. I had begun to conceive of what my education might cost me, and I had begun to resent it.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER I READ AUDREY’S LETTER, the past shifted. It started with my memories of her. They transformed. When I recalled any part of our childhood together, moments of tenderness or humor, of the little girl who had been me with the little girl
who had been her, the memory was immediately changed, blemished, turned to rot. The past became as ghastly as the present.

  The change was repeated with every member of my family. My memories of them became ominous, indicting. The female child in them, who had been me, stopped being a child and became something else, something threatening and ruthless, something that would consume them.

  This monster child stalked me for a month before I found a logic to banish her: that I was likely insane. If I was insane, everything could be made to make sense. If I was sane, nothing could. This logic seemed damning. It was also a relief. I was not evil; I was clinical.

  I began to defer, always, to the judgment of others. If Drew remembered something differently than I did, I would immediately concede the point. I began to rely on Drew to tell me the facts of our lives. I took pleasure in doubting myself about whether we’d seen a particular friend last week or the week before, or whether our favorite crêperie was next to the library or the museum. Questioning these trivial facts, and my ability to grasp them, allowed me to doubt whether anything I remembered had happened at all.

  My journals were a problem. I knew that my memories were not memories only, that I had recorded them, that they existed in black and white. This meant that more than my memory was in error. The delusion was deeper, in the core of my mind, which invented in the very moment of occurrence, then recorded the fiction.

  In the month that followed, I lived the life of a lunatic. Seeing sunshine, I suspected rain. I felt a relentless desire to ask people to verify whether they were seeing what I was seeing. Is this book blue? I wanted to ask. Is that man tall?

  Sometimes this skepticism took the form of uncompromising certainty: there were days when the more I doubted my own sanity, the more violently I defended my own memories, my own “truth,” as the only truth possible. Shawn was violent, dangerous, and my father was his protector. I couldn’t bear to hear any other opinion on the subject.

  In those moments I searched feverishly for a reason to think myself sane. Evidence. I craved it like air. I wrote to Erin—the woman Shawn had dated before and after Sadie, who I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen. I told her what I remembered and asked her, bluntly, if I was deranged. She replied immediately that I was not. To help me trust myself, she shared her memories—of Shawn screaming at her that she was a whore. My mind snagged on that word. I had not told her that that was my word.

  Erin told me another story. Once, when she had talked back to Shawn—just a little, she said, as if her manners were on trial—he’d ripped her from her house and slammed her head against a brick wall so hard she’d thought he was going to kill her. His hands locked around her throat. I was lucky, she wrote. I had screamed before he began choking me, and my grandpa heard it and stopped him in time. But I know what I saw in his eyes.

  Her letter was like a handrail fixed to reality, one I could reach out and grasp when my mind began to spin. That is, until it occurred to me that she might be as crazy as I was. She was damaged, obviously, I told myself. How could I trust her account after what she’d been through? I could not give this woman credence because I, of all people, knew how crippling her psychological injuries were. So I continued searching for testimony from some other source.

  Four years later, by pure chance, I would get it.

  While traveling in Utah for research, I would meet a young man who would bristle at my last name.

  “Westover,” he would say, his face darkening. “Any relation to Shawn?”

  “My brother.”

  “Well, the last time I saw your brother,” he would say, emphasizing this last word as if he were spitting on it, “he had both hands wrapped around my cousin’s neck, and he was smashing her head into a brick wall. He would have killed her, if it weren’t for my grandfather.”

  And there it was. A witness. An impartial account. But by the time I heard it, I no longer needed to hear it. The fever of self-doubt had broken long ago. That’s not to say I trusted my memory absolutely, but I trusted it as much as I trusted anybody else’s, and more than some people’s.

  But that was years away.

  It was a sunny September afternoon when I heaved my suitcase through Harvard Yard. The colonial architecture felt foreign but also crisp and unimposing compared to the Gothic pinnacles of Cambridge. The central library, called the Widener, was the largest I had ever seen, and for a few minutes I forgot the past year and stared up at it, wonderstruck.

  My room was in the graduate dorms near the law school. It was small and cavelike—dark, moist, frigid, with ashen walls and cold tiles the color of lead. I spent as little time in it as possible. The university seemed to offer a new beginning, and I intended to take it. I enrolled in every course I could squeeze into my schedule, from German idealism to the history of secularism to ethics and law. I joined a weekly study group to practice French, and another to learn knitting. The graduate school offered a free course on charcoal sketching. I had never drawn in my life but I signed up for that, too.

  I began to read—Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. I lost myself in the world they had lived in, the problems they had tried to solve. I became obsessed with their ideas about the family—with how a person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin against their obligations to society as a whole. Then I began to write, weaving the strands I’d found in Hume’s Principles of Morals with filaments from Mill’s The Subjection of Women. It was good work, I knew it even as I wrote it, and when I’d finished I set it aside. It was the first chapter of my PhD.

  I returned from my sketching class one Saturday morning to find an email from my mother. We’re coming to Harvard, she said. I read that line at least three times, certain she was joking. My father did not travel—I’d never known him to go anywhere except Arizona to visit his mother—so the idea that he would fly across the country to see a daughter he believed taken by the devil seemed ludicrous. Then I understood: he was coming to save me. Mother said they had already booked their flights and would be staying in my dorm room.

  “Do you want a hotel?” I asked. They didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I signed in to an old chat program I hadn’t used in years. There was a cheerful jingle and a name turned from gray to green. Charles is online, it said. I’m not sure who started the chat, or who suggested moving the conversation to the phone. We talked for an hour, and it was as if no time had passed.

  He asked where I was studying; when I answered, he said, “Harvard! Holy hell!”

  “Who woulda thought?” I said.

  “I did,” he said, and it was true. He had always seen me like that, long before there was any reason to.

  I asked what he’d done after graduating from college and there was a strained silence. “Things didn’t go the way I planned,” he said. He’d never graduated. He’d dropped out his sophomore year after his son was born, because his wife was sick and there was a mound of medical bills. He’d signed on to work the oil rigs in Wyoming. “It was only supposed to be for a few months,” he said. “That was a year ago.”

  I told him about Shawn, how I’d lost him, how I was losing the rest of my family. He listened quietly, then let out a long sigh and said, “Have you ever thought maybe you should just let them go?”

  I hadn’t, not once. “It’s not permanent,” I said. “I can fix it.”

  “Funny how you can change so much,” Charles said, “but still sound the same as when we were seventeen.”

  * * *

  —

  MY PARENTS ARRIVED AS the leaves began to turn, when campus was at its most beautiful, the reds and yellows of autumn mingling with the burgundy of colonial brick. With his hayseed grammar, denim shirt and lifetime-member NRA cap, Dad would have always been out of place at Harvard, but his scarring intensified the effect. I had seen him many times in the years since the explosion, but it wasn’t until he came to Harvard, and I saw him set against my life there, that I rea
lized how severely he’d disfigured himself. That awareness reached me through the eyes of others—strangers whose faces changed when he passed them in the street, who turned to get a second look. Then I would look at him, too, and notice how the skin on his chin was taut and plastic; how his lips lacked natural roundness; how his cheeks sucked inward at an angle that was almost skeletal. His right hand, which he often raised to point at some feature or other, was knotted and twisted, and when I gazed at it, set against Harvard’s antediluvian steeples and columns, it seemed to me the claw of some mythical creature.

  Dad had little interest in the university, so I took him into the city. I taught him how to take the T—how to feed his card through the slot and push through the rotating gate. He laughed out loud, as if it were a fabulous technology. A homeless man passed through our subway car and asked for a dollar. Dad gave him a crisp fifty.

  “You keep that up in Boston, you won’t have any money left,” I said.

  “Doubt it,” Dad said with a wink. “The business is rolling. We got more than we can spend!”

  Because his health was fragile, my father took the bed. I had purchased an air mattress, which I gave to Mother. I slept on the tile floor. Both my parents snored loudly, and I lay awake all night. When the sun finally rose I stayed on the floor, eyes closed, breathing slow, deep breaths, while my parents ransacked my mini fridge and discussed me in hushed tones.

  “The Lord has commanded me to testify,” Dad said. “She may yet be brought to the Lord.”

  While they plotted how to reconvert me, I plotted how to let them. I was ready to yield, even if it meant an exorcism. A miracle would be useful: if I could stage a convincing rebirth, I could dissociate from everything I’d said and done in the last year. I could take it all back—blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.