I remembered the dream, the maze. I remembered the walls made of grain sacks and ammunition boxes, of my father’s fears and paranoias, his scriptures and prophecies. I had wanted to escape the maze with its disorienting switchbacks, its ever-modulating pathways, to find the precious thing. But now I understood: the precious thing, that was the maze. That’s all that was left of the life I’d had here: a puzzle whose rules I would never understand, because they were not rules at all but a kind of cage meant to enclose me. I could stay, and search for what had been home, or I could go, now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut.
Mother was sliding biscuits into the oven when I entered the kitchen. I looked around, mentally searching the house. What do I need from this place? There was only one thing: my memories. I found them under my bed, in a box, where I had left them. I carried them to the car and put them in the backseat.
“I’m going for a drive,” I told Mother. I tried to keep my voice smooth. I hugged her, then took a long look at Buck’s Peak, memorizing every line and shadow. Mother had seen me take my journals to the car. She must have known what that meant, must have sensed the farewell in it, because she fetched my father. He gave me a stiff hug and said, “I love you, you know that?”
“I do,” I said. “That has never been the issue.”
Those words are the last I said to my father.
* * *
—
I DROVE SOUTH; I didn’t know where I was going. It was nearly Christmas. I had decided to go to the airport and board the next flight to Boston when Tyler called.
I hadn’t spoken to my brother in months—after what happened with Audrey, it had seemed pointless to confide in my siblings. I was sure Mother would have told every brother, cousin, aunt and uncle the story she had told Erin: that I was possessed, dangerous, taken by the devil. I wasn’t wrong: Mother had warned them. But then she made a mistake.
After I left Buck’s Peak, she panicked. She was afraid I might contact Tyler, and that if I did, he might sympathize with me. She decided to get to Tyler first, to deny anything I might tell him, but she miscalculated. She didn’t stop to think how the denials would sound, coming from nowhere like that.
“Of course Shawn didn’t stab Diego and threaten Tara with the knife,” Mother reassured Tyler, but to Tyler, who had never heard any part of this story, not from me or anyone else, this was somewhat less than reassuring. A moment after he said goodbye to Mother, Tyler called me, demanding to know what had happened and why I hadn’t come to him.
I thought he’d say I was lying but he didn’t. He accepted almost immediately the reality I’d spent a year denying. I didn’t understand why he was trusting me, but then he told me his own stories and I remembered: Shawn had been his older brother, too.
In the weeks that followed, Tyler began to test my parents in the subtle, nonconfrontational way that was uniquely his. He suggested that perhaps the situation had been mishandled, that perhaps I was not possessed. Perhaps I was not evil at all.
I might have taken comfort in Tyler’s trying to help me, but the memory of my sister was too raw, and I didn’t trust him. I knew that if Tyler confronted my parents—really confronted them—they would force him to choose between me and them, between me and the rest of the family. And from Audrey I had learned: he would not choose me.
* * *
—
MY FELLOWSHIP AT HARVARD finished in the spring. I flew to the Middle East, where Drew was completing a Fulbright. It took some effort, but I managed to hide from Drew how poorly I was doing, or at least I thought I did. I probably didn’t. He was, after all, the one chasing me through his flat when I awoke in the middle of the night, screaming and sprinting, with no idea where I was but a desperate need to escape it.
We left Amman and drove south. We were in a Bedouin camp in the Jordanian desert on the day the navy SEALs killed bin Laden. Drew spoke Arabic, and when the news broke he spent hours in conversation with our guides. “He’s no Muslim,” they told Drew as we sat on cold sand watching the dying flames of a campfire. “He does not understand Islam, or he would not do the terrible things he’s done.”
I watched Drew talk with the Bedouins, heard the strange, smooth sounds falling from his lips, and was struck by the implausibility of my presence there. When the twin towers had fallen ten years before, I had never heard of Islam. Now I was drinking sugary tea with Zalabia Bedouins and squatting on a sand drift in Wadi Rum, the Valley of the Moon, less than twenty miles from the Saudi Arabian border.
The distance—physical and mental—that had been traversed in the last decade nearly stopped my breath, and I wondered if perhaps I had changed too much. All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere? I thought of the girl who, knowing nothing beyond her junkyard and her mountain, had stared at a screen, watching as two planes sailed into strange white pillars. Her classroom was a heap of junk. Her textbooks, slates of scrap. And yet she had something precious that I—despite all my opportunities, or maybe because of them—did not.
* * *
—
I RETURNED TO ENGLAND, where I continued to unravel. My first week back in Cambridge, I awoke nearly every night in the street, having run there, shouting, asleep. I developed headaches that lasted for days. My dentist said I was grinding my teeth. My skin broke out so severely that twice perfect strangers stopped me in the street and asked if I was having an allergic reaction. No, I said. I always look like this.
One evening, I got into an argument with a friend about something trivial, and before I knew what was happening I had pressed myself into the wall and was hugging my knees to my chest, trying to keep my heart from leaping out of my body. My friend rushed toward me to help and I screamed. It was an hour before I could let her touch me, before I could will myself away from the wall. So that’s a panic attack, I thought the next morning.
Soon after, I sent a letter to my father. I’m not proud of that letter. It’s full of rage, a fractious child screaming, “I hate you” at a parent. It’s filled with words like “thug” and “tyrant,” and it goes on for pages, a torrent of frustration and abuse.
That is how I told my parents I was cutting off contact with them. Between insults and fits of temper, I said I needed a year to heal myself; then perhaps I could return to their mad world to try to make sense of it.
My mother begged me to find another way. My father said nothing.
* The italicized language in the description of the referenced email exchange is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved.
I was failing my PhD.
If I had explained to my supervisor, Dr. Runciman, why I was unable to work, he would have helped me, would have secured additional funding, petitioned the department for more time. But I didn’t explain, I couldn’t. He had no idea why it had been nearly a year since I’d sent him work, so when we met in his office one overcast July afternoon, he suggested that I quit.
“The PhD is exceptionally demanding,” he said. “It’s okay if you can’t do it.”
I left his office full of fury at myself. I went to the library and gathered half a dozen books, which I lugged to my room and arranged on my desk. But my mind was made nauseous by rational thought, and by the next morning the books had moved to my bed, where they propped up my laptop while I worked steadily through Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
* * *
—
THAT AUTUMN, TYLER CONFRONTED my father. He talked to Mother first, on the phone. He called me after and related their conversation. He said Mother was “on our side,” that she thought the situation with Shawn was unacceptable and had convinced Dad to do something. “Dad is taking care of it,” Tyler said. “Everything is going to be fine. You can come home.”
My phone rang again two days later, and I paused Buffy to answer it. It was Tyler. The whole thing had exploded in his face. He had felt uneasy after his conversation with Mother, so he had call
ed Dad to see exactly what was being done about Shawn. Dad had become angry, aggressive. He’d shouted at Tyler that if he brought this up again, he would be disowned, then he’d hung up the phone.
I dislike imagining this conversation. Tyler’s stutter was always worse when he talked to our father. I picture my brother hunched over the receiver, trying to concentrate, to push out the words that have jammed in his throat, while his father hurls an arsenal of ugly words.
Tyler was still reeling from Dad’s threat when his phone rang. He thought it was Dad calling to apologize, but it was Shawn. Dad had told him everything. “I can have you out of this family in two minutes,” Shawn said. “You know I can do it. Just ask Tara.”
I listened to Tyler relate this story while staring at the frozen image of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Tyler talked for a long time, moving through the events quickly but lingering in a wasteland of rationalization and self-recrimination. Dad must have misunderstood, Tyler said. There had been a mistake, a miscommunication. Maybe it was his fault, maybe he hadn’t said the right thing in the right way. That was it. He had done this, and he could repair it.
As I listened, I felt a strange sensation of distance that bordered on disinterestedness, as if my future with Tyler, this brother I had known and loved all my life, was a film I had already seen and knew the ending of. I knew the shape of this drama because I had lived it already, with my sister. This was the moment I had lost Audrey: this was the moment the costs had become real, when the tax was levied, the rent due. This was the moment she had realized how much easier it was to walk away: what a poor trade it was to swap an entire family for a single sister.
So I knew even before it happened that Tyler would go the same way. I could hear his hand-wringing through the long echo of the telephone. He was deciding what to do, but I knew something he did not: that the decision had already been made, and what he was doing now was just the long work of justifying it.
It was October when I got the letter.
It came in the form of a PDF attached to an email from Tyler and Stefanie. The message explained that the letter had been drafted carefully, thoughtfully, and that a copy would be sent to my parents. When I saw that, I knew what it meant. It meant Tyler was ready to denounce me, to say my father’s words, that I was possessed, dangerous. The letter was a kind of voucher, a pass that would admit him back into the family.
I couldn’t get myself to open the attachment; some instinct had seized my fingers. I remembered Tyler as he’d been when I was young, the quiet older brother reading his books while I lay under his desk, staring at his socks and breathing in his music. I wasn’t sure I could bear it, to hear those words in his voice.
I clicked the mouse, the attachment opened. I was so far removed from myself that I read the entire letter without understanding it: Our parents are held down by chains of abuse, manipulation, and control….They see change as dangerous and will exile anyone who asks for it. This is a perverted idea of family loyalty….They claim faith, but this is not what the gospel teaches. Keep safe. We love you.
From Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, I would learn the story of this letter, how in the days after my father had threatened disownment, Tyler had gone to bed every night saying aloud to himself, over and over, “What am I supposed to do? She’s my sister.”
When I heard this story, I made the only good decision I had made for months: I enrolled in the university counseling service. I was assigned to a sprightly middle-aged woman with tight curls and sharp eyes, who rarely spoke in our sessions, preferring to let me talk it out, which I did, week after week, month after month. The counseling did nothing at first—I can’t think of a single session I would describe as “helpful”—but their collective power over time was undeniable. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now, but there was something nourishing in setting aside that time each week, in the act of admitting that I needed something I could not provide for myself.
Tyler did send the letter to my parents, and once committed he never wavered. That winter I spent many hours on the phone with him and Stefanie, who became a sister to me. They were available whenever I needed to talk, and back then I needed to talk quite a lot.
Tyler paid a price for that letter, though the price is hard to define. He was not disowned, or at least his disownment was not permanent. Eventually he worked out a truce with my father, but their relationship may never be the same.
I’ve apologized to Tyler more times than I can count for what I’ve cost him, but the words are awkwardly placed and I stumble over them. What is the proper arrangement of words? How do you craft an apology for weakening someone’s ties to his father, to his family? Perhaps there aren’t words for that. How do you thank a brother who refused to let you go, who seized your hand and wrenched you upward, just as you had decided to stop kicking and sink? There aren’t words for that, either.
* * *
—
WINTER WAS LONG THAT YEAR, the dreariness punctuated only by my weekly counseling sessions and the odd sense of loss, almost bereavement, I felt whenever I finished one TV series and had to find another.
Then it was spring, then summer, and finally as summer turned to fall, I found I could read with focus. I could hold thoughts in my head besides anger and self-accusation. I returned to the chapter I had written nearly two years before at Harvard. Again I read Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. Again I thought about the family. There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?
I began the research. I narrowed the question, made it academic, specific. In the end, I chose four intellectual movements from the nineteenth century and examined how they had struggled with the question of family obligation. One of the movements I chose was nineteenth-century Mormonism. I worked for a solid year, and at the end of it I had a draft of my thesis: “The Family, Morality, and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890.”
The chapter on Mormonism was my favorite. As a child in Sunday school, I’d been taught that all history was a preparation for Mormonism: that every event since the death of Christ had been fashioned by God to make possible the moment when Joseph Smith would kneel in the Sacred Grove and God would restore the one true church. Wars, migrations, natural disasters—these were mere preludes to the Mormon story. On the other hand, secular histories tended to overlook spiritual movements like Mormonism altogether.
My dissertation gave a different shape to history, one that was neither Mormon nor anti-Mormon, neither spiritual nor profane. It didn’t treat Mormonism as the objective of human history, but neither did it discount the contribution Mormonism had made in grappling with the questions of the age. Instead, it treated the Mormon ideology as a chapter in the larger human story. In my account, history did not set Mormons apart from the rest of the human family; it bound them to it.
I sent Dr. Runciman the draft, and a few days later we met in his office. He sat across from me and, with a look of astonishment, said it was good. “Some parts of it are very good,” he said. He was smiling now. “I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t earn a doctorate.”
As I walked home carrying the heavy manuscript, I remembered attending one of Dr. Kerry’s lectures, which he had begun by writing, “Who writes history?” on the blackboard. I remembered how strange the question had seemed to me then. My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King’s College, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought. I do.
* * *
—
ON MY TWENTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, the birthday I had chosen, I submitted my PhD dissertation. The defense took place in December, in a small, simply furnished room. I passed and returned t
o London, where Drew had a job and we’d rented a flat. In January, nearly ten years to the day since I’d set foot in my first classroom at BYU, I received confirmation from the University of Cambridge: I was Dr. Westover.
I had built a new life, and it was a happy one, but I felt a sense of loss that went beyond family. I had lost Buck’s Peak, not by leaving but by leaving silently. I had retreated, fled across an ocean and allowed my father to tell my story for me, to define me to everyone I had ever known. I had conceded too much ground—not just the mountain, but the entire province of our shared history.
It was time to go home.
It was spring when I arrived in the valley. I drove along the highway to the edge of town, then pulled over at the drop-off overlooking the Bear River. From there I could look out over the basin, a patchwork of expectant fields stretching to Buck’s Peak. The mountain was crisp with evergreens, which were luminous set against the browns and grays of shale and limestone. The Princess was as bright as I’d ever seen her. She stood facing me, the valley between us, radiating permanence.
The Princess had been haunting me. From across the ocean I’d heard her beckoning, as if I were a troublesome calf who’d wandered from her herd. Her voice had been gentle at first, coaxing, but when I didn’t answer, when I stayed away, it had turned to fury. I had betrayed her. I imagined her face contorted with rage, her stance heavy and threatening. She had been living in my mind like this for years, a deity of contempt.
But seeing her now, standing watch over her fields and pastures, I realized that I had misunderstood her. She was not angry with me for leaving, because leaving was a part of her cycle. Her role was not to corral the buffalo, not to gather and confine them by force. It was to celebrate their return.
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