I’d long felt about my family leaked out of me almost overnight. For the first time in my life I talked openly about where I’d come from. I admitted to my friends that I’d never been to school. I described Buck’s Peak, with its many junkyards, barns, corrals. I even told them about the root cellar full of supplies in the wheat field, and the gasoline buried near the old barn.
I told them I’d been poor, I told them I’d been ignorant, and in telling them this I felt not the slightest prick of shame. Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn’t that I hadn’t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn’t a diplomat. It wasn’t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.
I fashioned a new history for myself. I became a popular dinner guest, with my stories of hunting and horses, of scrapping and fighting mountain fires. Of my brilliant mother, midwife and entrepreneur; of my eccentric father, junkman and zealot. I thought I was finally being honest about the life I’d had before. It wasn’t the truth exactly, but it was true in a larger sense: true to what would be, in the future, now that everything had changed for the better. Now that Mother had found her strength.
The past was a ghost, insubstantial, unaffecting. Only the future had weight.
*1 The italics used on this page indicate that the language from the referenced email is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved.
*2 The italicized language in the description of the referenced text exchange is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved.
When I next returned to Buck’s Peak, it was autumn and Grandma-down-the-hill was dying. For nine years she had battled the cancer in her bone marrow; now the contest was ending. I had just learned that I’d won a place at Cambridge to study for a PhD when Mother wrote to me. “Grandma is in the hospital again,” she said. “Come quick. I think this will be the last time.”
When I landed in Salt Lake, Grandma was drifting in and out of consciousness. Drew met me at the airport. We were more than friends by then, and Drew said he would drive me to Idaho, to the hospital in town.
I hadn’t been back there since I’d taken Shawn years before, and as I walked down its white, antiseptic hallway, it was difficult not to think of him. We found Grandma’s room. Grandpa was seated at her bedside, holding her speckled hand. Her eyes were open and she looked at me. “It’s my little Tara, come all the way from England,” she said, then her eyes closed. Grandpa squeezed her hand but she was asleep. A nurse told us she would likely sleep for hours.
Drew said he would drive me to Buck’s Peak. I agreed, and it wasn’t until the mountain came into view that I wondered whether I’d made a mistake. Drew had heard my stories, but still there was a risk in bringing him here: this was not a story, and I doubted whether anyone would play the part I had written for them.
The house was in chaos. There were women everywhere, some taking orders over the phone, others mixing oils or straining tinctures. There was a new annex on the south side of the house, where younger women were filling bottles and packaging orders for shipment. I left Drew in the living room and went to the bathroom, which was the only room in the house that still looked the way I remembered it. When I came out I walked straight into a thin old woman with wiry hair and large, square glasses.
“This bathroom is for senior management only,” she said. “Bottle fillers must use the bathroom in the annex.”
“I don’t work here,” I said.
She stared at me. Of course I worked here. Everyone worked here.
“This bathroom is for senior management,” she repeated, straightening to her full height. “You are not allowed to leave the annex.”