he needed to hear. But they were not in me, not yet.
Before we returned to Harvard, I convinced my parents to take a detour to Niagara Falls. The mood in the car was heavy, and at first I regretted having suggested the diversion, but the moment Dad saw the falls he was transformed, elated. I had a camera. Dad had always hated cameras but when he saw mine his eyes shone with excitement. “Tara! Tara!” he shouted, running ahead of me and Mother. “Get yourself a picture of this angle. Ain’t that pretty!” It was as if he realized we were making a memory, something beautiful we might need later. Or perhaps I’m projecting, because that was how I felt. There are some photos from today that might help me forget the grove, I wrote in my journal. There’s a picture of me and Dad happy, together. Proof that’s possible.
* * *
—
WHEN WE RETURNED TO HARVARD, I offered to pay for a hotel. They refused to go. For a week we stumbled over one another in my dorm room. Every morning my father trudged up a flight of stairs to the communal shower in nothing but a small white towel. This would have humiliated me at BYU, but at Harvard I shrugged. I had transcended embarrassment. What did it matter who saw him, or what he said to them, or how shocked they were? It was his opinion I cared about; he was the one I was losing.
Then it was their last night, and still I had not been reborn.
Mother and I shuffled around the shared kitchen making a beef and potato casserole, which we brought into the room on trays. My father studied his plate quietly, as if he were alone. Mother made a few observations about the food, then she laughed nervously and was silent.
When we’d finished, Dad said he had a gift for me. “It’s why I came,” he said. “To offer you a priesthood blessing.”
In Mormonism, the priesthood is God’s power to act on earth—to advise, to counsel, to heal the sick, and to cast out demons. It is given to men. This was the moment: if I accepted the blessing, he would cleanse me. He would lay his hands on my head and cast out the evil thing that had made me say what I had said, that had made me unwelcome in my own family. All I had to do was yield, and in five minutes it would be over.
I heard myself say no.
Dad gaped at me in disbelief, then he began to testify—not about God, but about Mother. The herbs, he said, were a divine calling from the Lord. Everything that happened to our family, every injury, every near death, was because we had been chosen, we were special. God had orchestrated all of it so we could denounce the Medical Establishment and testify of His power.
“Remember when Luke burned his leg?” Dad said, as if I could forget. “That was the Lord’s plan. It was a curriculum. For your mother. So she would be ready for what would happen to me.”
The explosion, the burn. It was the highest of spiritual honors, he said, to be made a living testament of God’s power. Dad held my hands in his mangled fingers and told me that his disfiguration had been foreordained. That it was a tender mercy, that it had brought souls to God.
Mother added her testimony in low, reverent whispers. She said she could stop a stroke by adjusting a chakra; that she could halt heart attacks using only energy; that she could cure cancer if people had faith. She herself had had breast cancer, she said, and she had cured it.
My head snapped up. “You have cancer?” I said. “You’re sure? You had it tested?”
“I didn’t need to have it tested,” she said. “I muscle-tested it. It was cancer. I cured it.”
“We could have cured Grandma, too,” Dad said. “But she turned away from Christ. She lacked faith and that’s why she’s dead. God won’t heal the faithless.”
Mother nodded but never looked up.
“Grandma’s sin was serious,” Dad said. “But your sins are more serious still, because you were given the truth and have turned from it.”
The room was quiet except for the dull hum of traffic on Oxford Street.
Dad’s eyes were fixed on me. It was the gaze of a seer, of a holy oracle whose power and authority were drawn from the very universe. I wanted to meet it head-on, to