music paused; it was time to sing. I might have had any number of thoughts at that moment. I might have thought of my teacher and her techniques—square stance, straight back, dropped jaw. Instead I thought of Tyler, and of lying on the carpet next to his desk, staring at his woolen-socked feet while the Mormon Tabernacle Choir chanted and trilled. He’d filled my head with their voices, which to me were more beautiful than anything except Buck’s Peak.
Mother’s fingers hovered over the keys. The pause had become awkward; the congregation shifted uncomfortably. I thought of the voices, of their strange contradictions—of the way they made sound float on air, of how that sound was soft like a warm wind, but so sharp it pierced. I reached for those voices, reached into my mind—and there they were. Nothing had ever felt so natural; it was as if I thought the sound, and by thinking it brought it into being. But reality had never yielded to my thoughts before.
The song finished and I returned to our pew. A prayer was offered to close the service, then the crowd rushed me. Women in floral prints smiled and clasped my hand, men in square black suits clapped my shoulder. The choir director invited me to join the choir, Brother Davis asked me to sing for the Rotary Club, and the bishop—the Mormon equivalent of a pastor—said he’d like me to sing my song at a funeral. I said yes to all of them.
Dad smiled at everyone. There was scarcely a person in the church that Dad hadn’t called a gentile—for visiting a doctor or for sending their kids to the public school—but that day he seemed to forget about California socialism and the Illuminati. He stood next to me, a hand on my shoulder, graciously collecting compliments. “We’re very blessed,” he kept saying. “Very blessed.” Papa Jay crossed the chapel and paused in front of our pew. He said I sang like one of God’s own angels. Dad looked at him for a moment, then his eyes began to shine and he shook Papa Jay’s hand like they were old friends.
I’d never seen this side of my father, but I would see it many times after—every time I sang. However long he’d worked in the junkyard, he was never too tired to drive across the valley to hear me. However bitter his feelings toward socialists like Papa Jay, they were never so bitter that, should those people praise my voice, Dad wouldn’t put aside the great battle he was fighting against the Illuminati long enough to say, “Yes, God has blessed us, we’re very blessed.” It was as if, when I sang, Dad forgot for a moment that the world was a frightening place, that it would corrupt me, that I should be kept safe, sheltered, at home. He wanted my voice to be heard.
The theater in town was putting on a play, Annie, and my teacher said that if the director heard me sing, he would give me the lead. Mother warned me not to get my hopes up. She said we couldn’t afford to drive the twelve miles to town four nights a week for rehearsals, and that even if we could, Dad would never allow me to spend time in town, alone, with who knows what kind of people.
I practiced the songs anyway because I liked them. One evening, I was in my room singing, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow,” when Dad came in for supper. He chewed his meatloaf quietly, and listened.
“I’ll find the money,” he told Mother when they went to bed that night. “You get her to that audition.”
The summer I sang the lead for Annie it was 1999. My father was in serious preparedness mode. Not since I was five, and the Weavers were under siege, had he been so certain that the Days of Abomination were upon us.
Dad called it Y2K. On January 1, he said, computer systems all over the world would fail. There would be no electricity, no telephones. All would sink into chaos, and this would usher in the Second Coming of Christ.
“How do you know the day?” I asked.
Dad said that the Government had programmed the computers with a six-digit calendar, which meant the year had only two digits. “When nine-nine becomes oh-oh,” he said, “the computers won’t know what year it is. They’ll shut down.”
“Can’t they fix it?”
“Nope, can’t be done,” Dad said. “Man trusted his own strength, and his