reread his careful explanations. After a few weeks of this, by magic or miracle, the concepts took hold. I retook the practice test. The advanced algebra was still indecipherable—it came from a world beyond my ability to perceive—but the trigonometry had become intelligible, messages written in a language I could understand, from a world of logic and order that only existed in black ink and on white paper.
The real world, meanwhile, plunged into chaos. The doctors told Mother that Shawn’s injury might have altered his personality—that in the hospital, he had shown tendencies toward volatility, even violence, and that such changes might be permanent.
He did succumb to rages, moments of blind anger when all he wanted was to hurt someone. He had an intuition for nastiness, for saying the single most devastating thing, that left Mother in tears more nights than not. These rages changed, and worsened, as his physical strength improved, and I found myself cleaning the toilet every morning, knowing my head might be inside it before lunch. Mother said I was the only one who could calm him, and I persuaded myself that that was true. Who better? I thought. He doesn’t affect me.
Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure the injury changed him that much, but I convinced myself that it had, and that any cruelty on his part was entirely new. I can read my journals from this period and trace the evolution—of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury, I never got hurt at all.
* My account of Shawn’s fall is based on the story as it was told to me at the time. Tyler was told the same story; in fact, many of the details in this account come from his memory. Asked fifteen years later, others remember it differently. Mother says Shawn was not standing on a pallet, only on forklift tines. Luke remembers the pallet, but substitutes a metal drain, with the grating removed, in place of the rebar. He says the fall was twelve feet, and that Shawn began acting strangely as soon as he regained consciousness. Luke has no memory of who dialed 911, but says there were men working in a nearby mill, and he suspects that one of them called immediately after Shawn fell.
There was a moment that winter. I was kneeling on the carpet, listening to Dad testify of Mother’s calling as a healer, when my breath caught in my chest and I felt taken out of myself. I no longer saw my parents or our living room. What I saw was a woman grown, with her own mind, her own prayers, who no longer sat, childlike, at her father’s feet.
I saw the woman’s swollen belly and it was my belly. Next to her sat her mother, the midwife. She took her mother’s hand and said she wanted the baby delivered in a hospital, by a doctor. I’ll drive you, her mother said. The women moved toward the door, but the door was blocked—by loyalty, by obedience. By her father. He stood, immovable. But the woman was his daughter, and she had drawn to herself all his conviction, all his weightiness. She set him aside and moved through the door.
I tried to imagine what future such a woman might claim for herself. I tried to conjure other scenes in which she and her father were of two minds. When she ignored his counsel and kept her own. But my father had taught me that there are not two reasonable opinions to be had on any subject: there is Truth and there are Lies. I knelt on the carpet, listening to my father but studying this stranger, and felt suspended between them, drawn to each, repelled by both. I understood that no future could hold them; no destiny could tolerate him and her. I would remain a child, in perpetuity, always, or I would lose him.
* * *
—
I WAS LYING ON MY BED, watching the shadows my feeble lamp cast on the ceiling, when I heard my father’s voice at the door. Instinctively I jerked to my feet in a kind of salute, but once I was standing I wasn’t sure what to do. There was no precedent for this: my father had never visited my room before.