Educated(108)

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I BACKTRACKED A QUARTER mile into town and parked beside Grandma-over-in-town’s white picket fence. In my mind it was still her fence, even though she didn’t live here anymore: she had been moved to a hospice facility near Main Street.

I had not seen my grandparents in three years, not since my parents had begun telling the extended family that I was possessed. My grandparents loved their daughter. I was sure they had believed her account of me. So I had surrendered them. It was too late to reclaim Grandma—she was suffering from Alzheimer’s and would not have known me—so I had come to see my grandfather, to find out whether there would be a place for me in his life.

We sat in the living room; the carpet was the same crisp white from my childhood. The visit was short and polite. He talked about Grandma, whom he had cared for long after she ceased to recognize him. I talked about England. Grandpa mentioned my mother, and when he spoke of her it was with the same look of awe that I had seen in the faces of her followers. I didn’t blame him. From what I’d heard, my parents were powerful people in the valley. Mother was marketing her products as a spiritual alternative to Obamacare, and she was selling product as fast as she could make it, even with dozens of employees.

God had to be behind such a wondrous success, Grandpa said. My parents must have been called by the Lord to do what they have done, to be great healers, to bring souls to God. I smiled and stood to go. He was the same gentle old man I remembered, but I was overwhelmed by the distance between us. I hugged him at the door, and gave him a long look. He was eighty-seven. I doubted whether, in the years he had left, I would be able to prove to him that I was not what my father said I was, that I was not a wicked thing.



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TYLER AND STEFANIE LIVED a hundred miles north of Buck’s Peak, in Idaho Falls. It was there I planned to go next, but before leaving the valley, I wrote my mother. It was a short message. I said I was nearby and wanted her to meet me in town. I wasn’t ready to see Dad, I said, but it had been years since I’d seen her face. Would she come?

I waited for her reply in the parking lot at Stokes. I didn’t wait long.

It pains me that you think it is acceptable to ask this. A wife does not go where her husband is not welcome. I will not be party to such blatant disrespect.*

The message was long and reading it made me tired, as if I’d run a great distance. The bulk of it was a lecture on loyalty: that families forgive, and that if I could not forgive mine, I would regret it for the rest of my life. The past, she wrote, whatever it was, ought to be shoveled fifty feet under and left to rot in the earth.

Mother said I was welcome to come to the house, that she prayed for the day when I would run through the back door, shouting, “I’m home!”

I wanted to answer her prayer—I was barely more than ten miles from the mountain—but I knew what unspoken pact I would be making as I walked through that door. I could have my mother’s love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.

Mother’s message amounted to an ultimatum: I could see her and my father, or I would never see her again. She has never recanted.



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THE PARKING LOT HAD filled while I was reading. I let her words settle, then started the engine and pulled onto Main Street. At the intersection I turned west, toward the mountain. Before I left the valley, I would set eyes on my home.

Over the years I’d heard many rumors about my parents: that they were millionaires, that they were building a fortress on the mountain, that they had hidden away enough food to last decades. The most interesting, by far, were the stories about Dad hiring and firing employees. The valley had never recovered from the recession; people needed work. My parents were one of the largest employers in the county, but from what I could tell Dad’s mental state made it difficult for him to maintain employees long-term: when he had a fit of paranoia, he tended to fire people with little cause. Months before, he had fired Diane Hardy, Rob’s ex-wife, the same Rob who’d come to fetch us after the second accident. Diane and Rob had been friends with my parents for twenty years. Until Dad fired Diane.

It was perhaps in another such fit of paranoia that Dad fired my mother’s sister Angie. Angie had spoken to Mother, believing her sister would never treat family that way. When I was a child it had been Mother’s business; now it was hers and Dad’s together. But at this test of whose it was really, my father won: Angie was dismissed.

It is difficult to piece together what happened next, but from what I later learned, Angie filed for unemployment benefits, and when the Department of Labor called my parents to confirm that she had been terminated, Dad lost what little reason remained to him. It was not the Department of Labor on the phone, he said, but the Department of Homeland Security, pretending to be the Department of Labor. Angie had put his name on the terrorist watch list, he said. The Government was after him now—after his money and his guns and his fuel. It was Ruby Ridge all over again.

I pulled off the highway and onto the gravel, then stepped out of the car and gazed up at Buck’s Peak. It was clear immediately that at least some of the rumors were true—for one, that my parents were making huge sums of money. The house was massive. The home I’d grown up in had had five bedrooms; now it had been expanded in all directions and looked as though it had at least forty.