Tyler had lived with her during his first year at BYU, but that was all I knew
of her.
Tyler answered the door. We settled in the living room while Debbie
prepared a casserole. Tyler solved the equations easily, writing out orderly
explanations for every step. He was studying mechanical engineering, set to
graduate near the top of his class, and soon after would start a PhD at Purdue.
My trig equations were far beneath his abilities, but if he was bored he didn’t
show it; he just explained the principles patiently, over and over. The gate
opened a little, and I peeked through it.
Tyler had gone, and Debbie was pushing a plate of casserole into my
hands, when the phone rang. It was Mother.
“There’s been an accident in Malad,” she said.
Mother had little information. Shawn had fallen. He’d landed on his head.
Someone had called 9-11, and he’d been airlifted to a hospital in Pocatello.
The doctors weren’t sure if he would live. That was all she knew.
I wanted more, some statement of the odds, even if it was just so I could
reason against them. I wanted her to say, “They think he’ll be fine” or even
“They expect we’ll lose him.” Anything but what she was saying, which was,
“They don’t know.”
Mother said I should come to the hospital. I imagined Shawn on a white
gurney, the life leaking out of him. I felt such a wave of loss that my knees
nearly buckled, but in the next moment I felt something else. Relief.
There was a storm coming, set to lay three feet of snow over Sardine
Canyon, which guarded the entrance to our valley. Mother’s car, which I had
driven to Debbie’s, had bald tires. I told Mother I couldn’t get through.
The story of how Shawn fell would come to me in bits and pieces, thin lines
of narrative from Luke and Benjamin, who were there. It was a frigid
afternoon and the wind was fierce, whipping the fine dust up in soft clouds.
Shawn was standing on a wooden pallet, twenty feet in the air. Twelve feet
below him was a half-finished concrete wall, with rebar jutting outward like
blunt skewers. I don’t know for certain what Shawn was doing on the pallet,
but he was probably fitting posts or welding, because that was the kind of
work he did. Dad was driving the forklift.
I’ve heard conflicting accounts of why Shawn fell.^4 Someone said Dad
moved the boom unexpectedly and Shawn pitched over the edge. But the