I stared into the darkness, searching it for her face, trying to understand
what power my brother had over her. He’d had that power over me, I knew.
He had some of it still. I was neither under his spell, nor free of it.
“He’s a spiritual man,” she said again. Then she slipped into her sleeping
bag, and I knew the conversation was over.
I returned to BYU a few days before the fall semester. I drove directly to
Nick’s apartment. We’d hardly spoken. Whenever he called, I always seemed
to be needed somewhere to change a bandage or make salve. Nick knew my
father had been burned, but he didn’t know the severity of it. I’d withheld
more information than I’d given, never saying that there had been an
explosion, or that when I “visited” my father it wasn’t in a hospital but in our
living room. I hadn’t told Nick about his heart stopping. I hadn’t described
the gnarled hands, or the enemas, or the pounds of liquefied tissue we’d
scraped off his body.
I knocked and Nick opened the door. He seemed surprised to see me.
“How’s your dad?” he asked after I’d joined him on the sofa.
In retrospect, this was probably the most important moment of our
friendship, the moment I could have done one thing, the better thing, and I
did something else. It was the first time I’d seen Nick since the explosion. I
might have told him everything right then: that my family didn’t believe in
modern medicine; that we were treating the burn at home with salves and
homeopathy; that it had been terrifying, worse than terrifying; that for as long
as I lived I would never forget the smell of charred flesh. I could have told
him all that, could have surrendered the weight, let the relationship carry it
and grow stronger. Instead I kept the burden for myself, and my friendship
with Nick, already anemic, underfed and underused, dwindled in
obsolescence.
I believed I could repair the damage—that now I was back, this would be
my life, and it wouldn’t matter that Nick understood nothing of Buck’s Peak.
But the peak refused to give me up. It clung to me. The black craters in my
father’s chest often materialized on chalkboards, and I saw the sagging cavity
of his mouth on the pages of my textbooks. This remembered world was
somehow more vivid than the physical world I inhabited, and I phased
between them. Nick would take my hand, and for a moment I would be there
with him, feeling the surprise of his skin on mine. But when I looked at our