Mother’s oils, they had offered to buy her out for an astonishing three million
dollars. My parents hadn’t even considered it. Healing was their calling. No
amount of money could tempt them. Dad explained that they were taking the
bulk of their profits and reconsecrating them to God in the form of supplies—
food, fuel, may be even a real bomb shelter. I suppressed a grin. From what I
could tell, Dad was on track to become the best-funded lunatic in the
Mountain West.
Richard appeared on the stairwell. He was finishing his undergraduate
degree in chemistry at Idaho State. He’d come home for Christmas, and he’d
brought his wife, Kami, and their one-month-old son, Donavan. When I’d
met Kami a year before, just before the wedding, I’d been struck by how
normal she was. Like Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, Kami was an outsider: she was a
Mormon, but she was what Dad would have called “mainstream.” She
thanked Mother for her herbal advice but seemed oblivious to the expectation
that she renounce doctors. Donavan had been born in a hospital.
I wondered how Richard was navigating the turbulent waters between his
normal wife and his abnormal parents. I watched him closely that night, and
to me it seemed he was trying to live in both worlds, to be a loyal adherent to
all creeds. When my father condemned doctors as minions of Satan, Richard
turned to Kami and gave a small laugh, as if Dad were joking. But when my
father’s eyebrows rose, Richard’s expression changed to one of serious
contemplation and accord. He seemed in a state of constant transition,
phasing in and out of dimensions, unsure whether to be my father’s son or his
wife’s husband.
Mother was overwhelmed with holiday orders, so I passed my days on
Buck’s Peak just as I had as a child: in the kitchen, making homeopathics. I
poured the distilled water and added the drops from the base formula, then
passed the tiny glass bottle through the ring made by my thumb and index
fingers, counting to fifty or a hundred, then moving on to the next. Dad came
in for a drink of water. He smiled when he saw me.
“Who knew we’d have to send you to Cambridge to get you in the kitchen
where you belong?” he said.
In the afternoons, Shawn and I saddled the horses and fought our way up
the mountain, the horses half-jumping to clamber through snowdrifts that
reached their bellies. The mountain was beautiful and crisp; the air smelled of
leather and pine. Shawn talked about the horses, about their training, and