Educated

the core of my mind, which invented in the very moment of occurrence, then
recorded the fiction.
In the month that followed, I lived the life of a lunatic. Seeing sunshine, I
suspected rain. I felt a relentless desire to ask people to verify whether they
were seeing what I was seeing. Is this book blue? I wanted to ask. Is that man
tall?
Sometimes this skepticism took the form of uncompromising certainty:
there were days when the more I doubted my own sanity, the more violently I
defended my own memories, my own “truth,” as the only truth possible.
Shawn was violent, dangerous, and my father was his protector. I couldn’t
bear to hear any other opinion on the subject.
In those moments I searched feverishly for a reason to think myself sane.
Evidence. I craved it like air. I wrote to Erin—the woman Shawn had dated
before and after Sadie, who I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen. I told her what I
remembered and asked her, bluntly, if I was deranged. She replied
immediately that I was not. To help me trust myself, she shared her memories
—of Shawn screaming at her that she was a whore. My mind snagged on that
word. I had not told her that that was my word.
Erin told me another story. Once, when she had talked back to Shawn—
just a little, she said, as if her manners were on trial—he’d ripped her from
her house and slammed her head against a brick wall so hard she’d thought
he was going to kill her. His hands locked around her throat. I was lucky, she
wrote. I had screamed before he began choking me, and my grandpa heard it
and stopped him in time. But I know what I saw in his eyes.
Her letter was like a handrail fixed to reality, one I could reach out and
grasp when my mind began to spin. That is, until it occurred to me that she
might be as crazy as I was. She was damaged, obviously, I told myself. How
could I trust her account after what she’d been through? I could not give this
woman credence because I, of all people, knew how crippling her
psychological injuries were. So I continued searching for testimony from
some other source.
Four years later, by pure chance, I would get it.
While traveling in Utah for research, I would meet a young man who
would bristle at my last name.
“Westover,” he would say, his face darkening. “Any relation to Shawn?”
“My brother.”