Educated

I remembered the drama of Peter’s birth: how he’d slipped out of Emily
weighing little more than a pound; how he’d been such a shocking shade of
gray, they’d thought he was dead; how they’d fought through a snowstorm to
the hospital in town, only to be told it wasn’t enough, and there were no
choppers flying; how two ambulances had been dispatched to McKay-Dee in
Ogden. That a woman with this medical history, a woman so obviously high-
risk, should be advised to attempt a second birth at home seemed reckless to
the point of delusion.
If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?
I was still wondering at the birth of my niece when Erin’s response
appeared. You are right about Tara, she said. She is lost without faith. Erin
told Mother that my doubting myself—my writing to her, Erin, to ask if I
might be mistaken, if my memories might be false—was evidence that my
soul was in jeopardy, that I couldn’t be trusted: She is building her life on
fear. I will pray for her. Erin ended the message by praising my mother’s
skill as a midwife. You are a true hero, she wrote.
I closed the browser and stared at the wallpaper behind the screen. It was
the same floral print from my childhood. For how long had I been dreaming
of seeing it? I had come to reclaim that life, to save it. But there was nothing
here to save, nothing to grasp. There was only shifting sand, shifting
loyalties, shifting histories.
I remembered the dream, the maze. I remembered the walls made of grain
sacks and ammunition boxes, of my father’s fears and paranoias, his
scriptures and prophecies. I had wanted to escape the maze with its
disorienting switchbacks, its ever-modulating pathways, to find the precious
thing. But now I understood: the precious thing, that was the maze. That’s all
that was left of the life I’d had here: a puzzle whose rules I would never
understand, because they were not rules at all but a kind of cage meant to
enclose me. I could stay, and search for what had been home, or I could go,
now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut.
Mother was sliding biscuits into the oven when I entered the kitchen. I
looked around, mentally searching the house. What do I need from this
place? There was only one thing: my memories. I found them under my bed,
in a box, where I had left them. I carried them to the car and put them in the
backseat.
“I’m going for a drive,” I told Mother. I tried to keep my voice smooth. I
hugged her, then took a long look at Buck’s Peak, memorizing every line and