handing me the paper. “All I know is, that’s the answer.”
I walked back to the kitchen, comparing the clean, balanced
equation to the mayhem of unfinished computations and dizzying
sketches. I was struck by the strangeness of that page: Dad could
command this science, could decipher its language, decrypt its logic,
could bend and twist and squeeze from it the truth. But as it passed
through him, it turned to chaos.
—I STUDIED TRIGONOMETRY FOR a month. I sometimes dreamed about sine,
cosine and tangent, about mysterious angles and concussed
computations, but for all this I made no real progress. I could not self-
teach trigonometry. But I knew someone who had.
Tyler told me to meet him at our aunt Debbie’s house, because she
lived near Brigham Young University. The drive was three hours. I felt
uncomfortable knocking on my aunt’s door. She was Mother’s sister,
and 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 911, 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