same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for
theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the
earth.
Mother’s message amounted to an ultimatum: I could see her and my
father, or I would never see her again. She has never recanted.
The parking lot had filled while I was reading. I let her words settle, then
started the engine and pulled onto Main Street. At the intersection I turned
west, toward the mountain. Before I left the valley, I would set eyes on my
home.
Over the years I’d heard many rumors about my parents: that they were
millionaires, that they were building a fortress on the mountain, that they had
hidden away enough food to last decades. The most interesting, by far, were
the stories about Dad hiring and firing employees. The valley had never
recovered from the recession; people needed work. My parents were one of
the largest employers in the county, but from what I could tell Dad’s mental
state made it difficult for him to maintain employees long-term: when he had
a fit of paranoia, he tended to fire people with little cause. Months before, he
had fired Diane Hardy, Rob’s ex-wife, the same Rob who’d come to fetch us
after the second accident. Diane and Rob had been friends with my parents
for twenty years. Until Dad fired Diane.
It was perhaps in another such fit of paranoia that Dad fired my mother’s
sister Angie. Angie had spoken to Mother, believing her sister would never
treat family that way. When I was a child it had been Mother’s business; now
it was hers and Dad’s together. But at this test of whose it was really, my
father won: Angie was dismissed.
It is difficult to piece together what happened next, but from what I later
learned, Angie filed for unemployment benefits, and when the Department of
Labor called my parents to confirm that she had been terminated, Dad lost
what little reason remained to him. It was not the Department of Labor on the
phone, he said, but the Department of Homeland Security, pretending to be
the Department of Labor. Angie had put his name on the terrorist watch list,
he said. The Government was after him now—after his money and his guns
and his fuel. It was Ruby Ridge all over again.
I pulled off the highway and onto the gravel, then stepped out of the car
and gazed up at Buck’s Peak. It was clear immediately that at least some of
the rumors were true—for one, that my parents were making huge sums of