anemic, underfed and underused, dwindled in obsolescence.
I believed I could repair the damage—that now I was back, this
would be my life, and it wouldn’t matter that Nick understood nothing
of Buck’s Peak. But the peak refused to give me up. It clung to me. The
black craters in my father’s chest often materialized on chalkboards,
and I saw the sagging cavity of his mouth on the pages of my
textbooks. This remembered world was somehow more vivid than the
physical world I inhabited, and I phased between them. Nick would
take my hand, and for a moment I would be there with him, feeling the
surprise of his skin on mine. But when I looked at our joined fingers,
something would shift so that the hand was not Nick’s. It was bloody
and clawed, not a hand at all.
When I slept, I gave myself wholly to the peak. I dreamed of Luke, of
his eyes rolling back in his head. I dreamed of Dad, of the slow rattle in
his lungs. I dreamed of Shawn, of the moment my wrist had cracked in
the parking lot. I dreamed of myself, limping beside him, laughing that
high, horrible cackle. But in my dreams I had long, silvery hair.
—THE WEDDING WAS IN SEPTEMBER.
I arrived at the church full of anxious energy, as though I’d been sent
through time from some disastrous future to this moment, when my
actions still had weight and my thoughts, consequences. I didn’t know
what I’d been sent to do, so I wrung my hands and chewed my cheeks,
waiting for the crucial moment. Five minutes before the ceremony, I
vomited in the women’s bathroom.
When Emily said “I do,” the vitality left me. I again became a spirit,
and drifted back to BYU. I stared at the Rockies from my bedroom
window and was struck by how implausible they seemed. Like
paintings.
A week after the wedding I broke up with Nick—callously, I’m
ashamed to say. I never told him of my life before, never sketched for
him the world that had invaded and obliterated the one he and I had
shared. I could have explained. I could have said, “That place has a
hold on me, which I may never break.” That would have got to the
heart of it. Instead I sank through time. It was too late to confide in
Nick, to take him with me wherever I was going. So I said goodbye.