described the birth of Emily’s second child, a daughter, who had been
born a month before. Mother had midwifed the child. The birth had
taken place at home and, according to Mother, Emily had nearly bled
to death before they could get to a hospital. Mother finished the story
by testifying: God had worked through her hands that night, she said.
The birth was a testament of His power.
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