rest of my life. The past, she wrote, whatever it was, ought to be
shoveled fifty feet under and left to rot in the earth.
Mother said I was welcome to come to the house, that she prayed for
the day when I would run through the back door, shouting, “I’m
home!”
I wanted to answer her prayer—I was barely more than ten miles
from the mountain—but I knew what unspoken pact I would be
making as I walked through that door. I could have my mother’s love,
but there were terms, the 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