When I arrived at the peak, Mother was making the Thanksgiving meal. The large oak table was covered with jars of tincture and vials of essential oil, which I cleared away. Charles was coming for dinner.
Shawn was in a mood. He sat on a bench at the table, watching me gather the bottles and hide them. I’d washed Mother’s china, which had never been used, and I began laying it out, eyeing the distance between each plate and knife.
Shawn resented my making a fuss. “It’s just Charles,” he said. “His standards aren’t that high. He’s with you, after all.”
I fetched glasses. When I put one in front of him, Shawn jabbed a finger into my ribs, digging hard. “Don’t touch me!” I shrieked. Then the room turned upside down. My feet were knocked out from under me and I was swept into the living room, just out of Mother’s sight.
Shawn turned me onto my back and sat on my stomach, pinning my arms at my sides with his knees. The shock of his weight forced the breath from my chest. He pressed his forearm into my windpipe. I sputtered, trying to gulp enough air to shout, but the airway was blocked.
“When you act like a child, you force me to treat you like one.”
Shawn said this loudly, he almost shouted it. He was saying it to me, but he was not saying it for me. He was saying it for Mother, to define the moment: I was a misbehaving child; he was setting the child right. The pressure on my windpipe eased and I felt a delicious fullness in my lungs. He knew I would not call out.
“Knock it off,” Mother hollered from the kitchen, though I wasn’t sure whether she meant Shawn or me.
“Yelling is rude,” Shawn said, again speaking to the kitchen. “You’ll stay down until you apologize.” I said I was sorry for yelling at him. A moment later I was standing.
I folded napkins from paper towels and put one at each setting. When I placed one at Shawn’s plate, he again jabbed his finger into my ribs. I said nothing.
Charles arrived early—Dad hadn’t even come in from the junkyard yet—and sat at the table across from Shawn, who glared at him, never blinking. I didn’t want to leave them alone together, but Mother needed help with the cooking, so I returned to the stove but devised small errands to bring me back to the table. On one of those trips I heard Shawn telling Charles about his guns, and on another, about all the ways he could kill a man. I laughed loudly at both, hoping Charles would think they were jokes. The third time I returned to the table, Shawn pulled me onto his lap. I laughed at that, too.
The charade couldn’t last, not even until supper. I passed Shawn carrying a large china plate of dinner rolls, and he stabbed my gut so hard it knocked the wind out of me. I dropped the plate. It shattered.
“Why did you do that?” I shouted.
It happened so quickly, I don’t know how he got me to the floor, but again I was on my back and he was on top of me. He demanded that I apologize for breaking the plate. I whispered the apology, quietly, so Charles wouldn’t hear, but this enraged Shawn. He grabbed a fistful of my hair, again near the scalp, for leverage, and yanked me upright, then dragged me toward the bathroom. The movement was so abrupt, Charles had no time to react. The last thing I saw as my head hurled down the hall was Charles leaping to his feet, eyes wide, face pale.
My wrist was folded, my arm twisted behind my back. My head was shoved into the toilet so that my nose hovered above the water. Shawn was yelling something but I didn’t hear what. I was listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall, and when I heard them I became deranged. Charles could not see me like this. He could not know that for all my pretenses—my makeup, my new clothes, my china place settings—this is who I was.
I convulsed, arching my body and ripping my wrist away from Shawn. I’d caught him off guard; I was stronger than he’d expected, or maybe just more reckless, and he lost his hold. I sprang for the door. I’d made it through the frame and had taken a step into the hallway when my head shot backward. Shawn had caught me by the hair, and he yanked me toward him with such force that we both tumbled back and into the bathtub.
The next thing I remember, Charles was lifting me and I was laughing—a shrill, demented howl. I thought if I could just laugh loudly enough, the situation might still be saved, that Charles might yet be convinced it was all a joke. Tears streamed from my eyes—my big toe was broken—but I kept cackling. Shawn stood in the doorway looking awkward.
“Are you okay?” Charles kept saying.
“Of course I am! Shawn is so, so, so—funny.” My voice strangled on the last word as I put weight on my foot and a wave of pain swept through me. Charles tried to carry me but I pushed him off and walked on the break, grinding my teeth to stop myself from crying out, while I slapped playfully at my brother.
Charles didn’t stay for supper. He fled to his jeep and I didn’t hear from him for several hours, then he called and asked me to meet him at the church. He wouldn’t come to Buck’s Peak. We sat in his jeep in the dark, empty parking lot. He was crying.
“You didn’t see what you thought you saw,” I said.
If someone had asked me, I’d have said Charles was the most important thing in the world to me. But he wasn’t. And I would prove it to him. What was important to me wasn’t love or friendship, but my ability to lie convincingly to myself: to believe I was strong. I could never forgive Charles for knowing I wasn’t.
I became erratic, demanding, hostile. I devised a bizarre and ever-evolving rubric by which I measured his love for me, and when he failed to meet it, I became paranoid. I surrendered to rages, venting all my savage anger, every fearful resentment I’d ever felt toward Dad or Shawn, at him, this bewildered bystander who’d only ever helped me. When we argued, I screamed that I never wanted to see him again, and I screamed it so many times that one night, when I called to change my mind, like I always did, he wouldn’t let me.
We met one final time, in a field off the highway. Buck’s Peak loomed over us. He said he loved me but this was over his head. He couldn’t save me. Only I could.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
* * *
—
WINTER COVERED CAMPUS IN thick snow. I stayed indoors, memorizing algebraic equations, trying to live as I had before—to imagine my life at the university as disconnected from my life on Buck’s Peak. The wall separating the two had been impregnable. Charles was a hole in it.
The stomach ulcers returned, burning and aching through the night. Once, I awoke to Robin shaking me. She said I’d been shouting in my sleep. I touched my face and it was wet. She wrapped me in her arms so tight I felt cocooned.
The next morning, Robin asked me to go with her to a doctor—for the ulcers but also for an X-ray of my foot, because my big toe had turned black. I said I didn’t need a doctor. The ulcers would heal, and someone had already treated the toe.
Robin’s eyebrow rose. “Who? Who treated it?”
I shrugged. She assumed my mother had, and I let her believe it. The truth was, the morning after Thanksgiving, I had asked Shawn to tell me if it was broken. He’d knelt on the kitchen floor and I’d dropped my foot into his lap. In that posture he seemed to shrink. He examined the toe for a moment, then he looked up at me and I saw something in his blue eyes. I thought he was about to say he was sorry, but just when I expected his lips to part he grasped the tip of my toe and yanked. It felt as if my foot had exploded, so intense was the shock that shot through my leg. I was still trying to swallow spasms of pain when Shawn stood, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Sorry, Siddle Lister, but it hurts less if you don’t see it coming.”