Book 18 Sessions 11

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.

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.

He said he loved me but this was over his head. He couldn’t save me. Only I could.

“Sorry, Siddle Lister, but it hurts less if you don’t see it coming.”

Only an X-ray could prove otherwise. Thus, the X-ray would break my toe.

I was filled with an exquisite numbness. I felt drunk with it and wanted to shout at the world: Here’s the proof: nothing touches me.

ichard was the miracle son, the gift from God, the Einstein to disprove Einstein. Richard would move the world. Shawn would not.

“You drive,”

Shawn can smell shame.

“Don’t want your boyfriend to see you looking so glamorous?” He smiles and jabs me with his finger. He is looking at me strangely, as if to say, This is who you are. You’ve been pretending that you’re someone else. Someone better. But you are just this.

I go with him into the bright lights. I laugh as we pass through aisle after aisle, gathering the things he wants to buy. I laugh at every word he says, trying to convince anyone who might have been in the parking lot that it was all a joke. I’m walking on a sprained ankle, but the pain barely registers.

Dad sees nothing.

I ask myself questions. Why didn’t he stop when I begged him? It was like getting beaten by a zombie, I write. Like he couldn’t hear me.

Was it really fun and games? I write. Could he not tell he was hurting me? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

It’s comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.

There was one point when he was forcing me from the car, that he had both hands pinned above my head and my shirt rose up. I asked him to let me fix it but it was like he couldn’t hear me. He just stared at it like a great big jerk. It’s a good thing I’m as small as I am. If I was larger, at that moment, I would have torn him apart.

my humiliation was the cause of that pleasure

I retrieved my journal and I wrote another entry, opposite the first, in which I revised the memory. It was a misunderstanding, I wrote. If I’d asked him to stop, he would have.

Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.

I could not be near any man without despising myself.

one that was less about actions and more about essence. It was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.

It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.

Shawn played the same games with her he’d played with Sadie, testing his control. She never failed to follow his orders, quivering when he raised his voice, apologizing when he screamed at her. That their marriage would be manipulative and violent

I have so many bills I can’t imagine how I’m going to pay them. But God will provide either trials for growth or the means to succeed.

The check was in my hand. I was so tempted, the pain in my jaw so savage, that I must have held it for ten seconds before passing it back.

When I called Shawn and asked who he’d sold Bud to, he mumbled something vague about a guy passing through from Tooele.

He pulled out his wallet, opened it and extracted a crisp hundred-dollar bill.

I BELIEVED THAT HUNDRED dollars was a sign from God.

She knew I was lying—I could tell because when Dad came in unexpectedly and asked why she was copying the returns, she said the duplicates were for her records.

He never asked why I’d been sneaking into my own house at three in the morning, and I never asked who he’d been waiting for, sitting up in the middle of the night, with a loaded pistol.

“Look, honey,” she said. “You get that much because that’s how much you get. Cash it or don’t, it’s up to you.”

I’d believed the money would be used to control me, but what it did was enable me to keep my word to myself: for the first time, when I said I would never again work for my father, I believed it.

I never uttered the words “I’m from Idaho” until I’d left it.

I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.

My textbooks began to make sense, and I found myself doing more than the required reading.

bipolar disorder

This is my father, I wrote in my notes. He’s describing Dad.

Ruby Ridge

Ruby Ridge, Idaho

Randy Weaver and a number of Federal agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI.

the shooting of a boy, then of his father, then of his mother. The Government had murdered the entire family, parents and children, to cover up what they had done.

Randy Weaver was arrested

blasting the government’s callous disregard for life

Randy Weaver had been interviewed by major news organizations and had even co-written a book with his daughter. He now made his living speaking at gun shows.

Why had federal agents surrounded Randy Weaver’s cabin in the first place?

Why had Randy been targeted?

the conflict had begun when Randy sold two sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent he’d met at an Aryan Nations gathering.

white supremacy was at the heart of this story, not homeschool.

Dad must have read about Ruby Ridge or seen it on the news, and somehow as it passed through his feverish brain, it had ceased to be a story about someone else and had become a story about him.

irst, because they are genetically predisposed to mood disorders

second, because of the stressful environment and poor parenting of parents with such disorders

he kept on believing himself right—after the first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us who paid.

not about the car, but about the Weavers.

Why are you like this?

Why did you terrify us like that?

Why did you fight so hard against made-up monsters, but do nothing about the monsters in your own house?

If I could just pretend to be normal for a little while, maybe it would feel like the truth.

Given the choice between seeing an evil socialist doctor, and admitting to my boyfriend that I believed doctors were evil socialists, I chose to see the doctor.

You’re positive for strep and mono. Only person I’ve seen in a month to get both.

There I was, in the heart of the Medical Establishment, and I wanted to see, at long last, what it was I had always been afraid of. Would my eyes bleed? My tongue fall out? Surely something awful would happen. I needed to know what.

She hadn’t sent any remedies for the strep or the mono. Only for the penicillin.

Updated: 14 July, 2021
Created: 14 July, 2021