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9.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The wind had shifted after darkness fell and was now blowing in from the north, cold fingers clawing at the corners of our cabin. I lay in bed listening to the sounds of the woods, just on the other side of the planks: The hooting of the western screech owl that nested in the gnarled ponderosa pine at the bottom of our hill. The scratching of the barn mice that sheltered in our walls during the winter. The squeak of the tree branches rubbing against each other as they swayed. Sounds as familiar to me as a lullaby.

And yet, for the first time since my father had started leaving me alone at the cabin, I felt on edge, anxious about what was out there in the dark. I looked out the window and thought I could see strange shapes, circling just beyond my view. Serial killers from chat rooms. Shadowy government agents. Monsters beyond my imagination.

I knew these fears were irrational, and yet I couldn’t shake the sense that something critical was changing. My world had, over the last few days, somehow tilted off its axis: The shift in the wind, the workers pounding at our door, the dead wolf in our road, the doomsday drill. Esme and Theresa. Or maybe it was the passing of another birthday, my growing awareness of the scope of the world beyond my cabin, which was imparting this feeling of doom.

What was it that I was afraid of? The apocalypse my father kept predicting? Or was it something much closer to home, a seismic shift in the only relationship I’d ever known?

Your dad’s whole spiel about the authorities—you know it’s all just a paranoid delusion, right? My mom says his convoluted theories are just an excuse to keep you trapped out there in the woods.

What if your mom isn’t even dead ?

I circled this last thought tentatively, as if it were a hot coal that might burn me if I prodded it. Because while it was what I longed for the most—a real live mother!—it was also what I wanted the absolute least. If it was true, how could I ever look my father in the eye again?

It’s painful for me, now, to think about the intellectual contortions I went through for so many years in order to accept my father’s way of thinking. But at the time, they didn’t feel like contortions at all. It was simply what I had been taught, the “way things were.” If my father told me that we were living in a cabin in the woods because my mother was dead and shadowy government types were out to get us, of course I believed him. If he lied to me about my real name, well, there had to be a good reason, right? I had no reason to question him.

Except now, for the first time, I did.

—

The temperature dropped below freezing in the night, and when I woke in the morning there was a feathery white crust on the trees, glittering in the sunrise. The light of day had brought everything back into focus; the shadows in the woods resolved themselves into familiar shapes. The western larch that had blown over a few years back. The trellises for our green beans. As I lay in bed, I forced myself to laugh out loud, just to bust a hole through my own panic. Everything was fine. There was a logical explanation for everything. There had tobe.

I made myself a coffee, grabbed a book, and took the quilt off my bed to sit on the porch. I was reading Great Expectations for the third time and had just gotten to the part where Miss Havisham admits to Pip that she intentionally raised Estella to be cruel and heartless, as her revenge against the men she blamed for her own heartbreak.

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equally well.

There was something about poor, sad Miss Havisham, in her ravished seclusion, that made me profoundly uncomfortable. Maybe it was because she reminded me, in some dangerous way, of my father; in which case, did that mean I was Estella, the breaker of hearts? If so, whose heart was I supposed to break?

I sat wrapped in a blanket, watching the mist rise off the frozen ground as the sun began to warm the earth below, creating a soft low fog that clung to the forest like a dream. A family of deer—a mother and two fawns—tiptoed out of the woods and stepped lightly down the hill, stopping to sample the moss that grew in the glade below our cabin. I remained motionless, just watching. I knew I should go check on the hens in the henhouse and make sure they hadn’t frozen to death overnight, should collect eggs for breakfast and cut some firewood for the stove, but instead I just sat there, as though time had stopped.

I sat there until the coffee in my mug was as cold as a stone. I sat there until the frost melted off the trees and I lost all feeling in my legs. I thought my heart might break from all that beauty, which felt like a gift just forme.

I sat there as the saws began their work in the cut down the hill, broadcasting my father’s failure. I closed my eyes and saw the fresh cable lines stretching off into the infinite horizon, encircling the globe with their electrical currents. Inside them, the buzz of life, the exchange of information, the movement of human existence, all taking place just beyond my line of sight.

Inside me, I was experiencing an entirely different variety of buzz, a discontented whir of unanswerable questions. Who were Esme and Theresa? Why was I living here, in the middle of nowhere in Montana? Where did my father and I come from originally, and what was he so afraid of? And, most important of all, was it possible I did have a mother out there, somewhere, still? And, if so, why had my father lied? Was she the malevolent force that we were hiding from?

I knew that I couldn’t confront my father about the photograph. He’d know instantly that I had been breaking into his study and watching the forbidden television; and my fear of my father’s disappointment still trumped all other fears. There had to be other ways to piece together the meaning of those names on that photo, ways that didn’t involve asking him directly.

I sat there until I finally understood, with knifelike clarity, that I had to find a way out of this cabin. I couldn’t let myself be a prisoner here anymore—because yes, I could finally see it, Heidi was right about that. There was something out there I needed to learn about myself. It was time to escape beyond the borders of my claustrophobic world, and findit .

Now I just needed to figure out how.