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3.

I’m trying to reconstruct all this for you with some purity of memory, but the truth is that I’m never going to be able to rid myself entirely of hindsight. What I see now, from the perspective of these decades later, versus what I felt and saw and experienced in the moment, are two distinct things entirely. My father was a brilliant philosopher king, the benevolent ruler of our tranquil domain; or he was a tyrant, a maniac, and a menace. My life was bucolic and happy; or it was bizarre and lonely.

Which is true? Is it possible it could be both? The more I seek clarity, the more entangled and confused my recollections become.

So let’s start by focusing on facts.

Home for us was a seven-hundred-square-foot cabin in the middle of a patch of wild fields and shrubs, surrounded by national forest land, over an hour away from the nearest town. We were the longtime tenants of a man in Livingston who had used the cabin for hunting before he accidentally shot his own foot off. Our closest neighbor was a fifteen-minute drive up a rutted dirt road: a grizzled old carpenter named Shirley, who was as solitary and unsociable as Saul. The two of them drank beer together sometimes and discussed the merits of tax avoidance. That was the extent of my father’s social life.

My own social life was even more pathetic. There weren’t exactly a lot of teenagers living in the woods aroundus.

Behind the cabin was a modest vegetable garden and a henhouse, though our chickens kept dying from mange and foxes and general lackadaisical care on my part. Near the edge of the woods there was a garden shed with a solar array on the roof, which my father had built himself some years back and which provided power for us. Farther down the hill was a small pond, diverted from a stream in the woods, with a washing machine he’d jury-rigged out of a plastic bucket, a car battery, and some plungers. Beyond the pond spread a dense blanket of pine, covering the hills for hundreds of miles in every direction.

Once upon a time, you could walk for days through those woods and never come across a sign of civilization, just the occasional hunting cabin; but in recent years kids from the towns had started coming out with their ATVs and motorbikes and crashing their way through the forest. This made my father furious, of course. He’d threatened to put out beds of nails on the paths, or maybe string some wire between the trees, until I pointed out that if he did that and someone died, he would be held liable for murder. When I said that, he hesitated, a distant expression passing over his face; and for a horrible moment I’d wondered if that wasn’t such an unappealing prospect to him after all.

Our cabin had four rooms: two tiny bedrooms; a great room with a woodstove, a tidy kitchen, and a leather couch that had been weeping foam for most of my existence; plus my father’s study, which was the only room with a lock on the door. The study was where my father spent much of his days, writing on his dyspeptic Smith Corona, or reading, or tinkering with things that he called his “inventions.” I wasn’t allowed inside this room, though I had my ways.

When we’d first moved to the cabin, back when I was small, there had been no functional bathroom at all, just an outhouse. I could still conjure up the horror of that: the cold, dark maw below me, the spiders overhead, my terror that I might slip into the stinking hole and vanish. My father had finally built a bathroom after I’d cried too many times; he had paid for the septic tank and installed a toilet and claw-foot bathtub, a fact that he still lorded over me whenever I suggested improvements to our living situation.

“Pampered princess demanded a porcelain toilet, and I gave it to her, and that was my first mistake. I’ve been paying for it ever since. What’s next, heated floors and crystal chandeliers?”

“A toaster is not a crystal chandelier, Dad.”

“I don’t see why you can’t make toast under the broiler, the intelligent way. Toast is just heat plus bread. Why do we need a whole extra appliance, with only one function, that will inevitably end up in the landfill someday?”

I’d sighed and given up. I always did. It was impossible to win an argument against my father, though he liked me to try anyway. The man needed a worthy adversary, and I worried that it was never going to beme.

—

We did have a telephone: an old black Bakelite beast, with a cracked rotary dial. My father had installed this in case of emergency, but he mostly used it to call the office of The Bozeman Daily Chronicle and suggest editorials about criminalizing ATVs or leaf blowers. I used this phone, now, to call my friend Heidi and let her know that I would be coming by the bookstore. Then I dressed quickly into my cleanest clothes, pulled my hair into braids and assessed myself in the mirror. There wasn’t much else to be done.

The previous year, on a trip into town, I’d stolen a lipstick from a Walgreens—slipped it into my pocket while my dad was buying toilet paper—and tucked it at the back of my sock drawer once we got home. The next day, when my father was out in the shed, I hid in the bathroom and smeared it across my lips. The girl that stared back at me in the mirror looked foreign, clownish—the color was a garish, unflattering fuchsia—but I was fascinated by her anyway. As if I had just gotten a glimpse of a Jane from an alternate universe, one where there were school dances and double dates and afternoon matinees. Maybe even a girl who had a mother who taught her how to apply mascara and took her shopping and brushed her hair for her.

I wanted that so badly that it hurt to let myself thinkit.

“When you’re an adult,” the other Jane in the mirror said slowly, “you can go anywhere you want. You can leave here. You don’t have to stay.”

I gripped the edge of the sink, dizzy at the very thought, but then I could hear my father’s boots on the porch, his voice calling my name—“Jane? Squirrel? Where are you? Come give me a hand.”

I grabbed a tissue and swiped frantically at the lipstick, praying that my father wouldn’t notice that the cheap tint had stained the cracks in my chapped lips. I shoved the lipstick deep in the back of my sock drawer and didn’t look for it again for months.

When I did, I discovered that it had disappeared entirely.