“Where’s Dad?”
I haven’t even stepped into the apartment before I ask it. My mother—alive, wet-haired, living with her first-born in San Francisco—is like a ghost, floating down the hallway towards me in bare feet. But in the Technicolor reunion I’ve imagined for so many months, it’s both of my parents, their arms outstretched, their eyes crying and laughing. This scene is off, distorted—my vision goes fuzzy at the edges.
“Sweetheart,” my mother says gently. “You know where he is. He’s been saved.”
“No,” I reply. “That’s not right.” I don’t know why she’s lying to me but she is; it has something to do with the Church, something to do with the Corporation. I hear Frick’s voice echoing in my head: They had to move in secret so the Non-Believers could not follow. I push past Winnie, the dawning comprehension in her hazel eyes, and my mother, down the hallway and into the small living room, lit gold with sun. “Dad?”
There’s an air mattress on the floor partially deflated, its sheets in a tangle; there are paintings of birds on the walls and a huge messy bookshelf. But my father’s not here. My mother is hiding him away for some reason, the way she hid Winnie. I hear her rummaging through the closet behind me, and when she appears she has cotton balls, rubbing alcohol, bandages. She sits on the couch and pats the space beside her.
“Let me do something about your cheek, Vivian, honey.”
“First tell me where my father is,” I say. My heart is pounding at this boldness, at me telling my own mother what we’re going to do now, at preventing her from mothering me.
“I’ve already told you, Vivian.” Mom’s gets a little tight, like she’s about to cry. “He was saved. He’s gone on to his eternal reward.”
“How are you still lying, after everything that’s happened? Are they making you lie?”
“Is who making me lie?” My mother shakes her head at me, confused. “What do you mean? I’m telling you what I know, honey; I’m telling you the truth.”
I believe her—I know I have no reason in the world to believe her, but I believe that she doesn’t know where my father is. My father is gone. My mother is here. I listen to the click of Winnie’s footsteps on the hardwood floor behind me. I hear a heavy, ragged breathing and realize it’s my own. I’m making a spectacle of myself, I know, bleeding and wild-haired in a stranger’s apartment, staring down my mother, who looks very small and frightened in her bathrobe. And that’s exactly how I want it. I am past goodness, past grief. I’m broken in a way I don’t understand yet, and I’m going to make them feel it.
“You left me there,” I say, “alone. You left me alone in that house with no money and no parents. You put holes in the roof and you let me find them. Do you have any idea what that was like? I saw those holes and it was like my entire history and future were being sucked up through them, and I was the only thing left, and I was nothing. And you were here? Were you here the whole time?”
Mom’s eyes are glassy with tears. She nods.
“Well, that’s great.” My voice sounds thin and mean and I turn to look at Winnie. She’s leaning against the doorway, staring at the floor, her expression unreadable. I’m seized with a sudden hatred, of her twee paintings and her sunny apartment and the fact that she stands there, cool and disinterested, infuriatingly adult. “How special for you two, to be able to bond like that. While I was hungry and tired and waiting for the plagues to start raining down. While my friends were getting beaten and murdered.”
“Hey,” says Winnie. She gazes back at me now. “Don’t assume you’re the only one who’s been through something these last months. The apocalypse isn’t something happening to you and you alone.”
“Winnie,” my mother murmurs, like a warning. The sound of her name in my mother’s mouth makes my spine go rigid with jealousy.
“I know that,” I say. “If you think I don’t know that—”
“I think you’re throwing a fit, and you have a right to throw one,” Winnie continues. “But maybe let’s calm down for half a second so your mother can get a word in. Don’t you think she deserves it? Honor your father and mother, and all that?”
I laugh. “You would be a Believer. That’s just perfect. You’re the whole package, aren’t you? The anti-Viv.”
Winnie stands up straight. She’s been snapped out of her calm; her eyes are burning. “Call me a Believer again, kiddo; I’m begging you. I would seriously love to hear you call me that again.”
“Girls!”
My mother’s voice rings out sharply in the echoing apartment and when I turn she points to the couch beside her. I find I don’t even hesitate—I step forward, and sit down. She perches next to me and reaches for my hand, but I gasp in pain when she touches it.
“Vivian,” she says, examining it. “I think your hand is broken.”
“I think you’re right, yeah.”
“We should get it looked at.”
“First, tell me the truth.” I want to sound tough but I hear the begging in my own voice, the desperate, insistent pleading. “I don’t care if it’s hard; I’ve come all this way, and you owe me the truth.”
I see a shadow flicker across my mother’s face, and for a moment I think I’ve gone too far—she’s about to yell, or shut me out. But just as suddenly the shadow’s gone, and my mother takes a deep breath. She smiles sadly at me.
“Vivian, I don’t know where to start. I messed up. I’ve been messing up my entire life. But I promise you that where you were concerned, I was always trying to do the right thing, the good thing.
“I was basically your age when I met your dad. You don’t know how young that is, because you’re still there. You’ve had this adventure now and so maybe you think you know all the answers. But, for me, I was seventeen. I was pregnant. My parents had kicked me out of the house. I thought, I’m going to die. I thought it was only a matter of time. And then along came your father. He told me it was going to be okay; he was going to make it okay. Ned said it would be easy to be good because we’d love each other, because we’d be together. We’d be living for other people, not just for ourselves. It made sense to me then—it still makes sense—so I said yes, but the only thing I said was that I wanted to give up the baby. I didn’t think I’d be able to look at Winnie without feeling like I had before Ned, that feeling of death, of waiting to die.”
My mother glances up at Winnie but my sister stays impassive; she picks at the sleeve of her sweater like she doesn’t even hear.
“But it didn’t get easier,” Mom continues after a moment. “I loved your dad; I loved the quiet life we had. But it always felt like I was playing a part. I felt like it would take so little—a fight with Ned, or too many glasses of wine, or a bad phone call with Grant and Clarissa—to turn me into that girl again. But it wasn’t a small thing that pushed me there; it was you. After you were born, I had this feeling like, what have I done? Who was I to think myself capable of bringing this little person up in the world? Ned was so excited, but all I could think was that I was going to mess it up. I was going to care either too much or not enough. And what if you turned out like me? Wild, and unhappy, and hating us?
“If someone could have just shown me a vision of the future, of our Vivian Apple—from Day One, the sweetest and calmest and best of girls—I’d have relaxed. But instead I panicked.” She pauses and looks at me with a cringing, guilty expression. “I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell you … I ran away for a while when you were nine months old. Your dad raised you alone until right around your first birthday.”
She waits for my reaction but I say nothing—I’m not shocked by anything anymore, certainly not when it comes to the things I would never have expected my mother capable of.
“I went to New York. I tried to become someone new; I waited for it to feel right in a way that life at home hadn’t. I knew I couldn’t go back. Your father had saved me once, I thought; there was no chance he’d do it again.
“Of course I was wrong, and I should’ve known it. He tracked me down and asked me to come home. And I did, but I knew it would never be quite right. It felt like it didn’t matter how much I loved you and Ned; it didn’t matter how happy you both made me. I always felt like something was missing. Like a puzzle piece—the thing that would connect my old self to the new one. I could play the part of the good wife and mother, but I still didn’t understand what I was getting out of it.
“And then the Church came along. I think it appealed to Ned, the idea of joining a church. He’d read about it online. That was right after he lost his job, remember? He was very depressed; he felt like he didn’t know what his role was if he couldn’t provide for us. He begged me to come to services and I thought—well, why not? I thought it was the least I could do, to go to this place where he thought he might find himself, when he’d spent his whole adult life trying to help me do the same. And the people turned out to be so nice, Vivian—I know what you think of them, and some of them can be a little much, but the people we met those first weeks were so nice. The women, especially; it felt like they knew just what I was going through. They got it, you know? That it was hard to figure out how to be the right kind of wife, the right kind of mother. They understood because they were trying to get it right, too, while they still had time. And the best part was that the Church gave you actual guidelines! They said, we know this is hard. Here’s how you start. And for the first time, I felt like I was a good person. A person who was contributing to the world, making the person I loved best in the world happy.
“The only thing that bothered me then,” she says carefully, as if not wanting to hurt my feelings, “was that you didn’t want to be a part of it.”
“Sorry,” I say flatly.
“But, Vivian, I really don’t understand,” Mom says, and I can tell by her voice that she wants to. “It was always so easy for you. I feel like I never even had to teach you about all those things it took me until the Church to learn—sharing and hard work and kindness. Do you know I can never remember reprimanding you, until that last year? Any Believer who met you would attest to your godliness. So why did you never become one?”
It feels to me like the answer’s obvious, but my mother stares at me with genuine curiosity. “Because I didn’t Believe, Mom,” I explain.
She waves her hand dismissively. “But that’s just a part of it, Viv. That’s just a story you can take or leave. For me it was about feeling like a part of a community. It was about trying to be good.”
“But that’s not the kind of good I want to be,” I say. I think back to the statues outside the Believer compound—the men proud and dignified, slapping fives with Lincoln; the women in a corner, over an open flame. “What the Church wanted from you wasn’t goodness; it was meekness. And I know because that’s what I’ve been for seventeen years. That’s what you just called godliness. It’s so much easier to be that—to read the guidelines and submit and obey, instead of actually dealing with chaos, or pain—but it’s not what good is. When the Rapture comes, that’s the life you’re going to be satisfied by.”
I’ve said something wrong. Immediately my mom’s eyes well up.
“I’m sorry, Vivian,” she says. “It’s just that—well, you’re forgetting that the Rapture did come. And I’m still here. And I’m not satisfied by any of it.”
I feel a little thrill of excitement and fear, because we’re right at the precipice of what I still don’t understand. How did she manage to escape Frick and Taggart? How much does she know of what happened at the Believer compound? And if she’s still alive, despite what she keeps insisting, does that mean my father is out there somewhere, too? I can’t imagine how they could have gotten separated from each other; in what universe would my parents, who loved each other more than anything, let themselves be divided?
“How are you still here, Mom?” is the gentlest way I can think of to ask.
“I never made enough progress in my salvation,” she explains, her voice catching and starting and stopping again. “I still had doubts. Sometimes I found myself thinking about the Church as Ned’s religion, instead of my own. But—Vivian, the truth is I did something terrible. You’re sitting here and you’re already so angry at me—I can feel it, you know, you’re just radiating heat—and you’re going to be so much angrier when I tell you.”
“What is it?” I ask, trying to sound gentle, like this isn’t the case. But the truth is my mother is aggravating me even more than I think she realizes, wallowing in her mysterious despair, milking every minute of it. I think of the blue-haired girl she once was—what an exasperating drama queen that girl must have been.
“The Rapture was coming,” she explains, “and we were counting down the days. Ned was a lot more excited than me. I spent a lot of time wondering whether or not it would hurt. About a month before it was supposed to happen, we got this letter in the mail, signed by Pastor Frick. He explained that he misunderstood his own vision. He said we wouldn’t be Raptured from our homes. We’d have to be blessed personally by Frick at a special service at his secret compound. The Church had contacted pastors in every parish and asked them to send the letter to their most devout congregants.” She can’t help sounding a little smug at this. “The only catch was, we weren’t allowed to talk about it with anybody—not any Non-Believer friends or family, not even other Believers. The letter explained that more people thought they would be saved than would actually be saved. If everyone knew about the special service, it could get awkward. So we had to make our way to California in secret.
“Ned was thrilled. It meant so much to him that our pastor would single us out. He booked our plane tickets within an hour of the mail being delivered—that was just about the last of our savings. And that made it real, of course, in a way it hadn’t been. I started to think—what if we were wrong? What if we weren’t taken? What if Ned was taken and I wasn’t? Was I supposed to return to Pittsburgh alone? Raise you myself, with no money, without the guidance of Ned or the Church?
“But Ned told me to have faith, and I tried. He pointed out that my name was on the letter, like that meant anything more than the fact I was married to him. The tricky part was figuring out when to leave. We could tell which of our friends had been contacted because they started to leave town in the weeks before the Rapture—they’d say they were going to visit family one last time, or to one of the Seven Sacred Sites, but you knew what they were really saying. The Jandas just disappeared halfway through March. But we waited until the last possible moment, because we had you. You weren’t around very much that month. You were spending most of your time with Harp. When you left that morning, I wanted to tell you goodbye, but I knew I couldn’t. After you were gone, we put those holes in the ceiling. It killed us to do that, Vivian; you need to know that it killed us. Ned and I were both wrecks. But he said, and I believed him—you needed a trauma to learn the error of your ways, to come to Him. After that, a taxi picked us up and took us to the airport. We flew from Pittsburgh to San Jose. At San Jose, a shuttle came to take us to the compound.
“Your dad fell asleep as soon as the plane took off. But I couldn’t stop thinking. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like, once we were up there, in the air, I just sort of shed every year that had passed between seventeen and now. I thought about all the things I hadn’t done, that I’d given up to be with Ned. I’d never traveled anywhere. I’d never created anything I was really proud of. I’d only been with one man for over twenty-five years. All of this, I could live with, be happy with, even, but I believed I was entering my final few hours on Earth. And I just—I panicked, Vivian. I completely panicked.
“When he woke up, your dad said, ‘Alright?’ and I said yeah. We left the plane together. But he stopped in the bathroom right beside our gate. He thought I’d be waiting for him when he came out. But I ran.” Mom starts crying again, and angry as I am with her, I know her heart is really broken. “I ran and left him there. I did that, to the man I loved.”
I don’t want to hear the rest of the story, and I don’t want to imagine my father’s half. I see him leaving the bathroom, sprightly with anticipatory energy, thinking he’s about to go to heaven with the woman he loves. But she’s gone. I can guess what happened next. Mom made her way up to San Francisco, tracked down Winnie, with whom she’d always stayed in some form of touch.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I ask her.
Mom’s face looks much older than I’ve ever seen it. “I was embarrassed, Vivian.”
But I know there’s more to it than that. Yes, it would have been embarrassing for her to have to return to Pittsburgh, husbandless, a runaway, a fallen woman, Left Behind. Certainly, though she’d have had no way of knowing it at the time, it wouldn’t have been safe. But by running away first from me and then from my father, she’d also be able to recreate that aborted escape to New York. She’d be able to travel, meet new men, share a glamorous new life with her other daughter, the adult, the one who didn’t think of her as mother. I can understand this. She was a year older than me when she married. She really believes that the world is ending. All she wanted to do was have some fun. But I can’t forgive it. I try to find a tender spot in me with which to forgive her, but there simply aren’t any left.
“And Dad never contacted you?” I ask.
Mom flinches, startled. “How would he have contacted me, Viv? It was only a matter of hours between the last moment I saw him, and the moment he was saved.”
I say nothing. I want to tell myself a story. One in which my father survives, too. He leaves the airport bathroom and sees the empty space where my mother should stand, and he’s snapped to his senses, just as I’d imagined he eventually would be. He heads on his own adventure. But what would that be? All this time I’ve spent stumbling over my parents’ secrets, and still I can’t see any clear alternative. My father was a born rule-follower, risk-avoider. I never thought he could love anything more than my mother, until he joined the Church. No. I’m tired of telling myself stories about how things did not happen. Dad got on the shuttle; he drank the wine. Maybe he ended up somewhere peaceful, or maybe he’s nothing but ashes now. In truth I’ve been mourning him from the moment he converted, the moment he became something strange and hard, something other than the kind man in glasses who never made me play soccer after that first, disastrous time. But this is a different kind of grief altogether. To know, for certain, that he’s dead. It’s a horizon I’ll never reach. For now I’ll bury it. If I don’t bury it, I’ll fall apart.
“Vivian?” Mom says, studying me closely. “Do you know something? Have you—did you hear from Dad?”
I have the story of last night on the tip of my tongue. I could tell her of the fate she unwittingly escaped, of the one to which her husband probably fell. In doing so, I could inflict on her more pain than I’ve ever caused anyone. I could make her feel what I feel. But I shake my head no. “Not a word,” I tell her.
There’s a shift in the room’s atmosphere then. I can feel my energy draining away, my will to fight with either of these women stalled. I keep my eyes off the air mattress because every time I see it I feel a twinge. All I’ve wanted for three months is my mother. And some other daughter has had her instead. Winnie clears her throat and moves towards us.
“I’m sorry to do this,” she says. “But I have to go to work.”
“Of course, of course!” My mother wipes her eyes with the sleeves of her bathrobe and gets up to put her arm around Winnie. “Vivian, your sister works for a non-profit that finds temporary shelter for Left Behind babies—isn’t that wonderful?”
It isn’t Winnie’s fault my mother sought her out, but that doesn’t mean I have to like her. “That’s so godly of you,” I deadpan.
Winnie gives me a look I can’t quite decipher—it’s shrewd and maybe a little threatening. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, Viv. But only if you cut Mara some slack. She loves you like crazy, you know. Don’t forget that you’re the one she kept.”
My mother’s face goes a little pale at this, and a mild, uncomfortable smile stays on her face until Winnie walks down the hallway and we hear the front door shut behind her. Then she turns to me and the tiny smile becomes a huge, dazzling, fake grin. “I think we could both use some breakfast, don’t you?”
In the kitchen, Mom rifles through Winnie’s fridge and cabinets, taking out salt and pepper, butter and milk, and a carton of eggs. I feel weak, less with hunger than with the dizzying knowledge that I’m going to taste my mother’s food again.
“I know that was a rocky start, but I think you’ll get along with Winnie,” Mom says as she prepares. “She’s really sweet, and fun, too. Very bold, very opinionated. Nothing like your old friends from back home—no offense. But that Lara Cochran …”
“Lara Cochran’s the worst, Mom. She was Left Behind though, did you know?”
“No!” Mom drags the word out in a delighted, gossipy way. She’s cracking a ridiculous amount of eggs into the pan. “I didn’t know that. It’s very sinful of me to take pleasure in that, of course, but the Cochrans were a little much. Mrs. Cochran was—I guess the wording I’d use would be ‘unintentionally sanctimonious.’”
I laugh, flipping through a cookbook Winnie has propped up on her kitchen table. “I think the wording I would use is ‘heinous fucking bitch.’”
The room is silent except for the hiss of egg in the pan. My mother looks at me in horror. The sentence I’ve just said rings in my ears like an admonishment.
“Mom,” I say. “I don’t know why I thought you would find that funny. That was really inappropriate, I’m sorry.”
My mother recovers, taking a short breath and smiling. “It sounds like Harp Janda has been rubbing off on you.”
“Well, yeah. I’ve spent practically all my time with her for over a year now.”
“Maybe now that you’re here, you can take a little bit of a break.” She says it naturally, like it’s only a suggestion, but even though her back is turned, I know how serious she is. “I don’t know her well, of course, but I know enough. She’s a bit self-destructive, isn’t she? She’s a little too much.”
I don’t want to start a fight. Not now that she’s back, and more normal than she’s been in months. “A little,” I begrudgingly agree.
“And anyway, you’ll be busy, won’t you?” Mom sets a plate of eggs down in front of me, procures from nowhere a grater and a block of cheddar cheese, which she now piles manically on top. “You’ll be busy with me and Winnie. Me and my girls, together at last. Won’t we have a nice time, waiting out the apocalypse together? Won’t we be good influences on each other? Maybe after we get your hand taken care of, we can head down to Valencia and buy you some cool new San Francisco clothes. Winnie is so stylish; wait till you see her. And maybe we can find a good bed for you and me to share—the air mattress is fine for one person, but now that you’re here we’ll have to get something more comfortable. Isn’t this fun?”
There’s a small part of me that wants to speak up, to tell her I won’t blindly obey anymore, that I’m Vivian 2.0. But she’s offering scrambled eggs, medical attention, new clothes, a soft bed. I savor the wave of calm that spreads over me as I nod and nod and nod.