18

ANNIE

Luke,

I almost brought this journal with me to our session yesterday, but then I lost my nerve. I’m a coward. I don’t want you to ask me about Robert. I’m scared that if I hear you say his name, I’ll lose my mind.

Let’s see if I can write this down. I’ve never said it aloud. No one knows—no one in the world, except for Robert and me. It’s a secret we share that binds us—that’s part of the problem. I’m bound to the only person on earth whom I hate more than I hate myself.

At least when Lexie was around, I had someone around me who wasn’t completely sold on the extremism in the community. She and I could giggle over the ludicrousness of some of the rules, or point out the imbalance between the way the men behaved and were treated, and the way us lesser mortals—the women—were expected to behave.

But once Lexie was gone I was on my own. People were constantly reminding me of my own sinfulness, of my disgrace and my moral failure for not managing to fit in—those voices took up residence in my mind. And so the acts of rebellion—the pull toward self-expression that I’d always felt—the stubborn insistence that I needed to find a way to be different...those things became less about asserting myself, and more about being who I was gradually coming to believe I was.

Bad.

Different.

Sinful.

Tainted.

The louder those voices grew inside my mind, the worse my behavior became. And the harder Robert clamped down on me, the more determined I was to find a way to break free. As my behavior escalated, Robert’s punishments morphed from strict to sadistic—and then Lexie left, and the loss of control seemed to send him a little mad. In the days after her birthday, he locked me in my room for four days without food so that I could “fast” to atone for my sins, and when that didn’t work, he told me I wasn’t even allowed to go to school until I sought the Lord’s forgiveness.

I didn’t enjoy going to school, but it was, at least, an escape from our house. When Robert banned me from going, the consequence was complete and utter isolation. And because I was alone, I was more vulnerable than I had ever been before.

The first time it happened, I woke up the next day and convinced myself that it had been a nightmare. I was furious with myself for imagining such a disgusting thing—wasn’t this still more evidence of my sinfulness? It was difficult to convince myself to ignore the physical signs that my nightmare had been real, but I was twelve years old—denial was a much safer option than facing the reality of what he’d done.

But after that first night, I found it so hard to fall asleep, and I was wide-awake the next time he came—awake enough to fight; awake enough to hear his threats and justifications.

You deserve this, you filthy little slut. This is all that you are good for. If you tell your mother, I’ll throw you both out—do you understand that? Where would you even go?

If I had already started to fall victim to the voices that said I was bad, once Robert started coming to my room at night, I believed wholeheartedly in every self-deprecating cry that crossed my mind. Now I had evidence—he was strict, but everyone in the community revered him as a good, God-fearing man. Why would he hurt me like that if I wasn’t already damaged in some way?

I blamed myself. I had been causing him grief for years. Clearly I deserved what he was doing to me. And then there was Mom. She had already lost one husband, and if I told her, she’d surely leave Robert immediately and then she’d sink back into that shell. Her smile would disappear again. There were practical considerations, too—Lexie used to remind me that Mom had sold the house and signed Dad’s pension over to Robert—so we’d be cast out, and we’d have nothing.

So for my final two years in the community, I became a model citizen. I grew my hair and I even stopped braiding it—I wore it long down my back, just the way all of the other women did. I wore the head scarf and I went to services and I did my schoolwork and I read the Bible in the afternoons like I was supposed to.

If he had set out to break my spirit, Robert finally found a way to do it. It didn’t stop his visits at night—but conforming meant that at least Mom was proud of me again.

And I hated him—and I hate him—and every second that I was there and I saw the triumph in his eyes as I finally, finally gave in and complied with the stupid rules of that place, I hated him more, until that hate became part of who I am. People who have never had cause to hate do not understand how it stains you. Hating for the very first time is black dye seeping into white fabric—you can scrub and scrub and scrub and wash and wash and wash, but there will always be a stain—the fabric forever changed.

And if it has long enough to fester, hate stops feeling like anger or rage and it feels only like pain.

If you had asked me, before we moved to the community, when we were at that big house in the suburbs with the beautiful flowing agapanthus on the path, who are you, Annie? I would have said that I was the daughter of Neil and Deborah Vidler, and that my father was a hero, and that my mother nurtured as easily as she breathed. I’d have told you about my brilliantly clever big sister, and I’d have told you that one day, I was going to write a book, and until then I was going to read and read and read and live every adventure that life offered me.

I left the community when I was fourteen, right at dawn so I didn’t cause a fuss—just like Lexie did. I didn’t leave because I was old enough to leave. I left because my period had started, and I was terrified I would become pregnant if I stayed. I left because I had to, and I left because I figured that no one would bother to follow me. They all knew that I wasn’t worth saving.

I left with a broken spirit and an irrevocably damaged soul. And as I walked away from those gates that day, if you had asked me who I was, I’d have told you that I was a sinner—a girl who been used because that was what she deserved. Someone who cost her family its happiness, someone who cost herself her soul.