8

ANNIE

Dear Luke,

That year with Mom so unwell—

* * *

Luke,

The year after Dad’s death—

* * *

To Luke,

After a while, we—

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Luke,

I can’t fucking do this.

* * *

Dear Luke,

This is my fifth attempt at this entry and it’s awful and I’m a mess. But I’m going to keep trying until I make it work. It hurts to do this, and when I hurt, I want to get high. Since I’m in rehab, that’s pretty much off the table, and so instead I get angry. You might have noticed that when I stormed out of your office this morning.

But I need to get better. I need to get back to my baby. So here goes nothing.

As we passed the twelve-month anniversary of Dad’s death, Mom gradually began emerging from her depression. Lexie had been promising me this would happen eventually, and she was quite triumphant when the improvement started to become obvious. There were little indications at first—coming home from school to find Mom reading a book with the curtains open, or Mom actually eating without Lexie nagging her into it, or spontaneously dressing and doing her hair. I had forgotten how pretty my mom was with her hair freshly washed and hanging loose around her shoulder blades, and the first time I walked in the door to find Mom wearing a dress instead of her pajamas, I was so shocked that I actually dropped my school bag.

It took a long time to realize that there was a pattern to these good days—but finally, we figured out that the good days were Wednesdays. Lexie and I racked our brains to try to figure out what it was about Wednesday that made Mom so happy—was one of us born that day? Was it the day she married Dad? Was it a coincidence—or maybe it took so much out of Mom that it took her a full week to get the energy back to do it all again?

Then school break came. The first Wednesday of the break, the three of us were sitting around the table eating breakfast when Mom told us that she was expecting some guests. This was even more shocking than the sight of Mom in her dress. She had been declining most requests to visit with her for a full year, and as far as Lexie and I knew, she’d lost touch with all her friends.

“I have some friends who visit me on a Wednesday,” Mom told us. “I’m excited for you girls to meet them. They’ve been helping me find meaning in what happened.”

I was curious at first, but as soon as we opened the door that day, I felt my heart sink. I remember staring at the people on our doorstep, and then looking to Lexie to see if she was as confused as I was. I realized immediately that Lexie wasn’t confused—she was suspicious.

Even at first glance, Mom’s “friends” weren’t your average visitors. Robert was there front and center, surrounded by women carrying Bibles. The women were each styled in variations on a theme—they all had very long hair beneath neatly pressed head scarves, and they wore skirts to their ankles. But although Robert was just an average, clean-cut-looking guy, dressed relatively normally, there was something about him that made my skin crawl. It took me years to put my finger on it—all I knew at the beginning was that I didn’t like him, and I really didn’t trust him.

Lexie and I pretended to read in the living room so we could eavesdrop on the goings-on in the dining room. Robert led a Bible study, and Mom joined in with as much enthusiasm as we’d seen her show toward anything since Dad’s death. She’d always been quietly religious, as had Dad, but this entire affair seemed different somehow—much more pointed, much more zealous.

“They’re from a sect...it’s like a closed church. I think they all live out at that little village near the lake—it’s called Winterton.”

There was another shock awaiting us when Robert and the women went to leave. At the door, Robert paused, and while he turned his gaze to Lexie and me, he said to Mom, “So, Deborah, we will be seeing you all on Saturday?”

“What’s Saturday?” Lexie asked him. I was glad she asked. I wanted to know, too, but I was too petrified to speak to Robert—his presence was so imposing.

“It’s the Lord’s day, Alexis. Your mother is bringing you to worship with us.”

Sometimes at Christmas, Dad and Mom took us to church services, but religion had been such a small part of our lives.

That Saturday we had our first taste of life in the fundamentalist sect Robert belonged to—which is kind of like someone who’d only ever seen puddles being dumped without a life jacket in the middle of the ocean. Mom made us wear our longest skirts and we had to wear our hair down, and then Robert picked us up in a minivan. Mom rode up front with him while Lexie and I sat in the far back and whispered guesses about what this church was going to be like. We speculated about how weird it was going to be, and we were definitely right about that, but we had no idea what we were in for. Lex and I were still thinking we were headed toward a church like the ones we’d occasionally been to with Mom and Dad.

We weren’t prepared for an isolated community in its own little village, five miles out of town. And we certainly weren’t prepared when, as we were walking into the long, windowless hall where the services were held, Robert turned to us and passed us head scarves. He stared into my eyes as he fixed it over my head, and my heart started to race and butterflies with razor-sharp wings seemed to appear out of nowhere in my stomach. I felt cold and confused and uncomfortable, and I had no idea what it meant or what to do about it. When he was done, Robert rested a hand on Lexie’s shoulder and one on mine, and he said very sternly, “Girls, you are not to speak once we pass through those doors. You may only ask questions and speak when the service is over and we move out of the auditorium. Not so much as a whisper, got it?”

And so for the next three hours we sat in stunned, bored silence as the service dragged on and on. There were hymns and prayers and several sermons—all delivered by men. The women in the congregation sat in total silence—even the female children sat silent, their eyes glazed with boredom, just as mine and Lexie’s were. I tried to amuse myself during this enforced silence—looking around at the congregation, wondering who all of these people were. I imagined lives for them. The lady in the blue head scarf was Jill, an expert marksman and martial arts expert, who worked in a shoe store by day and fought crime by night. The young woman next to her was training to be a nurse, and she wanted to work in Africa when she graduated. The plump, elderly woman with the gray shawl had once fallen in love with a king of some far-flung country, but his family did not like her and he sent her away, and she’d never again given her heart to a man.

This game amused me for some time, until I realized with some shock that one of the subjects I was imagining a world for was actually my grandmother, Dad’s mother, and she was sitting with a woman whom I recognized as Dad’s sister, Aunt Ursula. I had met this aunt exactly twice—once in an awkward exchange at the grocery store when Dad was still alive, and then again as she left his wake. I tried to draw Lexie’s attention to this shocking discovery, but she was staring at the preacher, and the more determined my attempts became the more attention they drew from Mom. Eventually Mom shot us a furious glare and I gave up. But having realized that Dad had some tie to this odd church, I began to wonder if Mom did, too. It didn’t take me long to locate her mother also, sitting several rows behind us.

I had no idea what to make of all of this, but it unnerved me and I felt myself becoming oddly teary at the realization that this odd, uncomfortable place somehow had links to my family. When the service finally ended and we filed back outside into the too-bright sunshine, Lexie caught my arm and whispered into my ear, “We have to get her away from these people.”

When our grandmothers approached a few minutes later, their cordial greetings and awkward small talk did nothing to comfort Lexie or me. We knew—right from the beginning—that something was off about that community.

The challenge with freeing her from these people was that we’d become so isolated over that year since Dad’s death. Mom had effectively become a shut-in, and our old network had all but vanished from our lives. Lexie and I talked to some of the teachers at school, colleagues who had also been Mom’s friends, but she became very defensive when they tried to talk to her and was then angry with Lex and me for mentioning it. Lexie even walked to the fire station one afternoon to see if Captain Edwards could help, but when he came to the front door, Mom refused to speak to him. So while we were worried about Mom’s involvement with the strange church, we didn’t know how to stop it, and Mom always reacted violently whenever we questioned her about it.

“They are helping me, girls. Can’t you see that? Your dad’s family is there, and so is mine—I need the support so that I can be a good mom to you. It’s working, isn’t it?”

And she was certainly right about that. Mom seemed calmer and more stable, and she cared again about us. She little by little opened up to us about an entire history that we’d never known, explaining that she and Dad had grown up with their families in the village, but that they’d left together in their late teens.

“We just wanted to see what else was out there in the world, and I wanted to go to college but wasn’t allowed to while I was there—girls are only allowed to study up to the end of middle school,” she explained to Lexie and me. “And because we left, we weren’t allowed to stay in touch with our families much after that. But, girls, I need my family now, and I need my friends there. You need them, too. I know the services are long and it all seems a bit strange, but can you go along with it? For me?”

So of course we said yes, but that didn’t mean Lexie or I liked what was happening with Mom. She might have been coming out of her shell, but she was also rapidly adopting the assembly’s rules in our home, and our lives began to change. The preachers at the church prohibited television and the radio, and so Lexie and I came home from school one day to find ours on the front curb. We begged her to reconsider this, but Mom became increasingly convinced that TV and the radio were pathways for “worldly ways” to enter our house.

“You can survive without them,” she said stiffly, when I threw an Olympic-level tantrum in a last-ditch effort to get her to change her mind. “There are no televisions or radios in Winterton—not even in the cars. No one even misses them.”

Then she began to censor the books we were allowed to read. I was right in the middle of a Nancy Drew phase—Nancy was wearing only a bathing suit on one of the covers, so that was the end of that. Soon Mom was compulsively checking the books we were reading and asking us about what we had learned and discussed during the school day. Lexie and I were worried about where her paranoia might end, but we weren’t at all prepared when she sat us down after dinner one night to make an announcement.

Mom had decided to marry Robert and she would be selling the house. We would all be moving to Robert’s home in Winterton.

“Your dad and I were wrong to start our family out here, and I can see that now. This world has nothing to offer us except pain. You girls will be so much better off out there, where I can keep you safe. The elders can teach you to live righteous lives.”

We cried and we screamed, and we told her we would never go—as if we had a say, as if we had any power at all as eight-and twelve-year-old girls. I was too young to realize it—but for a child, there is protection in stability, and strength to be found in a life that feels controlled.

But when Mom decided to move us into Robert’s house, Lexie and I were about to find out just how vulnerable and powerless we actually were.