SEVENTEEN

Abbie drove home on autopilot. She was glad Libbie had given her the buffer she needed after listening to Port’s psychoanalysis. Those few moments of laughing so hard she cried were the only moments she’d had without low-level dread since Heber’s death.

It wasn’t until she climbed out of her car to open the old gate at the bottom of her drive that she remembered she wasn’t supposed to be here.

Abbie looked around. No one was watching. She opened the gate. Then she went to grab the mail from her rusty mailbox. She paid almost all her bills online, so she rarely checked the actual post. It generally consisted of coupons for local businesses, the odd postcard from a real estate agent who had sold property in the area, and an occasional request for donations. This time there was only one pristine white envelope. The return address printed in a proprietary font indicated the letter was from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

She slipped her index finger under the corner of the flap and pulled across the envelope, leaving a jagged edge along the top. There was a neatly folded letter inside:

Dear Sister Abish Violet Taylor:

The Stake Presidency is considering formal disciplinary action in your behalf, including the possibility of disfellowshipment or excommunication, because you are reported to have participated in conduct unbecoming a member of the church.

You are invited the join this disciplinary council to give your response, and, if you wish, to provide witness or other evidence in your behalf.

Abbie didn’t recognize the Stake President’s signature because she didn’t know her Stake President. She hadn’t been to her own church since she’d moved back to Utah. She didn’t intend to.

When she’d lived in New York and heard about an LDS scholar or podcaster being excommunicated, she’d dismissed the possibility that the same could happen to her. It seemed unlikely anyone would go through the trouble of reporting her to the Strengthening Church Members Committee. She wasn’t prominent enough in her own right to cause the Church any discomfort. It didn’t, however, take much imagination to figure out why she was being scrutinized now, or how her disciplinary hearing would end. She would be excommunicated for apostasy because she was, after all, an apostate.

Excommunication was mostly an academic matter for her. She wouldn’t necessarily lose her job, although it certainly would make it harder. The few new friends she had managed to make since she’d moved back to Utah wouldn’t care about her status as a member of the Church; they might even find the entire situation amusing. Her family, though, would not.

Being excommunicated would force them to make a decision about interacting with her. Abbie wasn’t sure if she could compete with the promise of eternal exaltation.

Abbie got back in Flynn’s SUV, letter in hand, and drove up her driveway. She tried to convince herself she didn’t care about the disciplinary hearing, but if she was being honest with herself, she didn’t really want it to come to this. She didn’t believe Joseph Smith had been visited by God, Jesus Christ, and an angel in upstate New York. She didn’t believe the history he’d translated from the gold plates about people coming from Israel to the Americas. She certainly had no faith that the current President of the Church was a prophet who received revelations from a god of any sort. She didn’t pay tithing. She didn’t follow the Word of Wisdom. Her laundry list of Mormon sins was a long one. Still, excommunication was so final.

She got out of her car, but didn’t go inside. She walked around the side of her house and sat down on a chair with a view of the mountains. She felt the sun of a cloudless sky.

This letter was inevitable. Those quiet personal choices she’d made after prayer, after fasting, after years of trying to stay in the Church would be judged by two men she had never met. The familiar weight of hopelessness pressed on her. She’d experienced it too many times before not to recognize it, the heaviness of truth that comes with a diagnosis but no cure.

Port had known her since birth, but she also knew him. The dread she was feeling wasn’t all about her. That she knew. She wasn’t the only Taylor to have gotten a letter like this today. If she still believed in the power of prayer, she would have dropped to her knees. Instead, she called her dad.

He sounded like the wind had been knocked out of him. Even disfellowshipment would mean he couldn’t maintain his position as a professor. Being excommunicated would end his career at BYU, and probably everywhere else. There simply were not that many religion departments around the country, not ones in need of professors well past their publishing prime. This letter was a threat not only to her dad’s spiritual life, but to his worldly life as well.

The despair in his voice and in the silence between words was so deep, Abbie felt like they would both drown in it. Her rail-thin, widowed father was sitting all alone in his study, surrounded by stacks of books that covered every horizontal surface, with a letter that was more terrible to him than a death sentence.

Tears welled in her eyes. She closed them and listened to her father’s silence.

He was not going to say the words, but they both knew that he would bear the loss of his profession, he would bear the loss of his Church, but he could not bear the threat that he would not be worthy to be united with her mom in the Celestial Kingdom.

“Dad?” Abbie had let him sit in silence as long as she could stand. “I’m so sorry. Don’t worry. I don’t think they’ll really do anything to you. Someone just wants to scare us.”

“Well, they’ve succeeded, with me at least.”

“It’ll be okay,” Abbie said, “I know it will.”

“You don’t know that.” He was right. She didn’t.

“When’s your date? Do you want me to come?” Abbie asked.

“Your presence,” he said softly, “would undoubtedly make things worse.”

If only. If only he and Heber hadn’t had their lunches; if only they had never talked about his students dropping out; if he hadn’t mentioned those lunches to Abbie; if Bowen hadn’t seen her in Colonia Juárez. If Heber hadn’t been killed. A wave of remorse washed over her.

“Dad?” Silence. “Dad? Are you still there?”

Abbie heard her dad exhale.

“Blame it on me,” she instructed.

“What?”

“We both know I’ve been in the crosshairs before and will again, if I don’t get excommunicated this time. Tell them you don’t know anything. Nothing about Mexico, nothing about the students, nothing about Brittany Thompson. Tell them you don’t believe my crazy ideas. Tell them—”

“Abish, that would be a lie.”

“Think about what really matters. You’re as worthy a member of the Church as this world will ever know. You keep your covenants, you walk the path, you believe.”

“I will take responsibility for what I’ve done. I’ll do whatever I need to do to repent.” Nothing Abbie could say or do would comfort or help him. There was silence on the line again as they both processed what their neatly folded letters meant.

Then he said, “Abish, I love you. I will always love you.”

Abbie didn’t respond immediately. She wasn’t used to such raw emotion from her dad. “I love you, too, Dad.”

Silence again. Abbie wasn’t sure if he’d already hung up the phone.