Lisa
47 days since leaving Grace
Avoiding Mother was only possible in a limited way. Lisa could manage it, but she soon realized if she didn’t make an appearance at least once a day, Mother started to get twitchy.
“Twitchy” was Jake’s word for it. Jake was her newsfeed to the outside world, letting her know when he was going shopping, buying her peanut butter and bread she could keep in her room.
She still had to leave to get jelly, though he’d bought her an entire flat of water. She heard Singer and Mother fighting about it once when she was grabbing a few bananas.
“He shouldn’t enable her like that,” Mother said tersely.
“By buying her water? What would you rather we do, let her get dehydrated?”
“She needs help, Singer.”
Singer said something to that, but Lisa had escaped back to her room and shoved the side table up to the door. She’d squished one of the bananas so hard it oozed through cracks in the peel. Nothing for that, so she ate it and plugged her ears with a roll of toilet paper she’d stockpiled for her more out-of-control crying jags.
Making an appearance in the morning seemed the best way to do it; when she got it out of the way early, sometimes she could return to her regular schedule of hiding in bed or haunting #praiseforanthonygrace on Twitter. Or rereading those blogs about how to get over yourself after leaving a cult. Not that reading seemed to have helped at all. Here she was, freaked out and sitting in her bed, knowing she had to leave the room at some point. Step number one for cult recovery: Leave your room.
How was she going to get a job if she couldn’t even leave her room?
Just do it.
She gathered her composure and promised herself coffee.
Mother was sitting at the kitchen table, like anyone would sit at their kitchen table. But when she looked up, Lisa wished she’d gone back to bed.
“I’m glad you’re awake,” Mother said. “We have an appointment.”
“An appointment?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of appointment?”
Mother’s eyes flicked up and down, and Lisa’s entire body cringed away from her assessment. This was the woman who’d taught her how to apply lipstick and trace the outside of each lip with liner. This was the woman who’d taught her how to curl her eyelashes and straighten her bangs. This was the woman now eyeing her as if she had just jumped off a truck leaving the fields after a hard day of work.
Was that racist? Lisa half turned away, ashamed of herself for a kaleidoscope of reasons, some of which actually seemed to conflict. She washed her hands, which was a normal thing to do, except that seeing water running over skin reminded her of the time she and Abigail tried to make tamales for their dinner shift, how the corn husks hadn’t held together and it all ended up being one huge mess. Still tasted pretty good, even if everyone had to scoop it into bowls.
Clara had nearly thrown a fit. Ranting about resources and planned menus and responsibility until someone (Di, maybe) stepped in. They hadn’t used more than a meal’s worth of food, after all. They hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. Abigail had taken it hard. Abigail took everything hard, Lisa thought, standing in her mother’s kitchen with the remembered feel of the farm’s wood-grain countertops rough under her palms. They’d washed up—volunteered for it to get Clara off their backs—and she’d made Abigail laugh, tears on her face.
Was that it? Had that been the day she’d decided to do it? But that had been at least a year ago. She’d been okay for a while after that.
Not that any of it mattered.
“We’ll leave in forty-five minutes. When you’re ready.”
Slight emphasis. She forced herself to translate: Clearly you aren’t ready to leave the house now, but forty-five minutes should be enough time to pull yourself together.
Her internal Mother voice was such a bitch. She’d have to ask Singer if he had one of those, too.
“Fine,” Lisa said. She could fight, but where would it get her? Did the Bay Area have cult specialists? She was probably about to find out.
*
The new specialist was a woman, which could have been okay. Except she bonded immediately with Mother. They spent the entire hour processing Mother’s feelings about what she termed Lisa’s “abandonment of the family,” and in a way, it was interesting. She’d been so in love with Anthony, with the fantasy he’d offered of living on the farm, everyone responsible for everyone else, everyone in love, that she’d hardly blinked when they told her to write a letter withdrawing from her “baby family.” You’re a grown woman now, Lisa. You don’t need them to take care of you anymore. We will take care of you.
Mother said reading that letter was like having her heart torn from her breast. She actually said “breast.” If Lisa remembered how to laugh, she might have. It was probably good she didn’t.
The therapist, whose name she didn’t remember, was very sympathetic. She nodded a lot and asked Mother questions, drawing out her responses. Toward the end, the woman had looked at Lisa and asked if she’d known how deeply her actions affected her family.
For a second, she’d frozen. But this was an easy question, so she’d offered an answer.
“I guess it didn’t seem like anything I ever did mattered before.”
Mother had gasped and started crying again, which was weird. Lisa tried to feel bad, but she couldn’t feel much of anything.
They left, Mother still dabbing her eyes, and once they were safely in the car, Mother said, “She’s the first one we’ve seen who was helpful, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
It was enough. Thankfully today Mother didn’t insist on any further errands. Mental note: make Mother cry at therapy so she gets insecure about her makeup and doesn’t decide to tack a Nordstrom’s trip on after.
God, what a horrible thought. Lisa at the farm wouldn’t have thought that way. For a brief moment, she’d been a better person. Was it only because of the structure? Was it only because of the pressure to be good? Was it only because Abigail used to look at her like she was good so she started to believe it?
Lisa turned her face to the window and discreetly bit down on three of her fingers. Don’t think. Don’t.
Her fingers wiggled—had she told them to?—and she realized they were snakes. She pulled them from her mouth, heart pounding. The strange girl in the reflection looked terrified. Was that her? Was she terrified? She could still taste her fingers. Not snakes.
She dug her nails into her palms for the rest of the ride home and chanted no snakes, no snakes, no snakes until they were nonsense syllables in her head.