Stacy Wong never leaves my mind. I see Stacy wherever I look. I suppose I always will.
Stacy was never supposed to be caught in the fallout of Lonnie’s wickedness. She had no part in the evil that must be obliterated. Anyone could see that. She just came a little too close to ferreting out some secrets that could not—must not—ever see the light of day again.
It was a hard slog through the storm sewer with a gallon of paint thinner, a gallon of white paint, and more sandpaper than I like to remember. And I did it while wearing Lonnie’s old boots, making my footprints untraceable to me.
Everything needed to be perfect, and it almost was.
I rubbed away and sanded off every single mark on those brightly painted walls that would have pointed the FBI to the family. Then I sanded off some more stuff, just to confuse them, and I splashed a gallon of paint around to confuse them even more. I bagged up the sandpaper, the empty cans, the brush, and the rags, passing them through the metal door. Then I prepared to crawl through it myself and drop into the ankle-deep water.
That should have been the end of it. And it would have been if Stacy hadn’t appeared at the open portal at just that moment, standing in the storm sewer and peering in. I will never forget the grief in the woman’s voice as she looked at the defaced paintings and shrieked, “Did you do this? Why would anybody do such a thing?”
If Stacy had known what those paintings stood for, she would have helped me sand them away. Together, we would have dabbed gouts of white paint over every multicolored square inch that Lonnie had painted. If Stacy had known the truth, she wouldn’t have seen them as history or art. She would have seen them as documentation of the misery of eight people. She would have seen them as an indictment of Lonnie for the premeditated murder of my brothers. She would have understood.
But there was no time to explain it to her. Stacy took one look at the paint on my hands and freaked out.
“You had no right. No right! This was history and you’ve destroyed it. It’s gone. Obliterated.”
The word “obliterated” triggered the violence that has been buried in my psyche since I was six years old, sitting on a hard bench in that cold room and listening to Lonnie justify the obliteration of anyone outside the family.
“Evil must be obliterated,” he said, time and again. “Until that day, we must separate ourselves from evil in all its forms. We will look back on this hard time and know that we were purified here. Here, we achieved our metamorphosis.”
I am the only living soul who remembers what Lonnie was like during the winter of our metamorphosis. My first mother is dead now, so she can’t help remember. My other mother, Sandra, is dead, too. Lonnie was guilty in their deaths, as guilty as he was in my brothers’ deaths, because people who don’t get things like mammograms and routine cholesterol testing don’t tend to live very long.
My first sister was barely toddling during the time we lived in this room, and my first brother was an infant. The others weren’t born yet. Only I remember the terrible winter when we lived in The Sanctuary. It was the time of purification, when we passed from the real world into a world that existed only in Lonnie’s head.
My mothers had spent the winter petrified of leaving The Sanctuary without Lonnie’s permission. His was a great talent for mind control. I give him that much credit. Even when he left to get groceries and paint—lots of paint that consumed money he could have used for jars of peanut butter and bags of bread—my mothers stayed underground voluntarily, buried until he decided it was time for our resurrection.
My second mother, already heavily pregnant with Zeb, spent that winter begging little Gabe to live. The baby’s illness hardly registered with Lonnie, busily daubing the walls with his hallucinations. He only put down his paintbrush to sleep and to dole out stingy portions of food.
“When we run out of money, it will be a sign that it’s time to rise to the surface again.” Lonnie said this on a daily basis, while opening a single can of beans to feed a man, a child, a toddler, and two women, one of them a nursing mother, but he had lied. Lonnie never opened his mouth without a lie coming out. We weren’t waiting underground until God gave us a sign to leave by cutting off our food. We were waiting for Lonnie’s father to finish dying so that we could have his house and his thirty acres.
Fortunately, my grandfather died early in the spring. Otherwise, we would never have gotten the garden planted, and this might well have killed us all. Our money was nearly gone, and Lonnie would have let us starve before he accepted help from the government. I was an adult before I escaped him. Only then did I learn that the government he hated so much might have given my brothers the medical care they needed to stay alive.
On the day I learned that my brothers didn’t have to die, I became a ticking time bomb. Lonnie deserved to be caught in my blast radius. Stacy Wong did not.