I'll Be You(94)

Had I said that? I reached my mind back to Iona’s one visit to my house a few months back, tried to figure out if she might have misheard me. “Oh, I don’t know—”

Roni stepped in closer, so close that I had to tilt my head up to meet her eyes. She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “It makes sense, honestly. To start fresh. Move somewhere new. Considering your current circumstances.”

Your current circumstances. I wondered what current circumstances she was referring to, and then realized, with a sinking awareness, that she was referring to Charlotte. Roni knew, too. Did everyone? She was smiling with so many teeth visible that it was hard not to read a veiled threat in her words, a wolfish hunger. I thought of Ruth’s word—collateral—and wanted to cry. It wasn’t just paranoia; Ruth was right. How many more pieces of myself was I going to be asked to give away?

Roni rubbed her hand up and down my arm, as if I were a nervous child who needed to be soothed. I had to stop myself from twitching away from her touch. “You know I’m a real estate agent, right?” Roni continued. “All you’ll need to do is give me your keys, sign a few papers, tell me where your important documents are kept, and I can take care of everything else for you. Remember, Give up control in order to take control!”

By then, I understood exactly what would happen after my house was sold. Roni would take her cut, and Dr. Cindy would ask for the rest—another “investment,” perhaps—and somehow I’d end up with nothing at all.

I gave Roni the keys anyway. Because I didn’t have a choice. And—if I’m going to be honest—part of me wondered whether she was right, and it wasn’t such a bad idea to start fresh. To run away. I imagined moving somewhere far away with Charlotte, someplace where no one—not my family, not Chuck, not the Arizona police—would ever find us. A place where I wouldn’t have to explain myself to anyone. Maybe, once I hit Level Ten, I could go be a Mentor in New Jersey. Charlotte and I would be safer there.

I’ll happily sell everything I own, give it all to GenFem, if that’s what it takes to protect us, I told myself. And for a few minutes after I handed Roni the keys to my life, I almost convinced myself that it was possible.



* * *



—

My final evening at the retreat, not long before I was supposed to return to Santa Barbara, Iona came to find me. She was my ride back home, and I assumed she was coming to plan our departure. But instead, she led me down to the field, where we sat in the shade of the oak trees and sipped on canned seltzer. It was coming toward evening but the heat of the day was still crushing. Sweat trickled down my stomach underneath the loose tent of my dress. Beside me—her pale bare legs stretched out before her, flip-flops kicked aside—Iona gazed out across the grass. On the other side of the field, in the rustic amphitheater, Dr. Cindy was giving a lecture on “memory distortion” to a group of women who had just arrived the previous evening.

“You’ve done great work this weekend,” Iona told me. “But I think you have more to do.”

“More?” But I shaved my head! I thought. I smiled and I wore the dress, I took the workshops, I am letting Roni sell my house. Is that not enough?

“Dr. Cindy feels like you have some block that we need to keep working on. She can feel your resistance to fully embracing the Method, which makes us all concerned about how prepared you are for life back in Santa Barbara. You have made choices”—she said this with a waggle of her eyebrow, as if she hadn’t steered me toward those choices in the first place—“which require commitments and I worry that you haven’t mastered the control and strength you’ll need to face these. You’re not ready to go home.”

I thought of Charlotte with a pang. “How long do you think I should stay?”

Iona frowned. “Another week, at least, I think. It would be another twelve thousand, of course, but I think it would be worth it. You’d get a lot of one-on-one time with Dr. Cindy. Maybe we could get you to Level Nine, which, you know, is just a step away from becoming a Mentor yourself.”

I was silent, mulling this over. I wondered what would happen if I just left, cut ties completely. How long before the Arizona police got an anonymous call about the whereabouts of Emma Gonzalez? Would that be my punishment for letting GenFem down, for denying my fealty and finances to Dr. Cindy’s cause?

Of course it would. The vengeance would be swift.

In the distance, the sun was fading from the tops of the Topatopa mountain range, the evening shadows creeping up to steal the light. The air smelled like Mexican sage and eucalyptus and a faint whiff of charcoal. On the other side of the field, the women sitting with Dr. Cindy assiduously scribbled in notebooks, their foreheads buckled with intent. I tried to imagine this as my future, a never-ending string of workshops until I was finally the one standing in the middle of the circle, dispensing advice. A steel-spined Mentor.

Even without the threat of exposure, I wasn’t ready to go home, I realized. I wasn’t ready to face my disemboweled existence in Santa Barbara—business dying, relationships severed, house for sale, constantly living in fear of getting caught. Nor was I ready to try to reimagine a new one with Charlotte, somewhere far away.

But I also wasn’t prepared to stay there in Ojai, living in exile from Charlotte while I let GenFem continue to drain me, pretending I had never heard what Ruth had told me. Maybe remaining there longer was the punishment that I deserved. But it mostly felt like a form of avoidance—a way of staying where it was comparatively safe, hoping that everything in the outside world would somehow fix itself before my return.