I'll Be You(97)

This wasn’t only to be found at the bottom of a bottle, I saw now. It wasn’t even about the thrill of adventure, though certainly there’d been plenty of that. It turned out that this—the precipitous adrenaline leap—came from giving your heart to someone, and not knowing what might happen next.

In order to love a little girl, Elli and I had no choice but to take her back where she belonged.



* * *



—

But first I had to spring my sister from a cult.



* * *



—

We’d heard people looking for Elli while we talked—voices on the stairs, a cabin door swinging open on its hinges, footsteps slapping across concrete. Someone had called Elli’s name, an impatient woman’s voice echoing through the oak trees. But by the time we finally left the bathroom, nearly an hour later, the hill was quiet again.

Dusk had settled over the camp, though it wasn’t quite dark. Below, I could see the illuminated lodge, porch lined with fairy lights that twinkled through the scrubby woods. All of the women must have still been inside, because the rest of the campus was empty. As we stood there, listening carefully, I thought I heard the muffled sound of women’s shouts coming from the lodge.

“They’re doing Circle of Confidence,” my sister murmured. “It was supposed to be my turn tonight.”

I had no clue what this meant. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

We gathered my sister’s suitcase from her cabin and then headed down the stairs and crossed the meadow, our feet silent in the grass. At the back porch of the lodge, we stopped. Behind the door the voices were louder now, an angry chorus interrupted occasionally by a shriek of fury.

“How long do you think you need?” I whispered to Elli.

“I don’t know. Five minutes, maybe? Ten?” She hesitated. “I’m not sure about this.”

“I am. Go.” I pushed her, gently, away from me. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep them occupied.”

She lingered on the path. “But how?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I was surprised she didn’t already know. “I’ll be you.”

A funny look crossed her face. She lifted one hand and made a slight gesture—just the barest twist of a wrist, a flattened palm turned sideways—that I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. Then she smiled ruefully, turned, and left.

I watched her walk around the edge of the building, carrying the suitcase in her arms so it wouldn’t clatter on the path. Then I climbed the porch steps, pushed the door open, and braced myself to face GenFem.



* * *



—

They sat in a circle, nearly two dozen women, on folding chairs and lumpy couches placed around the perimeter of a blue-carpeted lounge. Some women clutched mugs of tea and others sat cross-legged on the floor. The whole scene would have reminded me a bit of an NA meeting I used to attend in a rec center in Santa Monica if it weren’t for the fact that all of the women were yelling.

Standing in the center of the room, her eyes closed, was Ruth. It appeared that they were yelling at her.

The cacophony in the room was overwhelming. It was so loud that I had to plug my ears with my fingers and still I could hear the insults that the women were flinging Ruth’s way. “You’re weak…you’re useless…you are a terrible mother…you care too much what people think…you’re vain…you’re fat…you have no self-control…no wonder everyone you love leaves you!”

Ruth’s face was the color of a fresh beet; her fists were clenched tightly against her side. She rocked back and forth on her heels, as if the abuse were a buffeting wind that threatened to knock her over, but her back remained ramrod straight. Over the chanting of the women, I could hear Ruth’s own coarse, keening wail.

“I am strong! I am my own person! I don’t care what you think of me! I am in control of my own life! I reject social norms!”

Surveying this savage scene, thin-lipped and contemptuous, was a slight woman with graying hair. She sat a little apart from the women in an upholstered armchair placed directly in front of the stone fireplace. In her hand was a steno notepad, on which she occasionally took notes with doctorly authority. I recognized her from the GenFem website: Dr. Cindy Medina.

She saw me standing in the doorway and the smile faded from her face. She held up a hand for silence, and the shouting skittered to a stop. The women—flushed, out of breath—turned obediently to look at Dr. Medina, and then swiveled again to see what she was looking at.

Me.

I lifted a hand in greeting. “Hi.”

Ruth, still panting, turned to face me. Her voice was dark with recrimination. “It was supposed to be your turn tonight,” she said.

I sucked in my cheeks, dropped my shoulders, tried to sink into myself, to feel as gaunt as my sister looked. All eyes were on me; it felt impossible that someone wouldn’t notice the ruse. Then again, I was a professional. “I’m sorry,” I said, and smiled faintly.

On the other side of the room, leaning against the wall, I noticed the statuesque Black woman that Caleb and I had met at the GenFem center earlier in the week. The woman who had been in charge, the one who told me that she didn’t know who my sister was. Liar. What was her name? Roni. She was looking at me with a strange expression on her face, as if seeing something that no one else had noticed. I quickly turned my profile to her.