Before I Let You Go(24)
I was curious at first, but as soon as we opened the door that day, I felt my heart sink. I remember staring at the people on our doorstep, and then looking to Lexie to see if she was as confused as I was. I realized immediately that Lexie wasn’t confused—she was suspicious.
Even at first glance, Mom’s “friends” weren’t your average visitors. Robert was there front and center, surrounded by women carrying Bibles. The women were each styled in variations on a theme—they all had very long hair beneath neatly pressed head scarves, and they wore skirts to their ankles. But although Robert was just an average, clean-cut-looking guy, dressed relatively normally, there was something about him that made my skin crawl. It took me years to put my finger on it—all I knew at the beginning was that I didn’t like him, and I really didn’t trust him.
Lexie and I pretended to read in the living room so we could eavesdrop on the goings-on in the dining room. Robert led a Bible study, and Mom joined in with as much enthusiasm as we’d seen her show toward anything since Dad’s death. She’d always been quietly religious, as had Dad, but this entire affair seemed different somehow—much more pointed, much more zealous.
“They’re from a sect . . . it’s like a closed church. I think they all live out at that little village near the lake—it’s called Winterton.”
There was another shock awaiting us when Robert and the women went to leave. At the door, Robert paused, and while he turned his gaze to Lexie and me, he said to Mom, “So, Deborah, we will be seeing you all on Saturday?”
“What’s Saturday?” Lexie asked him. I was glad she asked. I wanted to know, too, but I was too petrified to speak to Robert—his presence was so imposing.
“It’s the Lord’s day, Alexis. Your mother is bringing you to worship with us.”
Sometimes at Christmas, Dad and Mom took us to church services, but religion had been such a small part of our lives.
That Saturday we had our first taste of life in the fundamentalist sect Robert belonged to—which is kind of like someone who’d only ever seen puddles being dumped without a life jacket in the middle of the ocean. Mom made us wear our longest skirts and we had to wear our hair down, and then Robert picked us up in a minivan. Mom rode up front with him while Lexie and I sat in the far back and whispered guesses about what this church was going to be like. We speculated about how weird it was going to be, and we were definitely right about that, but we had no idea what we were in for. Lex and I were still thinking we were headed toward a church like the ones we’d occasionally been to with Mom and Dad.
We weren’t prepared for an isolated community in its own little village, five miles out of town. And we certainly weren’t prepared when, as we were walking into the long, windowless hall where the services were held, Robert turned to us and passed us head scarves. He stared into my eyes as he fixed it over my head, and my heart started to race and butterflies with razor-sharp wings seemed to appear out of nowhere in my stomach. I felt cold and confused and uncomfortable, and I had no idea what it meant or what to do about it. When he was done, Robert rested a hand on Lexie’s shoulder and one on mine, and he said very sternly, “Girls, you are not to speak once we pass through those doors. You may only ask questions and speak when the service is over and we move out of the auditorium. Not so much as a whisper, got it?”
And so for the next three hours we sat in stunned, bored silence as the service dragged on and on. There were hymns and prayers and several sermons—all delivered by men. The women in the congregation sat in total silence—even the female children sat silent, their eyes glazed with boredom, just as mine and Lexie’s were. I tried to amuse myself during this enforced silence—looking around at the congregation, wondering who all of these people were. I imagined lives for them. The lady in the blue head scarf was Jill, an expert marksman and martial arts expert, who worked in a shoe store by day and fought crime by night. The young woman next to her was training to be a nurse, and she wanted to work in Africa when she graduated. The plump, elderly woman with the gray shawl had once fallen in love with a king of some far-flung country, but his family did not like her and he sent her away, and she’d never again given her heart to a man.
This game amused me for some time, until I realized with some shock that one of the subjects I was imagining a world for was actually my grandmother, Dad’s mother, and she was sitting with a woman whom I recognized as Dad’s sister, Aunt Ursula. I had met this aunt exactly twice—once in an awkward exchange at the grocery store when Dad was still alive, and then again as she left his wake. I tried to draw Lexie’s attention to this shocking discovery, but she was staring at the preacher, and the more determined my attempts became the more attention they drew from Mom. Eventually Mom shot us a furious glare and I gave up. But having realized that Dad had some tie to this odd church, I began to wonder if Mom did, too. It didn’t take me long to locate her mother also, sitting several rows behind us.
I had no idea what to make of all of this, but it unnerved me and I felt myself becoming oddly teary at the realization that this odd, uncomfortable place somehow had links to my family. When the service finally ended and we filed back outside into the too-bright sunshine, Lexie caught my arm and whispered into my ear, “We have to get her away from these people.”
When our grandmothers approached a few minutes later, their cordial greetings and awkward small talk did nothing to comfort Lexie or me. We knew—right from the beginning—that something was off about that community.