Before I Let You Go(38)
“What is this?” he asked, and he threw one of my notepads onto the desk beside me. I looked to Lexie.
“It’s mine,” she said. “It’s just some stories I made up. No harm done.”
“Yours?” he repeated scornfully. “Alexis, your handwriting would be neater than this even if you wrote it with your left hand. No, there’s only one person in this family with the letter formation of a preschooler and an overactive imagination.”
“They are just stories, Father,” Lexie protested. “It’s harmless.”
Robert turned his attention from Lexie to me, and he crouched beside me and held the notebook right in front of my face. I recognized it then; it was the book that contained the story of how Tara and Ellen escaped from an icy prison cell after being captured by an evil horse rustler.
As an adult, I can see that the symbolism wasn’t exactly subtle, but at the time, I couldn’t actually understand Robert’s fury.
“There must be something very wicked about you indeed for you to need to make up nonsense like this,” he whispered fiercely, and he held the notebook right in front of my face. I raised my chin, stubbornly holding his gaze, and he tore the notepad into two even pieces. I didn’t even let myself blink. “Focus your energies on the Lord and learning your Bible. If I catch you doing this again, there’ll be consequences. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Robert,” I said, and his gaze narrowed. He left the room, but returned quickly with the leather strap from the dining room. I was already well aware by that stage that my disobedience inevitably resulted in serious consequences. The leather belt hung on the wall near the dining room table, and during our first few weeks in his house, Robert had taken it down to fling it against my thighs when I didn’t say “Amen” after grace. That day, he lashed me for forgetting to say “Father,” and then he lashed me again for hiding the notebooks, and then for extra-good measure he hit Lexie, too, for her insolence. Neither one of us cried until he left the room, and then nursing our stinging thighs, we lay on our stomachs on our beds and we offered each other empty consolations.
“I’ll still keep my notebooks,” I said. “I’ll just be more careful to hide them.”
“Maybe a better idea would be to keep making up your stories . . . but don’t leave any evidence lying around,” Lexie muttered. “Just tell them to me instead.”
“It’s going to get better, isn’t it, Lex?”
“Sure it is. He’s still getting used to us. He’ll back off soon.”
“Sorry he hit you.”
“I’m really sorry he hit you.”
Mom wasn’t kidding when she told us we had dozens of cousins within the community. We met a seemingly endless series of relatives we had no clue existed before the move. But we had almost nothing in common with them, not even with the kids our own age. The children who grew up in the community were compliant and quiet, well accustomed to the strict discipline and dogmatic rules. As outsiders, Lexie and I were also excluded—I overheard an aunt explaining our “odd” ways to her ten-year-old son.
“They can’t help it, son. They were raised in a world of sin.”
I had no idea what this meant as an eight-year-old, only that it wasn’t a nice thing to say, and that it somehow explained why even the friends I made at the schoolhouse kept their distance. It seemed the more familiar I became with the community, the more I realized just how much there was to hate.
But there was a window of time each day when no one really seemed to care what Lexie and I did. Without TV and with limited reading material available, we were supposed to stay in our rooms after school to study the Bible or pray—but we quickly figured out that as long as we weren’t bothering the adults, kids were left to do whatever they pleased in the afternoons. Most stayed at the schoolyard to play, but as outcasts, Lexie and I attempted that only a few times before we realized we weren’t welcome, so instead, we took to exploring.
The woods had been cleared when the village was established, but a small patch of wilderness had been left untouched behind the worship hall. Robert’s house was only a few hundred yards away, so Lexie and I would quietly disappear into the trees.
The first few times we tried it, we weren’t sure if we were breaking some unspoken rule and we were so nervous about being caught that we just sat on rocks and waited for the ax to fall. But as the days passed, and our trips to the woods went undetected, Lexie and I began to relax. She was far too old by then for make-believe, but I needed it. I needed to escape, and there were no books for me to lose myself in and no TV shows to zone out into, and even the boisterous, fun play I’d always enjoyed with my school friends had disappeared from my life. One day sitting there in the woods, I turned to my sister and I blurted, “Can we play ‘mommies and daddies’?”
And Lexie—the smartest kid I’d ever met, well into puberty by that stage and more mature in so many ways even than our mother—stared at me. After a while, she nodded thoughtfully, and then she said, “Deal. But only if I can be the mom.”
13
LEXIE
I’m onto my fourth consult Monday morning when the phone on my desk rings.
“Please excuse me,” I say to my patient, and I pick up the handset. “Yep?”