Before I Let You Go(44)
“Don’t you want to try to feed her first?”
“Maybe later,” Annie whispers, and she kisses her baby’s cheek and closes her eyes. I lift the baby carefully into my arms, and once I’ve rested her in the crib, I hesitate.
“Annie?”
“Hmm?”
“You can decide on the name later, okay?”
“Hmm . . .”
She’s either already asleep, or maybe she’s pretending to be. I sigh and start to push the baby back to the NICU, but I’m only a few feet down the hallway when I’m stopped in my tracks by a memory surging to the front of my mind.
I’m back in the woods. Annie is walking along beside me, her long braids over her shoulders, holding the stupid doll I stole for her, wearing a broad beam on her face. Robert had taken away every single thing that gave my sister joy over the first few weeks in the community. It was as if he had set out to break her spirit, and I was starting to think it was working.
Annie had stopped smiling. I hadn’t realized what a difference a smile makes to a person’s face until hers disappeared. I’d always been jealous that Annie got Dad’s big blue eyes, but they were no longer so appealing when their sparkle disappeared. Looking at my sister and watching her fade away was like losing my father all over again; maybe even worse because it was slowly happening before my eyes.
So I stole the doll. I told Annie I found it behind a cupboard at school, but I actually took it from one of the kids who lived next door—I sneaked into her bedroom one afternoon when everyone else was playing at the schoolhouse. I just wanted to make Annie smile again, and it worked. The doll was a tool, just like the games I used to play to distract her during those long afternoons—simple ways to try to keep her connected to the childhood the sect and our new stepfather seemed determined to take away from her. From us. I can barely believe Annie remembers that doll at all—it was nothing, a pathetic straw that I clutched at when I didn’t know how else to help her.
But now, two decades later, Annie wants to name her baby after that doll, and my first reaction was to dismiss the suggestion as if it were meaningless.
I turn to stare at the door to the recovery room, but I can’t bring myself to go back. I tell myself she’s asleep and I can talk to her about it later, but the reality is, my throat feels tight and I know I’m going to cry. I avoid the gazes of hospital staff as I return the baby to the NICU, and then I go to my car and I finally start to sob.
I cry for the Annie who went into that community, I cry for the broken creature who escaped six years later, and I cry for the baby who one way or another is going to pay a price for her mother’s pain.
16
ANNIE
Luke,
Even as a nine-year-old, I knew I should have been figuring out ways to stay under the radar. Unlike Lexie, I just couldn’t bring myself to blend in. Her instinct was to survive long enough to escape, mine was always to fight.
I was never malicious or spiteful. I just wanted to go home, and so I fought constantly against any sign that I might be assimilating into that place. In the first few years, they were relatively small rebellions—skipping lessons at the schoolhouse, talking during the worship services, refusing to say “amen.” The punishments started small, too—those spankings with the leather strap barely penetrated the fierceness of my rebellion. And initially, they really were just light strikes against my skin—and Mom sat silently as he administered them over his lap, right there at the dinner table. I’d stare at Lexie while he hit me, and she’d stare right back—her eyes wet with tears, her nostrils flared. One night, when she tried to intervene, he hit her, too, and we both ended up in bed hungry.
“Just leave it, Lexie,” I told her. “I don’t even care if he hits me.”
“Can’t you just say it? Just say ‘amen’ and be done with it. It’s just a stupid word,” she whispered to me in the darkness.
“I can’t let him win.”
And even when the beatings grew fiercer, the pain didn’t bother me—I actually found a measure of satisfaction in the frustration I could see on Robert’s face as he reached for the belt night after night. But I hated that he’d hit Lexie, too, and so eventually I did learn to say the word at the end of the blessing, just to keep the peace for her.
Robert won that battle, but I still felt like we were at war, and the conflict soon shifted to my clothing. All women in the community were required to wear long skirts year-round, but in the summer, I tripped on one of my outings to the woods with Lexie and ripped my skirt. Inspired, I tore the bottom half of the skirt off, and I came to breakfast the next morning with it falling only as far as my knees.
Robert rose silently, lifted the belt from the hook beside the table and dragged me by the neck of my shirt back to the bedroom I shared with Lexie. He threw me onto the bed, and for the first time ever, he lifted the skirt and pulled away my underwear and he brought the belt down onto my bare skin.
“Keep your mouth shut,” he hissed, when I cried out. I heard a hesitant knock at the door. I knew it was Lexie, and so did Robert—he turned toward the door and he thundered, “Leave us, Alexis!”
Her footsteps did not retreat as I bit the insides of my cheeks to stop myself from crying out. Robert brought the belt onto my bare skin again and again. For the first time, he hit me until his rage subsided—and when he was finished, I was bruised and barely able to move. I crawled stiffly along the bed to press my face into my pillow as Robert hissed, “You are a filthy, sinful little girl, Anne, and I swear to you that I’ll beat the sin out of you if I have to.”