Before I Let You Go(46)
I barely croaked the word because my throat felt so tight. I’m not even sure if she heard me, because my aunt circled around me and then bent close to hiss right in my face.
“Tell them about the darkness in your heart, Anne. Confess your sin and repent.”
“No,” I said again. My voice was just a little louder this time—more steel within the word. Another woman joined us on the stage, and she pressed an accusing forefinger into my face and thundered, “Elder Robert told us you cut your skirt last week and tried to go to school with your knees exposed. And now this—cutting your crowning glory, dishonoring the Lord. These are the lustful acts of a slut, Anne Herbert. You are trying to distract the men of this community with your appearance, aren’t you? You want their desire, don’t you? Whore!”
I was nine years old. I had no idea what any of that meant, only that the other women in the room were still staring at me, nodding their approval at the accusations. I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to do or say—so I stood and tried to run away. The aunts cornered me and pushed me back onto the chair and the questions continued. I have no idea how long it went on—only that eventually, I slipped away from them altogether. Maybe my body was still there on the stage, but my mind was somewhere else—somewhere safe.
But still . . . I didn’t apologize.
Later that night, Robert sat me on the couch and lectured me—pacing the length of the room as if he was too charged up to sit still.
“The devil is in you, Anne Herbert,” he thundered, and I snapped out of the strange half sleep I’d been in since the women’s meeting as I shot to my feet and hissed back at him,
“My name is Annie Vidler.”
Mom burst into tears, and I froze. Robert raised his hand and slapped me. I slammed my eyes shut instinctively, and when I opened them, I saw that Mom was holding her hand over her mouth, her knuckles white. She watched in silence as Robert dragged me into the bedroom for another beating.
“You just have to stop, Annie,” Lexie whispered to me in the woods in the days after the incident. “I know you’re trying to make a point, but this isn’t the way to go about it.”
“I have to,” I said stubbornly. “I’m not like you. I can’t just make myself fit in here. I hate these people.”
“I do, too. But we have to survive until we can leave, and you’re just making things harder for yourself.”
“I’m going to convince Mom to take me home.”
“Home? Annie—this is home now. There’s nowhere else for us to go—she sold the house, and her family is all here. She couldn’t take us away even if she wanted to.”
“But she could work at the old school, she could—”
“Annie!” Lexie grew impatient with me, and she raised her voice—something she’d do a lot in the years that followed, but it was rare enough then that I fell silent. “You’re making life even more awful than it already is, not just for yourself, but for all of us—for me and Mom, too. Please—can you please try a little harder to just go along with all of their nonsense?”
“But Lexie . . .” I started to protest again, but I fell silent when Lexie’s expression softened and she pulled me into her arms for a hug. Her arms were the safest place in the world, and when she embraced me, the sick tension in my belly unfurled . . . at least for a little while. Her arms were a fortress, confining my anger and keeping the demons away. Just for a few moments while she hugged me, I was actually just fine.
“I know it’s hard, Annie,” she whispered against my hair. “I hate it here, too. But we have each other, don’t we?”
“Yeah.”
“And as long as we have each other, we can get through anything, right?”
“Okay,” I said, and when she released me I looked right into her eyes and I promised, “I’ll try harder, Lexie. I’ll try to fit in.”
And I did try for a while, but I’d gotten into such a habit of being the bad girl, it seemed I couldn’t stop even when I wanted to. I tried to make friends in school, but everyone knew who I was by then—if not by reputation, then certainly by my haircut. Lexie and I had never fit into the community, but now we were completely ostracized, and I found myself acting out to simply deal with the intense loneliness I felt.
No one smiled at me. No one was kind to me. When I walked down the street, the other kids crossed the road to get away from me. If I tried to hug Mom, she’d pull away. I craved contact and acceptance—and I started to wonder if there wasn’t something more to the way the community rejected me after all.
Maybe I really was the bad girl.
I argued with my teachers and the elders, and I antagonized Robert, and I smashed a window in the kitchen just because, and I tore Robert’s precious family Bible then refused to admit it was me—even after he beat me until I bled. If there was a way to anger him, I found it. It became a game to me—a form of entertainment—but it was a game that increased the isolation that made me miserable in the first place and a game I couldn’t seem to stop.
Three and a half years after we arrived at the community, Lexie turned sixteen. She had a farewell party at the school the day before her birthday, and Mom lined a job up for her at the general store. The smartest kid in the community was going to be doing the filing for a purchasing clerk.