Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(56)

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I was fifteen years old when we left the Family for good. Escaping a cult isn’t nearly as exciting as they make it sound, not the Family anyway. We walked out one night after dinner. No big deal.

All I have to mark the occasion is a single line in the diary I’d been keeping: “Mom came in to pray with me.” No one reading my diary would’ve known what I’d meant. But I’ll never forget. She asked if I’d leave with her. It was bad enough my sisters were in different homes and we’d have to leave without them. I was fifteen, old enough, she said, to decide for myself. I made the note in my diary, and I tried not to hope.

   She’d been planning it for a while. We’d been living in a smaller home outside Munich, just Mom, Gabe, and Mikey. My sisters had been sent to a teen home in some other city. It’s not a bad retention tactic. Harder to leave when you don’t know where your kids are. With a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you what my sisters’ names were then.

Of all the Family homes, that last one was my favorite. We’d rented it furnished, this chalet on a hillside overlooking a pristine alpine lake in Bavaria. My parents’ bedroom was the sort of library I still fantasize about. Three walls of books and a rolling wooden ladder to reach the top shelves. It was a home where the guy in charge was more scared of my mom than he was of the Family. Where my mom let us borrow books to read. Where I could get away with things like keeping a diary. Where we could take walks into town where Mom could call our grandma and ask for help with plane tickets. Where we could just walk out one night, take the train to Munich, and fly back to Texas. I’m not even sure we told anyone when we left.

My grandmother in Amarillo took us in, as always. We’d lived with her for three years when we left the cult the first time. I was six then. This time I was a teenager and had been living in a cult for six years. After Bavaria, and Switzerland before it, lands colored in with crayons—green meadows dotted with splotchy cows, pink and purple geraniums overflowing their window boxes on brown chalets, turquoise lakes and blue skies and mountains left white at the top of the page—Amarillo looked like coffee spilled on a brown Formica table.

   It’s a city where the weather is matched only by the meanness. My forebears moved out there in covered wagons in search of cheap land. The land tried to do what the natives couldn’t. But the Scots-Irish are a stubborn, stupid sort. They stayed despite the blizzards, tornadoes, hail, fog, freezing fog, heat, floods, and drought. They farmed dirt through the Dust Bowl and the wind that blows forty miles an hour on a calm day, coating the city in dried cow shit from the feedlots west of town. It’s a town where a year after I graduated high school, a punk, a sweet oddball named Brian Deneke, was killed, run over by a rich kid in a Cadillac during a fight. (If you think that sounds like murder, you’d be mistaken. See, the rich kid was a good Christian and a football player. Brian, a punk. Amarillo sentenced his killer to probation.) It’s a town where they sued Oprah. When you think about it, Amarillo’s reason enough to join a cult.

I got off the plane and looked out at the endless prairie, an ocean of brown nothing, and felt like I was lost at sea. I don’t know that I ever did get my bearings again.

Assimilating back into a “normal” teenage world was an adjustment. For the first few years my brother and I were homeschooled, which just meant we filled in some quizzes before our parents got home from work, after we’d watched MTV all day.

Most of the day, we tried to learn how to dress, talk, and act like humans. We quizzed each other on the lyrics to “Baby Got Back” because everyone else knew the words. We quizzed each other on sitcom and movie characters. We’d steal the People magazines from Grandma’s bathroom and memorize the important facts—ask me anything about Julia Roberts. We called this class “humanities,” because the ancient shit in the textbook wasn’t going to help us in Amarillo. We played basketball at a nearby Christian school. My brother was tortured for his bikini briefs in the locker room; I was teased for my giant red Sally Jessy Raphael glasses. We wore clothes my aunt bought us at garage sales. While Mom cleaned houses, Gabe blew money on pyramid schemes and make-your-first-million seminars.

   We enrolled in high school when I was a senior. My brother was cute and funny. I was weird and invisible. The one time anyone did pay attention to me was when a football player who wore a belt buckle the size of my head cheated off my algebra test and failed. I wasn’t even useful as a nerd.

I’m certain there were parties to attend on the weekends. But if I wasn’t working at the fast-food restaurant where I held a part-time job, I’d toss a couple books and a sack of tacos in the old Pontiac my grandpa gave me when I’d turned seventeen and I’d drive to the edge of the canyon singing along to Toad the Wet Sprocket and Pearl Jam songs blasting through my one working speaker. Then I’d drive home to make sure I wasn’t late for my pointless curfew.

There’s a specific time period you’re supposed to learn how to make friends, how to have a conversation, what role you play in the social order. I didn’t learn any of that because I was in a cult. And once I was out of the cult, I couldn’t explain any of that, because I’d been in a fucking cult. That I didn’t fit in even in the cult wasn’t much help.

   The distance between me and everyone around me, the disconnect, only served to reinforce what I’d learned in the cult: I didn’t belong.