Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(76)

I don’t know how the fuck a box of Family literature ended up in a suburban garage in Texas, not exactly. Most of it should’ve been burned long ago.

When I was maybe fourteen, in Switzerland, other homes in Europe kept getting raided, the children carted off to foster care. If any authorities got their hands on those books, they would be evidence, pretty damning evidence—Heaven’s Girl (a sort of YA novel about a teen girl who fights the Antichrist and enjoys being gang-raped by soldiers—how else would you tell them about Jesus); Mo Letters, the meaty stuff; the how-to manuals on Flirty Fishing, sex, and training teens; and The Last State (how to tie a kid to a bed and beat her with sticks until the demon comes out).

   We had always been on edge about Romans, the police. But with news of the raids, we knew the Romans were finally coming. Just a matter of time. So every night, for months, we would burn books.

I didn’t care. I was hoping for the police, for any authority, to save me. I knew my grandma’s number by heart.

Either way, burning books was a cake assignment—outdoors, no one listening to you talk, keep the fire low so the neighbors don’t see and you don’t burn down a fucking chalet, tell a joke and toss another section of Heaven’s Girl on the fire.

Clearly we missed a few copies. Some members hated that we were destroying them and held on to their libraries. My guess—based on familiarity with paranoid older cult members—is one of those people who kept their books eventually stashed them in their daughter’s garage during a move or a divorce. All I know is the daughter wanted them out of her house before her kids or, god forbid, her husband found them. She called a friend, who called a friend, who called me.



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We have our own reasons for preserving the books that have nothing to do with their holiness and a lot to do with custody cases should someone need to get their kids from a parent who won’t leave the Family. Strange as it may seem, these books are our history. It’s proof of the stories we tell and the stories we can’t explain to our therapists and the stories we don’t tell the people who love us, because we love them and don’t want to hurt them. But I like to think that someday, people will gently fold their MAGA hats and All Lives Matter T-shirts, stuff them into a box, and shove them in the back of the closet next to the box that holds Grandpa’s white hood we don’t talk about anymore. I want to believe that eventually, finding someone who supported Trump will be as difficult as finding someone who supported the war in Iraq, or a prominent member of a doomsday cult, QAnon, if you will. You can’t change everyone’s mind. Sometimes it’s enough to know they feel shame.



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   I suppose it helps to explain what the hell I was doing in a Winnebago in Texas. I was having the sort of midlife crisis that causes people to quit their jobs, sell their houses, move into RVs, and drive across the country. Normal shit. You’ve seen movies. All of this had been an urge for a while. All it took was Springsteen on the radio during my nightly hour-long commute and I’d think, Fuck it. Just keep going. You can be in California by Tuesday. Some nights the only reason I didn’t keep driving was they’d put transponders in our work vans.

I had been doing what was expected of me, the job, the house, the modest forty-two-inch flat screen, the gym membership, the sensible Ikea sofa, lawn tickets to concerts twice a year, the two-week vacation somewhere cheap but nice.

For a moment, I had it all, the American dream.

My house, perpetually in some stage of renovation, as is the rule of fixer-uppers, was finally almost presentable. I’d patched and painted the once Pepto-pink walls in slate blues and grays, hung curtains, replaced the grout in the bathroom; both toilets flushed, the patched and sealed chimney had stopped leaking into the fireplace, most of the closets had doors, the porch railings were scraped and painted, I’d coaxed grass to grow between the weeds and planted a garden, you could even turn on a few lights without shorting out another light.

   So I did what you’re supposed to do, as a fine upstanding American homeowner in the Maryland suburbs: I invited everyone over for a crab boil. I was stuck outside in 100-degree heat steaming crabs. But I’d look in every so often and watch my friends standing around the living room, drinks in hand, making small talk. A few boyfriends and husbands were missing, and I assumed they were in the spare bedroom, watching football with my girlfriend.

I kept looking in because I was waiting for this guy to show up. I’d known him when we were kids in Switzerland. Now that I think about it, we’d burned books together a few times. It doesn’t matter. His name was Tom. And I used to know him. He was always a nice kid, always in trouble. (If you want to ponder the nature vs. nurture of it all, it’s kids like him I get along with now. The tattletales and rule followers and spiritual kids grew up to be assholes.) Tom said he was in town and I’d invited him, but hadn’t heard back. Then he walked in, and he looked like an overgrown version of the thirteen-year-old boy I used to know. His hair still sticking up around the same cowlick. Same half-dimple in his chin. Someone pointed to the back door and I waved.

What happened next was the saddest goddamn game of Show Me Your Life I’ve ever played. He showed me pictures of his kids. I introduced him to my dogs. He scrolled through pictures of his house, stairs he’d refinished, the deck he’d just built. I gestured around with the crab tongs—walls. He showed pictures of his vacation to Europe where he’d found these old ruins where we used to play Antichrist vs. Heaven’s Girl. I opened his beer with a bottle opener someone gave me when they got back from Croatia. He told me about his construction company. I might’ve told him something about work. Probably not. He’d already seen my work van out front.