You Can't Catch Me(69)

My mother had, bizarrely, sent me a Christmas card with the address a year after that New Year’s Eve party with Kiki. I didn’t know who it was from when I got it; I’d never seen my mother’s handwriting. The return address was for someone named Charlotte Williams, which I honest to God had forgotten was my mother’s actual name. I thought it might be some long-lost cousin reaching out after having read the piece in FeedNews. It had come out in September and had garnered a ton of attention, both for me and the cult itself. I’d gotten a steady stream of emails from people I barely remembered. Some of them were thanking me. Others wished I’d left well enough alone. I didn’t care about them, though. What mattered to me was Kiki’s reaction, and the leg up the article had given me at work.

I’d made Kiki the protagonist of the story. She’d started her year away in Ohio. I’d included that detail in the story too. Her happy ending, turning all the bad she’d suffered into something better for a new generation.

“I don’t want people to know my business,” she’d said to me in a phone call after it had come out.

“I hid your identity.” I’d called her Katherine in the story, her middle name.

“That doesn’t change anything.”

I felt like shit. I’d made the usually placid Kiki angry. All to advance my career. “I mean, I hoped that the story would get a lot of reads, and I told you I was writing it.”

“You didn’t say it would be about me. You didn’t ask my permission.”

“You’re right. I suck. Forgive me?”

The line went staticky.

“Kiki?”

“I wanted to start over.”

“I know. Me too.” I looked at the picture she’d painted for me for Christmas, which I’d hung on my wall. “No one will figure it out. And if they do, you can use it to your advantage. Like, I grew up in a cult! Isn’t that cool?”

“I’m not cool; I’m going to be a kindergarten teacher.”

“You’re the coolest person there ever was,” I said, and she laughed. “Besides, this story will be yesterday’s news tomorrow, and you can go on living your elementary schoolteacher dream in peace.”

Those words have haunted me.

So, there I was, on a hot June day four years ago, driving down a dusty road searching for an address that had been a bit blurry on the Christmas card my mother sent me. Inside was a premade Christmas message, but below that she’d written: We love you. And that was it. Nothing asking to see me. Nothing saying she was sorry. Just a declaration of love that I had trouble believing.

I found the right road and turned left. From a distance, the house looked impressive—a large white farmhouse surrounded by pastures. Up close, though, the house screamed of neglect. The paint was flaking off, the garden was overgrown, and several rusted-out trucks were parked near the garage.

It seemed almost abandoned, except for the little girl swinging in a tire hanging from a tree. It was the girl I’d seen with my parents at Todd’s funeral, the one who looked enough like me to be my sister. She was about seven then, and her yellow hair was in two pigtails caught at the end with red barrettes. She was wearing a pair of blue coveralls, and she looked so innocent and perfect that it occurred to me that she’d been placed there to lure people in.

Nothing to see here, folks! Look, we have cute little girls in pigtails!

I hadn’t given her much thought since the funeral, and I wasn’t expecting to see her. What I was expecting, I didn’t rightly know. Just not her.

“I know who you are,” she said to me after I got out of the car and started walking to the house.

“That right?”

“Yeah. You’re the girl who left.”

“My name is Jessica.”

She cocked her head to the side. “I didn’t know that.”

“No?”

She popped her fingers into her mouth, sucking them. “Nah, they don’t use your name.”

I wanted to vomit. My parents didn’t use my name? They just referred to me as what? The Girl Who Left? What the fuck was this? Why the hell was I here?

I almost turned around and got back in my car, but I could see my mother peeking through the window, and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing me turn tail and leave.

“What’s your name?”

“Serene.”

“That right?”

“Yes.”

She had a slight lisp, which must have put her on Todd’s shit list. Any imperfection was the fault of the imperfect person. He nearly lost his mind once when he noticed that one of the boys had a large zit on his chin. Clean living, you see, should’ve kept the downsides of puberty away. God, he was an asshole.

“What’s your last name?” I asked her.

“Blakemore.”

I clenched my fist so hard my nails almost broke skin. “That’s not your last name.”

“Yes, it is. Mom says.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. We were all Blakemores when we lived in the LOT. Todd’s last name was given to all of us—we were all his children, apparently, belonging to him. But he didn’t have any actual children, not that we knew of. There were rumors—an occasional woman who gave birth to a child who people whispered about and then watched for signs of particular favor from Todd. Liam’s nephew, Aaron, was one of those kids, but it’s also just as likely that the other kids were simply jealous and looking for a reason why he didn’t have to spend as much time as we did learning how to dig the perfect ditch and tricking out end-of-the-world shelters.