You Can't Catch Me(80)

I nodded in agreement, but I didn’t know anything about my father or my parents’ religion, whether they were regular Mormons or in one of those splinter sects. Even when I was little and allowed to live with them, it was my mother who’d been the caretaker. If I had to guess, he agreed to have me to please her. Or I was an accident. More questions I couldn’t ask.

“Anyway, our parents decided we’d get married right away, at twenty, after your dad got back from his mission, Lord knows why, but it was such a blessing. Once we had our own home, we could make our own rules. We could sleep in, or watch TV, or sing along to songs on the radio. The one thing they believed in, our parents, was an education. They thought we were going to Brigham Young—your dad, anyway—and they gave him the money for it. But we’d applied to colleges in the East without them knowing, and we both got into Connecticut College with some scholarship money, and we decided to go for it.”

“They must’ve been upset.”

“They were livid. But we did it anyway. We moved away, went to college, met other kids.”

“And Todd.”

She nodded. “He was a philosophy professor. But he wasn’t like the other teachers. He wasn’t teaching from books; he was teaching from life. For life. Everything he said made so much sense to both of us.”

“If he was teaching anything resembling what I’ve heard, he should’ve been fired.”

My mother cleared her throat. “Well, he was. Fired. There was an . . . incident. But it was never clear what had happened. That girl was always throwing herself at him, and we were already in his thrall, and when he told us it was all made-up lies by the patriarchy to keep us asleep, well, we believed him. Without question. That’s when he came up with the idea of going to Schroon.”

“Why there?”

“He grew up there. That was his family’s land.”

A flock of birds crossed overhead. I wondered if they were still migrating back from wherever they went to in winter, or if they were local. Were these birds in my mother’s life, or only temporary visitors, like me?

“And you decided to follow him.”

“I know it sounds nuts, and it was, in a way, but after the way I was brought up . . . freedom was great for a while, but then I saw all the things that people did when they were free. We were learning about life for the first time. Seeing what all the possibilities were, but all the bad stuff too.”

I wanted to scream, and maybe the birds heard my thoughts because they suddenly wheeled away in a shriek of their own.

“You think I don’t know what it’s like to leave a cloistered life and get out into the real world?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Right. Whatever. You never do.”

I crossed my arms, hugging myself like I used to do when I was a child and I wanted to sleep. When I needed comfort. I was falling to pieces right there in that cornfield. It had to stop.

“This isn’t helping,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You telling me how you ended up under Todd’s spell, it isn’t helping. Kiki’s still dead and it hurts, Mom. It fucking hurts.”

She put her hand on my arm. I shrugged it away. “Don’t touch me!”

“Jessica, please—”

“No, you can’t make it better, Mother, okay? You didn’t even try. How could you not have even tried?”

She was crying, and I was fine with that. “I did try, I did.”

“Oh, please. No, you didn’t.”

“But I did,” she said, taking in a deep breath and letting it out through her nose the way Todd had taught us to when we were losing control. She did it again and I watched the tears stop. When she spoke, her voice was calmer, almost trancelike. “I let you go up that hill even though Todd offered to let you stay with us because I knew it would be better for you up there than with us. With him. And I did do something for Kiki. It was too late, too late for all of us, as it turns out, but I did try.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She turned to me with an expression I’d seen once too often growing up. The light of certainty even as the worst offense was being committed.

“This is bullshit,” I said. “What did you do? Nothing, just like always.”

She reached out her hand as if she hadn’t heard me, placing it gently on my arm. “Tell me, dear. Are you still under the impression that Todd died of natural causes?”

JJ and I drive through town to the police station. It’s not far, but sometimes short journeys can feel momentous. We park the car, then stand outside the building. Its base is made of the same stone they seem to use for a lot of buildings in town, a local granite, perhaps, though it hasn’t got a shine to it. It doesn’t look big, but there are jail cells inside and so many lies to tell if we’re going to avoid ending up in one of them.

“Are we doing the right thing?” I ask JJ as we stand on the walkway.

“You’re asking me that now?”

“I know, right? But seriously. We could . . .”

“Run?”

“We have her money.”

“Not yet.”

“No, but we can get it. And then we could be free.”

JJ shakes her head. “I don’t think any of this was about freedom, was it?”