The Way It Ends

by Marnie Vinge

  A cult, it was called in the news now. Its humble beginnings never whispered of a cult. But Vanessa can’t deny how it looks out here. Away from society, they’ve constructed a compound. The very word was dirty. The ranch is their home. It’s more than just a collection of people following a philosophy. It’s become a community.

  And now their leader is wanted for murder.

  A better wife might be more concerned for Tom than the future of what he’d built. But Vanessa sees an opportunity, and fortune favors the bold. If she can position herself, she could lead these people.

  The first step in that, though, will be making sure that the baby was alright.

  One of the conditions when people reached the ranch was the dissolution of marriages. Tom, ordained by the universe, was the only man who was allowed to sleep with the women. And Tom had said, from the very beginning, that the universe would bless them all with a child. And Birdie had been the first to become pregnant.

  The word hadn’t been spoken—not by Tom or anyone—but it hovered in the empty spaces between sentences. The idea that the child was the messiah. That the child had been sent to alleviate the suffering that the group so eagerly avoided by coming to Revelation Ranch. The very cornerstone of the philosophy Tom had put forth was the idea that you could escape pain. It was a very powerful thought.

  Now Vanessa needs to seed another powerful thought in Tom’s mind. She needs him to think it would be a good idea for her to leave the ranch and get help for Birdie. As much as Tom wants that child, Vanessa wants it more.

  There had been a time in her life when children hadn’t been a concern. But now, a child is hope. A child is the future. And maybe her biological clock is ticking. But whatever it is, that baby matters more to her than him.

  She goes back inside the house, leaving the pig to rot in the sun. Inside, it’s like a tomb. Jeff and Ollie had left Tom alone in the study and he hadn’t moved. She stands in the doorway, watching him.

  He leans his head against the palms of his hands. His hair is a mess and wrinkles like mountain ranges on a map cover his clothes.

  Vanessa waits for him to notice her.

  “Oh,” he finally says when he brings his head up.

  “Tom, I need to talk to you,” she says.

  He groans. Her sentence never a good sign in a marriage.

  “It’s about Birdie,” she says.

  Tom’s eyes meet hers. Something there that Vanessa hoped she would see: fear.

  “She’s not well,” she says carefully. “And I’m concerned about the baby.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think she needs to see a doctor. A real one. She’s not doing too well; I don’t think she’s felt the baby move since she was shot,” Vanessa reveals the secret slowly, peeling back the layers of the sentence one by one.

  “She’s not leaving,” Tom says definitively.

  “Tom—”

  “Vanessa!” Tom shouts back. “If she leaves here, we’ll never see that child.”

  “The infection is spreading,” Vanessa replies calmly. “And eventually, it will get to the baby. Eventually, she’ll go septic.”

  Tom thinks about this for a moment.

  “You really don’t think she’s felt the baby move?” Tom asks. He’s horrified.

  This is just the reaction she wants.

  “I don’t think she has.”

  Tom inhales sharply, leaning back in his chair.

  “What are we going to do?” he asks. In that moment, he is a child. Vanessa feels his terror. She feels his pain. But she shuts them both down.

  “I’m going to take her to the doctor,” she says.

  “No!” Tom slams a fist onto the desk making the rotary phone ring out startled.

  “You need to make up your mind about what’s important, Tom,” Vanessa says, a threat. “Either you let her leave and the child lives or she stays and it dies.”

  “She can’t leave,” Tom’s voice is just above a whisper.

  “I guess you’ve made your choice then,” Vanessa says.

  Tom looks out the window, a sullenness in his expression that reminds Vanessa of a kid not getting his way.

  “Have it your way, Tom,” she says and turns.

  The doubt she’s planted is enough for now. It needs time to curl its roots into Tom’s psyche. She knows it will find fertile ground there. For now, she needs to do something with the pig.

  IONE

  I wake to the sound of voices. The realization that I’m not alone on the bluff startles me. There’s a little cave behind me. Hardly a cave—more of a concave piece on the back of a rock formation on the bluff. I grab my sleeping bag and my backpack and scurry over the dusty gravel atop the flat surface. I scrape my knee, garnering a nice strawberry that makes me think of my days as a kid spent playing in my parents’ cul de sac.

  The memory is short-lived as the voices grow nearer.

  First two, then I make out a third indistinct set of words. All men. I hear them talking.

  “The journalists have been coming up around here,” one of them says.

  “Probably trying to get a good picture,” says the other.

  I’m keenly aware of the fact that if I’m caught, they won’t find a camera in my bag.

  The third man grunts in agreement and if his noise can sound annoyed, it does.

  “Almost caught three of them up here yesterday afternoon. Looks like they’re leaving behind all their snack wrappers,” one says. I hear the rustling of foil packaging. Probably the man picking up a candy bar wrapper.

  “They ever go up here?” asks the other. This man’s voice sounds younger, less gruff than the first.

  “Nah, I don’t think so.”

  “It’s probably the best place to get a good look,” says the younger man. “And look, footprints.”

  Shit.

  I cram myself against the rock as well as I can. My bones pop, not quite as awake as the rest of me. My heart pounds in my chest at the thought of being caught. For a brief moment it reminds me of another childhood memory—hide and seek. Although, I think something much larger might be at stake now.

  I count my breaths as the men talk to each other. And then I hear footsteps approaching, coming up the side of the small hill. They scramble just like I did, trying to find footing and failing, then trying again and succeeding. The wait is excruciating. I pray that I go unnoticed when they reach the top.

  “Look,” says the younger one.

  I can see them now. One man is younger, black hair swept to the side and the other older with graying sideburns and salt and pepper hair. The third appears, having struggled the most on the trek up. He holds a walking stick and is older still than the other two.

  The younger one points to the water bottle that I left sitting beside the spot where I’d spent the night. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  The three of them turn simultaneously. Our eyes meet.

  “Well,” says the younger one. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I say.

  “You a journalist?” the older one asks.

  “Not exactly,” I say.

  “What are you doing out here then?” he asks.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” I stand from my crouch, my knees cracking.

  “You sure you’re not a journalist?” the oldest one asks. “Because we could use a journalist.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “We haven’t been exactly getting the best press, you know?” the younger one says. “Ollie,” he sticks his hand out.

  I shake it.

  “Jeff,” he gestures toward the middle-aged man. “Sid,” he points to the oldest of the three.

  “Ione,” I say.

  “Maybe we could talk to you, tell our side of the story,” Ollie says.

  “Ollie,” Jeff cautions.

  “What? It’s the best chance we’ve got at this point to turn this thing around.”

  “I would be happy to do that,” I say. “I went to school for jour
nalism. I’ve published a few pieces.” Suddenly I’m giving these men my resume, seeing my ticket in.

  “You wanna come back with us?” Ollie asks.

  “Ollie—” Jeff begins.

  “Yes,” I say the word before I can think through the ramifications. I’m entering an active crime scene. Someone is dead and the FBI is putting pressure on these people to come out. And now, I’m putting myself in the middle of it.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” the other man says to Ollie. He eyes me suspiciously.

  Ollie looks at me again, like he’s sizing me up, assessing the level of threat that I pose. He apparently finds it acceptable.

  “We need her help,” he says.

  “I don’t think Tom will like this,” the second oldest man says.

  Hearing Tom’s name is enough to bring reality crashing back down around me. The fact that this is really about to happen washes over me. It suddenly feels like everything is happening far too quickly.

  “I don’t like it,” says the one with the walking stick.

  Ollie sighs. The other two argue for a few moments, going back and forth about the pros and cons of bringing me back with them. Finally, Ollie interrupts them.

  “This is the best chance we’ve got,” he repeats his statement from earlier. “We need to take her back with us.”

  The other two look me over, doing their own threat assessment. They look back at each other, and finally, the three of them come to an unspoken agreement.

  They lead me down the side of the hill. I follow them, trying to catch up as even the older man makes good time with his walking stick. Ollie hangs back to talk to me.

  “You think you can put a positive spin on this?” he asks.

  “I can try,” I say, not sure that if I were to write something about what’s going on if it would be possible to make Tom appear to be the victim. I’m also not sure that I would want to paint him any other way than as the villain.

  “We can use the help,” Ollie says. “So, what made you come out here?”

  We walk through another little copse of trees just like the two that I passed through on my trek into and out of the creek.

  “Curiosity, I guess,” I say. “I guess I wanted to get back into journalism,” I lie.

  “Well, this is a hell of a story, I’d say.”

  Ollie seems to have more of a grasp on reality than I would have given him credit for at first. I’d imagined the people who came out here to live on Tom’s compound as empty-headed or crazy. I imagined the weak being preyed upon. And maybe these people were weak when Tom found them. I had no doubt that he was a predator at the core of his being. But these people weren’t caricatures of cult followers; they were real human beings with wants and needs just like the rest of us. They just got swept up in something bigger than themselves.

  And it just so happened that my former professor was at the heart of it.

  “I’d say you’re right,” I respond.

  The four of us walk across a pasture with cattle in it.

  “These yours?” I ask.

  “Yep,” Ollie says. “We’ve got cattle, horses, pigs. We only eat two of them, though,” he smiles at me. He’s charming even if he is a kid. I imagine him to be about twenty-three at most. His life is just beginning, I want to tell him. He doesn’t need whatever Tom has made him think he does.

  “So,” I broach the subject. “What’s this I heard about a pregnant woman being shot?”

  His face darkens. His brows knit themselves together with an invisible stitch.

  “You heard right,” he says. “Birdie. She got shot that night. She probably needs a doctor. Maybe you could help with that,” he looks imploringly at me.

  It’s clear that he feels for her. That he doesn’t want her to die out here. Whatever convictions he has about Tom as a leader, he has his doubts here. It’s a point I might need to exploit later, and I make a note of it.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I say. Hearing her name hits me in the gut. Imagining how far we’ve fallen or come, however you look at it, is overwhelming. It’s then that I make out the ranch in the distance.

  “Here we are,” Ollie says. “Home sweet home.” He says the last bitterly. I wonder how much he believed it when he first came here—if he thought in a million years it would end this way. Because this is the way it ends. Anyone on the outside can see that.

  As I take it in, I’m swept up in memory. Stepping under a barbed wire fence onto the proper part of the ranch is like stepping through a curtain into the past. Though the terrain is unfamiliar physically, Tom’s energy abounds in the place. It’s inexplicable. I wonder for a brief moment how it was that he had such a sway over my life for so long.

  And then it dawns on me.

  He still does.

  BIRDIE

  The tray that Ollie brought to her before making his rounds with Sid and Jeff sits untouched on the bedside nightstand. Birdie looks over at the food grown cold. She should eat. She grits her teeth and hauls herself up, stifling the unending urge to scream at every little movement. Maybe it will be like soreness after a workout; maybe if she moves enough, the pain will lessen, little by little.

  Still, she hasn’t felt the baby move. It’s not a good omen, if Birdie was invested in omens. But it’s not the end. Not yet. There’s still some fight left in her.

  She uses her good arm to get a spoonful of the oatmeal. Cold, it touches her lips and turns her stomach. She forces herself to eat, each bite provoking the urge to vomit. She feels her stomach contract involuntarily, threatening to spill everything she’s consumed since morning. And the image of the blood-soaked rag hovers in her mind, a ghost haunting her. It makes her more nauseated to think of it.

  After a few bites, she gives up. She hauls herself back into a sitting position in the bed and relaxes her body. The action of allowing her muscles to go slack makes pain radiate from the gunshot wound like a sunburst. She cries out and stifles it by digging her fingers into the blankets around her, burrowing down into the fabric like worms with bones.

  The pain subsides to the point that she can focus on the ceiling. The fan sits, lifeless above the bed with the electricity cut. It would be nice to feel the air circulating, she thinks. She notices a bead of sweat on her brow and wipes it with her palm. She draws her hand away and looks at the sheen of perspiration. A dull throb in her shoulder reminds her that sweat is the least of her problems. For a moment she wonders if the sweat on her brow means the infection is subsiding. She isn’t sure. She touches her collarbone gingerly and feels heat there.

  She groans once more, this time more at circumstance than at pain. And then she hears the voices.

  Down below the floorboards, in Tom’s study, someone speaks.

  “…radioed in on the solar walkie. They’ve got a journalist with them,” says one voice.

  “Some girl from the city looking for a story,” the other clarifies.

  Tom is silent. Birdie imagines his face, calm contemplation.

  “This could be a good thing,” says the first voice, making it obvious that Tom is skeptical.

  “How do you figure that?” the second voice asks.

  “He’s saying that we might be able to get a message out,” Tom says.

  “A message that’s not filtered through the FBI,” the first man says.

  A journalist. The thought thrills Birdie’s heart, making it flutter at a dangerous pace. She feels the blood thunder through her veins, suddenly conscious of every inch of her body. She wants to get up, to run, to leave. She wants to see this person. She wants to talk to them. Hope hasn’t been lost after all.

  Her mind whirs like a wheel, a hamster racing toward nothing. Her thoughts spin out of control, losing their original thread.

  The conversation goes on.

  “Did they give you a name?” Tom asks.

  “No. The message was short. Sounded like Jeff stepped away long enough to relay the message out of earshot of the others.”

&
nbsp; The realization dawns on Birdie that Ollie is part of the party that went out scouting the perimeter of the ranch. He told her when he brought the food by earlier. He’s with the journalist. If anyone would advocate on her behalf, it’s him.

  She wonders what he’s said to the woman. If he’s told her about her situation. She wonders how much the press already knows about the pregnant woman who was shot. Though she hardly feels like a woman right now. She feels like a girl. She feels helpless against her situation.

  But that’s not the case.

  Not now.

  There’s hope.

  BIRDIE

  6 YEARS AGO

  Almost a year passed from the time that Birdie officially received the Gorman Fellowship until she put a pen to paper and wrote a single word of her own.

  It had been eight months since the night that Ione left the ballroom and walked out of Birdie’s life. They didn’t speak after that. They both graduated the following spring, and from the same college at the university. But they didn’t acknowledge each other at the ceremony. Birdie was grateful that the student population was so dense that she saw Ione only when she walked across the stage.

  Another school year was on the cusp of beginning and Dr. Wolsieffer had dedicated himself to preparing for it. The last three-quarters of a year, Birdie had spent her time running errands for him—getting his coffee, his dry cleaning, returning his library books—and hadn’t spent a moment working on her own masterpiece.

  Bitterness had begun to creep in at the cracks in the foundation of their relationship, built on the betrayal of her best friend. Her position in his life had become an intimate one, though not in the way that Ione’s had been. She kept up with his appointments and did his scheduling for him. Sometimes she even prepared class lectures for him. Birdie sometimes wondered what the hell she was doing with her life.

  It was that summer that his wife, Vanessa, discovered the Unitarian church just off the university.

  At first, Vanessa went alone. She’d begged him to go with her. It was something that he vented to Birdie about. He had zero desire to participate in anything that might give Vanessa any amount of satisfaction. Something was broken inside their relationship, but Birdie could never quite identify it.