Unfollow

by Megan Phelps-Roper

  I never allowed myself to imagine it, but it would be foolish to deny the secret hope that I came to harbor: that he could be mine someday. That he would eventually rip off the mask and appear at church one Sunday morning. That was the only way it could happen, of course; he’d have to join Westboro. I knew this was the only way, and I did what I could—keeping my words as disciplined and proper as I could make them—to sway him in that direction. In the subtlest of ways, I was trying to convince him of the rightness of our doctrines, the necessity of the protests, and the magnificence of life at the church. I never directly encouraged him to come to Topeka. Westboro had always frowned on attempting conversions; we didn’t want to guilt or cajole people into joining our ranks, because we believed conversion was God’s job alone. Still, I insinuated that it was the right move—and because he was responding with curiosity instead of condemnation, I continued to hope. I told several church members about him, even, as honestly as I could bring myself to be. I didn’t tell them he was the most captivating person I’d ever known. I didn’t tell them I loved my conversations with him more than just about any other part of my day. I didn’t tell them what he had promised me when I worried aloud that he would one day decide I was evil and stop talking to me (“I never will unless you want me to”). Since I was hiding the depth of my infatuation even from myself, it wasn’t so very difficult to hide it from the rest of my family, too.

  The latent dream of my waking hours became impossible to ignore one night in late September. Seven months of these conversations had left me impossibly intrigued and altogether obsessed, and as I slept, I dreamed. In the dream, I’m standing on the driveway outside my house one summer Saturday; the grass is a vibrant green, the neighborhood alive with activity, and the noonday sun is beating down unmercifully—just like I like it. A black car with darkly tinted windows pulls up beside me, and a tall, blond man opens the door and steps out of the backseat on the driver’s side. I can’t see his face and we’ve never met, but I know his name: Chad Garrett. Suddenly I’m on the other side of the block, on the front lawn of the church itself. There are church members all around working on maintenance—mowing the lawns and cleaning the inside of the building and playing with the kids out back—but I’m looking for him. He comes around the corner looking for me, too, and we’re alone for a moment. He walks over and embraces me, his hands tangling in my curls as he holds me against him. I’m keenly aware that we’re on the church’s security cameras, and I know I’ll be in trouble when everyone finds out, but I can’t bring myself to stop. I want this so badly. I’ve waited so long for him. It is undeniable.

  When I awoke, I was shaking. I could still feel his hands in my hair. It was September 30, and I spent the day fighting back tears, my stomach constantly on the verge of spilling its contents, though it was empty. When he started a game that night, I told him I couldn’t talk to him anymore, or ever again. That I was deleting Words With Friends. We went back and forth about the whys and the wherefores for a little while, but I knew I was right. It had become undeniable.

  This could not be. It would destroy me, body and soul, just like God had promised.

  Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?

  I’d already let this ungodly affection for an unbeliever take root in my heart. If I didn’t rip it out with both hands, I would fall away and lose everything—my family, my friends, my whole life in this world—and in the world to come I’d be tormented in Hell for all of eternity, where the worm that consumes your flesh never dies and the fire is never quenched.

  I didn’t imagine it was possible for this to be any more gut-wrenching than it already was, but I was swiftly corrected when the messages kept coming:

  You know I love you. You know I do. It’s not just the idea of you. I know you.

  You also know I’m not coming to Topeka.

  My heart hit the floor with a sickening thud. It was what I’d unconsciously ached to hear for so many long months, followed by what I’d feared was true all along. I thought bitterly of Jack Boughton, a character from Gilead, the first book he’d ever recommended to me: “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then, when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all.”

  I hated myself.

  Just before I deleted the app, he said, “South Dakota.”

  It took me less than two minutes to find his name. On a list of South Dakota State’s Attorneys, there it was: “Chad Fjelland, Clark County.” C.G.’s username included that foreign letter combination—“F/j”—and I was sure this had to be him. I looked him up on Google and found a photo: there he is, sitting in an office at a big wooden desk with papers strewn about, law books filling the shelves against the far wall. He’s wearing a white button-up shirt, his tie thrown casually over his shoulder. I stared for a minute, feeling so strange to finally have a face.

  I had to cut him out of my life forever, but first I had to know more. I wanted to know if he’d been honest. Online research had always been a strength of mine, so I spent a few minutes using my talents to uncover as much about him as I could, to see if he’d told me the truth. My mind swept through seven months of talk and came to rest on three data points that could possibly be confirmed independently: the size of the community he lived in and two deaths that had occurred there.

  First, I looked up the funeral home’s website and searched through the obituaries. It only took a moment to find what I was looking for, and my heart swelled a little.

  He’d told me the truth.

  “Clark, SD” was my next search term. Population: 1,139.

  Truth.

  I felt frantic, pathetic, and out of control. I was entering true stalker territory, but I couldn’t stop; I paid $6.95 for a public records search.

  POSSIBLE ALIASES: Chad G Fjelland.

  “C. G.” Truth.

  AGE: 39.

  Older than I’d believed—fourteen years my senior—but he’d never told me otherwise. Truth.

  MARRIAGE INDEX: No Records Found.

  The most important part. Truth.

  There was a list of addresses and phone numbers, but they meant nothing to me. I sat in the empty office staring at my computer screen for a long time. In the span of twenty minutes I’d gone from total ignorance to stalker-level scrutiny, and I finally had answers. I had a name and a face, proof that I’d been conversing with a real man who really existed in the real world. His name was Chad, even, just as I’d dreamed.

  And now he was gone forever.

  I crawled into bed and cried until I slept.

  * * *

  I tried to undo it all the next night, to take back my insistence that we never speak again.

  No, he said, we couldn’t talk anymore. It had all become too much.

  I agreed. What else could I do?

  I didn’t tell him I’d hunted him down and discovered his identity, but I did tell him I’d dreamed the name “Chad Garrett.” I didn’t know whether the middle name was correct, because the records search had only said “G.” Within half an hour, he’d sent me an email: a list confirming all the personal data I’d found the day before and more. The only thing that didn’t match was his age.

  “Age 38.”

  I shrugged it off. The public records search must’ve been based on the year, and his birthday just hadn’t come yet this year. Our age difference was unexpected, but by then, I just couldn’t bring myself to care.

  And anyway, my eyes kept returning to the first line of the email:

  “Chad Garrett Fjelland.”

  Chad Garrett. Chad Garrett. Could it possibly be that my dream had been right? It felt like a sign from God. It gave me hope that maybe the rest of my dream would come true someday, too.

  He said, “Believing in your heart that you’ll always be anonymous, and then to give that up … I think t
hat maybe that’s really the only way that a human being can share their heart. I never planned on surrendering that anonymity. You have what’s left of mine. Just never hurt me.”

  It was late. He made the last play of the game and won.

  Ever the tease, he said, “Finishing second in a two-person word game only hurts when you’re better at making words. Here’s three: goodbye, dear Megan.”

  Ever the know-it-all, I corrected his grammar: “Here *are* three.”

  “You passed the test,” he said. “Unchanged from the day I ‘met’ you. Unchanged.”

  For the second night in a row, I cried myself to sleep.

  * * *

  Months went by. I was depressed and missed him terribly for a while. I came to hate the Internet, because I couldn’t ever get away from him. He’d deleted his Twitter account—my Gatsby was gone for good—but there was a new one whose tweets and favorites I checked obsessively for months after we stopped talking. And then there was his Spotify account. His Instagram. His Facebook, though he didn’t friend me. But even apart from the Internet, he seemed always near at hand. His hipster music began to play on mainstream radio stations, eventually becoming fodder for Westboro parodies. My brothers had taken a liking to his little Field Notes notebooks, too, and I loved and hated the sight of them strewn about the house. Pathetic.

  Eventually I lost hope. Life went back to normal, but it was grayer than before. I’d finally seen what I was missing, and my world felt impoverished without it. Without him.

  It got easier with time, but I woke up one morning the following June feeling altogether desolate. A dream again, though I couldn’t remember it. The house was silent so early in the morning—most of its eleven inhabitants were still asleep—and I traipsed down the stairs to find my mama sitting in our office in her pajamas, her face lit up by her computer monitor. She looked over at me with a wide smile that morphed into maternal concern when she saw that I’d been crying. She rose immediately and hurried over to put her arms around me, rubbing circles on my back. “What is it, sweet doll?” she asked softly. I couldn’t talk through the tears, and she just held me tight for a long moment. Finally I managed to choke out between sobs, “I just feel so alone sometimes. I didn’t know it was possible to be around so many people and feel so alone.”

  She squeezed me and didn’t let go. She understood. “Oh, love bug.” She was so gentle. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened. He will comfort you. He does comfort you. I love you. We have a wonderful life.”

  She was right. She had always been right. Outsiders had scoffed at the long years of my mother’s anti-lust entreaties, the hysterical ravings of a Puritanical sex-obsessed hypocrite: “Really?” they’d ask, “God is going to send you to Hell for going on a date? What exactly is the harm?” But they knew better. The truth was memorialized everywhere from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” King David’s gaze lingering on Bathsheba as she bathed on the roof, Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you. Chance encounters igniting obsessions that shatter into heartache. The most pitiful part was that mine hadn’t even needed a face or a body to root its hemlock inside me. He was just words on a screen, and more than half a year had passed since I’d said goodbye to him. Can a man take fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned?

  I squeezed my mother and buried my face in her shoulder.

  6. The Appearance of Evil

  Right around the time the world began to unravel, my mother was recovering from surgery. She was supine in the king-sized bed she shared with my father, one set of pillows stacked beneath her knees and another propping her torso up against the tall, chestnut-colored headboard. My father was always on the lookout for ways to make her life easier, and he’d found her a small bed-desk from which she was now working. Aside from the whirring of her laptop, a companionable silence filled the room. I sat in the chair at her bedside with my feet tucked under me, writing a letter to my sister.

  Dear Grace Eliza, Sister-mine, Trouble-maker, Friend—

  Photography is where you shine, but you also have a way with words that’s truly your own. I think this [Field Notes Book] is perfect for you, and I hope you’ll write down the story of the little orphan girl who wanted to be a pirate (changed my life!) and Adventures of Mini Megan and other important things that strike your keen eye. I’m so thankful to walk this path with you, dear heart. So. Very. Thankful.

  With all my love to my baby sister (and favorite shopping partner ), I am

  Yours always,

  Megan Marie

  I was newly smitten with my anonymous friend, and he had just turned me on to these pocket-sized Field Notes Brand notebooks. The one in my hand was a special edition allowing for custom headlines, and to its blank cover I had delicately applied dry transfer decals to give it the title THUG LIFE in the chic Futura typeface beloved by hipsters everywhere. All for the irony, of course. My eighteen-year-old sister was no more a thug than I was a hipster, but it was fun to knowingly pretend, mocking both ourselves and the identities we took on. In spite of our skinny jeans and liberal deployment of gangsta rap lyrics in daily conversation, we had the self-awareness to know that we could never convincingly pull off these characters—“The Notorious M.E.G.”—all of which were especially ridiculous and giggle-inducing given that we were members of a despised religious group, both of us still living at home and required to obtain our mother’s permission to leave the house even for short periods. The juxtaposition was the joke. “The world is doomed, but check out these shutter shades and old-timey newsie outfits!”

  I looked up from the notebook as my mother set aside her computer, her eyelids turned down at the corners. Exhausted. Uncomfortable. Impatient. We were in the throes of the travel and media frenzy following the Supreme Court arguments, and this compulsory downtime was getting to her. The surgery had aimed for pain relief in her lower back, and as she curled her body away from me in preparation for a brief afternoon nap, I eased myself into the space beside her and pressed my thumbs firmly into the flesh on either side of her spine. Ours was a physically expressive family, my parents and the sisters in particular: Bekah, Grace, and I. Massage had long been a casual, regular occurrence in our home—so common, in fact, that I’d developed a Pavlovian response to my sister’s approach: goose bumps would appear all over my skin even before Bekah had begun to smooth away the tension she found in my neck and shoulders. She and I often spent evening Bible studies standing over our parents as they read aloud, working through the knots that had collected in their muscles as they spent long hours sitting at a desk, or laboring in our overflowing vegetable garden, or picketing on a breezy day with two signs in each hand (“the Butterfly”), or—in our father’s case—commuting 140 miles round-trip each day for his job in Kansas City.

  “Thank you, sweet doll,” my mother mumbled into the pillow. My hands began the familiar trek around each shoulder blade in turn, along the spine, across the span of her low back, and then reversed direction upward, returning to the pliable skin of her neck. The pressure I applied was alternating at regular intervals, muscle memory taking over, and I continued until her breaths came slow and steady. A few minutes longer to ensure she wouldn’t rouse, and then I slowly, deliberately disentangled myself.

  * * *

  My mother’s troubles began with an email. My parents tried to keep it under wraps at first, and they managed to shield my siblings for a short time, but I was twenty-five. For years I had spent most hours of most days directly in my mother’s orbit. Though I didn’t know its cause, her distress was apparent to me. She and my father were spending an inordinate amount of time in heated conversation that became hushed on my approach.

  After a day or two of gentle pressing on my part, my parents finally allowed me to see the message—just once, and only on my father’s iPhone for a few short moments. He hovered, antsy, so I read in haste before he could take it back. It was a disciplinary email from my eldest brother, Sam—just thirty-two at the
time—and Steve, a former documentary filmmaker who’d converted and joined Westboro a decade earlier. My stomach turned as I read the accusations, which primarily surrounded the harsh, unmerciful way she could treat others in the church. I knew as well as anyone that my mother could be too zealous in correcting other church members. I’d frequently found myself on the wrong end of her sharp tongue, and I’d had a front-row seat as most of the others had, as well. Still, no one could deny that her vehemence was borne of a desire to do right by the Lord and by us, and that—as Margie had rightly noted in her message to me the year before—my mother’s hard edges had been softening for some time now. She had a remarkable tenderness that had been an example for me all my life, the very embodiment of God loveth a cheerful giver. She sacrificed for our loved ones tirelessly, the result of an uncanny ability to discern our needs and an unparalleled determination to fill them, no matter what it cost her.