Unfollow

by Megan Phelps-Roper

  I started recording everything. Hymn-singing practices. The sounds of our monthly birthday parties. Evening Bible study. My mother’s stories about my siblings and me when we were young. A prayer she said for me. The din inside the van on picket trips. Bekah reading aloud. The repartee of my little brothers. Even if I somehow got them back later—even if they eventually left—all the years of their little-boy voices would be gone.

  An endless stream of photos. A family kickball game. Mom and Luke getting ready to walk to school one morning. My parents holding hands as they walked through a department store. A family visit to our favorite art museum in Kansas City. Milkshake parties with Gran and Gramps. Walks to the park with my nieces and nephew. The front porch where Grace and I ate breakfast each morning. A trip out for snow cones with Luke.

  In those months, every joyful experience became a torture that left Grace and me in tears and gasping for breath. We’d huddle together on my bed like that, trying to remember what it was like before all this. What it was like to be happy without the inescapable sense that we were watching the slow, excruciating deaths of everyone we loved. I began obsessively taking notes to chronicle every moment. I filled notebooks with descriptions of routine interactions, terrified of losing even a single one. As if clinging to these memories might alleviate the agony. As if recording it all could keep them from slipping from my grasp.

  I made a list entitled “Funny/Nice Things Said During Hugs.” Gran, on how she could always count on me to smell good. Gramps, on how my curls in his face made it difficult to breathe—how he was going to drown in them someday. Mom, on how she didn’t mind being smothered by them. Dad, on how he loved it when I finished his sentences. “I love you, Mimi,” he said. It was the name Luke had given me as a toddler, when he couldn’t pronounce mine correctly. “We’re very fortunate to have you as a daughter.” I wrote it down before he could regret it. Before he could take it back. Before he could take down the photos of me that hung on the walls, before he could repurpose my bedroom, before he could spend the rest of his life erasing me from his memory as much as possible.

  I started to clean out my room. I had never moved anywhere in my life, and I didn’t know how anyone ever did it. It took weeks, because I pored over everything. Old photo albums. Shoeboxes full of birthday cards and thank you notes I’d been saving since elementary school. I scrutinized every page of the baby book my father had been maintaining for me since I was born. He added to it every year, and it was full to bursting by now, outgrowing the three-inch leather binder he’d bought to expand it. Our family grew larger each time I flipped to a new page, until I came to something I didn’t recognize. A note my father had slipped in two months earlier, back in August.

  Dear Miss Megan,

  Thank you for all the kind things you do for me. I love you dearly. I don’t say either of those things enough. We are so fortunate. Your mother and I love you so much!

  Love, Dad

  A little at a time, Grace and I began packing our things in boxes. My sister made labels that said things like “shoes” or “books.” I numbered my boxes, meticulously cataloguing every single item that went into each one (“Shoes—Blue Wedge Heels from Jael’s Wedding”). I tucked each piece of jewelry I owned into a tiny white envelope labeled with the date and occasion on which I’d received it. If I ever forgot any detail, there would be no one around to remind me. I copied sixty-three DVDs’ worth of home movies, watching scene after scene play like a funeral reel.

  And all the while I knew what would happen when we left. I knew the heartbreak they would feel, and the betrayal. I had felt it when Josh left eight years earlier—a devastating postmortem that went on for weeks after he left. We had racked our brains looking for every sign of his duplicity. And with each new instance we found, we had transformed our horror into outrage. All of us who remained were disgusted with his perfidy. How could he? What sort of monster could pretend to be one of us, knowing all the while that he was going to abandon us forever?

  It did not occur to us to think of his devastation. We couldn’t see his terror, or his despair, or his desperation. It was so much easier to rewrite history and cast him as a villain. To insist that he didn’t care about us. That he was a selfish jerk who wanted only to pursue his own lusts. We could not imagine that this nineteen-year-old boy could have a legitimate reason to leave the only Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in the world today. We could not consider that there was anything truly wrong with us.

  My parents, my brothers, my sister, my Gramps and my Gran—they would all look back just like I had. They would see me copying those home movies. Interviewing Gran. Cleaning out my bedroom. They would search through all the text messages and emails I had sent. They would remember my tears and my refusal to tweet, and they would wonder how I ever could have looked them in the eye. They wouldn’t understand that I’d wanted to tell them everything. That I’d tried so hard to keep them. That I’d been begging for change.

  That I’d wanted to stay.

  * * *

  November dawned, and Grace and I couldn’t hold on anymore.

  Steve had announced a new round of Sign Movies—short videos, each featuring a member of the church explaining one of Westboro’s signs—and asked all members to choose which sign they wanted to address. Grace and I both signed up, but we knew we wouldn’t go through with it. The videos would be filmed November 23 to 25, so we had until then.

  Less than three weeks.

  We didn’t know it yet, but we wouldn’t make it even that long.

  At the end of September, as Grace and I were starting to plan our exit in earnest, it became clear to me that Justin and Lindsey wouldn’t last at Westboro. Especially from the perspective of an outsider, their treatment must have seemed so bizarre and unjustified. Why would they tolerate it indefinitely? So I reached out to Justin, ever so cautiously, to see if they were going to leave, too.

  They were.

  We started talking. First Justin and I. Then Lindsey and I. But Lindsey still didn’t want to talk to Grace. She was still suspicious. I told Lindsey that Grace had assured me there had never been anything more than friendship with Justin, and that I believed her. On the day that Grace finally spoke with Justin for the first time since May, I sent her a message:

  MEGAN: Dear Gracie, Just in case I don’t get back before you leave, a word of caution (as if you needed any more…): be careful with what you say to Justin. I know you’re cautious and discreet, and I know you wouldn’t deliberately do anything to hurt a friend. Just be careful not to put him in a position to be secretive or duplicitous to his wife; distrust—especially in that kind of relationship—is poison. No matter what, you’re a likely temptation. Sweet, charming, beautiful, talented, funny, and more. All those things + closeness to Justin = easy for Lindsey to suspect something. Make your conduct above reproach, and (if she’ll give you the opportunity again) be her friend. Make sure she knows she can trust you. You’re a good person. And you want good for people, and you want to *be* good to people. It’s hard for me to believe that there’s a person in the world you couldn’t win over.

  You probably didn’t need all this—but sometimes you say obvious things to me, and it helps me be focused and think clearly. Love you, Sun.

  Given that we still weren’t allowed to speak, the four of us began a disjointed discussion about our plans. Justin and Lindsey wanted to move to North Carolina, and at first the dream was for the five of us to buy a house together. I would get a job, and the other three adults would go to school, and Grace and I would help take care of Justin and Lindsey’s sweet baby boy. If we were living with our good friends—people who knew this life, who knew our family, who understood what it meant to leave them—then maybe we wouldn’t be so lonely. The problem was that the more time passed, the more strained these relationships became. The four of us could hardly keep ourselves together under the intense pressure, let alone be a support for the others.

  Desperate for help dealing with th
e emotional fallout of our decision, Grace and I reached out to one of our old high school English teachers. Whereas most of our teachers had preferred to ignore Westboro’s existence while we were in school, Keith Newbery had been one of the very few who hadn’t been afraid of the subject. He was a bit of a gentle giant—a former offensive lineman for Washburn’s football team when he was in college—and though he was less than a decade older than me, I had a sense of him as an older, wiser, calming presence. In school, he had never shared his beliefs or tried to shame us for ours; he just asked thoughtful questions when related issues came up in our homework or in the news. Twitter had opened an even closer line of communication with Newbery, and we’d kept up with him there over the previous year. He ran an account called @TchrQuotes (“Teacher Quotes”), which he filled with sarcastic riffs on things his students said. His posts were funny and inoffensive—“Nobody in this meeting knows I have a McChicken in my pocket.”—but whenever he tweeted me in a friendly tone, he was vehemently attacked by Westboro’s critics. That this cycle never dissuaded him from his kindness was part of what made Grace and me believe that we could trust him.

  Newbery was everything we could have hoped and more: a calm, rational, dependable third party. Objective. Someone who knew us, and our history, and our family, and who wanted to help us, whatever we decided. We started moving boxes into his family’s garage in late October, with the understanding that if Westboro changed, we would bring them all back. I could hardly think straight during that time, and I unleashed onto Newbery all of the thoughts and fears and sorrows and grief that I couldn’t subject my sister to. He was a voice of compassion and reason when we needed it most—which was fortunate because confusion was mounting.

  Justin explained that he and Lindsey were splitting up. The last several months had been too much pressure on their relationship. They were both planning to move to North Carolina, but now to different cities. Now what? I still wanted to help them, but getting into the middle of an increasingly messy situation seemed like a bad idea. I started to back off. Maybe we’d just have to go our own way after all.

  But then Justin sent a message to Grace on her twentieth birthday: he wanted to be more than friends. I was aghast. He was a worldly twenty-eight-year-old, married, with a young son. She was naïve, much younger than her years, and was on the verge of losing everything, still living in an impossibly controlling home under even more scrutiny than usual. How could he possibly do this—especially now?

  I thought of Lindsey. I had told her there was nothing between Justin and Grace. I could not imagine being in her place. She had come to Westboro looking for God, and she was leaving a year later with her world a shambles. I could not believe what had happened to her. I was ashamed of all of us.

  Justin was not pleased to find out I was discouraging Grace. He insisted that he and Lindsey had been planning to split anyway, independent of Grace. He’d told me about their split weeks ago, remember? Why was I trying to control my sister the way our family controlled us? Hadn’t I spent my whole life telling other people how to live? Who did I think I was?

  It quickly became a moot point as everything unraveled at once. The relationship between Justin and Grace existed mostly by text, and lasted about two weeks before Grace ended it—but after it was over, Lindsey found out. The email came a few days later.

  “Dear WBC…”

  * * *

  November 11, 2012. 3:55 P.M. Sunday.

  I knew we had come to the end of the line as soon as I heard my father’s voice. Stern. Gruff. Urgent.

  He threw open the door to my bedroom, and my head snapped up. Grace and I were crying again, and she was scratching my head.

  “You need to come talk.” Eyes wide. He turned on his heel and headed down the hall. Grace and I looked at each other and tried to dry our faces.

  We followed him to my parents’ bedroom, where Mom was sitting in the new rocking chair. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Her words were quick and urgent, too.

  We all sat down in their little sitting area, Grace and I on one side and our parents on the other. Dad started reading an email that Lindsey had sent him. About Grace and Justin. About our plans to leave. Things that were true mixed with things that were not. I was looking down, listening, shaking my head, knowing that we had to leave immediately.

  I looked up, and my mother was holding her phone. A moment later, I heard the sound that an iPhone plays when you start recording a video.

  “Please don’t,” I whispered.

  She apologized. She’d meant to take a photo.

  My father continued to read.

  I understood why my mother had said, It’s okay, it’s okay.

  Because there was hope for me.

  I could have repented.

  But there was no saving Grace. After this email, there was no possibility she wouldn’t be voted out.

  I looked at my sister and spoke in a low voice. “We need to go.”

  Our father hadn’t heard. Our mother had.

  I looked up.

  I watched her mouth drop open in a look of shocked horror that will haunt me until I die.

  I’d thought she might know. After all our talks, I’d thought she might see it coming.

  She had not.

  We filed back to our bedrooms to pack. We’d moved around twenty boxes out already, but there was so much more.

  We tried to stay together. We knew people would come to try to talk us out of leaving. But we were sobbing, not thinking clearly, and Grace darted into her room next door.

  Sam and Steve in the hall. Steve pushed the door open. I pushed it closed and kept packing. He pushed it open again, and wouldn’t let me close it this time. They were yelling, saying that I knew better than this. My face was so contorted that I couldn’t form sounds to make words. They left. Grace would tell me later that she’d asked our father to make them go. She’d heard them yelling in the hall. “She doesn’t want to talk to them!” she told Dad.

  My mom came in and asked that I go talk to Gramps. That didn’t I owe him that? I’d known this was coming. Mom had made others on the cusp of leaving do it in the past. A last-ditch effort to convince them to stay. How could anyone look at our beloved Gran and Gramps and say they were leaving? I wanted to say no. I looked at her face. I couldn’t.

  I walked across the yard with her, not registering that this would be my last time. This path I’d traversed, often several times a day, since I was a child. Down the sidewalk, past the trampolines and the green cover over the pool, in the kitchen door, and up the stairs. My mother was telling me that I didn’t have to follow Grace out the door.

  We sat down with Gran and Gramps in his bedroom, the television blaring as always. He shut it off. Mom tried to explain. She thought this was because of Justin. She didn’t understand that he was nothing. Absolutely nothing. That we would never give her up for a boy.

  That we would never hurt her for a boy.

  Gran, so quiet, disbelieving. “You don’t want to leave us, do you?” I wept harder at her gentleness. I couldn’t breathe. “You’re not gonna do this…?”

  I hugged her as hard as I could. “I’m sorry, Granny!” I sobbed into her ear.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  “Meg…?” Mom said.

  I had lived to support them. There was no worse anguish than causing them pain.

  I will never know grief worse than seeing the pain I was causing. Hearing the hope in their words, and knowing that it was too late.

  “We can’t let you go, honey.” Gran held me tight. “We’ll be so sorry if you go.” She paused. “Why?” Nonplussed.

  I tried to explain. I had wanted to tell them openly for months. I had determined that if I couldn’t make my objections while I stayed, then I would explain them in detail when I left. Maybe then they would listen. Maybe then they would understand.

  But I couldn’t say more than a few words at a time.

  “She basically says that she feels hopeless,”
my mother said. “She has a litany of … She thinks that the … Well, I don’t want to speak for her.” Even now, after more than eighteen months of mistreatment, on the verge of losing two of her three daughters, her “right hand,” she was too afraid of the elders even to relay my grievances about what they’d been up to.

  “I’ve talked to Mom about this before…” I wept. I said a few words about the elders. About the way my mother had been treated, up until that very day.

  “Well, this is not the way to treat your mom,” Gramps said gently.

  It was quiet for a moment. I couldn’t speak.

  He looked over at my mother. “Well. I thought we had a jewel this time, Shirl.” How quickly his voice had turned. Cutting. Disgusted. “Looks like we got it all wrong.”

  Three elders walked in a moment later, including Sam and Steve.

  I stood up. “I don’t … I can’t…” I was in no state to talk, and I would not be bullied. Not now. A conversation that was sure to go nowhere.

  A singular urge to run. I turned—

  “Megan!” My mom lowered her voice to an incredulous whisper, “Are you saying that your pride is more important than your soul?”

  “No!” I whispered back. Of course not. I panicked. “I need to go—”

  I ran out of the bedroom, down the stairs, out the kitchen door, and smashed into Jael on her way in. Jonah was right outside. It was so cold. I hugged him and told him I loved him so much, forever. That I was sorry. To please keep my phone number and to call me if he ever wanted to. He hugged me back, but he was only fifteen. He looked confused, unsure of what he was supposed to do.

  I sprinted the rest of the way home, back up to my bedroom.

  Margie appeared a few minutes later, crying as hard as I was. “Please don’t do this,” she pleaded. “Please don’t go. You’ve seen and said too much. You know this is right. Please don’t go. I’ve never asked anyone not to go.”