Unfollow

by Megan Phelps-Roper

We held each other and wept.

  “I’m sorry, Margie. I love you so much.”

  She let go after a long moment. She patted my back and walked away.

  She walked away.

  Jael came in a short while later, acting aloof and unmoved. She sat down on my bed, staring at her phone, typing away. She didn’t look at me. She wanted to know why we were leaving. Her coldness in the face of my chaos was painful, but it made it a little easier to speak. I kept packing and answered as best I could through tears and grief. I spoke of the elders and their abuse of authority. I spoke of the mistreatment of church members. I spoke of doctrinal error, of unscriptural temperaments and picket signs. I told her I didn’t think God was with Westboro anymore. She said little and stayed composed, but her voice broke when she thanked me for all the work I’d done on her wedding. How much time and energy I had spent to make it special.

  “I only ever wanted to be good to you,” I tried to say. I had to say it twice before she could understand.

  “But friendship is a two-way street,” she said, “and if I haven’t been doing it on my side, I’m sorry.” She was quiet for a long time, the only sound the clacking of the hangers as I pulled shirts off them one by one. Bekah and I had shared a wardrobe for years—“the community closet”—and I had to decide what to take and what to leave.

  “Have you been praying for the Lord to help you?” Jael asked.

  I nodded. “And my mom and I would together.”

  My dad walked in to discuss my assertion that I didn’t have a voice anymore. “Are you happy?” he asked Jael. She nodded. “Do you think you have a voice?”

  “Through my husband,” Jael said. Simpering.

  “And is that acceptable or unacceptable to you?”

  “That’s the way it should be,” Jael answered. “She has a voice through you. She has to submit to her father. That’s her lot.”

  And that was how the elders had managed to pull this off, I thought. The conflation of parental and ecclesiastical authority was only possible in a church like ours, where nearly everyone was related. By rendering us “children” so long as we were unmarried, they thwarted all possible challenges to their control. There was no need to listen to what anyone else thought, because as our parents, they would tell us what to think. I shook my head involuntarily. My father had never been like this. I hated what this church had done to him. I hated what it had done to my mother. I hated what it was doing to our family, and to everyone we had taken aim at outside.

  This place was toxic.

  I ran downstairs to sort out my desk and found Bekah. She held out her arms and I fell into them, both of us openly weeping. She was getting ready to head out the door.

  “I have to go drive with Jayme,” she said, “and you gotta do what you’re doing, so I guess we’re parting ways.”

  “I love you so much, Bekah.” Why didn’t better words exist? Your voice will follow me like a shadow for the rest of my days and I’ll never be whole without you and The nights I dream of you will be my happiest. I couldn’t let her go.

  “I don’t know how you can say that and be doing this,” she cried, “but Mom says you’re always welcome back here.”

  “I tried to talk to you about all this…” I wept into her shoulder. Someone was playing a hymn on the piano.

  “I hoped you just needed to get the right words from the right person,” Bekah said.

  We clung to each other until it didn’t make sense, and then she tapped me three times—the way we always signaled the end of a massage—and she turned to go.

  Noah texted me: “Pls turn around.”

  I looked up, and he stood there looking nervous. Afraid to speak to me.

  I turned, and I saw Zach’s computer from across the room. Noah often used it to play Minecraft, but now he’d set it up with a message for me. “MEGAN, LOOK” it read, with an arrow pointing to the second monitor. I moved closer. He had pulled up the Kansas City Star article from a year earlier. I’m all in. I wanted to tell him how often I had wished to go back to that place. How much I’d wanted to un-ask the questions, to un-see the contradictions. Instead, I hugged him. He was only thirteen. Maybe one day he would look back at this moment and understand. The way I had with Josh.

  I texted him back. “I love you, my brother. Forever and ever. I’m so sorry.”

  One by one, I said goodbye to my siblings as I came upon them.

  Three hours after my father walked into my bedroom, he was helping us load the minivan with our things. We’d have to come back the next day with a U-Haul. We couldn’t stay in the house that night—our lifelong home was not our house anymore—so he would leave us at the motel next to our old middle school. He checked us in, helped us unload the minivan, hugged us, and left.

  Room 108 was cold and sterile, entirely devoid of life, warmth, or happiness. It was everything I was afraid the world would be, and I couldn’t bear to stay there, not then. I sent a message to Newbery asking if Grace and I could stay with his family that night, and then Grace and I sat on the bed, waiting.

  A few minutes passed, and then my cousin Libby arrived with her husband. I hadn’t spoken to her in the years since she’d left the church—she’d been cast as “Libidinous Libby” upon her exit, a selfish, self-important whore—but along with so many other of Westboro’s judgments, I’d started to question their thoughts on her, too. I’d worked up the courage to reach out to her a few weeks earlier—a phone call to her office, because I was afraid she’d turn on me and publish my message if I emailed her. I’d told Libby that Grace and I were probably leaving, and she said, “I want you to come live with me,” and we spoke like friends who hadn’t just missed the last three and a half years of each other’s lives.

  In the howling, icy wind and the stark fluorescent light of the motel parking lot, the four of us loaded suitcases into the back of Libby’s car. They’d take it all back to their home in Lawrence, thirty miles away. My sister and I would follow in the morning.

  We hugged them goodbye, and they headed home with our things.

  As Grace and I drove to Newbery’s house in silence, I thought of a conversation I’d had with Bekah back in August. A letter had gone viral—a father disowning his son for coming out as gay—and she had called me into her office at the law firm.

  “I can’t believe it!” she’d exclaimed. “This guy actually says it right!” She started to read aloud, detailing the father’s refusal to have any further communication with his son. Their happy times together were a thing of the past, and his son was no longer welcome in his home.

  “If you choose not to attend my funeral,” he wrote, “my friends and family will understand.”

  I’d felt my heart sink as Bekah read, but she was too excited to notice that I’d only managed a dull “Wow…” in response. I knew this letter was exactly the posture my family would take if we left. Grace and I had wept that night, realizing that it was gay people—I’d stopped using the “f” word by then—who would best understand what we were going through. The community we had antagonized more than any other. I hated that it had had to come to this for me to understand what the church had been doing to vulnerable people for so long.

  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

  I couldn’t escape the sense of certainty pulsing through me as I pulled into Newbery’s driveway.

  No matter what I had intended, I deserved every bit of this.

  Newbery opened the door. His two sons and his wife were already asleep. He led us down to their basement, a pile of linens in hand, and Grace and I each picked a couch and tucked ourselves in. This place was foreign, but unlike the motel, it was bright and cozy. And most important: we had friends here. I was ready to cry myself to sleep, assuming Newbery would leave us to our misery and head off to bed. Instead he sat down in a recliner and talked with us for a couple of hours. I hadn’t known how badly I needed to talk to someone unti
l he started asking his gentle, unassuming questions. How urgently I needed to mourn my family aloud, free of the need to stifle and camouflage every word.

  Why had they made it so hard to tell the truth?

  Just before 10 A.M. the following morning, I parked an enormous U-Haul at the end of our front sidewalk. Grace and I walked up to the front door like we had a thousand times before.

  I rang the doorbell.

  “Why did you ring the doorbell?!” Grace was incredulous.

  “Because…” I had never thought to do otherwise. We were outsiders now. I had internalized my new status overnight.

  My parents reinforced that status from the moment they opened the door. They stayed with us wherever we roamed in the house, apparently afraid to leave us alone. As if they couldn’t trust us. It hurt my heart, but not like the jacket I found hanging on my bedroom door. Tucked into the hood was a sheet of paper torn from a notebook, with Bekah’s handwriting: “This is yours, Meg.” She had received the jacket as a gift from Jael several years earlier, but she’d shared it with me because she knew I loved it, too. We wore it so much that we’d put a hole in the left sleeve. The first moment I was alone, I slipped across the hall into Bekah’s bedroom, pressed my forehead to the floor, and wept so hard no sound came out. At the thought of her lying in bed thinking about this the night before. At the thought that she wanted to give me this piece of her—of us—to take with me. At the fact that she couldn’t say anything more than This is yours, Meg without running afoul of our family’s expectations of her. I tore a page out of the same notebook, but my thoughts were a circle of I love you I’m sorry I love you I’m sorry I love you I’m sorry, and expressions of those thoughts were the only things to come out of my pencil.

  Dearest sister-mine, Flor, Babi Lynne, Bobber Sue,

  I’m so sorry. I wish I could have been better. I love you more than words could ever say. I will love you and miss you forever, no matter what. I’m so sorry for everything, and for every offense I caused you. I’m so sorry. I love you.

  Swirl, MegHeart, Megabee, Megabus

  I left the tears that fell on the page and on her desk. They would be dry by the time she saw my note, but I hoped she would feel them anyway, and that they would say more than my words.

  As my parents, Grace, and I moved back and forth between the front door and the bedrooms, our timing became mismatched, and I found myself alone for another moment. I looked around, and then took off down the basement steps, rounded the corners, and ran into the darkened party room. Filled with a dozen long tables each encircled by chairs, this was a space we used to celebrate birthdays in the winter, and for meetings and Bible studies year-round. I flipped on the lights and pulled my phone from the back pocket of my jeans.

  Photos of my grandparents and their children hung all along the room’s two longest walls. I had wanted to take photos of them all before I left, but there hadn’t been time. There was never enough time. I pressed record and made my way around the room as fast as I could, afraid I’d be caught and told to stop. Still filming, I switched off the lights and continued to move quickly, back through the laundry room with the drain that had terrified me as a kid, back through the rooms that Josh had lived in just before he left, back up the fourteen steps, and into the kitchen. Weeping now, I moved through the downstairs, carefully avoiding my parents and sister.

  This could not be happening.

  Making my way around the upstairs next, I stopped at the photos of an exuberant baby Gabe. They were taken before his headful of blond curls had come in, back when he was bald and so fat he had three chins. I wondered if we would ever be friends before he grew bald again. I choked on the thought.

  I made it back to my room. Grace and our dad were outside loading a piece of furniture into the U-Haul. Hesitant, my mom pushed open the door to my rapidly emptying bedroom. I looked up and stopped moving. She stayed just inside the door. She looked like she wanted to come closer, but was afraid. Her tone was cautious.

  “What will you do, Meg? You’ve loved these doctrines. You were a little girl, walking around the park—”

  Her voice broke and her face twisted in despair. Gage Park. Our earliest pickets, back when I was five. She finished the sentence in tears.

  “—and you were so happy.”

  She turned to go, and all I could do was weep. I had no idea what I was going to do. I just knew that I would never be free of the pain of causing her pain. Of all the dreadful things I had ever done or ever would do, nothing—nothing—would be worse than this.

  The van was filled too quickly. We asked for our Bibles and headscarves and hymn books, and our father ran down to the church to get them. We met him and our mother outside by the garage. No hymn books, he said. Those belonged to the church. I thought of the blue hymnal that I’d written all over when Grace was born: “Megan Phelps-Roper + Grace Phelps-Roper” with a heart drawn around them. If they didn’t cover it up, it would be an object of scorn and pity for its new owner. Those two foolish girls.

  It was time for final hugs. Dad first.

  “Well, we’re not gonna be doing this for a while.” He didn’t mean it unkindly.

  And then Mom.

  “Goodbye, doll.”

  I was shaking. I don’t remember if I said anything. I just held them tight for as long as they let me.

  Grace and I turned to cross the yard to the van.

  “Girls?” Mom called out.

  We turned.

  “You can always come back.”

  Her hope broke me more than her tears.

  8. Strangers and Pilgrims

  We’d been on the road for a few hours by the time I realized I was white-knuckling the steering wheel. There weren’t many cars at that early hour, but the image would have seemed comical to anyone passing me driving north on I-29. Leaning forward with my face hovering just behind the dash, whole body clenched, I looked like the stereotypical grandmother with poor vision trying to navigate during rush hour. Had my sister not been sleeping in the passenger seat, she surely would have made fun. I unclenched my fists and tried to relax in my seat—only to realize a few minutes later that in the absence of conscious effort, my body had resumed its original position. I gave up.

  It was mid-December, and Grace and I were more than ready to get out of Kansas. Just over a month had passed since I’d last seen my parents, and confusion had reigned in the interim. After so many years of a life micromanaged by my mother, I now felt paralyzed each time I had to render an opinion about what steps to take next—as if decision-making were a muscle that had long since atrophied from disuse. At home, everything I did, everywhere I went, how long I’d be gone, everything had been pre-approved, double-checked, and tightly controlled. The multiplicity of rules was sometimes cause for frustration, but it was also a source of great confidence: I’d known what was required of me. I’d known who I was, and where I fit into the world. What did it mean to be the good girl in a world with no rules? I was unmoored. Outside of Westboro’s rigid system, fear and uncertainty now consumed me, a physical weight that I felt from the first morning I awoke in my cousin Libby’s house and every day thereafter: a boulder sitting on my chest, crushing my lungs, blocking any attempt to see around it. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I was terrified of making a decision that would land my sister and me in some horrific situation. Homeless. Friendless. Penniless.

  At the same time, the pressure to make every decision right now was staggering. I was keenly aware that Grace and I had a little bit of time and a little bit of money, and that both would be gone in no time at all. I needed to find a way to take care of us. I needed to be responsible. I needed a job immediately—since I’d graduated from Washburn four years earlier, I’d only worked for the family law firm, which was clearly no longer a possibility. And if the apocalypse wasn’t imminent, as Westboro had been proclaiming for years, then I was behind in heeding the counsel of my business professors by nearly a decade already. Two days after leaving Wes
tboro, I panicked to Newbery: “I need to start saving for retirement!” It was a stand-in for my every failure to prepare for this life, and the adrenaline coursing through me was not appeased by Newbery’s assurances that I had plenty of time to figure things out.

  And beneath the urgency and the loss and the yawning chasm of uncertainty, there was a deeper sort of terror: that no matter what I did, I was spinning my wheels in a futile effort to outpace the wrath of God reserved for the children of disobedience. My grip on the steering wheel tightened as I imagined my little black Pontiac spinning off into a ditch, smashing into a concrete divide, crumpling into a mass of metal and broken bones protruding from torn, sizzling flesh resting in pools of blood after a head-on collision with a southbound semi and—

  Stop! I ordered myself.

  I unclenched my fists again. Sat back. Slowed my breath. Tried to still the tremors in my limbs.

  I looked out the window, where no grisly scene awaited. The sun was bright and the fields along the interstate were vast and glistening with frost. Iowa, just after 8 A.M. I glanced over at my sleeping sister in the passenger seat. Though we shared our grief and fear, Grace’s disposition could not have been more of a contrast to mine. Where I wanted to cautiously reason and agonize over each decision, she seemed possessed by every emotion that came over her. Whatever she felt in any given moment was a call to action that needed no review and no revision, and she didn’t appreciate my offering them. When Grace had first suggested an escape in the days after we left—running away to France was her actual proposal—I rejected the idea. She couldn’t possibly be serious, could she? “If we can’t have our family,” I’d told her, both of us in tears, “then it doesn’t matter if we’re thirty minutes away from them or three thousand miles. Nothing will bring them back to us.” I had argued that running away from that reality wouldn’t change anything; it would only waste our ever-dwindling resources. She had just a few weeks left of the semester, anyway. Did she want to waste all the effort she’d already put in? None of these practicalities moved my sister. She was still determined to go, weeping in desperate frustration and despair that I refused. If I truly cared about her, Grace reasoned, then I would go with her.