But after two weeks, I’d started to realize that Grace was right. It did matter that we were still so close to home. I’d thought that staying with Libby and her husband would be ideal: Libby had been one of my best friends before she left Westboro three and a half years earlier, and I thought we could pick up right where we left off. And while spending time with her helped me start to find some perspective—not to mention comic relief—it quickly became clear that the thirty miles between Westboro and her home in Lawrence weren’t nearly enough. We were commuting to Topeka four days a week for Grace’s classes, and though it was a city of 140,000, we seemed to run into our family everywhere. We saw them while driving by pickets on the way to school. At the mall. The university. I was shopping for groceries while Grace was in class one evening, turning into an aisle only to immediately duck back around the corner—there was Margie, reaching for an item on the top shelf at the far end.
When I spoke to Newbery of these incidents, he didn’t seem to understand my overpowering physiological need to conceal myself from their gaze, and I couldn’t explain it. No, they wouldn’t yell at me. They wouldn’t attack me or otherwise make a scene. They would just pretend that I didn’t exist. To say that I hid to avoid judgment and the silent treatment could not convey or justify the depths of that savage instinct to hide, but it was the best I could come up with. I couldn’t bear to think of the things my siblings would hear from the rest of the church members, who made it a habit to report back whenever they saw ex-members. If Grace and I seemed in good spirits, we would be considered foolish and bestial, not recognizing how vain and worthless our lives now were. If we seemed mournful, we were pathetic, feeling the sentence of death in ourselves. In their eyes, we would never be truly happy—and we were delusional if we thought we could be.
And then there were the messages from church members that stopped my heart each time they appeared on my phone’s screen. They’d begun back at home, the moment word got to the rest of the church that Grace and I were leaving, but I had assumed they would stop once we were gone. They did not. Gran texted me the morning following our departure: “You need to consider the rebellion of Korah!!!! FLEE the wrath to come!” Jael sent several text messages and emails, as well, and she had changed my name to “Korah” in her phone. In a way, it was nice to know the narrative church members were spinning in my absence. Korah was a biblical figure who publicly challenged the legitimacy of Moses’s leadership over the children of Israel. As a result, God made a spectacular display of demonstrating that He had chosen Moses: He caused the earth to open up and swallow Korah, his cohorts, and their families—including their little children. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation. Afterward, God had sent fire and then a fast-moving plague to kill all who supported Korah. At the end of it all, about fifteen thousand were dead.
On receiving these messages from Gran and Jael, I’d read the story again and was struck by how much my complaints about Westboro’s elders sounded like Korah’s complaint against Moses: Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord? A pang of fear had gripped me, but I’d thought for a moment. Moses had been established as the Lord’s chosen leader via direct interaction with God Himself and a series of miracles—among them the parting of the Red Sea, the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites by day, and the pillar of fire that gave them light by night. Westboro’s elders had no such evidence to support their claim to unquestionable authority, and quite the opposite: their legacy was a series of unscriptural edicts and contradictory doctrines. They were not Moses. I was not Korah. And I would not be intimidated by their decision to paint me as such. In truth, once the first wave of fear passed, the comparison even struck me as genuinely funny: in place of a man who’d incited the revolt of thousands, there was me, perennial nerd and consummate good girl, leading a rebellion of two alongside my sundress-wearing sidekick. They gave us—and themselves—far too much credit.
Still, I remembered back to the days just after Josh left. Anger and indignation had been so much easier to tolerate than grief.
The messages kept coming. One of my aunts called to tell me that I had destroyed my sister. “It’s because of you that Grace has been able to go down this path to certain destruction. You weren’t content to take your own soul to Hell—you had to drag your sister down with you.” Her voice had sounded cautious at first, but quickly took on a vicious disgust. I didn’t know what to say. There was a good chance that she was right, and that things would go horribly wrong. I knew I couldn’t take responsibility for Grace’s decisions, but if she got hurt, there was no way I wouldn’t blame myself.
Two weeks after our departure, I received a text message from Margie accusing me of modesty violations and of fabricating reasons to leave because of my “lust.” Since I had been dressing exactly the same since leaving Westboro, I was confused. We went back and forth for a little while, and I tried to reiterate some of the actual reasons I left, but she just couldn’t hear me. She could acknowledge no wrongdoing on the part of the church. This, she insisted, was all my fault. “If your heart gets broken and you are ashamed,” she wrote, “reach out. Otherwise this is done.” I had sighed. Clearly, there was no point in continuing the conversation, and I cried to Newbery in bitter frustration.
NEWBERY: I guess it’s important to remember that they are trying to deal with this, too. They don’t know what to do any more than you do, but what they do still have is the church and the “certainty” that comes with that. And it’s all they have to try to find answers and deal with it.
I suppose that’s a long way to go to get to an idea that is much harder than it sounds, which is: I think you need to try not to take it personally. The only aunt and cousin I think you *really* need to remember is the one you knew when you were still there. The rest is just coping and probably fear.
I remembered what it was like on that side of this divide, and I knew that Newbery was right. But I was dismayed to realize that even while paying the enormous cost of leaving Westboro, Grace and I were still under the judgmental gaze of its members. How could we possibly move on while living in the shadow of the church?
It was time to go.
Just beyond the WELCOME TO SOUTH DAKOTA sign, the speed limit bumped up to 75 miles an hour. I hit the gas and barreled on.
* * *
We arrived at our destination at 4:15 P.M., just as the sun was setting over the Black Hills. I’d first seen them on the horizon about an hour earlier, rising ominously from a dense mist toward thick cloud cover that had cast a pall over everything since we’d crossed the Missouri River around midday. Grace read the Wikipedia page aloud: “The hills were so-called because of their dark appearance from a distance, as they were covered in trees.” As we drew nearer, I realized it was true—an endless array of pine. Grace looked up from her phone and we stared out at the clusters of trees with every branch and needle covered in a delicate sheet of ice. The fog made it seem like they sprang up and frosted just for our eyes’ amusement. “It looks like Narnia,” she marveled.
The road through Black Hills National Forest wasn’t especially icy, but I steered around the sharp curves with overmuch caution anyway. My eyes kept darting away from the road to a series of small signs reading WHY DIE?—memorials for victims of fatal car crashes, I would learn later—which further elevated my sense of foreboding. The question called to mind a verse my mother referenced often. Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel? “Repent!” I could hear my mother say. “Why will ye die?!”
Twelve hours on the road had landed Grace and me here in Deadwood. My sister had wanted to go to a beach, but I was afraid to spend that kind of money. I thought we should find a destination tha
t was less expensive and reachable by car, and I’d been drawn to Deadwood for several reasons. Its isolation and beauty. The fact that my brother Sam had been a fan of HBO’s television series by the same name. And though there was no chance of running into C.G. on this trip—his home was 400 miles away—some pathetic part of me was heartened at the prospect of sharing his beloved home state for a while. Having just learned about the home-sharing company Airbnb, I’d searched their website for “Deadwood” on a whim, and the very first hit had looked like destiny: the attic room of a huge, Victorian-era house set on a steep hillside in the city’s historic Presidential District, a long-term restoration project taken on by its owners, a young couple named Dustin and Laura Floyd. They were preparing to run their home as an inn. I liked the premise of Airbnb, but since I was a bit anxious about the reality of sleeping in the home of strangers, I looked them up on Google before our trip. The website of TDG Communications, a Deadwood marketing firm, listed Dustin as its co-owner and Laura as an administrator. Looking at their silly photos, biographies, and job titles—“benevolent overlord,” “administrative goddess”—I figured they were probably safe.
With the nose pointed down the steep incline, I threw my car into park and stepped out into the brisk afternoon, Grace following a second later. We opened the back end and stared past our visible breath for a beat: every inch of space had been filled with backpacks full of clothes, coats, boots, the comforter I’d slept with since sixth grade, Grace-approved foods like chips, bagels, and English muffins, and two hefty boxes full of books. Our heads snapped up as a petite young woman—just a few years older than me, I guessed, early thirties—suddenly appeared on the broad porch, descending the front steps with a warm “Hell-o! You must be Megan and Grace! I’m Laura, I’ll show you to your room!” She stepped carefully over the curbside mound of packed snow, paused at the overflowing trunk—“Does all this come inside?”—and grabbed the nearest box to lead the way to the attic.
The three of us maneuvered the contents of my vehicle through the cramped mudroom, past a small room with wood floors, up two flights of stairs that creaked with every step, and into the room I’d seen in the Airbnb photos: L-shaped with scuffed hardwood floors, two large windows overlooking the neighborhood, and steep rooflines that made constant vigilance essential: though twelve feet high at its center, the ceiling sloped precipitously downward until it was just four feet at the room’s edges.
Laura gave us a few pointers about the town, told us which way to go if we cared to wander around, and then left us to head back to the office. Grace and I stood in the attic in the midst of all the boxes, silent for a moment, assessing the space, planning. We spent the next couple of hours rearranging the room. We slid the queen-sized bed into the southeast corner, under the lowest part of the ceiling. Beneath the low slope on the west side, the boxes of books and empty suitcases. Clothes in the bureau. Dresses and cardigans on the little rack around the corner, next to a beige-colored door labeled—inexplicably and in sloppy blue marker across the top of the door—JANE’S ATTIC. We speculated as to who this Jane might be—a ghostly old woman haunting the gold miner she widowed? A young woman fleeing an arranged marriage?—while we organized our books and filled the recently remodeled bathroom with bottles of shampoo and conditioner and the rest of our toiletries. Finally, I spread my old comforter over the bed, and we sat down on top of it.
“What now?” Gracie asked.
I looked around. There was still a bit more to unpack, but we’d been at it for two hours already. “Well—” I started.
“Let’s go explore!”
Snow was just beginning to fall in thick flurries as we made our way down the hill in the darkness, but once we left the residential section and neared Deadwood’s Main Street, the lights seemed almost as bright as daytime. SILVERADO screamed the sign in front of the first casino we came to, row after row of slot machines visible through the front windows. We turned north onto Lower Main to find what looked to have been a thriving downtown at some point—casinos, restaurants, hotels, boutique clothing stores, and souvenir shops—each trying to look as if they still belonged in the Old West.
But like the brick road they lined, each appeared to be nearly deserted.
Many of the souvenir shops were already closed, but we stared through their windows anyway. It still felt almost criminal to simply wander around with no rules. We could take as much time as we wanted. We could go anywhere we liked. And we needed absolutely no reason at all. The freedom was heady. We kept going, past Pam’s Purple Door, past the Bullock Hotel, Belle Joli winery, Tin Lizzie’s, and the Gem Saloon. We admired the decorative streetlamps wrapped in snow-dusted garlands that lined both sides of the street, and followed their alternating red and green bulbs all the way to the end of the road: the Four Aces.
The entrance opened directly onto a brightly lit gaming floor, with the musical noise of slot machines and tables for blackjack and three-card poker. Aside from a large man slumped in front of a slot machine in the next room, the only people visible were casino employees: a couple of dealers, the bartender, and a maintenance worker. One of the dealers gave me an inordinately long stare, but I averted my gaze and continued on. Grace and I pulled up chairs at the bar and sat down. It was my first time at a bar—Grace had gone with friends a couple of times back in Kansas—but I tried to play it cool and pretend I wasn’t freaked out by the whole experience.
On the other side of the counter, a pretty, thirty-something blonde in a short black skirt, a revealing white button-up, and plenty of eyeliner turned around and gave us a maternal smile. She’d have to check our IDs. I told her that Grace wasn’t twenty-one and I wasn’t drinking, so there was no need. She looked puzzled but smiled and offered us hot chocolate. We sipped it through tiny red and white straws and chatted with her.
“Cora,” she said, extending a hand. “So … what are you girls doing here?”
We explained, giving the least amount of information possible: that we were visiting town for a month, between Grace’s fall and spring semesters. That we didn’t really know anything about the area. And that we had come to read books. Cora’s smile was broad. “Books!” She laughed. She seemed to think we were hilarious, and her voice had a gentle warmth that made me like her immediately. I forgot to be guarded.
It started off innocently enough: Why Deadwood? I told Cora that our eldest brother was a fan of the show on HBO.
“Your eldest brother?” she wondered. “How many siblings do you have?”
“There are eleven of us total,” I answered automatically.
“Eleven! Your family must be religious.”
“Baptist,” I said.
“What kind of Baptist?”
My eyes widened. How had we gotten here so fast?
“Independent,” I dodged.
She nodded sagely. Maybe it was my tone or my expression, or maybe Grace and I were unwittingly giving off a “runaways” vibe, but Cora seemed to intuit that our family’s religion and our presence in Deadwood were not entirely unrelated. She began to tell us about her mother, a woman who had created a religion of her own by cobbling together elements of Judaism and fringe Christian denominations.
“My mother was very ‘book smart,’ and she read a lot about a lot of different religions. She was very strict. She thought she knew better than everybody else. The whole world was wrong, but she had figured it all out. Very strict, very controlling.”
“What do you mean by ‘strict’?” I asked.
Cora described several prohibitions her mother had imposed, including a ban on the celebration of birthdays, Christmas, and other holidays.
“If anything bad happened to me,” she said, “it was because I was a sinner. It was because I deserved it. Instead of showing compassion or understanding or trying to help—you know, being a parent—my mother said things like that.”
I was dumbfounded. Westboro and this woman’s mother clearly did not draw from all the same wells, but their attitu
des sounded remarkably similar: an unwavering certainty in their righteousness and a categorical disdain for any ideas that did not fit with their own. Although it saddened me to hear, I also felt a surge of recognition that made me oddly hopeful. Maybe it wasn’t just us. For so long, I had seen Westboro as an anomaly, unique among all the world. I feared no one would understand what that life was like, and it made me feel alone—cast out of our family and forever set apart from the world for all the years we had spent antagonizing others. Hiding from the past seemed like the only answer, and it was another reason we had come to this sleepy tourist town in the frozen Hills.
Grace and I looked at each other, and I knew we were thinking the same thing.
We turned back to Cora and told her everything.
“Next time,” she promised at the end of the night, “I’ll add a shot of Jack Daniels to your hot chocolate.”
* * *
It was nearing eleven the following morning by the time I finally awoke from a dead sleep. I opened my eyes and waited for them to adjust to the cold light pouring in from the windows just next to the head of the bed. I knew without looking that Grace was still asleep, her breath slow and even. Even under the blankets, I was shivering. I slowly sat up and scratched my sister’s head.
“Gracie?” I whispered.
“Emph!” she grunted in protest, pulling the blankets up to her ears.
I persisted. “Shall I go make us breakfast? Half a muffin and coffee?” We still weren’t eating much. There was another petulant grunt from beneath the blanket, but Grace opened her eyes and we bargained: I would go on a mission to find the kitchen and return with breakfast, while she did some more unpacking. I picked up a bag of English muffins and a can of Folgers instant coffee and headed downstairs. The kitchen seemed improbably small after the historic grandeur of the other rooms on the first floor—broad spaces with high ceilings, beautiful hardwood floors, and brilliant sunlight streaming in through huge windows that spanned most of the distance from floor to ceiling. When breakfast was ready, I returned to the attic and Grace and I got down to the main purpose of our trip: reading.
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