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by Megan Phelps-Roper

  Back at the beginning of my communication with C.G.—Chad, I chided myself—he had introduced me to the writer David Foster Wallace. I’d begun exploring Wallace’s words in whatever forms I could find them—short stories, essays, interviews—and had shared them with Grace. We were particularly enthralled with a scene from one interview, in which Wallace recalled taking a year off from college to drive a school bus. He was unhappy, and there was much he wanted to read that wouldn’t be assigned in his classes. “And I read,” Wallace said; “pretty much everything I’ve read was read during that year.” Grace reminded me of the line in the weeks after we left Westboro, and it became an inspiration for our trip. I couldn’t think of a more suitable use of our newfound freedom: trying to see the world from the perspectives of others. Following Wallace’s example sounded like a grand adventure—an indulgence that would never have been countenanced at Westboro—but more than anything, it seemed like it might help Grace and me find some answers. We would only have one month before she’d have to return to school in Kansas for the spring semester, but it was better than nothing.

  In preparation for our reading trip, Grace and I had gathered stacks of books from a few friends, and had also paid a visit to the Lawrence Public Library. While she had wandered off to the fiction section looking for Flannery O’Connor and J. D. Salinger, I’d asked a middle-aged librarian where I might find books on philosophy and religion. I had run my fingers along their spines for a few minutes, reading titles and noting authors: David Hume, Immanuel Kant, C. S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche. After a moment, I’d found myself stepping back and staring up at the stacks, centuries’ worth of human thought devoted to understanding God and the world and how to live in it. I had wondered how we at Westboro could have ever believed that we alone had discovered the one true answer to it all. I had flushed with embarrassment at our arrogance, and at my own ignorance. What did I know of these philosophers and their ideas? Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. It was a catchall verse that had kept me from ever venturing too far off the beaten path, allowing me to dismiss out of hand any challenges to the most fundamental premises of our beliefs: Did God exist? And was the Bible His infallible Word? I had been taught that these were the questions of fools, but now I felt foolish for all the years I had failed to ask them.

  I knew that I would read the Bible on this trip, but at Newbery’s suggestion, I had also brought along books by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins: God Is Not Great, The End of Faith, and The God Delusion. Their presence felt illicit, so I decided to ease into the journey with a short book by Hemingway, whom I had also never read. Lying prone on the hardwood floor with my elbows propped up on a pillow, I picked up Newbery’s copy of The Old Man and the Sea and began. My phone sat nearby, ready and waiting for me to record any lines I found particularly moving. I needed wisdom and direction, and I intended to cull as much of it as I could from as many places as I could find it.

  Dec. 18, 2012—Day 1

  THE OLD MAN & THE SEA

  Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

  * * *

  Despite our best intentions to read uninterrupted for hours on end, Grace and I didn’t make it too long before we decided it was time for lunch. Grace sat at the kitchen table and read Anna Karenina aloud to me as I assembled peanut butter sandwiches, and then continued as I cleaned up the kitchen after lunch—washing pans, loading and unloading the dishwasher, sweeping the floor. Most of the mess didn’t belong to us, but compared to the nightly hurricane that constituted dinner in the Phelps-Roper home, this was nothing.

  And in any case, I was always happiest being useful.

  A door slammed and we both froze, my eyes snapping up to Grace’s. I peeked out the kitchen threshold, past the dining room and the entryway, and saw Laura coming through the front door, followed closely by a tall man with dark sideburns looking smart in a black peacoat and thick-rimmed glasses. Damn, I thought. Too late to hide now. I tiptoed back to the sink.

  “I’ve never seen the kitchen so clean!” the man said. “I’m Dustin. You must be…” His finger wavered back and forth between my sister and me. “Megan?” he asked, pointing at me. “And Grace?”

  I grabbed a towel to dry my hands and then shook his. He explained that since the offices for TDG, the marketing firm I’d read about, were just down the hill and around the corner, he and Laura often made the ten-minute walk home for lunch. I looked at the clock and made a mental note to stay away from the first floor during any hour that could plausibly be considered lunchtime. With three people now milling about, the kitchen had become uncomfortably full, so I stepped out of the main area and sat down with Grace at the table. I watched the couple as they raided the refrigerator for leftover pizza and some sort of rice dish, surreptitiously studying them for signs of latent psychopathy.

  “So what are you guys up to today? Is there anything specific you’re interested in doing while you’re here?” Dustin’s tone was friendly and helpful, and I sensed that he was in the habit of acting as tour guide.

  “Is there anything you’d recommend?” I asked. He rattled off a list of local attractions, most of which I didn’t recognize, but he noted that this time of year, many of Deadwood’s historic locations were either closed or only functioning on a limited basis.

  “And then there’s hiking,” he continued. “Just up the hill is Mount Moriah Cemetery, where famous Deadwood locals are buried—Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Grace and I were dressed and out the door. The cemetery gates were only about three blocks up the hill, but we were huffing and puffing almost as soon as we set out. The incline was steep, the temperature was below freezing, and the air up here—nearly a mile above sea level—was far thinner than we were accustomed to. We trekked along a paved path through the cemetery for a time, but layers of snow and ice made it difficult to follow. I looked over my shoulder at the falling sun.

  “We’re not gonna make it if we keep trying to follow the road,” I warned Grace. There were no more gravestones here, so she shrugged and began sidestepping directly up the mountain. Navigating straight up through the trees and around the iciest patches as best we could, we arrived at the top in less than twenty minutes. To the west was a view of pine forests in Deadwood Gulch, and to the east, a vast expanse of the Black Hills with their rounded summits, some covered in snow and others dotted with the standing remains of dead trees. The wind was ferocious. We only had a few minutes before we had to head back—I was convinced we needed a cushion of daylight in case one of us broke several bones tumbling over the rocky edge or down the steep slope—but I sat down on a frozen concrete beam to take in the view anyway. Grace sat across from me and slipped her phone out of her coat pocket.

  “The Snail and the Rosebush,” she began, “by Hans Christian Andersen.”

  It was a short tale, maybe half a dozen minutes long, but the wind was whipping away my tears by the end. “But shouldn’t all of us on earth give the best we have to others and offer whatever is in our power?” the Rosebush asked the Snail.

  “What do I have to do with the world?” the Snail derided. “I spit at the world. It’s no good! The world means nothing to me.” My mind called forth images of our most contentious protests, surrounded by scores of counter-protesters who were screaming, chanting, only held back by lines of officers and police barricades. I remembered our intent in those moments, the insistent need to show ourselves unbowed by “these God-haters,” our willingness to wound, our desire to cut them down in their arrogance—even when they were preparing to bury their closest loved ones.

  Which of those people wouldn’t love to hurt me now? An admission of guilt would be blood in the water. They would eat me alive.

  It was clear that the Snail’s path was the only option now: “I retire w
ithin myself, and there I shall stay.”

  My sister came to sit next to me, and we linked arms and wept.

  “I don’t want to be a snail!” I cried into her shoulder. We could never be more than an object of scorn to the world. What did we have to offer anyone? Our lives were forever tainted and would never amount to anything so good and pure as the Rosebush.

  “The sun was warm and the air so refreshing. I drank of the clear dew and the strong rain. I breathed. I lived. A power rose in me from out of the earth; a strength came down from up above; I felt an increasing happiness, always new, always great, so I had to blossom over and over again. That was my life; I couldn’t do anything else.”

  It was just too late for us.

  We stood and started back, arriving at the inn at sunset again.

  Twenty-four hours.

  Dec. 19, 2012—Day 2

  THE SUN ALSO RISES

  You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

  It was only our second full day up here, but we’d already slipped into the pattern that would define our trip: Sleep late. Eat breakfast. Read. Eat lunch. Read. Use the late afternoon to explore the Black Hills. Eat dinner. And then read until it was time to sleep again.

  Tonight we would do our evening reading at the Four Aces, to keep Cora company on her next shift. I already felt like a regular, and the employees greeted me like one. Cora put mugs of hot chocolate in front of Grace and me, and introduced us to a couple of the dealers working that night, Ryan and Derek. I recognized Ryan as the one who’d stared too long when I came in the last time—and soon discovered that it was because he had recognized me. An amateur filmmaker and fan of the director Kevin Smith, Ryan had followed my years-long Twitter battle with Smith (#SaveMegan).

  With eyes wide and mouth agape, I shook my head. How was this possible? I’d traveled twelve hours to this tiny town at the edge of South Dakota to get away from everything and everyone who knew me—only to be spotted on the first night at the first establishment I’d wandered into. What were the odds?

  “I need a drink,” I told Cora, using a poor imitation of a wink to disguise how unsettled Ryan’s revelation had made me. She poured a shot of Jack Daniels’ Tennessee Honey into my hot chocolate, which I nearly spewed out the instant it touched my tongue. Disgusting. Not wanting to be rude, I sipped the rest of it slowly while we all conversed—and though the flavor didn’t improve, I felt my stomach grow warm and my worries fade. As the dealers rotated through their stations and then off the gaming floor, they’d come to the bar to chat. Grace and I would ask them questions about their families and their lives—so foreign to us—and they’d ask about Westboro, what it was like to picket in the face of angry crowds, how our peers at school had treated us. They got a real kick out of the fact that we had made a habit of protesting outside our own high school over our lunch hour, snacking on Lunchables while classmates drove by honking their horns, flipping us off, and throwing the occasional sandwich.

  “Do you have any family outside of the church?” Cora asked.

  I beamed and told them the happiest moment I’d had since leaving.

  Two nights after our departure from Westboro, Libby had driven Grace and me to our brother Josh’s house. It had been eight years since he left—several lifetimes, it seemed—and at my request, Libby hadn’t alerted him to the fact that Grace and I had left, too. My stomach was in knots during the forty-five-minute drive. I had a terrible feeling that he would be unrecognizable to me, and that I would be to him. I kept thinking of the terrible things I’d said about him when asked by journalists. I’d told them he was a disobedient rebel. I’d told them he was bound for Hell. I’d told them he wasn’t my brother anymore. For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. I suddenly felt so silly and arrogant for judging him all these years, based only on his behavior as a nineteen-year-old kid and the fact that he wasn’t a member of Westboro. Would he forgive me? What kind of person had he become since I’d known him?

  It was pitch-dark when we arrived, nearly 9 P.M. Libby found the keypad and entered the code to open the garage door, and I followed her in while Grace stayed outside, waiting to see how Josh would react. All the inside lights were on, and I only needed a glance and a moment to take it all in: the granite countertops and matching kitchen appliances, the hardwood floors, high ceilings, and the inviting scent of maple-vanilla candles. This was the home of someone who’d made something of himself. Libby pointed me down the steps just inside the door, and I proceeded alone, pausing at the bottom of the stairs to look around. It was classic Josh. To my right, a framed collection of theater ticket stubs. Still the movie buff. Above the basement door, a wooden plaque that read, “I’m ashamed of what I did for a Klondike Bar.” The same sort of saying that had characterized his entire T-shirt collection in high school. And there in front of me was Josh himself, playing a video game with a headset on, his back to me—exactly the same position in which I’d found him so many times in his basement bedroom back at home.

  Some things never change.

  I held my breath, crossed the room, and sat down on the couch adjacent to the one he was occupying. His head turned, and he froze. Silence. I studied his face for a beat, looking for signs of anger or rejection and finding only incomprehension. I saw that where he had always been slim before, he was thick and muscled now. He had less hair, but his face was the same—the male version of mine.

  My head started to spin, and I finally exhaled. In my hands was an envelope full of photos—of our parents and our siblings through all the years Josh had missed. I pulled them out and started to babble, not knowing what to expect.

  “Hi!” I squeaked nervously. “I brought these for you. This is Jonah, and this is Gabe, and Noah … Luke. Grace took this one of Mom and Dad when we were hiking, and…”

  He sat still, unmoving, and I rambled on.

  Finally, he interrupted: “Hold on a second!” He stood up, took the photos from my hands, set them on the couch, and motioned for me to stand. His embrace had all the intensity of my final ones with Bekah and Mom and Dad, and though this one was “hello” instead of “goodbye,” I couldn’t stop the tears from spilling over again.

  Grace walked in the basement door a minute later.

  Josh stepped back from me. “What are you doing here?” He sounded truly bewildered. As if he thought it might be a dream.

  We stayed up talking until the wee hours of the morning, and if it weren’t for the sweeping changes in Josh’s life, it would have seemed like we’d never been apart at all. Josh was married now and had a little boy. He’d finished college and gotten a master’s degree. He had a great job. He had just bought this house. Motivated, industrious, and hardworking, just like our parents. I was elated for my brother and proud of what he had accomplished without the vast support system we’d grown up with—but I couldn’t help feeling very small next to him. There were only seventeen months between our births, and at twenty-eight, he’d already managed to build a wonderful life. I felt a pang of envy and regret that he and Grace had both chosen to leave Westboro so much earlier in their lives. Their decisions had left them more years to live in a world outside of Westboro’s conjuring—years I had wasted hurting people in a misguided effort to serve an image of a God that seemed less real all the time.

  But I got more years with our family, I reminded myself before bitterness could root itself too deeply. Eight more years of morning coffee with our mother. Of sharing jokes and indie rock music with our dad. Of pulling Noah and Luke around the neighborhood in the little green wagon while they slept. Of French-braiding Bekah’s shimmery auburn hair while she read aloud to me. I called forth memories to steel myself against twin but opposing tendencies I felt warring inside me: between regretting the past and romanticizing it. I couldn’t allow bitterness to steal the beauty in my family, or love to conceal the destructiveness in it. I wouldn’t rewrite history. I would
hold the whole messy truth of it to myself all at once.

  I wouldn’t do to them what we had done to Josh.

  “We have more family, actually,” I told Cora. “Like my grandparents. We haven’t spoken to them yet.”

  “Why not?” she wondered.

  I paused. Growing up, I’d hardly known my dad’s parents. Since neither had ever been part of our church community, we didn’t see them except for rare visits. My mother had always spoken derisively of them, and I understood from a young age that they were not like us. Nana and Grandpa had married young, and divorced amicably when my father was a baby—a cardinal sin in Westboro’s estimation, especially because they had both remarried. Still, their occasional stops had been grudgingly allowed until a few years earlier, not long after Grandpa’s final visit. He had stopped by unannounced one summer day, and my mother had used the opportunity to instigate a fight with him: she asked him what he thought of our protests at soldiers’ funerals. Grandpa was a career military man, serving in the U.S. Air Force until he retired, so when my mother asked, he told her exactly what he thought of the protests. Seeing the contentious discussion, my nine-year-old brother Noah wandered over: “Who is this guy?!” he demanded. Grandpa had left a few minutes later, and I hadn’t spoken to him since. My parents wrote letters to Nana and Grandpa enumerating my grandparents’ sins, insisting they wouldn’t expose us children to such corrupting influences, and that had been the end of it.

  “I don’t know exactly,” I told Cora. “I just have this … bad feeling.” She nodded, but she clearly didn’t understand.