The Line Between

by Tosca Lee

  “. . . bottle in my medicine cabinet . . .” Julie is saying as she leads me to the sofa. A minute later, Ken returns with a white pill.

  “Wynter? Take this. Go ahead and chew it. It won’t taste good, but it’ll help.”

  A few minutes later, my heart begins to slow. I feel a little better. But I’m not. I know I’m not.

  “Honey,” Julie says, taking my hand. “Listen. Natural disasters happen. They’re a fact of life.”

  I let out a broken sound with my breath. Feel like I might vomit. “Magnus said—”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t give a flying crap what Magnus said. Look. There was a tsunami in 2004 that killed maybe a quarter-million people. Hurricane Katrina killed at least a thousand.”

  “Mmm, closer to two thousand,” Ken says, nodding. “I seem to remember a Chinese flood in the thirties that killed millions.” He reaches for his laptop. A minute later he says, “Here it is. Yes. Nearly four million people.”

  “All tragedies,” Julie says. “But the world didn’t end. A landslide isn’t the apocalypse. I promise.”

  I nod, the motion slow.

  I get that they’re not worried. But they’re of the world. Deaf to the Testament. They don’t know better.

  But I did.

  Which means if the world ends now I’m not only going to burn for eternity but will never see Jaclyn or Truly again.

  Julie makes me a bed on the living room sofa where I fall into a thick and merciful sleep. The next day, she takes me to see a doctor—one of Ken’s friends—who gives me a prescription.

  I don’t like how it makes me feel. But it dulls Magnus’s voice and the war of logic raging like a torrent in my head. Because by all appearances, the end Magnus prophesied is coming. Is here. But neither can I reconcile his Testament with what I know.

  A few days later, Julie takes me to talk to another doctor. Dr. Reiker doesn’t wear a white coat. She doesn’t have a stethoscope. She talks about PTSD and obsessive-compulsive disorder and gives me a prescription, which we pick up on the way home after my first flu shot ever.

  • • •

  THE MEDICINE SLOWS me down and makes me tired. I take it if only to get through each day. Because it’s hard to function when you’re facing eternal fire.

  I sleep a lot. Julie says she expected this—that there had to be some kind of ramifications for being in “that place.” That we’ll get through it.

  I don’t know how to tell her that there’s no way to get through an irrevocable decision. Or wishing every single minute you could go back in time . . . knowing you’d only make the same decision all over again.

  That this must be what it is to be damned.

  The new clothes Julie gave me hang off my hips and shoulders. Nothing tastes good. Julie fixes me soup and when I can’t eat it, makes me a sundae. Says once I’m off my prescription—the sleepy one—we’ll practice backing the car out of the driveway.

  But I am, by now, so fixated I can think of little else. What good is ice cream? We’re all going to Hell. What good is learning to drive when it won’t save your soul?

  At the end of my second appointment, Dr. Reiker suggests Julie remove the TV from the carriage house.

  I stare at the churches we pass on the way home. “Purveyors of lies” Magnus called them. False prophets selling cheap imitations of a truth revealed only to us.

  That night, Ken carries the television to the main house. But they don’t take away my phone.

  I track the news with panicked obsession. The death count in China has topped ten thousand. Two hurricanes are bearing down on Florida and another has just hit the Virgin Islands. But it’s the contagious strain of early-onset dementia that dominates headlines as people wander into traffic and burn down their homes.

  It is everything Magnus predicted.

  And here I am, on the outside. The wrong side.

  Sleep is my only relief.

  The next day Julie and Lauren take me on a forced walk. I squint beneath the sun as Lauren asks whether she has to stay in school. Julie says they’ll talk about it later, though what she means is not in front of me.

  That night over dinner, Ken gently informs me that they’re taking my phone—just for now.

  “None of us has gone through this before, Wynter,” he says, brows drawn together over the rim of his glasses. “So we’re learning along with you. The fact is, I don’t think we understood how overwhelming access to so much information was going to be for you. That’s our fault, not yours. Just know that we’re committed to getting you the help and resources you need. You’re part of our family now. You don’t have to go through this alone. Okay?”

  But that’s just it. They can’t give me the help I need. No one out here can.

  I take my medicine that night, sleep as late as I can the next day and the next. When I finally wake, I feel a little better. Lighter, maybe, the noise in my mind—once a roaring cyclone—having calmed to an eddy.

  I eat a spinach, avocado, and provolone sandwich. Potato chips. Toaster Strudel and tea. The leaves are falling even as temperatures return to the seventies. By the end of the week, Ken and Julie announce that we’re going to Indiana Dunes for a few days to unplug—for all of our benefit.

  I am stunned by the sandy beach, the teal-green waters of Lake Michigan stretching to the Chicago skyline where a flock of birds swarms into the warm autumn air.

  The next morning I learn that those weren’t birds at all but a billow of smoke from a high-rise on fire.

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  The result: the New Earth community and not-for-profit outreach ministry located north of Ames, Iowa, and the New Earth Pure Life™ Seed Bank and Company. Today, we are three things:

  1. A community of like-minded souls intent on worshipping the Creator in all that we do—including what we put into our bodies and by sustainable living practices.

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  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  Jaclyn would marry Magnus in twelve days.

  Two weeks after which, I was to marry Elder Decaro.

  Shae’s dad.

  The news—delivered to me and the entire assembly at morning service—left me numb. I barely heard the congratulations of the women around me as I endured their hugs.

  He was forty-nine. I had just turned eighteen—the same age as Shae. Not that she would probably ever know she had a stepmom. Since her disappearance, Elder Decaro technically no longer had any children.

  I moved as though through a fog as he came to take my elbow after service and led me
outside to a bench, saying he’d like to get to know me. I listened as he told me that he had been born in Nevada, gone to college in California. That he had owned a financial company in San Diego before coming to the Enclave after his divorce—which wouldn’t impede our marriage as it had happened outside the Testament. Erased, as though it never existed.

  Just like Shae.

  “I wanted to explain why I’m not coming to you chaste,” he said. “And . . . you?” he asked, openly studying me.

  I looked up, cheeks threatening to burst into flame. Affronted by the question. To be having this discussion at all. For Shae, wherever she was.

  “No, I’ve never been married or fathered children,” I said, before making some excuse about being needed in the Banquet Table and striding away.

  I shut myself in the kitchen’s equipment room and slid down against the shelves, heels of my hands pressed to my eyes. How had this happened? Whose idea had this been? Had he asked for me?

  I couldn’t do it. Could I? Was it possible I could ever look at him that way?

  No. Not possible. Elder Omni’s son, handsome and twenty-six, yes. Always. Though I’d repented of those ruminations years ago, or so I thought.

  I’d been rude to Shae’s dad—though I reasoned he’d been rude to me, too. We’d barely exchanged a dozen words in the last three years and that was the first thing he asked me?

  I stumbled through my lunch shift, keeping well to the back of the kitchen, away from the serving line. Spent the rest of the day enduring the envious glances of the other girls in my barrow, feeling all the while tilted off axis, reeling out of orbit.

  That night I prayed for a way out of my engagement. To be released from the honor.

  And then I prayed to be forgiven for even asking . . . and asked again.

  By morning, preparations for Jaclyn’s wedding were already in full swing. Flowers. Food. Music. The two-hour service that would mark the union of human and divine when Magnus, the Mouthpiece of God, would deign to become one with his Select once more.

  At least the focus was off me for now.

  Were I not coming to terms with my own marriage, I might have been happier for Jaclyn. She’d be the Kestral of our age. Except that in every way Kestral had been angelic, Jaclyn was dour. Where Kestral had been gentle, Jaclyn was severe.

  When the day came, she looked happy—radiant, even—as Elder Canon served her and Magnus communion and Elder Omni prayed for the blessing of children.

  I wondered if Jaclyn was nervous—if not for tonight then at the prospect of childbirth. I’d heard another girl’s screams from the next barrow over as she gave birth to a ten-pound baby girl just after her nineteenth birthday.

  The next morning, I rode to Ames with two other girls and set up the New Earth booth at the farmers’ market I had finally been allowed to work since the start of summer. The first week I had stared around us in wonder and shock. Fumbled over my words with strangers. Tried not to stare at the girls in their shorts, covet their painted nails and lip gloss, or envy their tank tops in the summer heat.

  But today I was jealous. Of the girls laughing and flirting with boys their age. The young couples strolling with entwined fingers.

  It was wrong. One day they—and the rest of the world that allowed them such freedom—would wish they were me as they burned in Hell. But for the space of those few hours, I wondered what it’d be like to be them. With no knowledge of the Testament or New Earth or the Enclave. To kiss so casually in public. Go on dates and to the movies. Cook dinner together, alone.

  Today was both hotter and busier than any week I had worked so far. So when I made change for a customer and caught sight of something cylindrical and red against the side of the money box closest to me, I hesitated.

  I knew what it was. Knew where it had come from—could recall the girl my age who had stopped to buy several packets of seeds for her mother, unloading the contents of her wristlet to dig for exact change in the process. I remember wishing I could look at all her things, smell her tiny bottle of perfume. Unfurl that lipstick.

  That had been over an hour ago; the girl was long gone. I glanced at the two other women behind the table, both of whom were too busy to see me cover the shiny tube with my hand and deftly slip it into my pocket.

  What was I doing?

  I couldn’t possibly keep it, let alone use it. Why, then, did I want it so much?

  I was so distracted that I realized I had given a man a ten in lieu of a twenty only after he’d left our table. This, after being warned how important it was to represent New Earth perfectly—especially as we added free pamphlets and sermon CDs to bags.

  Grabbing ten dollars, I dashed down the row of vendors in the direction most of the foot traffic was flowing, trying to remember if he’d had a hat on, the color of his shirt. But I’d barely been paying attention and had been so well trained to avoid the appearance of flirting that I hardly looked at most men directly to begin with.

  I was just on the verge of giving up when the Guardian who had driven us here—clad in khaki instead of the usual black—grabbed me by the arm.

  He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to for me to realize what he thought I was doing. His very presence at the booth was a result of the day Shae disappeared into the crowd with a fistful of cash from the money box.

  And here I was with a ten-dollar bill in my hand.

  “I miscounted someone’s change,” I said, showing him, his fingers bruising my arm through my sleeve.

  “Everything okay here?” a male voice asked behind us. I twisted around in time to see a guy in an Iowa State T-shirt step out of line at a nearby taco stand.

  He was suntanned and muscular, with a baseball cap backward on his head. And I was mortified. At the heat in my cheeks. For what this looked like—to the Guardian and to the guy. For drawing attention to myself at all.

  “Fine, yes. Thank you,” I said with a flustered smile before I turned on my heel and marched back to the table.

  By the time I got there, the others had already begun to pack up.

  We left early. No one spoke to me in the van on the way back, their gazes fixed in the other direction—which allowed me to slip the lipstick from my pocket and hide it under the edge of my seat, knowing I’d be searched in Penitence.

  For the next hour, as I waited on the Admitter to take my statement, I thought about the guy who had asked if I was all right. No man had ever done anything like that for me before.

  Of course that wasn’t true. Magnus and Jesus had saved me from eternal fire. Still, I wondered what his name was. If he played basketball or football or worked somewhere.

  If he had a girlfriend.

  I confessed all of these thoughts as the Admitter repeated the same questions over and over and shouted scripture at me for an hour until my ears rang: THOU SHALL NOT LIE! THOU SHALL NOT STEAL! The works of the flesh are ADULTERY! FORNICATION! UNCLEANNESS!

  In the end, the money box corroborated my story. Still, I’d cheated a man of ten dollars and tainted New Earth’s reputation, for which I would no longer be allowed to work the market.

  I never mentioned the lipstick, admitting instead to envying the trappings of the world and looking with desire on another man—a confession that landed on every Elder’s desk the next morning in the Admitter’s log.

  My engagement to Shae’s dad was abruptly annulled; I was deemed an unsuitable helpmate for a man of his station.

  Three weeks later, he married Ara instead.

  To show my relief would have been considered unrepentant. But I was relieved. I even imagined I was happy for Ara, who had gained the status I knew she craved and had no compunction about marrying the father of a girl she had once called friend or pretending that girl no longer existed.

  In that way they were perfect for each other.

  A few days after the wedding, I was assigned to clean the van. Crouched down between the seats with a cordless vacuum, I felt carefully beneath the seat I had been sitting in an
d then ducked down to stare beneath it.

  The lipstick was gone.

  • • •

  THREE MONTHS AFTER Jaclyn’s marriage, she announced she was pregnant.

  It was received as a miracle—especially once our midwife calculated it back to Jaclyn’s wedding night.

  Magnus beamed as he read poetry from the Song of Songs with a tenderness I’d never known his voice capable of. And he sighed as he preached on the beauty of the coming kingdom from the fourth volume of his Testament.

  I forgot my frustration. I spent every moment I could with Jaclyn and we grew close again for the first time in years.

  The night Truly was born—three weeks early—my questions no longer mattered. They all had just one answer: her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  By mid-November, the panic attacks have nearly subsided.

  I make homemade tiramisù (Lauren’s favorite) for her birthday. Drive with Julie as far as the bookstore where, at Dr. Reiker’s suggestion, I buy a journal in which I will record all I want to achieve in my new life.

  I also agree to get my hair, which has not seen scissors in years, cut and layered at Julie’s salon where the magazines are covered with bright headlines about losing weight and “beauty secrets after 30.” I pick one up while I’m waiting, thumb past articles on the Mediterranean diet and how to talk to your doctor about your sex life. Nothing about the dead in China or the demented hacking off their own limbs. For a minute I wonder who’s crazier—the man tackling demons only he can see or a world pretending such people don’t exist?

  A few weeks later, I’m given my phone back—with controls that keep me from streaming shows or searching the Internet. Soon after, Dr. Reiker okays television on the condition that I log what I watch and how it makes me feel. The controls on the phone come off.

  The news has taken a dramatic turn and now I realize how much Julie and Ken have kept from me over the last few weeks. Gone, the celebrity gossip, the sports and political updates. The headlines are devoted to the sharp uptick of early-onset dementia spreading along the West Coast and the “Bellevue 13”—a group of patients with the disease who had procedures at the same hospital. They’re all under the age of fifty-five, and the second of them has just died.