by Lara Zielin
“Okay,” my dad said. “Let’s do this.” He barged into the cold water with a tiny copy of the New Testament tucked into his breast pocket. The entire congregation watched as he waded in up to his waist, Nat and I trailing behind. The cold hurt like jellyfish stings and our teeth were chattering before the baptism even started.
My dad opened his little Bible, turned to Matthew Chapter 3, and started reading. “And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’”
As my dad spoke, the water swirled around me and I felt small rocks tumbling over my toes. I glanced over at Natalie and noticed how her eyes matched the mossy river bottom. She held her hands out from her sides, palms down, as if resting them on top of the current.
“Emma, you first,” my dad said, tucking the Word back into his shirt. I nodded and took two unsteady steps toward him. Please, God, I prayed silently, please let something really spiritual happen to me in this water. My dad reached out and put one hand on my back and one over my clavicle bones on my chest. “Hold your nose,” he said. I did. With one hand he pushed me toward the water, at the same time using his other hand to lift up my back and help get my feet out from underneath me.
With my face toward heaven, I was submerged into the icy water. I tried keeping my eyes open but couldn’t—the current was too strong. The cold took my breath away and I suddenly felt winded and panicked. I tried breathing and got river water up my nose instead. As my dad lifted me out of the water, I sputtered and gagged, spitting up lungfuls of the Minnetonka River.
“You okay?” my dad asked.
Nearly convulsing with cold, I just stared at him. Was I okay? I looked down at my hands, which were a sickly white. I couldn’t feel anything. I wanted to reach out to him, to have him dunk me under again, because not one thing had happened when I was baptized. Not tongues, a vision, or even a warm-fuzzy close-to-God feeling. I wanted a do-over, but I couldn’t move. I was numb—in my limbs and in my heart.
“You’re all set,” my dad said, turning away from me and toward Nat. “You can head back to shore. Mom has a towel for you.”
I nodded and forced my body to start making its way back toward the beach. I could feel the eyes of the congregation burning into me. I knew they could all see it: that I was exactly the same as I’d been before the baptism. I hadn’t experienced anything in the water except cold and fear.
What was wrong with me? Would I ever feel what everyone else at Living Word seemed to?
My mom handed me a towel when I got close enough. She smiled, but the motion didn’t go past her mouth. She could barely meet my eyes. She knew, without having to ask, that I hadn’t started speaking in tongues. I could practically feel the disappointment radiating off her.
Next to her, Lizzie was jumping up and down, asking me if I’d seen any fish. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
My mom turned her back to me, and I could feel her mood lighten as she focused on Lizzie. One of the seven deadly sins—envy—stabbed at my heart. Was I really that hard to be around? And was Lizzie really so preferable?
I wrapped the towel around me more tightly and watched Natalie go down in the water. Instead of coming back up like me, flailing and retching, she came out of the water smoothly, renewed and ready for a life committed to God. Her face glowed as she stood in the currents, her cheeks pink like she had an eternal fire inside of her, even as the cold water dripped off of her. The congregants all gave a collective “oooh” at the inspiring sight.
Nat trekked back toward shore, smiling, despite the way her jaw was trembling with cold. My dad followed in her delicate wake. Then, just as Nat started climbing out of the water, Mr. O’Connor suddenly started climbing in. He started splashing around and crying, “Forgive us, Lord! Forgive us, Lord!”
My dad made sure Nat was out of the river safely, then started making his way back toward Mr. O’Connor. “Gary,” he said, twisting his torso and fighting the water. “Gary, is the Lord speaking to you? Tell us what’s going on.”
Mr. O’Connor stopped splashing for a second. His suit—which probably cost more than my dad’s annual salary—was soaked and ruined. His body had quieted, but his eyes stayed wide and wild. “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man!” Mr. O’Connor shouted. I’d heard that scripture before and I knew that Mr. O’Connor was quoting the Bible, though I couldn’t remember exactly where in the Bible that phrase was located. I’d find out later it was First Timothy in the New Testament.
I looked over at my mom, who was clutching Lizzie and looked like she couldn’t quite get her mind around what was happening.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“Shhh. Not now.”
Everyone always got quiet in the church when someone “had a prophecy,” which is what you called outbursts like this. Usually they were pretty vanilla and people said things like “the Lord wants to bless you” or “you have put other things in your life before the Lord.” And usually they happened at the church. I’d certainly never seen one at a baptism before, and I’m not sure anyone else had either.
“Women are the weaker vessel!” Mr. O’Connor shouted from the cold water.
Another Bible scripture—this time from First Peter.
My dad finally reached Mr. O’Connor, and before Mr. O’Connor could say anything else, my dad leaned in and whispered something in Mr. O’Connor’s ear. None of us standing on the riverbank ever heard what was said, but all of us got a great view of the reaction.
Mr. O’Connor started writhing and thrashing in the water, and my dad had to actually step back from him. “Your women are out of balance!” cried Mr. O’Connor in a deep voice, like he was suddenly the mouthpiece for God. “Your women are too empowered! Repent and bring balance back into the church! I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man! I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man!”
“Gary!” shouted my dad, trying to get Mr. O’Connor to stop. “Enough!”
They wrestled in the water a little bit as my dad tried bringing Mr. O’Connor back to shore, but by that time I was probably the only person left in the congregation who was still looking at them. Everyone else was pretty much staring at the one person Mr. O’Connor was talking about—the one woman who, apart from a handful of Sunday school ladies, did the lion’s share of teaching and preaching at Living Word Redeemer.
My mom.
Chapter Three
I tried to find a clear path to get to Little Saints, but it wasn’t easy. Even the foyer was crowded with people talking about my mom’s sermon, their eyes wide and their mouths moving furiously.
A hand like a claw reached out and grabbed my elbow. I found myself face-to-face with Mrs. Knickerbacher, who was raising her overplucked eyebrows at me.
“Emma,” she said too brightly. “Where are you off to?”
Mrs. Knickerbacher was what people called a church elder, meaning she’d been at Living Word Redeemer since it had started up. She was also the biggest gossip in the church’s history—at least in my opinion. “She should carry a trowel with her, the way she always tries to dig up dirt on people,” I’d said to my mom once. My mom had clucked disapprovingly, though she didn’t out-and-out disagree with me.
“I—I have to go get Lizzie,” I said, looking past Mrs. Knickerbacher and trying to figure out how many more people I’d have to fight through before I’d get to Little Saints.
But Mrs. Knickerbacher wasn’t done tormenting me yet. She glanced around, and all the people nearby tuned in to our conversation instinctively. Then she smiled at me so coldly, I shivered.
“So tell us,” she said, a little too loudly, “how is that Harry Potter Bible study of yours coming along?”
Embarrassment erupted in all parts of my body, making me warm. Even my fingers felt
heated. I looked down at them and could practically see them changing from white to red.
It was no secret that a while back, I’d tried to start a Harry Potter Bible study among the Living Word Redeemer teens. I hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. I’d simply wanted to look at the ways Harry Potter wrestled with good and evil and how that was similar to the ways Christians sometimes wrestled with good and evil—at least in the Bible. But then a bunch of kids went home and told their parents that I was trying to get people to read Harry Potter in place of the Bible, and people like Mrs. Knickerbacher had been so worried about me having demons, they’d asked my dad to consider having a special service where they laid hands on me and cast out my unholy spirits. Thankfully, my dad said that it wasn’t necessary, but he did give me a bunch of scriptures to memorize—“for punishment and edification,” he’d said—one of them being from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament: “The Lord God will help me, therefore I will not be confused.”
For a while there, I’d repeated it over and over, until it stuck to the insides of my brain like flypaper. I’d mumbled it like a mantra. Because, seriously, I wanted God to help me. I didn’t want to make everyone in the church mad at me, and I liked the idea that God could make me less confused.
But that had been months ago, and by now I knew the truth. God wasn’t interested in helping me. The more I’d spoken that scripture, the farther away God got, and the more confusing life became.
“Perhaps next time you can try to start up a Lord of the Rings Bible study,” Mrs. Knickerbacher said, her lips twisted into a condescending smile. A few people nearby cackled.
I glared at her, since I knew for a fact she had bigger problems than my choice in Bible studies. A few years ago, when I’d been snooping in my parents’ office files, I found out that Mrs. Knickerbacher’s husband had seen my dad for counseling about a porno addiction. A few pages later in the file it said that the couple had been to see my dad for marital counseling.
There’s a scripture about that, actually. Not about porno and counseling, but about not picking apart everybody else’s life when your own isn’t so picture-perfect. If I could have remembered it right then, standing there in the foyer while Mrs. Knickerbacher made fun of me, I would have quoted it to her. But unless my dad was making me memorize scriptures as punishment, I had a hard time recalling any of them.
“I have to go,” I said, and pushed my way through the crowd. Once clear, I ran the rest of the way to Little Saints.
I thought about how Nat told me one time there was an actual medical condition for people who used the Bible as an excuse to talk behind your back all the time.
“There is?” I’d asked.
She’d nodded. “Biblical Tourette’s.”
I’d laughed so hard when she said that, the pop I’d been drinking came out of my nose. But I didn’t feel like laughing now. I felt sick to my stomach, in fact, and I stopped running for a moment, leaning against one of Living Word’s walls just so I could catch my breath and not hurl. My best friend in the whole world hated me, the church thought I was a heathen, and I still couldn’t figure out why Mr. O’Connor had waded into the Minnetonka River on the day of our baptism. Make no mistake, I didn’t think his prophecy was even slightly true, but I couldn’t figure out what his motive could possibly have been for doing it in the first place.
I was stumped and I needed someone to talk to about all this. And the truth was, there was only one person who I wanted to talk to about this. I took out my cell and gripped it tightly. Could I call him? Could I dial his number after everything that had happened between us? I put the phone back in my pocket.
I couldn’t do it. Not yet. I needed to wait before I called Jake O’Connor. In fact, I wanted to wait as long as possible before I went near an O’Connor again.
I stepped into Little Saints and tried to spot Lizzie among all the construction-paper crosses and cotton-ball lambs that were taped to every wall. The room’s overhead fluorescent bulbs hummed happily, spotlighting the permanent marker blotches on all the little worktables. I glanced past all the baby animal posters with captions that read, “Jesus loves a happy heart,” and saw Lizzie sitting on the floor among a handful of other kids. She was playing with a plastic Noah and two of every ark animal.
I grabbed her hand and said, “C’mon, Lizzie. We gotta go.”
“No!” she protested. She had just loaded the elephants into the wooden ship and didn’t want to leave.
“Seriously. Move it.”
Lizzie can play a typical seven-year-old for about two seconds before she remembers every single Bible verse she’s ever been taught. You could see “obey your elders” ticker-taping its way through her frontal lobe.
She lifted up her head and her blond ringlets fell away from her face. How she got to be blond was anybody’s guess—both my parents were brunets and my hair at present looked like dark, rotten wood. I hadn’t had much time to brush it before church.
“Okay,” Lizzie said finally, and stood up. Together we started walking back toward the sanctuary. The crowd had thinned outside the doors, and I exhaled when I saw Mrs. Knickerbacher was nowhere around. Lizzie hummed happily, and I noticed she smelled a little waxy. I wondered if she’d been eating crayons again.
When we got to the sanctuary, I made a beeline for the front pew, where my dad was alone, no longer mobbed. As we got closer, I noticed he wasn’t really doing anything—just sitting there, staring straight ahead. Plus he’d said he was going to get my mom, but she was nowhere in sight.
“Dad?” I asked, sitting next to him. “Are you okay?”
As if he was finally waking up from a bad dream, my dad nodded. His blue-gray eyes looked tired. He leaned over and grabbed my hand so hard, I thought I’d done something wrong. But instead of giving me a lecture, he opened my fingers and pressed his car keys into the palm of my hand.
“Emma,” he said, “I want you and Lizzie to leave now. Keep your cell phone on and don’t stop to talk to anyone.”
There was a note in his voice that sounded like fear, which made my whole body almost go numb, since my dad was never afraid of anything.
“But how will you and Mom get home?”
He looked toward the church stage, where my mom had given her sermon. “We’ll get a ride from someone. Don’t worry about that.”
Lizzie reached out to touch my dad’s hand, and he engulfed her small fingers with his massive ones. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, winking at her.
“But Dad,” I started tentatively, “where’s Mom?”
“She’s in the church’s meditation room,” my dad replied. “The church board has called an emergency meeting tonight and we need to stay, along with a handful of the elders.”
My dad rubbed his hands together while he spoke. I watched him for a few seconds. “So, um, did you even know Mom was going to give that sermon tonight?” I asked finally.
My dad’s hands stopped. “We’d discussed it briefly but hadn’t come to any conclusions. I guess the Lord led her to do . . . what she did.”
“How bad has it made things? I mean, what’s the church board going to say?”
My dad looked at me in a way that reminded me of a painting I saw once of a rugged, weather-beaten farmer carefully pouring milk into a dish for a kitten. This is it, I thought. He’s going to actually tell me something. We’ll have a real conversation about all the late-night meetings he and my mom have been going to, about how half their friends never call them anymore, and about how Mom doesn’t want to check the mail these days because she gets letters that make her hands shake. But then my dad just took a deep breath and said, “The church is going through a lot right now. It’s better if you go home.”
“Dad . . .” I stumbled, disappointed that he’d backed down from actually saying something. I swallowed, searching for the right words. I decided to press him about the donut camp. It was risky, but I had to get there.
“Dad, can I just drop Lizzie off at Mrs. Stein’s? I need to
get to the donut camp.” Mrs. Stein was our neighbor, and she babysat for Lizzie all the time.
My dad blinked. “What?”
“The Crispy Dream donut camp. You said I could go. Starting tonight.”
My dad looked over his left shoulder, and as I followed his gaze, I saw Mr. O’Connor marching down the sanctuary aisle toward us, his black sport coat billowing out behind him like a cloak.
“Use the back door,” my dad said. “Drive to Mrs. Stein’s. Leave my car there and have Mrs. Stein take you to the camp. Under no circumstances will you turn off your cell phone. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“All right then,” he said. “Go.”
I grabbed Lizzie, and we bolted for the back door.
Chapter Four
I glanced in the rearview mirror as Lizzie and I sped away from Living Word Redeemer and was surprised at how warm and friendly the church looked. The lights were on inside, giving it a cozy glow, and all the landscaping my mom had done earlier that summer made the exterior extra bright and welcoming.
With such a peaceful facade, it was hard to imagine the inside of the church roiling with turmoil, but I bet that was exactly what was happening—especially now that the board members were being called in to discuss my mom’s sermon.
“I don’t want to go to Mrs. Stein’s,” Lizzie said, interrupting my thoughts. “Can’t I just come with you tonight?”
“Sorry,” I said. “No can do.”
“But Mrs. Stein smells like cough drops,” she protested.
I smiled, trying not to laugh out loud. Sometimes Lizzie could be a pretty funny, cool kid. Except, of course, when she drove me crazy, which was a lot. Like when she’d skip around the house, singing “This Little Light of Mine” with her heart in every word. Or when she’d pull cupcakes out of her Easy-Bake Oven and hand them to my mom, saying, “Eat this in remembrance of me.”