by Megan Hart
“I won’t.”
The women were gone by the time Sunny left Wendy’s office, and she was glad. Still, hearing what they’d thought about what Sanctuary had been like stuck with her. She’d always known the blemished didn’t understand the Family of Superior Bliss, but she hadn’t understood just what sorts of misconceptions had run so rampant.
Sunny finished every day at four, but always went to the library a few blocks away to wait until Chris picked her up at a little after six. Liesel could’ve come for her, but it interrupted nap times, and it was a huge hassle to get all three kids in the car for a fifteen-minute drive. Besides, Sunny liked the library. In those two hours, she could study for her GED. She could sit and read, uninterrupted, which was a luxury she’d never known in Sanctuary. Novels, magazines, newspapers, nonfiction texts on subjects she’d never heard of. She struggled sometimes with the bigger words, because though she’d been taught to read well enough to get through the family literature, reading for pleasure had been discouraged. She struggled more often with references to events and situations she didn’t know. History she’d never been taught. Slang she’d never heard.
She could also use the library’s computers to get on the internet. She’d have been allowed to use the computer at Liesel and Chris’s house, but there never seemed to be any time and Sunny felt funny asking permission to use what seemed like such a personal possession. At the library, she watched videos of funny kittens or penguins getting tickled or babies laughing. She watched television commercials for products she’d never heard of and caught pieces of movies and TV programs that made little sense. The comments left on these videos made her feel just as confused. The blemished seemed to make a habit out of being anonymously cruel.
Liesel said The Wizard of Oz had been her favorite movie as a little girl and had played it for the kids and Sunny. Navigating this new world made Sunny feel like Dorothy stepping out from her black-and-white house into a world of color so bright it didn’t seem real. Everything in this world seemed like a dream.
Sometimes she left the library with her head aching, too full of information she didn’t know how to process. Other times she turned new concepts over and over in her mind and meditated on them until the voice of the stone angel whispered and helped her piece together what had become a very, very big quilt of ideas. There was so much to learn, so much she’d been denied, and she wanted to fill herself up.
Today at the library, on the internet, she searched for information on the Family of Superior Bliss. One site had long lists of accusations about the family, none of which were true, including the idea that they sacrificed animals to Satan. Sunny could only laugh at such blatant misconception. Another site showed photos of family members, including the only picture of Sunny herself, the one the newspeople had used. It had been taken during one of the visits from the social people who came to make sure the children were safe. Sunny clicked away from that site fast. Too many memories. And then, finally, scrolling through pages of links that had nothing to do with her family but another with a father figure that people had labeled a “cult,” she stopped on a simple website detailing local Lebanon County religious history.
This site had pictures of Papa as a young man with his wife next to him, baby John in her arms. Pages of text detailing Papa’s background and how he’d founded the family. She found copies of his early words, so different even from the stories she remembered that had changed during her lifetime. The internet called Papa’s teaching his “doctrine,” and described how it had changed over time, beginning as a simple dictate to live a life closer to the earth and as natural as possible and becoming something “twisted,” was what the website called it.
Sunny felt twisted, reading that. Her fingers moved the mouse, clicking and scrolling, until she had to close the pages and leave the computer to stop herself from feeling sick. If she was still seeing Dr. Braddock, she might’ve asked for advice on how to filter all this, how to file it away into sections that made sense, but Sunny had stopped her appointments when they decided she should get a job. She wasn’t sad about it; Chris and Liesel and Dr. Braddock had met with Sunny and asked her how she felt about her life, and that she should know she could talk to any of them at any time. None of them understood she didn’t need to talk to them when she had the stone angel to listen.
The stone angel wasn’t real. Her voice was Sunny’s voice. She knew that. Just like she knew from deep inside her heart that not everything Papa taught was wrong. Here in the library was a big can with Reduce, Reuse, Recycle printed on the lid. Liesel talked about being “green,” which didn’t mean a color but things like turning off lights or buying vegetables from the stands on the side of the road.
And yet…so much of what she’d been raised to believe was wrong. It had to be. Why else would her mother have gotten cancer? Why else would Sunny have three children by the time she was nineteen, something that had seemed natural and normal in Sanctuary and was definitely frowned upon out here. The blemished might be obsessed with sex, but not when babies resulted from it. Why else, she thought as she logged off the computer to go to the parking lot to wait for Christopher, would Papa have died?
The temperature outside the library was hot. Sunny’d grown too used to air-conditioning. She pulled a bottle of cola from her bag, too used to the sweet taste and bubbles to give it up in place of water. She looked up at the summer sky, blue and cloudless, and breathed in the scent of hot asphalt. Car exhaust. Her own sweat, which she knew enough now to find repulsive and cover with deodorant, though she hadn’t managed to find the courage to utilize antiperspirant. Too many chemicals, the lingering fear of cancers that started when you blocked your body’s natural functions.
All these things were part of her new life, the one her mother had insisted she have. Sunny’d thought maybe it was so she could bring the light to Liesel and Chris, maybe even lots of other people, but it had been too difficult to convince anyone else, when her own faith had been so shaken. Now she wasn’t sure what her task was supposed to be.
And how was she supposed to love what she wasn’t sure she was supposed to do?
Chapter 28
Date night. It had been too long since they’d gone out to dinner together like this, and Liesel was determined to make the most of it. That dress she knew Christopher liked, pulled from the back of her closet. High heels from way back in her Philly design-firm days. They pinched her toes now, but she’d deal with it. The price of beauty.
She did feel beautiful, too, holding on to her handsome husband’s arm as he helped her walk across the gravel parking lot to the deck. She could hear live music playing and caught a scent of something mouthwatering. She was going to order the biggest steak they had. Onion rings. Screw the calories and the extra lumps on her hips that had appeared since she’d been unable to find the time to run as long and often as she’d used to. Tonight was a night out away from Candy Land and macaroni and cheese (made by hand because the boxed kind was, of course, full of chemicals). Tonight she was going to be a grown-up.
“What?” she said twenty minutes after they’d been seated under the huge tree around which the deck had been built. Christopher had been drinking a beer, and Liesel had finished off her first margarita while they waited for their meal to arrive. She’d been talking a lot, she guessed by his expression. “What’s so funny?”
“Not funny. Just…even when we’re out, you can’t stop talking about them.”
Liesel paused, running over everything she’d said. In the car she’d given him the rundown on clothes and shoes, since the kids had all needed new things. Sunny had convinced her to shop at the local thrift stores instead of buying new, pointing out how fast the kids grew out of clothes and how much better it was to recycle. It had been an adventure. Led by Sunny, they’d all trooped up and down the aisles, pulling out the most ridiculous outfits they could find and laughing hysteri
cally. They’d come home with two huge bags of clothes for less than forty bucks.
Since sitting down at the table, Liesel’d covered the plans to get Happy into preschool in the fall and how it was going to be complicated because he didn’t have a birth certificate or social security card. She’d talked about Bliss getting teeth and learning to crawl, how they had to be so much more careful now about leaving small toys on the ground where she could put them in her mouth. She had, she realized, talked nonstop about her days, her life, and hadn’t asked a word about his.
“Sorry,” she said, chagrined. “How’s work?”
Christopher shrugged. “It’s fine.”
So much for that. Liesel tried to think about the last time they’d had a conversation that didn’t revolve around the house or Sunny or the children and was ashamed to realized that she was unable. She reached across the table to link her fingers through his.
“I love you,” Liesel said.
“Love you, too.” Christopher smiled and brought her knuckles to his lips to brush them with a kiss.
“How is work?” she repeated. “I know you were talking about that sales conference a couple weeks ago. How did it go?”
“Fine.” Christopher withdrew his hand and shrugged again. “Work’s fine. Same old stuff.”
Liesel sat back and sipped from her margarita. The slush had softened, turned to liquid. She licked the salt from the rim of her glass and sighed, tipping her head back to stare up through the tree branches. She couldn’t see the sky.
The waitress brought their food and a couple more drinks. They ate huge steaks with all the sides, and Liesel tried hard not to overwhelm her husband with the minutiae of children and housework, even if that was all she really had to talk about. Then, with her stomach so full it bumped out the front of her dress, Liesel reached again for her husband’s hand.
“Let’s dance.”
They hadn’t danced together since… Well, she couldn’t remember. Maybe the the last company holiday party they’d gone to, which wasn’t this past Christmas but the one before. Christopher was a good dancer, light on his feet, and Liesel happened to be a little bit tipsier than she’d expected. She stumbled, but he caught her. She lifted her mouth for a kiss, which he gave her.
It was sweet.
Everything about the night was sweet, including the ride home with the top down, the wind blowing her hair, the stars in the dark sky above. The dark and silent house, almost like they were alone again, and the way he pushed her up against the counter in the kitchen to kiss her. Tongue and hands roaming, when was the last time her husband had kissed her with this much passion? When was the last time she’d wanted him to?
In the past they might’ve made love right there on the kitchen table, but while the quiet house might have tricked them, the sink full of plastic cups and bowls didn’t. Instead, Christopher took her hand and they tiptoed up the stairs, past the rooms of sleeping children of all ages. Giggling, Liesel stopped to tug off her heels and toss them to the side as he closed their bedroom door.
Something about having to be quiet made this seem so urgent, almost furtive, like the days back in high school, making out for hours. Liesel’d never had that with Christopher. Neither of them had been virgins when they met, and though they hadn’t fallen into bed with each other without a thought, they hadn’t held off very long, either. Now they kissed and kissed and kissed in the same bed they’d shared for almost thirteen years, but when he ran his hands up and down her body, it felt like it could’ve been the first time he’d ever touched her.
When they had finished, Liesel lay sated in the tangle of their sheets while her husband padded naked to the bathroom. She heard the rush of water as he used the toilet and flushed, then a clatter. A curse.
“Liesel!”
She got out of bed to weave her way around a couple baskets of laundry she hadn’t had time to sort, through the dark. She stubbed her toe. The bathroom light hurt her eyes. “What’s the matter?”
He’d kicked over the bucket of water in which she’d been soaking her “fluff,” which was what the Etsy vendor had called the reusable cloth pads. Pink water and soaked flannel pads had spread across the tile, and Christopher stood in the mess with his bare feet.
“Don’t move,” she said and grabbed a towel to toss down.
“What the hell is that?”
Liesel uprighted the bucket and began tossing the fluff into it. She’d added some detergent to the water, and it had made the floor slick. Her fingers, too. She mopped at the mess with the towel, waiting for Christopher to bend down and help her. Of course, he didn’t. She looked up at him, her earlier good mood slowly starting to get nibbled away. “They’re my pads. I forgot to throw them in the washer.”
It had only been a couple days since her last period, and she’d meant to do it, but had become distracted by other tasks. Always distracted, that’s how she felt these days. And now, annoyed.
“You’re…”
Watching him hop away like he’d stepped in a pile of manure should’ve been funnier.
“What the hell?” Christopher turned on the shower. “Why do you have a bucket full of…those?”
Liesel put the rest of the fluff into the bucket, got up and used her feet to push the towel around to collect the water. “Your daughter didn’t want to use store-bought pads because they take up room in landfills and are bleached with chemicals. She was using rags, real rags because she didn’t have anything else and was too embarrassed to ask me for something different. When I found out, I looked up reusable pads online because she’d said they used to make them for themselves where she lived, but that she didn’t know how to sew. I found them online, and I ordered some. And I thought I’d try them out.”
The shower had begun to steam, but Christopher didn’t get in. “But…why?”
His plain disgust shouldn’t have bothered her. After all, Liesel had felt the same way upon learning that Sunny didn’t want to use regular pads and throw them in the trash. But, just as with the many other changes that the household had made, once Liesel really thought about how much better for the environment it would probably be to wash and reuse pads, it hadn’t seemed gross at all. Just…sensible.
“Why what?”
“Why are you using them?”
“Because that’s what happens to a woman when she’s not pregnant,” she said snidely. “She gets her period.”
She tossed the towel into the hamper, making a mental note to make sure that load went into the washer first thing in the morning.
Christopher let out a long, low hiss of dismay. “Whaaat are you doing? You wash that stuff with all my clothes?”
Liesel had gone to the sink to wash her hands, thinking that if he didn’t get in that shower soon she’d get in ahead of him. Now she paused. Turned. “Of course I do, how else would I wash it?”
“But it’s…” He wisely shut up after that and got in the shower.
Ten minutes ago Liesel would’ve joined him, but now she waited until he’d finished before hopping in herself. She stayed in there until the water got cold, knowing she’d regret it in the morning when the kids woke her earlier than she’d like. In bed she stretched out to touch him, thinking of how once they’d have snuggled up naked for the rest of the night, maybe even woken to make love again in the morning. Everything had changed.
“Maybe you shouldn’t let her convince you to do all this stuff,” Christopher said.
“Who, Sunny? What stuff?”
“All this freaky stuff. Cloth diapers, reusable…things.”
She’d never known him to be squeamish about feminine things before. Maybe he had been and she hadn’t noticed. “I don’t get what the big deal is, Christopher. You know I like to be as green as I can.”
“Shopping totes, su
re. Recycling. Whatever.” He paused. “Don’t you think maybe you’re taking it too far? We’re supposed to be helping her adjust to a normal life, not letting ourselves get sucked into something else.”
“Is that really what you think is happening?” Liesel rolled onto her side to look at him, wishing she could see his face, but it was blocked by shadows. “I mean, if you just talked to her about this stuff…”
His low snort gave her pause.
“You do talk to her, don’t you? I mean in the morning when you drop her off and then when you pick her up again. You talk to your daughter, Christopher, don’t you?”
“You want me to talk to her about her period?”
“You can talk to her about whatever you want,” Liesel told him. “I can’t believe you don’t talk.”
He made another low snort and shuffled onto his side. He’d be asleep in a minute or two. Snoring. Liesel touched his shoulder, but he didn’t turn.
“Maybe you should spend some time alone with her. Just you and her. Take her out to dinner or something—”
“Like what, a date or something? Christ, Liesel.” He shrank from her touch.
Confused at his vehemence, she scooted closer, but he didn’t bend to her the way he usually did. She pressed her lips to his shoulder. “Dads do take their daughters out to spend time with them, you know. You spend time with the kids on your own.”
“She’s not a kid.”
“Why should that matter?”
He said nothing for so long she was sure he’d fallen asleep, but then he said, “I don’t have anything to say to her. That’s all.”
“Maybe you should find something,” Liesel said.
Christopher made a low noise, deep from his throat. Like a grinding. His voice came out sounding gritty. “She looks like her mother.”
“She looks a lot like you, too—” Liesel began, but Christopher cut her off.