by Caela Carter
We waited patiently until Itheera started to sing.
“Oh Mother God
Oh Light of all Lights
Oh Protectress and Fortress and Enchantress of Light
I am yours.”
Her voice floated down the aisle in the middle of the stone Chapel until it reached Father Prophet where he sat in his throne on the altar, his cape spilling behind him onto the floor. We glued our tongues to the roofs of our mouths, keeping our voices inside. We all knew the song, we all sang it together every day. But this was the one day in the world that was Itheera’s day and not everyone’s and we were supposed to stay silent.
“Oh Mother God
I am Light
I am yours.”
When her voice faded away, Itheera stepped down the aisle and we gasped. She looked so different. She had traded in the girls’ white shorts for the long, white skirt with layers and layers of lace that the women and the teen girls wore on the formalist occasions. Her white T-shirt was now a silk blouse. Her lips and cheeks were pinker than we’d ever seen them, her eyes were bluer. Her light brown hair was clipped back with a million sparkling silver pins because she would never cut it again.
Her bare feet stepped gingerly down the aisle. A smile jerked back and forth on her face. This was the only time we saw girls in these clothes until they became full-grown women. This was the only time we saw most girls smile.
And after today we would see Itheera less and less. She’d move out of the Girls’ Dorm in the first circle and into the Teen Girls’ Dorm in the second circle. She’d go to school with us in the mornings at first, then, over the years, she’d be there for fewer and fewer hours until her days were spent mostly training to gather new souls. She’d disappear slowly from the routine of our lives until, when she turned twenty, she’d finally be fully trained and able to withstand weeks or months in the Darkness. We would almost forget about her; she’d only show up at the Feasts.
We’d seen it happen again and again as girls we knew turned into women. We were waiting for it to be our turn.
At the end of the aisle, Father Prophet reached out his hands and took both of hers. He pulled her up the metal steps, onto the stage with him.
She stood in front of him, his hands on her shoulders.
And then we all sang. We echoed back the song to her in unison, not even owning our voices, being nothing but a force of Light in the dimming Chapel.
“Happy birthday, Itheera,” Father said. “Are you ready to spread your Light?”
“I am, Father,” she said, just like we practiced.
He sat down in his big chair behind her. “Go ahead, Itheera,” he said.
She stood in the spot where it was almost every day only him. Then she whispered, “Judge me worthy.”
We held our breath. This was the moment when Mother God would decide if Itheera was Light enough, if she had been obedient enough to Father, if she had resisted Curiosity enough to embrace Mother’s Light fully.
Slowly Itheera raised her hands, her palms facing inward, her knuckles facing us, until her elbows were almost straight.
Then, with a huge, grand buzz, Mother God lit all of the lightbulbs in the Chapel on the walls and the ceiling and even the tiny ones lining the center aisle on the floor and we all whooped and applauded for Itheera as she finally let herself smile.
Father Prophet stood and put his large hands back on Itheera’s silk shoulders.
“It is good you are here, Itheera. It is most pleasing to Mother God that you are here the minute you turn thirteen. You have pleased her. You will always have the Darkness in you, but if you listen to me, you will always be a Child Inside the Light.”
He changed his tone to speak to all of us.
“Remember, my children, if you stray, you can always return Inside. But only until you turn thirteen.”
We stood blinking in the blinding brightness, watching Itheera smile, and waiting for our own turn.
That was the last Thirteenth Ceremony. It was long ago, weeks or months. Right before girls and boys started disappearing all the time.
I won’t ask to go home yet, even though I should. Not until after the hamburger and the spaghetti.
I won’t ask about Tessie, even though I want to.
I squint, looking in my brain for another question. In the six days I’ve been here, there’s been so much I don’t understand. Why they sleep in the dark. Why there is so much food. Where Louis goes when he says “work.” Why Charita is there, right with the kids, all the time. Why they all choose to stay in that little green house the way we choose to stay Inside. There are so many things I don’t know why they need: colors and computers and television and telephone and flip-flops and swing sets and toys and gray people in the house sometimes and pink stripes. I can’t formulate any of these images and objects and wonderings into a full sentence. A question.
I see Pocket Lady coming back toward our table, her arms heavy with blue plates. (Whoever heard of a blue plate? Will it make my spaghetti taste differently than it should?)
I look at Charita and say: “When they call you Mom, is that like a nickname too?”
An easy question. She can answer with one word.
Instead she spins her glass of soda against her palm and looks at Louis while he looks at her with those green eyes that are so like the ones in my head. Another wonder. Louis’s eyes. Elsie’s, Junior’s, Jakey’s eyes. Uncle Alan’s hair. I can’t make any of it into sentences.
“Well,” Charita says, still talking all slowly like she has been all day. “No. Mom is more like a title than a nickname.”
Pocket Lady starts clunking the plates onto the table and there’s steam rising up from my red spaghetti that’s so rich and sweet and thick in my nose I almost miss what Charita says next.
“They call me Mom because I’m their mother.”
No. No you’re not. The only Mother is God.
My head whips up to look at her. The steam is hot on my cheek. I don’t want to be looking at her though, her brown eyes, her wavy hair, her pomegranate tea skin.
She keeps talking and I tear my eyes away, find a fork, and start digging it through the red-and-white pile on my plate.
“And they call Louis Dad because he’s their father.”
No. No. No.
My heart is hammering so huge and so hard I swear it’s hitting my collarbone. She has to stop talking now. I can’t hear these things. I can’t even think about these things.
This is why they are Liars. This goes against the Ultimate Truth.
I put one noodle in my mouth and it burns my tongue so badly I spit it back onto the plate.
“. . . and Louis is also your—”
My burned mouth says, shouts, “There is no Mother except God. There is no Father except the Prophet.”
A few of the strangers turn to look at me. I said it louder than I’ve ever said anything in my life.
I don’t care if I’m punished for saying it because it’s the truth and Charita and Louis are lying. But Louis doesn’t hit me. Charita doesn’t slap me.
Instead, Louis’s eyes leak on to his face again and he shakes his head back and forth over his sandwich.
Charita pats his hand. “We have to do this, babe,” she says.
He moves his head the other way like he’s nodding but he doesn’t look up again.
Charita turns to me and she pulls my hand between the two of hers and I’m confused because her hands are warm and soft and nice and they shouldn’t feel that way when I’m so angry at her.
“Zylynn,” she says.
Then she freezes until I look at her.
“If you want believe in God, that’s OK. If you want to think of God as your Mother, that’s OK. If you want to think of God as the Mother of everything, that’s OK, that might be right.”
“It is right,” I say, but my words are smaller, quieter now. She’s calming me down against my will.
“But there are other mothers too, earthly mothers.”
I shake my head.
Charita’s hands loosen a little even though I don’t want them to.
Louis takes a shaky breath. “Have you ever seen a pregnant woman, Zylynn?”
I raise my eyebrows at him and nod. They think I’m so stupid.
Louis has something in his hand now. The black rectangle he calls a phone. He holds it up to me and I can see an image on the screen. “Take it,” he says.
Then it’s in my palm, the one that isn’t being squished and squeezed between Charita’s fingers, and I study the screen. It’s a woman in a purple dress, a long braid down her back, her hands resting on her large belly, her head twisted around so her eyes can look at me through the screen. It’s Charita. Pregnant.
“You know who that is?” she asks softly.
I nod. “You,” I say. It’s so weird that she can be in the screen and also sitting next to me. I know what pictures are. I understand how they work. But I’ve never been in the same room as a person and a picture who are the same people at the same time and also at different times.
“Yes,” she says, taking her top hand off mine. I could move mine away from her now. But I don’t. “But do you know who that is? Inside there?” Real-Charita’s finger points to picture-Charita’s swollen belly.
I shake my head.
“That’s Jakey,” she says. “Three years ago.”
“Oh!” The word rushes out of me in a relieved breath. “When you say ‘mother,’” I say, “you only mean the person you come out of.”
Louis and Charita smile and bite their lips at once as if they can be happy and nervous at the same time.
“Well,” Charita says. “That’s the beginning of being a mother.”
I start to get nervous again, but I ignore it and take a bite of hamburger. The food will distract me. The food will keep me from hearing anything I shouldn’t hear.
That doesn’t make sense because it’s Liar’s food.
“A mother is supposed to love, hug, laugh with, teach, and protect her children,” Charita says, speaking to the delicious, meaty juice running down my chin.
The image of her hugging Elsie and Junior and Jakey all at once comes flooding into my mind like proof.
But Mother God created Charita and so how can Charita also be mother?
The words are swirling, jumping, rearranging in my heart and brain.
“Any other questions?” she says.
Too many. So many. They run like electric wires through my veins, tearing me to pieces. I won’t let them out. I will squash Curiosity down below my throat, if I can’t kill her altogether.
Forget the food. Forget the rich smells climbing into my nose and the steam from the spaghetti warming my skin. I can’t hear all these awful lies about mothers and fathers. I can’t let them take away my Ultimate Truths one word at a time.
I open my mouth. I’m going to do it. I’m going to ask to go home. Now.
But then, there’s a new voice behind me at the table.
“Zylynn?” she says. I turn. I see her. My heart stops.
Jaycia.
“Close your books,” Father Prophet said. “That’s today’s lesson.” There were a whole bunch of new souls around so we saw him more those days: in the classrooms, the Chapel, the dorms. He was guest teaching our Light class.
Hermeel, the boy sitting in the desk in front of me, raised his hand. He was new to the compound still and always asking questions that the rest of us knew not to think of.
“If Mother God created the Light, and if we are the only ones who know about it . . . ,” he began.
Father nodded, a smile on his fleshy face. He never minded questions if they were about Mother God and Light. Or if they were about following instructions. He never minded our questions unless they came from Curiosity.
“Why is there sunlight everywhere?” Hermeel concluded.
Father walked up the aisle of desks and put his big hand on Hermeel’s cheek. “Mother God invites everyone into her Light. She wants everyone to abandon greed,” he said. “She provides invitations, like sunlight, all over the world. It’s a wonder that so many people choose to ignore her, isn’t it?”
“But—” Hermeel said.
“Shh, now,” Father Prophet said. He put his thick finger lightly on Hermeel’s lips. “You are about to wander into danger. Why should you think about sunlight on the Outside when Mother God has blessed us with so much Light here Inside?”
Hermeel sat frozen.
“Curiosity is the greatest evil, Hermeel. Do not invite her into my classroom.” Father slowly removed his hand from Hermeel’s face. “Can anyone give Hermeel an example of a safe question?”
My hand was in the air. I could hardly believe it. But I had been thinking about her all day and I had to know the answer.
Father raised his bushy gray eyebrows at me. It was unusual for anyone who wasn’t new to ask questions. “Y-yes, Zy-Zylynn?” he said, almost like he didn’t quite remember my name. Which was silly, he loved my name.
“Now what happens?” I said.
He lowered his eyebrows. “Yes, that is a safe question. Perfect. As you know, now you go to Exercise, just like every day,” he said.
“Th-that’s . . . that’s not what I meant,” I said.
Father froze in the space between Hermeel’s desk and mine. His eyes darted between our two blond heads. I could feel everyone in the room holding their breath. There was no rule about correcting Father Prophet but we’d never heard anyone do it.
“OK, Zylynn,” Father Prophet said. He put that note in his voice that told us he was trying for patience. The note that was always there when he reminded us about how we were from the Darkness and could never understand everything about Mother God the way he could.
I made the words rush out of my mouth. I didn’t think they came from Curiosity. It was a question about what had happened here, Inside. “Now what happens to Jaycia?” I asked.
I felt the other kids swivel in their chairs, turning their heads and bodies to study my face.
Someone said, “Who?”
Father Prophet froze and stared at me, so I kept talking.
“It was her thirteenth birthday yesterday,” I say. “She wasn’t here, she didn’t get a ceremony. What will happen to her?”
His eyes were huge now, like they were trying to escape the layers of skin piled up around them on his face. Still, he didn’t answer. We sat like that for a long time, everyone staring at me and staring at me and it felt like their eyes were squeezing my heart inside my chest but I needed to know the answer so I sat and waited.
“Can anyone else tell Zylynn what will happen to a boy or girl who is not here when he or she turns thirteen?” Father Prophet said.
Hands went up around the room, eager to please him.
“If the girl turned thirteen yesterday and she wasn’t here, she’s stuck,” Atkeesa said.
“She would dissolve into the Darkness forever; she will always be tortured,” Sunuko said.
My head was shaking, shaking, shaking back and forth. My brain was a swarm of moths flapping in my ears. She’d been gone only days or weeks: none of them remembered her. Did even Father Prophet forget Jaycia?
“Good job,” Father said. He made an indication with his arm that all of us could get up and move on to Exercise, but he put his big hand tight on my shoulder and kept it there as he led me into the sunshine.
When we were alone outside the classroom, he froze with me stuck beneath his palm. He bent over my ear and hissed, “I will tell you the truth, if you think you are ready for it. Are you?”
I nodded.
“You love me, right? You love me more than anyone, more than Jaycia?”
She was my friend. Except I couldn’t say that, I couldn’t say “my.” I nodded.
“This truth is not sad. If you are able to let out the dark greediness, you’ll see it as fact and you’ll move closer to the Light. It’s not a bad truth.”
I nodded harder now. My s
houlders relaxed under his grasp. The truth was not bad.
“She has forgotten us,” he said. “You must forget her too.”
I swallowed.
“She’s doomed,” he said. He shrugged. “She has chosen to be doomed. It’s a fact of life. She will awaken in anguish every day, she will sleep in terror every night. She will be tortured by the Darkness for every second. Because she chose to believe the Liars. She chose to stay where the Light cannot save her.”
My eyes were wide. My heart was pumping extra hard. I was scared for her.
“But it doesn’t matter to you, right?” Father Prophet demanded. He didn’t give me a second to reply, a second to think. “Anyone who is not here does not matter to you. Remember that, Zylynn. Remember that or you will be in danger. And I do not want there to be danger between you and me.”
He stared at me so hard, his big face was feet above mine but it felt like it was pressing into me anyway. A jiggle started in my heart and I knew it was fear even though I couldn’t be afraid because underneath Father’s gaze was the safest possible place to be. Still, with his face staring down on me and his hand squeezing my shoulder, I started to shake.
Then, with a swish of his white cape, he turned and plodded away from me, the red dust of the path climbing onto the cuffs of his white pants and the hem of his cape. I only watched a second before I hurried to catch up with the other kids who were scooting off in the opposite direction. I kept behind them though, so they wouldn’t see me shaking.
Because Jaycia was in the Darkness forever, but I thought I might love her anyway. And that didn’t seem like something I could tell anyone, ever.
Fourteen
“OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, oh my God,” Jaycia is saying behind me. I turn to Louis and Charita. I’m frozen, shocked. Louis and Charita are too. Their mouths hang open and they stare at her.