The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  Angel told me how paranoid they are about disease in jails, about incidents in history when illnesses wiped out entire prison populations in a matter of days, how there’s no getting away from it in a place where our bodies are so close together.

  People died fairly often in the Community. Wives died in childbirth, and men got small injuries on their hands that could become black and gelatinous in days, and then we always knew what would follow. We were to scrub all cuts in lye and not eat mushy vegetables and be careful around kitchen utensils. Anybody with something worse than a cough was locked in their house or quarantined to the barns on the edge of the woods until they got better or until the smell told us they’d no longer be a problem.

  The Prophet, whatever the cost, would not have allowed our spiritual mission to die off from something as insignificant as an outbreak of flu.

  • • •

  Dr. Wilson visits today, the first time I’ve seen him since I told him how I lost my hands. I’m still a little bruised by the memory. He sits on his stool and opens his yellow notepad.

  “The snow is melting in the mountains,” he says.

  I look up. “And?”

  “The crime scene investigators are finally able to collect evidence. Things may start moving more quickly now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He opens a file folder and scans a typed piece of paper. “Jude’s mother died at home, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” I say, unable to prevent a wariness from creeping into my voice. “Before I knew Jude.”

  “What killed her?”

  “Stomach cancer, I think.”

  “What’d she do for the pain? Drink?”

  “No. Jude said she never touched a drop of alcohol. She just put up with it.”

  “That must have been excruciating. Stomach cancer is one of the most painful. Almost too difficult to bear, some say.”

  “What are you saying?”

  He levels his eyes at me. “I don’t think Loretta Leland died of stomach cancer.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “Take a look.” He opens a packet and pulls out a photo. It shows a burned-out shell of a house, the glass from one window melted and weeping down the logs.

  “Recognize the place?” he asks.

  “Jude’s cabin,” I say. “The fire spread that far?”

  He nods. “The investigators found the body of a woman, aged between thirty-five and forty, near the Leland family property. She’d been dead for approximately six years. The medical examiner analyzed the remaining tissue and determined that the woman had advanced breast cancer which had metastasized in her stomach. But this woman didn’t die of cancer. Do you know what killed her, Minnow?”

  My limbs freeze. “How would I?”

  He nods like he expected that answer and slides a new photo from the stack. I look at the photo and my mind rejects it almost immediately, like what my stomach did once when I ate a poison berry, but I can’t pull my eyes away. In the photo, in a trench of upturned dirt, is a face. Recognizable, even in its horror, even in its decomposition, the gaping orbits, the bare teeth. Jude’s mother. The crown of her skull is blasted apart in chunks around her face.

  “She died of a gunshot wound to the head,” he says. “The bullet wound was so large, it split the skull into five pieces.”

  He lets the quiet stretch. I take in the big orbits where Jude’s mother’s eyes had been. I wonder if they were the same warm brown as Jude’s, the kind of brown that listens and speaks at the same time. I can’t get over how completely her eyes are gone.

  “You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?” he asks finally.

  “I didn’t even know Jude six years ago.”

  “But I think you may know what happened to her.”

  I look up at him. “This isn’t relevant.”

  “It’s not?” he asks. “This woman was murdered. The Prophet may have been murdered, too. It stands to reason that her killer and his killer might be the same person.”

  “That’d be so nice for you,” I say, my voice rising in pitch. “So nice and neat, wouldn’t it? You could go back to Washington, DC, early. Take your wife out for an expensive dinner in a fancy restaurant and eat till you puke.”

  “I see I’ve struck a chord.”

  “You haven’t struck anything.”

  “I thought you wanted to help me catch a killer.”

  “I won’t help you lay all the blame on Jude.”

  His eyebrows dart up. “Who said anything about Jude?”

  “Stop!” I shout. “Stop talking to me. Leave me alone.”

  “Minnow, I know this may be difficult for you,” he says, “but you suggested this deal. I help you get free, you help me catch the killer.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut until the bone behind my forehead threatens to break. I breathe heavily and after a moment he says, “Take some breaths,” a few times before standing to leave.

  He will never get the truth about Jude’s mother out of me. Never.

  Chapter 28

  Being here, I’m only now realizing how much was kept from me in the Community. I’ve heard the other girls talk and I can tell that they knew much more than me at a much younger age, that when I was learning how quickly a calf becomes a cow and how seeds morph into potatoes just by living in the ground, they were learning how to solve the strange puzzle of their bodies.

  In the Community, none of that was talked about. There was no need. Girls and boys never saw beneath their thick garments, and the events after a wedding night were relegated to our imaginations, the dull sounds that penetrated our fabric walls from where my father slept with one of his wives in the night, the sounds we didn’t understand but tried to block out anyway.

  Today the girls were in a titter because, instead of their normal reading classes, they’re to have a special class on sex education. “It’s just an ancient video that Mrs. New plays in the cafeteria,” Angel said before she left. “Nothing good. Nothing we didn’t already learn firsthand years ago.”

  I nodded, cheeks burning, not wanting to let on how much I’d like to be there anyway. I’m sure if I asked Benny for special permission to go, she’d let me since my suspension is almost up, but I doubt I could get the words out, even to her.

  Instead, I sit alone in the cell block, running my eyes across the page of the book in front of me. It has a blue cover, and pages that feel like feathers when I run them over my stumps. This book is beautiful. It is also impossible.

  “Psst.”

  I look up. Miss Bailey stands at the door of my cell.

  “Can I come in?” she asks.

  “All right,” I say. She looks down the skyway and nods to a guard. The door buzzes open.

  She adjusts her pink cardigan sweater and sits on the edge of my bed. “You’re missing quite the fun downstairs.”

  “I’m still suspended.”

  She nods. “What were you reading?” she asks, indicating the book I’d been paging through. A girl’s windburned face stares up from the blue cover.

  “I asked Angel to get me a book from the library. It’s poetry.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not good.”

  Miss Bailey nods. “Well, it’s one of my favorites. Would you like some help reading that book?”

  When I nod, she lifts her tote bag in the air and dumps a pile of books and papers onto the mattress.

  “I brought these for you. Hoped you’d say yes.” She picks out a big spiral-bound workbook and opens it to page with giant-printed letters. Her finger traverses the page and when it touches a letter, she says it big, with her entire mouth. Her entire face, really. I repeat the sounds.

  “MMMM.”

  “SSSS.”

  “AAAAAHHH.”

  “OOOOO.”

&
nbsp; Eventually, the sounds blend together to make words. MMMMM-AAAAAHHHH-SSSSSS makes moss. And T-RRRRRR-EEEEEEE makes tree. I don’t even hide my grin. It’s a thrill to rediscover these things in this place, surrounded by so much concrete and metal and recycled air. I read the words and in this cell, the forest blooms to life again, the earthy smell, the way the sun filters through the boughs of pines, the feeling of never being alone.

  Chapter 29

  “I never been to Disneyland,” Angel says. She sits cross-legged on the floor beside my bed, pushing black plastic beads up over the tail ends of her cornrows.

  “That one isn’t going to work,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Because, of course, I’ve never been to Disneyland. I’ve been to about four different places in my whole life.”

  Angel and I are playing a game she and her friends from school used to play. If I had been to Disneyland, I would’ve taken a drink from my water cup. The first person to pee loses. Angel said it works better with something besides water, but this will do.

  “Fine,” Angel says. “I never . . . met my real dad.”

  I laugh. “Unfortunately for me,” I say, levering my drinking cup from the floor with my stumps and pouring water into my mouth.

  “I NEVER KISSED A GIRL,” comes a voice from down the skyway.

  “You are not playing, Rashida,” Angel shouts.

  “Why, though?” Rashida calls. Her cell is one down from ours. “Tracy’s at therapy and Wendy won’t talk to me cause I traded her Skittles. I got nobody to play with over here.”

  Angel grunts. “All right, you can play. But it’s Minnow’s turn.”

  “Did anybody drink at mine?” Rashida asks. “Have either of you kissed a girl?”

  “Come see for yourself,” Angel says.

  I hear Rashida throw her plastic water cup at the bars of her cell, and a guard’s gruff voice asking her just what exactly she thinks she’s doing.

  “I never pulled the trigger of a gun,” I say.

  Angel’s smile cocks to the side. She picks up her cup and drinks.

  “That reminds me,” Angel says. “I’ve been thinking about genetics.”

  “How do guns remind you of genetics?” I ask.

  “Nobody wants to listen to this boring shit, Angel!” Rashida’s voice calls.

  “Rashida, why don’t you go back to huffing shampoo fumes and shut up!” Angel shouts. “Anyway, genetics. You know how we inherit traits from our ancestors? It’s supposed to take thousands of years, but I’ve seen it happen way quicker. You pick up things you don’t even realize. My mom taught me to shoot straight and not give a fuck what anyone thinks. Only things she did, besides how to get meth stink out of clothes. And I never met my dad. He was probably some petty criminal my mom slept with at the shelter in exchange for a cigarette. So I count myself lucky. I got to decide exactly how I was gonna be. Most of these girls have learned from somewhere to apologize for existing. It’s written on their genes, I swear. Just listen to them, even if they don’t say it, practically everything that comes out of their mouths is the word ‘sorry.’”

  She looks over at me and I can tell she’s thinking I’m one of those girls who apologize for existing. Even if I hadn’t lost my hands, I doubt I’d ever be the type to shoot a gun without being scared of the noise.

  “It’s hard,” I say. “Not always knowing what’s right.”

  Angel’s face scrunches. “How do you not always know what’s right?”

  I hunch up my shoulders.

  “Give me an example,” she says.

  “The Prophet always told us stories. They were meant to make us afraid.”

  “Like what?”

  “You really want to know?” I ask.

  “Entertain me.”

  “All right,” I say, sifting through memories. “This one time, it was winter and I was fifteen. It was late afternoon, and already black as night, and I stood on the side of a frozen pond, pounding an awl into the ice for water to scrub my family’s clothes.”

  Around the awl, my fingers had already turned blue. This was an all-day endeavor, breaking the ice, hauling the water one leaking bucketful at a time, and repeating the process eight or ten times. Like all of my chores, I was left to complete this on my own.

  A clanging noise shattered the quiet. Instinctively, I dropped the awl, pushed myself from the ice, and started running, ignoring the creaking in my knees and my aching blood-emptied fingers.

  When I arrived, the courtyard teemed with blue-clad bodies. A cold hand slipped into mine. Constance peered up at me with her giant icy eyes. The Prophet stood at his porch, clanging the bell that hung there, a big ferocious grin playing across his face. “Behold!” he shouted above the clanging. “God’s power in action!” He craned his neck up.

  High in the blackness, a small light the size of a nail head shot across the dark canvas of sky. A trail of light faded behind it and burned out.

  “Shooting stars?” someone in the crowd asked.

  Abruptly, the Prophet stopped clanging, and his arm hung in the air where it had rung the bell, so for a moment it looked as though he was reeling back for a punch. “No!” he shouted, walking out into the crowd. “War! The Gentiles are attacking. And look! God is stopping them. Those lights are bombs aimed at us, meant to kill us, burning out in the dome of God’s protection.”

  Another light flashed across the sky and some of the children made scared noises and cowered behind their mothers’ skirts, but the Prophet told them in a reassuring voice that they were safe, this was proof of God’s power and protection and love for us. I looked down into Constance’s face. She was nine and her hair was tied in a slippery braid down the side of her head. Her mouth was wide open in wonder, and I could see where the corners of her lips were chapped, her neck hinged as far backward as it could go. Soon, everyone was sighing amazedly, even the adults who had, moments before, called the things in the sky a different name.

  Everybody went to bed that night with an ache in their necks and a fullness in their hearts and a certainty that God loved them. That we were doing the right thing. All except me.

  “Why not you?” Angel asks.

  “I remembered something,” I say. “I must have heard it on TV or in preschool the few times my parents took me, before the Prophet, before the Community.” I take a breath. “I remembered those things had a name.”

  “Meteors,” Angel says.

  I nod. I remembered the word, and I knew the adults must have, too. And knowing that sowed something uncertain in my mind. I didn’t know what it meant—still don’t—only that it made me confused. Not doubtful, not yet. Just a feeling like something in me was broken, something that in everybody around me was whole.

  Chapter 30

  “Philip Lancaster wants to see you,” Dr. Wilson says during our next visit.

  I look up. I blink twice, hard.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I interviewed him,” Dr. Wilson says. “He said he’d like to talk to you.”

  “That’s not happening.”

  “Are you afraid you’d lose control again?”

  “No,” I say firmly. Because that’s not what makes me afraid. I’m afraid of looking him in the eye. It’s his eyes, more than anything, that terrify me.

  “Do you ever think about that night?” he asks.

  “Only sometimes,” I say. “Try not to.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d just escaped the Community, just seen Jude die. Walked for hours in the darkness not knowing if I’d see another person again. There’s a lot about that night I don’t want to remember.”

  “Don’t let it become a part of your mind that you’re afraid to touch,” he says. “Remembering doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

  I know he’s right. The more I ignore the memory of tha
t night under the bridge, the more space it takes up in my mind till I fear at some point I won’t be able to ignore it anymore. Philip Lancaster’s eyes will be all I can see.

  “It was so cold that night,” I say. “I can’t believe it really happened sometimes, but then I remember that feeling of cold. Cold enough I worried I’d never thaw out.”

  It took me hours and hours to find the city from the Community. By then, the ground had been blanketed with pristine snow. I followed the dull glow of light along the horizon and the vague smell that engines make, so different to the brisk, clean air in the high mountains. In the darkness, lit windows of buildings materialized, the faint rattle of a car whizzing past on the freeway.

  I followed the river through the night, stopped to rest beneath an old rusting bridge. I learned later that what murders happen in Missoula happen here. Teenagers beat a homeless man to death. Two meth heads have a falling out over a half-empty bottle of cough syrup. Beneath the bridge, there was none of the manicured, easy wilderness I always pictured when I remembered the city, young families plodding in their sneakers down wood-pelleted trails, coffee smells from shops, and the barking of Labradors nearly always audible. This wasn’t the place I’d spent years imagining. Beneath the bridge, the water was brown and the bank was made of muddy gravel, and there was a rimless tire threatening to take off into the river, but never quite making it.

  “Hey!” a man’s voice called over my shoulder. My heart guttered to a stop. I’d been leaning against a rusty leg of the bridge, completely lost in the movements of the river. I hadn’t noticed the man behind me.

  “Wha’s wrong with your hands?” He cocked his head to the side and stared at my stumps. Earlier that night, I’d nudged a pair of maroon gloves over my stumps with my teeth. I glanced down at them. The gloves’ fingers were empty and flat and hung off weirdly.

  “Nothing,” I said. He couldn’t have been much older than me, eyebrows thrust up his face, pale breath smoking in the cold. I forced my eyes away. There was only one way out, a steep narrow trail up to the street. It was slippery and precarious in the snow.