The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  I tried brushing by him toward the trail.

  “Now stop!” he said. “I jus wanna talk. I don’t have anybody to talk to anymore.”

  There was something wrong with him. For one thing, it was freezing, but all he wore was a light, long underwear–type shirt and slouchy jeans. But, something more. Something in the way he cast his eyes around, like a spotlight searching for a missing person in the dark.

  He reached his arm out and snatched away one of my gloves. He caught sight of my ruby red stump before I pulled it inside my coat sleeve.

  “Don’t—touch me,” I said, deadly quiet.

  “Y-you don’t have to run away,” he said excitedly. “I’m just like you. I’m missing something, too.”

  I turned my head slightly. “What are you missing?”

  “A soul,” he whispered.

  I reeled back a couple steps. My heart started working again, double time.

  “It got lost,” he continued. “I’m trying to find it.”

  “How do you lose your soul?” I asked, curious even as my eyes scanned behind him for an escape route.

  “All kindsa ways. But, the number one way that people lose their souls is this.” He took a big gulp of breath. “The Devil takes it.”

  “The Devil,” I repeated. When he nodded quickly, I realized that he believed every word he said. My skin began to itch with cold.

  I coughed into my elbow. “I need to go.”

  “Wait,” he said. “Will you help me?” His voice was small and pleading.

  “With what?”

  “Help me find my soul?” he implored. “Please, I just need someone to understand.” He grabbed my arm. One of his freezing palms squeezed my stump, and it sent a shiver strong as an electric shock through my gut.

  “DON’T TOUCH ME!” I pulled my stump away and stumbled backward a step, slipping where the river had turned the ground to ice and landing hard on my back. Above me, he was silhouetted against falling petals of snow and the scissored black outline of the bridge.

  He took a step toward me. I swept with my legs at his ankles, and he collapsed onto the frozen ground. I scrambled to my feet and stared down at him.

  His eyes were large and they beamed back at me like a torch. I gasped at the color. Green. Vibrant, bottle-glass green. Godly green.

  The decision to kick was entirely my own. I could’ve run, if I wanted. I didn’t want to. I wanted to hurt him. I was wearing the boots from Jude’s house. I didn’t know there was steel stuffed down in the toes, though I knew it made the boots sink satisfyingly into his stomach. I thought the strength was all my own. Something like pride bloomed inside my chest. I huffed and my blood was hot and it felt good. Power. Purple blotches at the corners of my eyes. Tongue running over my teeth. Not even feeling the cold.

  His name is Philip Lancaster. He is the son of an impressive Seattle software designer. He is a student at the University of Montana. He is a paranoid schizophrenic. I kicked out all the molars in the right side of his face. I broke apart his spleen. He was crying when I was done. His blood colored the toes of my shoes.

  It took moments for the high to collapse, for the cold to sink into my exposed face. I gazed down at him, my limbs shaking, my muscles so jumpy they felt pulsed with electricity. The blood on my boots stood out like neon.

  I wondered, What would Jude think, if he could see me? I doubled over to eject a pint of acid from my stomach.

  Chapter 31

  “He doesn’t blame you as much as you’d think,” the doctor tells me.

  “Philip?” I ask, flinching at the name.

  He nods. “He knows you were scared. He’s back on his medication.”

  I shake my head. The memory of that night is a physical object. When I touch it with the soft fingers of my mind, it feels cold and dark and sharp like metal. I feel at the object blindly, trying to memorize the dimensions, figure out its shape.

  Philip has the same object in his mind, I’m sure. The same cutting thing inside us, hurting us in different ways.

  “You can’t forgive that,” I say. “I know because I never could.”

  “Want to hear what he told me?” the doctor asks. “He said he doesn’t always know what’s real and what’s not. His mind tells him lies. He reminded me of you.”

  “Why?”

  “Philip struggles with what’s real, too. Almost like he has his own Prophet. One inside his own head.”

  “Maybe everybody has one,” I say. “How lucky am I that mine’s dead?”

  The doctor looks at me with a strange expression. We are hovering right on the edge of what he came here for, the smoke-choked moments when the Prophet breathed his last breath.

  “Do you ever think about Constance?”

  “What’s there to think?” I say. “I should’ve protected her better. That was my job.”

  “Now that’s something you should never do,” he says. “Blame yourself. I don’t think you can honestly say any of that was your fault.”

  “This wasn’t supposed to be about feelings, remember?” I say. “That’s not why you’re here.”

  There’s something struggling behind his face, but after a moment’s thought, he nods. He flicks through his notes. “What motivates someone to kill?” he asks.

  I look up at him. “How should I know?”

  “Just take a stab at it.” He smiles. “No pun intended.”

  “It could be a million things.”

  “Such as?”

  I glance at my affirmation wall. “Anger.”

  “Good. What else?”

  “Insanity.”

  “Yes,” he says, nodding. “There’s also heat of passion and revenge. There’s killing to claim life insurance, there’s euthanasia. Do you know what we call these things?”

  I shrug.

  “Motive,” he says. “If you determine the motive, you can sometimes determine the murderer. Why might someone have been motivated to kill the Prophet?”

  “Revenge, I guess.”

  “Very good. He punished countless people. We can add any of them, plus any of their loved ones, to the list of suspects. How about insanity? Was anyone in the Community prone to erratic behavior? Emotional distress?”

  “Besides the Prophet himself?”

  He nods.

  I consider this. “My mother.”

  “What sort of emotional distress?”

  “Just being sort of . . . numb. Dead to the world.”

  “But she helped you escape.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that she was absent, in every way, for almost my entire life.”

  “That sounds remarkably like resentment.”

  I almost laugh. How do I articulate it to him so he’ll understand? Maybe the image of her sitting in the dirt, her eyes locked on a crop of wild buttercups while my father hided my naked back for stealing a rye roll from my sister’s plate. Or should I describe the humming sound she made after Vivienne slapped me across my face for refusing to call her mother? It’s no use. Nothing could convey what it was like growing up with a ghost.

  “Do you know why your mother was this way?” he asks.

  I set my jaw. “She was weak.”

  He nods again and pulls a manila folder out of his bag. He places it open on my knees and reads it aloud.

  Missoula County Hospital

  Patient: Olivia Bly. DOB: 10/08/72

  Admitted: 15 August

  Department: Obstetrics

  Patient gave birth to a healthy daughter. 8 pounds, 3 ounces.

  At 6:30 PM, patient requested to hold her newborn and had a severe panic attack. Shortness of breath, dilated pupils, inflation of facial capillaries. Attack was unmotivated by any known medical condition. After sedation, blood work showed patient’s calcium and magnesium levels were extremely depl
eted. Patient was put on an intravenous drip to replenish low nutrients. In the morning, patient suffered another attack and was sedated again. Patient was discharged from obstetrics the following day and referred to Dr. Camille Wilcox in psych. Probable chemical imbalance as a result of giving birth.

  I blink at the paper, my eyes taking in individual words that stand out. Sedation. Birth. Panic.

  “I think you like seeing your mother as weak, Minnow.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because the idea of her being sick, not weak, makes you feel guilty. Makes you realize how unfairly you treated her.”

  I shake my head, pressing my stumps together in my lap until lines of pain shoot down my arms.

  “How many times was your mother pregnant after you were born?”

  “Eight times, I think,” I whisper to my knees. “A few miscarriages.”

  I hear the rest as though from a cloud space, miles up. She was drowning, he says. She dealt with it all on her own, he says, her world out of balance every time my father pushed another baby up her.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “It’s just more evidence.”

  “You’re lying,” I say with certainty. “Tell me the truth.”

  He purses. “She’s a suspect.”

  A bomb may have gone off. Time may have frozen. I shiver like you do when hearing something that rewrites the entire world. “So, what you’ve just told me . . . you’re building a case against her.”

  “Not necessarily. She’s one of many leads.”

  “No . . . you’re going to tell them I was wrong about her being asleep my entire childhood. You’ll tell them she was just sick. Sick but capable of killing.”

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned this,” he says, closing the manila folder.

  “Who else is there?” I say. “Who else is a suspect?”

  “Minnow, please.”

  “No!” I shout. “I’m angry. I’m angry because this always happens. The wrong person is punished for the wrong crime. And it’s people like you who make it happen again and again.”

  “People like me?” he asks.

  “You’re a cop,” I say.

  “You’re very certain I’m a bad guy, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m certain you’re here to help me,” I say mockingly.

  “That was never a lie,” he says.

  “I’ve figured you out, you know? You’re a coward. No wonder you jumped at the chance to come here. You’re just running away from something.”

  He scoffs. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, I do. You’re wearing a wedding ring. You have a family. But you left, for months, and leaving made you happy, remember? You’re just another guy who abandoned his family.”

  A pale fire shines in his eyes now. “Fine,” he says. “Let’s go right down the list, if that’s what you want.” He flips open another file and examines its contents. “Waylon Leland. Had motive, was a drunk, history of violence. He snuck in at night and stabbed the Prophet in the belly with his bowie knife.”

  “What?” My head shoots up. “That’s not—”

  “What about Constance, your sister? By all accounts a very maladjusted young girl, physically stunted, puberty delayed. She would’ve seen what happened to you and wanted to do something to protect you. She would’ve known she was next. She went into the Prophet’s bedroom that night and smashed a lantern over his bed and set him on fire.”

  I rise from my bunk, looking down on him, the memory of the fire burning in my chest, the heat of it charging my veins.

  “Maybe you did it, huh?” I shout. “Maybe you snuck in that night and lit the fire and smothered the Prophet with his own pillow, because you’re clearly schizo. Look! I’ve struck on it. You’re a fraud. You’re as crazy as you tell everyone they are.”

  “Or what about Jude?” he continues as though he hasn’t heard me. “Had motive, access, weapons, and let’s face facts, wasn’t the brightest bulb, was he? It was pretty easy to persuade him to come to the Community with you that night, wasn’t it? It couldn’t have been difficult to get him to kill the Prophet for you.”

  “YOU SHUT YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH!”

  “You’re going to have to stop yelling,” he says, disturbingly calm.

  “I’M GONNA HAVE TO START YELLING AND NEVER, EVER STOP!” I scream.

  He doesn’t call for a guard but Officer Prosser comes anyway. The cell door opens, and she grips me by my shoulders and slams me hard to the grated floor. That knocks the wind out of me for a moment. I hear the metal slam of my door closing. After I get my breath back, I fill my lungs and scream again, hurling my arms against the floor.

  “Tranq her,” I hear the doctor say from outside the cell door.

  “She can’t exactly damage anything,” Officer Prosser says.

  “She can damage herself.”

  “That’s higher than my pay grade.”

  Everyone always assumes it’s with hands that people disobey. The Prophet thought so, too. If only he knew, if only everyone knew, my hands were never the source of my disobedience.

  Chapter 32

  “Minnow, you have to try harder to control these outbursts,” Mrs. New says.

  I’m in her office again, in the wooden chair opposite her desk. I feel groggy and itchy, but I can’t figure out where. Like it’s my soul that itches.

  “Are you gonna suspend me from reading class?” I ask.

  “Your teacher has made the case that you be given leniency,” she says. “And I think I agree with her. This isn’t the first time you’ve left a counseling session in distress. I’m going to recommend you begin seeing another counselor.”

  “No!” I bark.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s my choice. You said it was my choice. Well, I choose him.”

  “Look what happened, Minnow,” she says in a measured tone. “Look what you’ve done to yourself.”

  I look down at my arms. They’re twined with white bandages. Beneath, the purple of new bruises are visible up to my elbows. The skin around my stumps pulled apart, so in the infirmary, they had to use staples.

  “You put staples in me?” I remember asking the nurse after I woke up from sedation.

  “It’s routine,” she said.

  “Staples?” I asked. “Let me see them. No, I don’t want to. God, this place is nuts.” They put something on my tongue that melted away like powder and I went very relaxed. I didn’t care as much about the staples anymore.

  “I did this to myself,” I say to Mrs. New. “Not Dr. Wilson. He was just trying to help.” The words still taste bitter in my mouth, but I swallow them because I need to see him again, to get him off the trail of my mother and Constance and Waylon and Jude.

  “You could’ve seriously injured yourself.” She shakes her head. “As it is, Dr. Wilson will be taking an indeterminate break from your case while another caseworker evaluates his progress.”

  “For how long?” I ask, trying to push through the fog the pill covered me in.

  “However long it takes.”

  I don’t move. My muscles are locked in loose submission. My bottom lip nestles under my top, and I cry.

  • • •

  For the rest of the day, I stare at the Post-it on my affirmation wall. Anger is a kind of murder you commit in your heart. I’ve read it so many times, I think I believe it. Today, there was something else in my heartbeat. There was a skirmish. There was a fight.

  “Angel, what do you miss the most?”

  Angel hangs her head over her bunk. “I miss Pop-Tarts,” she says. “And Mountain Dew, and real pizza, and oh, fried chicken. I miss that the most.”

  “No people?” I ask.

  She shakes her head, the tails of her cornrows flicking side to sid
e. “Not a soul,” she says. “People like me, we don’t look back. Only forward.”

  “Are you ever gonna tell me how long you’re serving?”

  “Do you think I’ll tell you anything about that with you lying on your bed all mopey and sad-looking? You’d burst into tears.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Be that way.”

  She disappears back to her bunk. After a moment, I hear her ask, “Are you trying to get me to ask you who you miss?”

  “Maybe.”

  “All right,” she says. “Who do you miss?”

  “My grandpa,” I say.

  She slides off of her bed and stands in front of me. “I thought for sure you’d say Jude.”

  I shake my head. Jude is beyond missing. He’s in some other realm where his absence crouches always in the shadows, his hands pressed coldly to my heart.

  “He was my father’s father,” I say. “He’s dead now, but I can’t help thinking he wouldn’t have let any of this happen. If he’d been stronger, if he’d lived, I think he might have saved all of us.”

  I didn’t know my grandparents well. My grandmother was a wrinkled peach of a thing who died when I was too little to think about it, but Grampy was around even after the Prophet showed up. He didn’t say much when my father started talking about the new things he’d decided to believe in, but I could tell Grampy didn’t like it by the way he’d go silent and hunch his shoulders, all of his muscles bunching up inside the loose skin he lived in.

  I was five when he died. We waited for hours in the hospital, and I spent the entire time being fascinated with a sheet cake in the hospital waiting room. My father wouldn’t let me eat any. He said it was touched by the teeth of Gentiles, or something. So I just stared at the chocolate insides marring the inches of white frosting and only the memory of a message scrawled in green on the top. It was a cake to celebrate someone getting better, being cured, leaving the hospital for good.

  Grampy had been in a war years before when, on a foreign street, out of nowhere, he got punched in the thigh by a speeding piece of metal from an exploded car. And here, years later, his leg began to die, the muscle turning to poison and killing him a little with every heartbeat.