When She Returned

by Berry, Lucinda

  He led me toward his door, ushering me back out into the hallway. “Please do consider attending one of our meetings. I think you’ll find them enjoyable, and I’d love to see you again.” He shut his door quickly, without giving me a chance to respond.

  I stared at the closed door. Leo wasn’t going to be happy with me. I didn’t know anything more about Love International than I had before the interview. Maybe getting back into the swing of things wasn’t going to be as easy as I had thought.

  EIGHT

  MEREDITH

  NOW

  “Mom, you can’t be serious—”

  I cut in. “Keep your voice down, Thad.”

  I didn’t want anyone to hear our phone conversation, and the hotel walls were paper thin. It didn’t matter that I’d gone outside and was leaning against the railing at the end of the hallway. People used to say Thad had a grown man’s voice in a little boy’s body. He would’ve made a great preacher, but none of my children were religious, even though they’d gone to mass every Sunday when they were kids. They’d turned their backs on God after they had prayed for their dad to get healed and he had died.

  He dropped his voice to a whisper. “You’re actually thinking about bringing her back to California and living with you guys?”

  I couldn’t believe it either. The last forty-eight hours had been a whirlwind of activity. “The FBI is moving her case to California, since they have jurisdiction over it. There’s some kind of safe house she could stay in—”

  “Mom!” he shrieked, not even bothering to keep his voice down. “Are you listening to what you’re saying? It’s a safe house.” He drew out the word safe. “They don’t put you up in one of those unless you’re in some kind of danger. And you’re considering taking her into your home?”

  “It would only be for a little while. Just until they get things figured out.” I tried to sound optimistic.

  “How are they planning on keeping you safe if they don’t know what they’re protecting you from?”

  I eyed the police officer standing outside our hotel room door. He had been trying to pretend like he hadn’t been watching me for our entire phone call. I still wasn’t used to them following us around. “They’re going to keep a security detail on us when we get home, like they’re doing now. So far it doesn’t look like anyone even knows where we are.”

  He snorted. “Because you’re not home. All that’s going to change once you get home and word gets out. It’s only a matter of time.”

  That went without saying. It was one of the reasons I’d been hesitant to move in with Scott, because of the house’s notoriety and strange following. He’d received his share of hate threats and messages, but at least those had been gone by the time we’d gotten together. Still. Every few months we’d find someone wandering slowly by the house, trying to pretend like they weren’t taking a picture of our place.

  “It’s not permanent. It’d only be while they continue their investigation. Besides, Scott won’t even consider letting her stay in the safe house. He’s been talking about bringing her home with us since we drove to pick her up.”

  “And Kate? Any chance she’s said anything about this?”

  “No, but come on, Thad. You can’t expect her to make any decisions in the state she’s in.”

  We had no clue what she thought about everything going on around her. She hadn’t spoken much since her first interaction with Scott, at least not to us or when we were in the room. She stayed huddled on her hospital bed with Shiloh pressed against her chest, her eyes darting back and forth across the room continuously. Even though her body was still, she was poised to run at any given moment. She jumped at the slightest noise.

  “I can’t even begin to tell you everything that’s wrong with this plan.” I could see him sticking out a finger as he listed each item on his list. He’d always been my logical and practical one. “You don’t know where she’s been or what she’s been doing for eleven years. No clue. Nobody knows why she left. Still. She clearly hasn’t been alone all this time.” I could hear his eye roll. “Then she suddenly pops up out of the blue with a baby, but once she’s rescued, she stops talking? Come on, Mom. You’ve got to admit, there’s something weird about all of it.”

  I sighed. “Everything about this is weird.”

  “What about her family? Why aren’t they there? How come they’re not rejoicing that she’s been found and coming in to swoop her up? Let her go live with them.”

  “I explained all this to you before,” I said. “Kate was an only child. Her parents died in a car accident when she was a teenager. Most of her extended family lives in Sweden, and she was never close with any of them, because they were all wild and crazy.”

  “I’m sticking with my original judgment—this is a terrible idea.” He huffed.

  I would’ve had the same reaction if the situation were reversed, but I trusted Scott’s judgment. He wouldn’t do anything to put us in harm’s way.

  KATE

  THEN

  I hurried to make it on time to my second interview session with Ray. Leo was still annoyed about how things had gone before, but he couldn’t get too upset, since I’d hit it out of the park with the other big story he’d assigned me—the girls’ soccer coach who’d just been fired from Middleton High School for sending inappropriate pictures of himself to a girl on his team. I had uncovered a list of prior offenses before anyone else, and the article had quickly made national news. But it didn’t make up for how terrible things had gone with this story, and I was determined to do better.

  I walked in the front doors without knocking and quickly made my way through a meeting in progress, doing my best not to disturb them, and hurried down the rows of rooms until I reached Ray’s at the end. His door was wide open, and he got up from his desk at the sight of me. He rushed toward me and threw his arms around me before I had a chance to protest. “Hi, Kate. It’s so good to see you again.” He quickly pulled away and motioned to the chair in front of his desk, where I’d sat before. “Have a seat. Let’s get started.”

  He left the door open behind us, which felt strange. It shouldn’t have, but something about it just didn’t feel right.

  “Does the door open make you uncomfortable?” he asked, instantly picking up on it.

  I wasn’t going to let him throw me off so easily this time. “I’m okay with it if you’re okay with it.”

  He lifted both his hands, palms up like he was a magician showing me there wasn’t anything up his sleeves. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “Perfect. Then should we get to it?” I asked, not giving him any time to gain control of the questions. I pulled my tape recorder out of my purse and set it on the desk. “Do you mind if I record this?” I asked. He nodded his agreement before I continued. “What do you have to say to your critics who think you only get people clean so that they can work for you for free?”

  He balked, taken off guard, but recovered quickly with a smile. “Okay, I see where you’re going now. I don’t have anything to say to my critics.”

  “Not even those who’d call you a cult?”

  He burst out laughing. “We’re not a cult.”

  “How would you describe yourself then?” I asked and quickly added, “In one sentence.”

  He rubbed his chin while he thought. “We’re a social justice movement committed to spreading the love of Christ to all.” He leaned across his desk. “Are you familiar with Matthew twenty-five?”

  “Sorry, I’m not,” I said.

  “Matthew twenty-five, verses thirty-five and thirty-six, sums up our entire philosophy. Jesus said, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me . . . Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.’ That’s how we live our lives, and it’s the closest thing we have to a creed.”

  I
t was hard to find fault with that. Not nearly as juicy as Leo and I might have secretly hoped. “So how does that work? Practically speaking.” It sounded beautiful and poetic, but I wanted to know how that played out in day-to-day life.

  He folded his hands on the top of the desk. “We live our lives as servants of Christ.”

  It still didn’t tell me anything significant. Not anything that I couldn’t read in one of the pamphlets stacked next to their front door. I shifted gears. “Were you always this into helping people?”

  “Absolutely not. I stumbled upon it purely by mistake and divine intervention,” he said.

  I spent the next hour listening to him describe how he’d grown up extremely poor on a small farm in rural New Jersey. He started working when he was nine and never stopped, going on to become a successful stockbroker as an adult. He described how he was living the American dream until one day on his commute home he started questioning his happiness. It led him to go in search of greater meaning. It seemed a bit cliché to me, and my thoughts drifted as he continued explaining how he gave his money away to various charities. He had started with giving possessions to homeless people on the streets and had ended with allowing families from domestic violence shelters to move into the three houses he owned across the country.

  “I’ve never looked back,” he said after he finished.

  “Not even once?”

  He shook his head. “There was always a measure of unrest and emptiness in my soul. I spent my life ignoring it and pretending like it wasn’t there. This way of life has not only taken away those feelings, but it’s allowed me to stop living a lie and to step into a life of authenticity. The greatest riches in the world never gave me that,” he said.

  I did my best to keep a straight face and not show my annoyance. The only people who ever complained about having all kinds of money and not being happy were the ones who had it. One of the reasons I was so glad to be back at work was that Scott and I could stop fighting about money. We’d been arguing about money since Abbi was born, and we’d never been ones to fight about our finances. All that had changed when we had gone down to nearly a one-income family, but Scott refused to admit that was why we were struggling so hard. It was too big of a hit to his ego that he couldn’t support us in the way we’d been used to on just his income alone.

  Ray’s voice jumped into my thoughts. “Boring you, huh?”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. Being a reporter meant I’d learned the art of feigning interest and pretending to listen when I didn’t care all that much, and Ray’s story was quickly losing me. It wasn’t any different from that of so many of the other self-proclaimed spiritual leaders running around California. I motioned to the walls in our room, the facility surrounding us. “Who paid for this?”

  “People give out of the generosity of their own hearts, and God always provides,” he said.

  Tomorrow I was interviewing the parents of a nineteen-year-old boy, Sean, who had been one of the first kids they’d helped get clean and had recently joined their movement. They’d given a $200,000 donation to Love International three weeks ago. It was hard to tell whether it was in support of the movement or a way to keep a roof over their son’s head while he was with them.

  “Have you had enough of this?” he asked, catching me off guard this time.

  “What do you mean?”

  He smiled at me. “Come on, Kate. I can tell when I’m boring someone to death.”

  I shook my head. “Not at all. I find this stuff fascinating,” I said, hoping I sounded convincing.

  “You don’t lie to your husband like that, do you?”

  I sat up in my chair. “Excuse me?”

  “My apologies. I didn’t mean to push any buttons.”

  “You didn’t push any buttons,” I snapped.

  “I didn’t?” He cocked his head to the side, eyeing me quizzically. “From where I’m standing, it looks like I did.”

  Was he like this with everyone? Or was it only with women?

  “I’m not a liar,” I said.

  “We’re all liars,” he countered, eerily similar to the philosophy professor I’d had in college.

  “What do you lie about?” I asked.

  A wide smile stretched across his face, lighting up his eyes. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said.

  It was my second meeting at the center, and I was so much more comfortable this time even though I was still bummed that Scott had refused to come.

  “You know how I feel about organized religion,” he had said.

  But that wasn’t the point. Religion wasn’t my thing either. My parents hadn’t even brought me to church on the holidays. I just thought it’d be fun, something different for us to do together, but he had no interest. Sometimes I didn’t know why I even tried. He was a creature of habit. Always had been.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and grabbed two of the sugar cookies from the platter before taking a seat on one of the aluminum chairs. When I was a kid, I had loved how routine oriented Scott had been, since it had been so different from the chaos continually erupting at my house. His structure had grounded me. It had kept me sane through all those difficult years, especially after my parents had died, but lately it felt stifling, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Guilt gnawed at me like it did whenever I let those kinds of thoughts creep in. I was lucky to have Scott. Period. I forced myself to pay attention to what was happening around me. The meeting would be a welcome distraction.

  The aluminum chairs were arranged in a circle tonight. Last time I’d been in this room was for orientation, and they’d been in front of the podium. You couldn’t attend any of the classes, lectures, or retreats until you’d completed their orientation. You weren’t even allowed in the building unless you were registered to do it, and everyone wore name tags on lanyards around their necks once they were inside, so there was no mistaking who you were. There wasn’t any official security, but you couldn’t miss the large, bouncer-looking dudes roaming the hallways and peeking into their classrooms. They’d had to tighten up their open-door policy after they’d started receiving death threats from someone in the community.

  “I’m not sure I want you going back there,” Scott had said after he’d heard about it on the news.

  I had dismissed him, not even entertaining the idea of not going back to their campus. None of the threats were serious. It was only talk. “It’s just the small-town mentality of people not liking change and being resistant to anything that doesn’t fall within their traditional ideologies.”

  He had grabbed my waist and pulled me close, kissing me. “I love it when you get all smarty-pants on me.”

  I hadn’t had the heart to tell him that sometimes I felt like I was describing him. Even though we’d both grown up in the same small town in Illinois—Castlerock, population all of three thousand people—I’d spent my childhood feeling like I never fit in and plotting ways to get out. Scott pretended to hate it as much as I had, but he would’ve gone back there after we finished college if I hadn’t insisted on moving to Chicago.

  I took my tablet out of my purse just as a van pulled up out front and a group of teenagers spilled out. They looked like the crew that went around town collecting donations from people’s homes and thrift-store castaways. There were different crews responsible for doing things throughout the community, and everyone got to choose their crew based on how and who they wanted to serve. Everyone did their part. That’s how things worked.

  “So who cleans the toilets?” I’d asked Ray in one of our meetings. We’d met four times, and our talks were growing on me. His personality could be intoxicating, and I always came out of them feeling like I’d had two glasses of wine.

  “You’d be surprised, but someone always selects bathroom duty. That’s not even the worst job, though. Somebody has to clean out the grease pan underneath the industrial stove in our kitchen. Imagine how disgusting that must be, but people do it, and many do it with a smile on their face,”
he’d said in response.

  The kids streamed through the rooms, sunburned, dirty, and tired, but with smiles on their faces. Some of them looked really young. We needed to get Abbi involved in service. She was old enough to do something. I made a mental note to talk to Scott about it when I got home.

  Our room quickly filled with people, and it wasn’t long before the seats were full. The disciples were dressed in their beige uniforms, making them stand out from the others. The women wore skirts down to their ankles, and the men wore khaki pants. They all had plain, matching T-shirts. Everyone else wore regular street clothes like me.

  “Why the beige?” I’d emailed Ray. He was surprisingly responsive to email and almost always got back to me within twenty-four hours, even though he claimed they avoided technology unless absolutely necessary.

  He’d explained one of their core beliefs was to eliminate all distractions and avoid any stimulus that might artificially create a spiritual experience where there was none. I had to admit, there was something inherently calming about it. Something about the nothingness quieted my mind.

  I checked to make sure my phone was off for the third time. They had very strict phone rules. They weren’t allowed at any gatherings, and you were asked to leave if it went off in a meeting or session. I still wasn’t used to carrying the stupid thing. Who wanted people being able to get ahold of you all the time? Definitely not me, but Scott had insisted on it, and it wasn’t worth the argument.

  The door shut, and all the voices quieted instantly. A man in the far end of the circle began speaking. “Welcome, everyone. My name is Sol, and I’m so glad to have you here tonight.” He had the glow of the newly converted, and there was no mistaking his zeal. “Before we get started, let’s all just take a moment to center ourselves by taking a big deep breath.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then dramatically let it all out before opening his eyes again. “There. Okay. Now let’s get started.” His eyes scanned the room. “Is this anyone’s first time here?”