Will pushed his way through the crowd and stood in front of Ray. “You had a gun, Ray, and nobody knew about it. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a much bigger problem than who’s going to eat these stupid rabbits.”
Ray nodded. “I can see why that would concern you, Will. I stumbled on the gun the other day when I was checking one of the tire springs in the back, and it was tucked underneath the tire jack.” We had a strict no-violence policy, and it went without saying that guns qualified. “One of our old drivers used to take this van on mission trips to the south side. He got robbed three times at gunpoint and started carrying a weapon for his safety. I guess he forgot it was back there, and nobody ever thought to look.” He shrugged, then raised his head to the sky. “Perhaps it was God’s way of doing for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves.”
Will wasn’t convinced, but I eyed the rest of the circle to see the others’ reactions. Doubt shone on most of their faces too. I turned to Margo, like I did for most things. She’d grown to be my voice of reason. She appeared unmoved, waiting on Ray with an expectant look on her face. Maybe this was some kind of test that she’d already figured out. If she wasn’t shocked or surprised about Ray having a gun, then I wasn’t either. After all, she knew him better than I did.
TWENTY-TWO
ABBI
NOW
I quietly knocked on Mom’s door. It had been two nights since I’d been in her room. I didn’t know what to say to her after everything that had happened. I still didn’t, but I missed talking to her at night. Our interactions weren’t the same when we were around everyone else. She relaxed with me in ways she didn’t with them. Mom opened the door, and Shiloh smiled when she saw me.
“Oh my gosh, Mom!” I squealed. “She smiled at me, like really smiled at me.”
“You’re her sister,” Mom said. She gave me a quick hug before moving to the side so I could get through the doorway. I scooped Shiloh from her arms and brought her to me. I sniffed the top of her bald head. She always smelled so good after she came out of a bath.
“I wonder when people start stinking?” I asked.
Mom laughed. It was different than how Dad described her laugh, but most things about her were. There wasn’t much of anything he’d said that was true about her anymore, but you couldn’t go through what she’d gone through and not become a changed person. Dad had always said her laugh was loud and boisterous, like an old fat man’s. Not anymore. It was quiet and gentle, tinged with guilt, like she wasn’t supposed to find things funny anymore or enjoy life.
“I can’t remember when it happened with you. One day you had the new-baby smell, and the next day you smelled like the food you’d smeared all over your face.” She smiled at the memory.
I climbed on her bed with Shiloh, laying her on her back while I rested on my elbow above her. She kicked and flailed her arms wildly. I giggled as I stroked her cheeks. Mom sat behind me and rubbed my back.
Her eyes misted. “I’m sorry for all this. Everything. Leaving. Not coming back.”
“Please stop saying you’re sorry, Mom.” My words hung in the air. Hanging out with Mom had forced me to get comfortable with silence. It was amazing how long she could go without saying anything. I wasn’t there yet. “What made you stay with them for so long?”
“I followed the word of God. It says, ‘I was a stranger and you invited me in. I was hungry and you fed me. I—’”
I put my arm on hers to interrupt her. None of her scripture ever made sense. Maybe it did to the others, but I just thought she sounded like a robot. It creeped me out, and I didn’t like it. “What was it like for you besides all the God stuff?”
She took a moment to think about her answer this time. “It was beautiful. Their purpose. The way they lived. Spoke. All of it. I’d never felt anything like it before, and it bonded us together. We felt like we belonged together, and Ray said he was responsible for us, that he’d never let anything bad happen to us.” Her eyes lit up when she said his name. They always did. “It was like falling in love. Everything else fell to the wayside.”
It hurt to be the “everything else,” but I’d asked her to tell me the truth, so I had to be open to hearing what she had to say even if I didn’t like it. “And Ray? What was he like?” I asked tentatively, not wanting to push too hard.
“He was charismatic.” She giggled nervously. “But it was more than that. He had this huge presence.” She spread her arms out wide. “It filled every space he went into. Being with him felt like a gift he bestowed upon you. Somehow he did it without being arrogant.” Her forehead crinkled in thought. “I don’t know how he did that.”
“Everyone loves the guy,” I said.
“Huh?” Her forehead wrinkled in confusion.
People had been fascinated with Ray since the story broke that Mom had been with Love International. They’d created Facebook and Instagram profiles in support of him. Countless of his followers had pledged their support of him, swearing there wasn’t any way he’d hurt Mom even if she’d been with them all this time, but I couldn’t tell any of that to Mom, since I wasn’t supposed to be looking at it. But I didn’t want to lie to her either. I eyed her bedroom door, which I’d made sure to shut behind me so that nobody could hear us if they happened to get up.
“I’ve seen Ray,” I whispered.
She grabbed me. “What? Where?” Her eyes skirted the room, like I might have hidden him in the closet or underneath the bed.
“On social media,” I said quickly, before she could get any more worked up.
“Social media? That’s the stuff on the internet?” she asked.
I smiled. Sometimes I forgot how little she knew about technology. “Basically.”
“And they had his picture?”
I nodded.
“Can I see?”
I froze. If I wasn’t supposed to be looking at any of this stuff, she definitely wasn’t supposed to be looking at any of it.
“Please, Abbi?” she asked when I still hadn’t responded.
It was only a picture, and it wasn’t like she didn’t know what he looked like anyway. I wouldn’t show her any of the articles or things they’d said about her. I grabbed my phone from my back pocket and quickly scrolled through the images on Google until I found the one that had gone viral. Everyone made comments about how gorgeous he was, but I didn’t think so. He reminded me of Tom Cruise—too pretty. I enlarged the picture and handed her my phone.
She stared at it like she was seeing a ghost. Her hands shook, and her eyes instantly filled with tears. Anxiety tightened my chest.
“Hey, Mom, you know what? That’s probably not the best idea. I don’t know what I was thinking.” I reached for my phone. She sprang off the bed and clutched it against her.
“No!” Her eyes were wild. The muscles in her neck stretched taut.
I inched my way off the bed. I could scream for Dad if I needed to, but he’d be furious that I’d set her off. She hadn’t gotten scared like this since we’d gotten home. “It’s okay, Mom. You can have my phone. I won’t take it from you.”
It took a second, but my words startled her back to herself. The color drained from her face. “I feel sick.”
I rushed toward her and put my arm around her waist. “Here, why don’t you just sit back down on the bed?” I helped her to it and set her down delicately. She still hadn’t let go of my phone, but at least she wasn’t looking at it anymore. Her body was rigid, stiff. The muscles in her neck hadn’t relaxed. Shiloh was asleep at the top of the bed, and I brought her to Mom without waking her up, hoping she’d snap her out of it. At first she held her robotically, like she was on autopilot, but as Shiloh settled against her, Mom slowly relaxed her body into hers. I breathed a sigh of relief.
I wasn’t doing that again.
TWENTY-THREE
MEREDITH
NOW
The restaurant was packed with people. I scanned the crowd and spotted Caleb at a table by himself in the corner. I hurrie
d past the hostess, and he rose to meet me. He gave me the hug I’d been waiting for all day. I hadn’t seen him in almost seven months. It was the longest we’d ever been apart, but he was buried in his internship at one of the law firms downtown and barely had time to breathe. We didn’t usually go out for dinner when he visited, since he preferred my cooking, but there was no way I was having him over to the house tonight. We had all been walking on eggshells around each other, and having an awkward sit-down dinner with everyone was the last thing I wanted to do.
“You look tired,” he said, pulling out my chair.
I laughed. “Thanks so much, son.”
He lifted his palms up. “Well, at least I’m honest.”
He had ordered me a glass of merlot, and his sat in front of him half-empty. A brush with alcoholism in his teens had terrified me, and I had kept an eye on his drinking ever since. It’d scared him bad enough to keep him sober for a decade, but in recent years he’d started drinking again. He swore it was only socially and he didn’t have a problem. Only time would tell.
“You need a haircut,” I said, taking a sip of my wine. I didn’t like when he wore his hair long. It made his nose look too big for his face.
“I’m growing it out.” He smirked at me, knowing how I felt about his long hair.
“Have you talked to Thad?” I asked. I’d barely spoken to him all week.
“Mom, please, can we just get to the good stuff? We can talk about Thad any time.”
“I don’t even know where to start,” I said. Not to mention I couldn’t remember what I’d told him and what I’d told his brother. I took another sip of my wine.
“Are they out of your house yet?” he asked, referring to the FBI’s command center.
“Not yet. Monday. That’s when everything changes,” I said.
There’d been a huge shift in how the FBI was going to handle Kate’s case going forward, since she’d revealed that she hadn’t been kidnapped. Camille felt confident that it was safe enough for her to start doing her forensic interviews at the police station and her deprogramming work with Brian at one of the local counseling centers downtown. Brian had spent most of our debriefing session yesterday stressing how important it was for all of us to start getting back into our daily routines to help us feel a sense of normalcy again, since it’d been almost two weeks since our world had flipped upside down. He said it would help Kate feel more secure too. On Monday, Scott was going back to work, and Abbi was going back to school, even though neither of them wanted to.
“Are you going to be the one driving Kate to all her appointments?” Caleb asked.
I nodded.
“And they’re sure all of this is safe?”
“More so than they were before, but we can’t stay quarantined forever.” He waved down the server, and he quickly placed our order, not bothering to ask what I wanted, since I always had the caramelized pork chop with a spinach salad. “Have they found Love International yet?”
“I told you they found their camp, right?”
“Yes, and that it had been abandoned, but they were pretty sure that’s where she’d been living for at least the past few years.”
I nodded before continuing. “They haven’t found Ray or any of the other people they’re looking for, but members and disciples of Love International have come out of the woodwork.”
“Really?” He raised his eyebrows. “What’s that like?”
“Bizarre and nothing like I expected. Most of them are regular people. Some of them are super successful people too.”
He shook his head. “No way.”
“Seriously. You’d be surprised. I had no idea. And most of them are in support of him. They swear he changed their lives.” I tried to stay away from watching any of the footage, but it was almost impossible. Dateline had interviewed six former members last night, and nothing could’ve kept me from the program. All of them spoke in favor of Ray and the movement, except for a set of parents who’d lost their twenty-four-year-old daughter to Love International. They’d always been convinced they had something to do with her disappearance and described their hunt to find her.
“Well, they definitely changed Kate’s. How’s she doing? Any better?”
“It’s hard to say. She doesn’t mumble nearly as much, or at least not around other people anymore. She still seems pretty spacey and out of it most of the time, though, but she gets lively and interactive with Shiloh and Abbi. You can tell she cares about them.”
“At least you’re getting your house back soon,” he said. “It’s not going to be as comfortable for Kate down at the station, but it’s going to be so much less invasive for all of you.”
“Yeah, I suppose, but I have no idea what we’re going to do with ourselves the rest of the time, when everyone else is gone. It’s going to be so weird. We’ve only been alone together one time, and that was the first night she got here. I don’t know how to even talk to her,” I said, fighting back the urge to cry. I tried not to cry in front of them, since it made them so upset, and I hated upsetting them. It was about more than being alone with Kate. I could feel Scott slipping through my fingers, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“I really want to meet her,” he said. He’d texted me something similar a few days ago, but I wasn’t going to let anyone treat her like she was some circus freak, not even my son. I shook my head. “Come on, Mom. It’s not like I’m not going to meet her eventually. She’s part of the family.”
“She’s not part of the family,” I snapped without thinking. Except that she was. A bigger part than I’d ever been, and my part only became smaller the more time went on. That was what hurt the most.
KATE
THEN
“Our pain is only there to tell us something. Listen to what it has to say,” Ray had instructed us before he left for another one of his thirty-day soul journeys. Last time he’d hiked the peaks of Sioux Valley, but he hadn’t told anyone where he was going this time. We had all agreed to enter into a thirty-day fast while he was gone to help him achieve greater commune with the Lord. We needed to help him find an answer, because the ground still wasn’t responding.
Even Phil ate meat now. It was either that or starve, because no matter how hard we worked in the fields, our crops refused to cooperate. None of us knew anything about planting and growing vegetables in the wild, despite how organic we might have professed to be in our former lives. The only way to learn was by doing, and so far we’d destroyed more than what we’d created. Our supplies had dwindled down to almost nothing.
We’d all been counting the days until Ray came back, and today was the day. All we’d done while he was away was pray and meditate. No one had to voice what we all knew to be true—we couldn’t live this way much longer. We had to find a way to survive or move on.
Darkness had settled around camp, and he still wasn’t home yet. We all anxiously lifted our eyes to the hills around us, searching, all the while pretending like we weren’t. For a second, the thought crossed my mind that he wasn’t coming back, and I quickly admonished myself for living in such fear. The voice of fear was one of the hardest voices to squelch in my spiritual journey, rearing its ugly head whenever I thought I’d gotten rid of it for good.
Willow sought me out as soon as we had gathered around the fire. No matter what happened, each day ended with a fire gathering. “I’m so nervous. What if something happened to him?” she whispered, so nobody else would hear, since fear was contagious. “There are so many bears out in those woods. I just keep picturing him out there bleeding to death from being attacked. Did you ever see that Leonardo DiCaprio movie where he gets into a fight with that huge bear? What was it called?” She raised her arms and pretended to be a bear.
I giggled at how ridiculous she looked. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“Anyway, that’s all I keep picturing.”
The energy around the fire was nervous and tense, like it was whenever we were waiting for Ray to re
turn. We were never the same when he wasn’t with us. Beth was describing a way she’d found to decrease the flour we needed for bread when she stopped midsentence and yelled, “There he is!” as she pointed to a figure moving through the clearing.
You couldn’t make out any of his features, but there was no mistaking Ray’s gait, and nobody besides him would be traipsing out in the forest at this time of night. We jumped up. Someone took off running toward him, and before I knew what was happening I was being carried along with the group. We picked up speed as we went, laughing and giggling like schoolchildren being released at recess. We swarmed him and passed him around the group, hugging and kissing him and each other. Nervous chatter followed us back to the fire. We all took up the positions we’d been in before, eager to hear what he had to say, hoping he wouldn’t wait until the morning to share it with us.
“Are you thirsty? Can I get you something to drink?” Bekah asked. Even though her belly swelled with pregnancy, she never tired of helping others. We had tried to get her to rest once it was clear what was going on with her, but she never would. The pregnancy had come as a huge surprise, since nobody knew she and Sam had been hooking up.
“I’m fine, thank you,” he said. His face was solemn. I’d never seen him look so serious. Worry filled my insides. The others sensed it, too, as we waited for him to speak. The silence stretched on until it grew uncomfortable. He bowed his head and folded his hands. His hair had gotten so long it hung down past his fingers. When he lifted his head, the smile had returned to his face. “Family, you are all aware of the reason for my journey, and I felt your presence while I’ve been away. Thank you for your prayers, because we were in desperate need of revelation and light.” He took a seat, folding his hands on his lap. “The ground around us only represents our inability to bring forth change and creation. It reflects what’s happening inside our souls.” He paused, giving his words a chance to sink in.
When She Returned Page 15