Cold Betrayal (8 page)

“I need to get to Flagstaff,” Enid blurted out urgently, saying the words fast enough that there was no time to change her mind. “I’m looking for a ride.”

Drying her hands, the woman turned to Enid with her brow furrowed into a frown. “We’re not going all the way to Flag,” she said. “Twenty miles this side, but you’re welcome to ride with us that far if you want.”

When Enid left the restroom at last, she scurried along beside the heavyset woman, hoping that the Indian woman’s ample body and voluminous skirt would shield her from the curious glances of both the clerk and the customers gathered around the cash register. Once outside, the woman led the way to a dusty pickup truck, an older-model Ford. A scrawny Indian man in a white Stetson, a black shirt, faded jeans, and equally faded boots was finishing filling the gas tank and returning the hose to the pump.

He looked up at Enid questioningly as she and the woman approached the vehicle. “She’s going to Flagstaff and needs a ride,” the woman explained. “I told her we’ll take her as far as we’re going.”

Under the wide brim of the Stetson, the man’s bronzed face was impassive, registering neither surprise nor objection. He simply nodded, as though picking up strangers and giving them rides was the most natural thing in the world. He waited until the pump burped out a receipt that he folded carefully before putting in his wallet.

“Okay then,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The woman climbed in first, taking the seat in the middle with the floor-mounted gearshift between her legs. Once seated, her body seemed to spread out in both directions, leaving just enough room for the driver and Enid to crowd into the cab on either side. It was a tight fit. Enid had a hard time closing her door. She was relieved when the old truck’s engine rumbled to life and then purred smoothly as they drove across the paved lot and onto the roadway. The truck may have been older than most of the vehicles at The Encampment, but this one seemed to run better.

Enid sat pressed up against the door with both arms resting on her swollen belly. As they headed south in the gathering dusk, the road was familiar at first. Enid realized then that she had been inside the restroom far longer than she had thought. The sun was already setting in the west as they drove past the dirt track called Sanctuary Road that, two miles later, would arrive at the first houses built inside The Encampment.

From that intersection on, Enid was in territory that was wholly new to her. The dark sky overhead was familiar, and so were the emerging stars, but she knew nothing of the surrounding landscape.
Was the Grand Canyon just over there?
she wondered, looking to the west.
Was she riding past it in the dark without being able to see it?

They rode for miles in utter silence. The woman was the first to speak. “When’s your baby due?” she asked.

“A month and a half,” Enid answered.

“A boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

The woman nodded, her smile visible in the reflected light from the dashboard. “That’s good,” she said. “Then when you have a son, he will always have an elder sister to look up to.”

Enid thought about that statement. It didn’t seem to jibe with the way things worked in The Family. Yes, little boys valued their older sisters when they were little and needed food to eat or to have their diapers changed, but there came a time when that was no longer true. That’s when the balance of power shifted. It didn’t take long for boys to start looking down on the very girls who had once cared for them. About that same time, though—about the time the girls were betrothed and sent to live with their future husbands’ families—the boys left their birth homes, too, going to live in the boys’ dormitories near the church where they were overseen by Bishop Lowell’s wives and trained to work in the fields. After that, the only time The Encampment’s boys and girls saw each other was during supervised events at church.

“Does your family know you’re out here by yourself?” the woman asked.

Enid nodded. “My mother’s in the hospital in Flagstaff,” she said, surprised at how easily the lie came to her lips. “I’m going to see her.”

The old woman nodded, seeming to accept Enid’s statement at face value.

As the silence deepened once more, the size of Enid’s lie seemed to grow around her, filling the cab of the truck, robbing it of air. She wished what she had said was true—that her mother
was
in a hospital someplace, but, of course, that wasn’t likely. In Enid’s heart of hearts, she hoped her mother was Outside somewhere—that she had somehow escaped life in The Family and that someday Enid might even be able to find her.

•   •   •

Enid had only the vaguest memories of her mother, or, at least, of the woman she thought had been her mother. She’d had blond hair, too, worn in braids wrapped around the crown of her head, just the way Enid wore hers. She remembered that a woman with blond hair, kind eyes, a sweet voice, and a wonderful smile had been part of Enid’s childhood for a while. She was there for a time, and then she was gone. After she disappeared, Enid went to live with another family. Then when she was five and betrothed to Gordon, she had come to live in his household under the strict thumb of Aunt Edith. Once, when Enid had asked Aunt Edith who her mother was and where she had gone, Aunt Edith had replied that Enid’s mother was dead. End of story.

Except it wasn’t. Last summer, Enid had broken one of The Family’s cardinal rules and had paid an unauthorized visit to the pig sheds. The two women who tended the Tower family pigs lived in a small tin Quonset hut near a similar building that housed their charges. Never referred to by name, they were known only as the Brought Back girls—girls who had attempted to escape The Family and had lived Outside before being returned home. According to The Family’s strictures, they were considered wicked and evil and were not to be spoken to under any circumstances.

The Brought Back girls slept on straw mattresses in a shed with no electricity. They had a kerosene lantern and a wood stove. Their Quonset hut came with no running water or indoor toilet. The two of them wore faded, cast-off, and much-mended clothing that was handed down to them only when it was no longer fit for anyone else to wear. After dinner each night, they came to the back door of the kitchen to collect that day’s slop bucket for the pigs, bringing along two tin plates for the scraps that were their own dinner. Never allowed inside the house, they stood in silence on the back step, waiting until whatever leftovers happened to be available were doled out onto their individual plates.

Older girls were assigned various household tasks and child-tending chores. Enid actually preferred doing dinner dishes to some of the other jobs—like sweeping, dusting, and shaking rugs. As a result, she was often in the kitchen when the Brought Back girls came to the house after supper to collect their evening meal—their only meal of the day.

Enid had noticed that when Aunt Margaret was in the kitchen overseeing the cleanup, the amount of food heaped onto the Brought Back girls’ plates was far more generous than when Aunt Edith was in charge. The same thing held true for the other wives when it came their turn. They made sure that the Brought Back girls’ helpings were stingier than they needed to be.

Curious, Enid had managed to ask enough questions to learn that one of The Family’s two in-house exiles was actually Aunt Margaret’s younger sister, someone who had once been betrothed to marry Gordon and who had run away months before the scheduled ceremony. No one ever mentioned how she had been found or returned to The Encampment, but clearly someone had gone Outside and retrieved her.

For the first time, Enid began to wonder. She knew that on the rare occasions when girls ran away from The Family and didn’t come back, their disappearances were worse than if they had died. Their names were inked out of family Bibles and were never mentioned again. It was almost as though they had never existed.

One afternoon, when Enid was charged with looking after some of the younger kids out in the play area, the electric fence around the pig-pen went down and some of the piglets escaped their enclosure. Enid and the children helped return some of the escapees to the pen, an act of kindness for which the Brought Back girls were effusively grateful. In the middle of all the excitement, Enid managed a quiet word with the one she had been told was Aunt Margaret’s younger sister.

The woman’s clothing was filthy, and so was she. Her footwear consisted of a pair of taped-together men’s boots several sizes too large for her. Her hands were rough and callused. Her matted hair was spiked with twigs of straw. She was missing several teeth. Enid tried to estimate how old she was, but the hard life she lived made guessing her age impossible.

Enid waited until no one else was within earshot. “My name is Enid,” she said quietly. “Did you ever know my mother?” She asked the question with little hope of an answer. Much to her surprise, the woman nodded.

“Her name was Anne—Anne Lowell. She was a year younger than me. She was married to Bishop Lowell, although he wasn’t the bishop back then. He was still Brother Lowell at the time.”

Enid was astonished. If her mother had been married to Bishop Lowell, did that make Enid one of his daughters? If so, why had he never acknowledged her in any way? She realized now that the bishop had never in her memory spoken so much as a single word to her. All through her childhood, in fact long before Enid married Gordon, she had been known as Enid Tower. In other words, The Family had first driven her mother away and then they had stripped Enid of her sole connection to Anne Lowell—her name.

“Aunt Edith told me once that my mother died. Is that true?”

The Brought Back girl shook her head. “Your mother and I were friends,” she said. “Anne had two miscarriages after you were born. When she got pregnant again, she ran away. Anne was one of the lucky ones. Unlike Agnes and me, she didn’t get caught.”

“Agnes?” Enid asked. “That’s your friend’s name?”

The other woman nodded, then she looked worriedly in the direction of the house, clearly concerned that someone might see them talking together. Enid knew what would happen to her if she was caught—she’d be punished, most likely with Aunt Edith’s willow switch. She realized then that the Brought Back girls would be punished, too, probably with something worse than a switch.

“What’s your name?” Enid asked.

“They used to call me Patricia,” the grimy woman said wistfully. “That was a long time ago.”

“You’re still Patricia to me,” Enid declared. “Thank you for telling me about my mother, and I’m glad to know your names.”

She had left the pigpen then, but that conversation marked the beginning of Enid’s rebellion. She was struck by the injustice of the way The Family’s boys were treated and the way the girls were treated. She was especially bothered by the unrelenting internal exile of the Brought Back girls. Once boys grew up, most of them chose to leave. Few came back, but the ones who did were always welcomed with open arms and a sermon at church about the return of the Prodigal Son. Some of the returnees were even allowed to marry the girls who had been betrothed to them years earlier. None of the boys who came back were sent off to live in Quonset huts and look after pigs.

If boys could leave The Encampment and then come back whenever they wanted, Enid wondered, why couldn’t girls?

Now that Enid knew her mother’s name, she thought about Anne Lowell all the time, wondering what had happened to her and to her baby. It was common knowledge in The Family that Bishop Lowell was beyond strict with members of his own family and with the boys in the dormitories, too. Helena, his First Wife, was known to be an absolute terror—a woman who made Aunt Edith look like sweetness and light.

Lying in bed next to her snoring husband that night, Enid thought about her mother—and about what her life must have been like, living under the thumb of Bishop Lowell and Helena. Enid could understand that things might have happened that would have provoked her mother into running away, but how could she do such a thing and leave Enid behind? For weeks, Enid tossed and turned, turning that painful question over and over in her head. Then came the day when Dr. Johnson did Enid’s first ultrasound.

Since most of the girls in The Family married on their fifteenth birthday, they usually had their first baby before they turned sixteen. For whatever reason, that hadn’t happened to Enid. The marriage part, yes, but she didn’t become pregnant for almost a year after that. It was so long, in fact, that Aunt Edith had called Enid aside one day and asked her if she was doing something wicked to keep from having a baby. Enid wasn’t, of course. She had no idea what any of those wicked things might be. For whatever reason, she had been a month past her sixteenth birthday when she made that first prenatal doctor’s visit.

As soon as Dr. Johnson told her she was expecting a girl, it was as though someone had flipped a switch somewhere deep in Enid’s soul. Suddenly she understood not only what her mother had done but also why. Anne had learned that she was expecting a girl. She must have realized even then that Enid was lost to her, but she refused to consign another girl child to live among people for whom girls were valuable only so long as they could go forth and multiply. Leaving had been the only way for Anne Lowell to escape the kind of tyranny that routinely dished out the kinds of punishments Patricia and Agnes were forced to endure while boys were free to come and go as they liked with no apparent punishment at all.

That day in Dr. Johnson’s office, before Enid had even finished dressing to leave the examining room, she had made up her mind and reached the same conclusion Anne Lowell had reached—Enid would run away.

For months afterward, she lay awake in bed next to Gordon, all the while plotting her escape. One night, when everyone was asleep, she managed to creep out of the house undetected and make her way back down the path to the dark Quonset hut that was home to Patricia and Agnes. When she tapped on the door, Patricia, carrying a lit candle, came to the door.

“I’m going to leave,” Enid said. “I wanted you to know, and I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye.”