Devoted (7 page)

“I have your lunch,” I say, placing the plate on the bed next to my mother and the glass of milk on her nightstand. She makes no effort to touch them, but she manages a quiet, “Thank you.”

“Can't you take one bite?” I ask, sitting gingerly on the edge of the bed.

“I'm really not hungry, Rachel. Maybe later.”

“It's important you get your strength back,” I say, feeling the lump in my throat threaten to split open again for the second time in one day. But I don't want to cry in front of my mother—that will only make her feel worse.

“Yes, I know,” my mom answers. “I'll eat something later, I promise.”

“Take just one bite, so I can see,” I say. “Please?”

For the tiniest second, my mother smiles a real smile, but it's gone so quickly I'm not sure if I imagined it or not. She reaches out, takes a small bite of the sandwich, and puts it back on the plate.

“That wasn't so bad, was it?”

My mother exhales and starts crying. My mother cries during church services when she seems moved by a particular Scripture or song, and she cried out of joy when Faith told her she was pregnant with Caleb, but I'm not used to seeing her cry like this. Out of sadness.

“Mom, I'm sorry,” I start, moving over to be closer to her. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have made you eat when you're not hungry.”

“No, Rachel, it's not that. It's just that I miss Joshua. I miss my baby boy. Did you know I had a dream where God spoke to me and told me it was a little boy? Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, Mom, you did,” I say. What I don't say is I know you miss Joshua, but you have ten babies. Right here. Ten babies who need you. I need you. If you were here, I wouldn't be getting a handful of hours of sleep a night trying to raise my brothers and sisters. If you were here, you would have let me know about my immodest shirt without making my cheeks burn. If you were here, you would have pretended not to see how much I loved that book, and I wouldn't have had to rip it to shreds.

If you were here.

But I can't say that. I shouldn't even be thinking it.

“I miss him,” my mother continues, “and I know he's waiting for me in Heaven, but I think he needs me now. I'm his mother, and he needs to be with me.” She wipes her tears off the bridge of her nose with both hands. “It's wrong to question the Lord's plan, but Joshua may have been my last chance for babies.”

Her last chance. I know my mother sees her childbearing as her gift to the Lord, as her way to praise Him. I wonder if she worries she won't be able to praise Him enough if she doesn't have any more children. My mind seizes on an image of myself pregnant, my stomach swollen tight, and my chest contracts and I try to find my breath. I think of the years stretched out before me, and know I could have a dozen children, maybe more. The thought of it, of ending up like my mother, crying alone in a bed while her other children wait for her, makes me want to scream, not sing God's praises. And Mom is crying so hard now I'm scared Faith will hear and come in to see what I've done wrong.

I grab some toilet paper from her bathroom and give it to her. I pat her shoulder and try to comfort her, but I don't have the words. I want to hug her, but my mother's hugs have always been so measured. So careful. Parceled out in even pieces. I'm not even sure how to hug her right now, just the two of us.

My mother always told us she wanted lots of kids—from the day Dad met her working at a Stop N' Go when she was nineteen and he was twenty, and they started talking and Dad asked her if she had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

“I was on the wrong path, and it wasn't the path Jesus wanted me to walk,” Mom would tell us. This was the part of the story we always loved best when we were little. How God timed everything just right, and then all of us came along. We've heard the story so many times, but that still doesn't make picturing my mother working at a Stop N' Go any easier. It's like trying to picture her flying through space. In the earliest photo I've ever seen of Mom, she's pregnant with her first child, my oldest brother. It's like she didn't exist before that. And we've been everything to her, but now it feels like we're not enough.

Not even ten of us are enough.

“Rachel, I need some time alone now,” my mother says, slipping down under the covers. “Thank you for bringing me the sandwich.”

“Okay,” I say, leaving the meal she won't eat on the nightstand.

As I walk out, I stand by the door and look at the lump under the covers.

“Mom, I love you,” I whisper.

She doesn't hear me. She doesn't answer back.

*   *   *

That night after Faith has gone home and everyone heads to bed, I creep downstairs. Standing by my parents' bedroom door, I count to one thousand to make sure they're asleep. The day is already lost—a big black mark on the calendar. A messy scribble. An ink stain. I can't start over until I fall asleep and the sun rises.

I might as well take advantage of my mistakes. My immodest clothing. My inability to run a house or make my mother feel better. My unnatural fear of the idea of getting married and having babies of my own.

I tiptoe down the hallway and sit down at the computer.

My heart is bumping up against my ribs—out of excitement or nervousness or both—and I find the link to Lauren's blog easily. Once I click, there's no going back. I know that. If I click, I'll read the blog.

And I want to read it.

My index finger rests on the mouse. I hold my breath and squeeze my eyes shut.

I click the link.

Lauren's blog pops up. There's a cartoon drawing of a blue and green butterfly at the top left, next to a loopy black font.

BUTTERFLY GIRL—A blog about being born again from being born again.

There's a picture, and it's Lauren. It's Lauren Sullivan without a doubt, and she's sitting on a bed with her legs crossed, wearing black shorts and a dark blue top—the kind that doesn't have any sleeves, just thin strips of fabric running over her shoulders. I can see her bra straps peeking out from underneath, too. Black bra straps.

Lauren's red hair is blond now, with green streaks in it the color of lime popsicles or Palmolive soap. She's six years older, but I don't think she looks it. Weirdly, it's almost like she looks younger somehow. That's impossible, I know, but that's how it seems to me.

She's smiling so big. She's smiling with her entire face. Even her dark brown eyes are smiling.

Then I'm struck by the realization that I'm smiling, too. Smiling right at her. So big and so wide my cheeks hurt. I put my hands up to my cheeks to make sure. Yes. I'm smiling. Hard.

I lean back a little in my chair and peek down the hallway toward my parents' bedroom. I glance up at the ceiling to listen for noises. Nothing. I wait for the right verse to burrow its way into my brain, reminding me I shouldn't be doing this.

I can't hear one single piece of Scripture, just the hum of the computer building up and down over and over again like a heartbeat.

I shift a bit in the folding chair and lean in toward the light of the screen. I start reading.

 

7

Lauren Sullivan is currently working
at Clayton Animal Hospital as a vet tech—a job she got since moving back to town. She has two cats named Mitzi and Frankie, and she is a vegan. A vegan, I've learned, is someone who doesn't eat any animals or animal products—not even cheese or eggs.

Lauren is learning about meditation, which means sitting and emptying your mind of thoughts, but she says she's not very good at it even though she likes the idea of it. Her favorite singer is a woman named Loretta Lynn and her favorite book is called
The Handmaid's Tale
, which, she wrote in one post, “totally and completely and seriously blew my mind.”

She has two tattoos, one of a butterfly on her shoulder and one of a rainbow on her ankle.

Since getting these tattoos, I've determined they're sort of clich
é
, but at the time I swear to you I got them in earnest, I really did. They meant something to me. They meant rebirth in the most earnest, honest way possible and I guess they still do, even though now I think they're corny.

That's what Lauren wrote about her tattoos on her blog, which I sit here reading even though it's well past midnight. I stare in fascination at the illustrations, amazed that Lauren would choose to do something so permanent to her body. Amazed that she can. She writes so much about her tattoos and her food habits and her favorite things that my eyes dry out trying to read about all of them.

Hello hello hello dear readers—all fifteen of you—in this post I am going to talk about my very favorite Manic Panic hair colors so get ready because there will be pictures … lots and lots of pictures.

Okay, so I've been wondering a lot about what it means to make the leap from vegetarianism to veganism, and sometimes I feel kind of flipped out that my food issues are just the old part of me looking for some legalistic lifestyle where I feel safe following a Set Of Rules which is sort of why I think sometimes I still eat bacon. To prove to myself that I'm still in charge of me.

Sometimes I miss the city … I miss the openness and the differences and the way no one knew about my past. But I needed to clear my head and I needed to move on from some of the crap I got sucked into living there so I'm back in my childhood hometown and that is kind of Freaking Me Out and everything because I'm afraid I'll run into Them or people from the cult who hurt me, but it's cheap as dirt here and I love my job and Mitzi and Frankie love it, too.

Every set of words Lauren writes sounds like an explosion—like she has so much she wants to say she can't even stop to use periods or commas. Her pictures are like little explosions, too. In each one she has different hair, each picture starring some new, unusual color that can't possibly be natural. Lime green. Lemon yellow. Sky blue. Like fireworks. I'm stunned at what she looks like. I suppose I thought she would still look like I remember her from her days at Calvary before she began to rebel. I instinctively touch my hair. The thought of even cutting it seems sinful.

Back in my old life, I couldn't do anything to my hair. My hair was my crown of glory—or that's what I was told—so I wasn't supposed to cut it at all. But now my hair is mine to do with what I want, so I want to do the most extreme things I can think of with it. Dye it, shave it, gel it, whatever it. I keep wondering if I'll get sick of doing these things and just let it grow out normal again, but it's been six years since The Great Escape, and I'm still doing them so I don't know.

Sitting in the family room, I blink my eyes over and over, trying to keep them comfortable as I race through Lauren's blog. Each little story she writes has links to some other story, and my fingers slip over the keyboard and grip the mouse, clicking and pointing, stopping only to read as fast as I possibly can. I can't stop. I can't get enough of finding out what happened to Lauren Sullivan.

What would I look like to one of my family members if they found me now, like this? Hunched over the dim light of the computer in the middle of the night, my gaze focused and intent, my mouth slightly open, my mind anywhere but with God? Is this how James Fulton's parents found him before they sent him to Journey of Faith for looking with lust at women on the computer?

But this isn't immodest images. Not really. It's just like reading a book. A story.

One where I happen to know the main character personally.

I force myself to take a breath and listen for creaking on the steps or Sarah crying out or my dad getting up to go get a drink of water—he's not the heaviest sleeper. But there's just the tick of the clock coming from the kitchen and the sound of rain lightly drumming on the plants and bushes outside.

There's one link I haven't clicked on yet. If I don't click on that, what I'm doing isn't wrong. If I don't click on that, all of this is research, really. Learning. Just like reading the encyclopedia. It's okay as long as I don't click on that one link. The one at the top right hand corner of Lauren's blog that stares at me like it can hear me thinking.

The Great Escape: How I Left My Fundie, Homeschooling, Woman-Hating Past Behind

I don't know what
fundie
means. Lauren was homeschooled like the rest of us, that's true. But if Scripture tells us that an excellent wife is more precious than jewels, how can she say we hate women?

But it doesn't matter because I'll never click on that link. If I don't click on that link, I haven't done anything that wrong. That's what I tell myself.

Suddenly, there's the sound of coughing coming from down the hall. Gruff and deep. My dad's cough.

I leap up, shutting down the computer with a few quick clicks. There's the cough again. I can either make an excuse for why I'm down here or I can make a break for it up the stairs. But maybe he won't even come out into the kitchen?

The computer is sighing shut, evidence of its recent use.

Please be quiet now
, I will it.

There's the cough again.

I could race to one of the family room couches and hide under a blanket. The lights are off, and he might not even see me on his way to the kitchen. Or I could race into the kitchen and get myself a glass of water, too, and if Dad walked in I could act like it was a strange coincidence. But if I were thirsty, wouldn't I have gotten a glass of water upstairs?

My body trumps my brain, and I run down the hallway and tiptoe up the stairs by my parents' bedroom. There hasn't been another cough. Once I reach the top landing, I take a breath. My heart is hammering away, but I've made it. Mostly. Only there's the problem of the computer browser. I didn't get a chance to clear the history.