Out of Heaven's Grasp (38 page)

“They know you’re coming. Don’t worry about that.” He turned to look at me, offering me a small smile. “We’re going to have to take each day as it comes, Abby. But one thing I’m sure of. After everything we’ve been through, there’s nothing we can’t do.”

I bit my lip, tears coming to my eyes. “I hope so.”

“I
know
so,” he said. “And I love you.”

“I love you too.” And I wiped the tears away from my cheek.

* * *

Jesse

Abby hardly said two words for hours after we arrived at the ranch. She smiled at River, and she responded by nodding or shaking her head when he asked her questions. But mostly, she clung to me, waiting for me to answer when questions were asked.

I’d hoped the ranch wouldn’t be too weird for her. After all, most of the women here were hippies and at least half of them were in flowing skirts. Most of them had long hair. I’d thought that Abby would feel less self-conscious about her clothing.

But I had forgotten how much little things seem foreign right after leaving the community.

The women might have been in skirts, but most of them wore tops that scooped low, revealing much more skin than any self-respecting woman of the Life might ever do. They spoke in boisterous voices. They swore.

Renee immediately began asking Abby questions about sharing husbands—revealing, sexual questions.

Abby had only turned white and shook her head, pressing close to me. That wasn’t something she thought to talk about, especially not with strangers.

For their part, the other people at the ranch immediately realized how nervous and confused Abby was, and they backed off. They were kind, and they didn’t push her, but there was so much that was different in the world than in the community. I could see that Abby was having a hard time processing it.

We made it through dinner, and then everyone went into the great room to sit in front of the fire, which was the typical activity in the big ranch house.

Most of us were drinking wine or beer, but Abby had denied it completely when offered, and she seemed a little scandalized to see me drinking it. I was tempted to stop, to make her feel more comfortable, but I knew that hiding in the beliefs of the community wasn’t going to help anything.

No, Abby needed something comforting and familiar, something that would make her feel better about who she was and where she was. Right now, she probably felt like she had nothing to hold onto except me.

So, I sat her down in a chair by the fire.

“Stay here. I’ll be right back,” I said.

Her eyes flashed in terror. “You’re leaving me?”

“For five minutes,” I said. “I’ll be right back. Just stay here. You’ll be okay.”

She swallowed, but she nodded and sat back in the chair. Her posture was rigid, and she was worrying at her bottom lip.

I ducked back into the music room, which was a place where most of the members of the ranch kept musical instruments. I selected one of the guitars that seemed to belong to the house. I’d played it a few times when River was trying to teach me to play songs by the Beatles.

Quickly, I checked to make sure it was in tune. There were a few sour notes, and I twisted the tuning pegs until everything sounded just right.

And then I went back to the great room.

Abby saw me coming with the guitar.

I grinned at her.

“I think you should play something,” I told her.

She eyed the guitar, and I could see an eagerness in her expression. “I haven’t gotten to play since Gideon took all the musical instruments.”

“What?” said Renee.

Abby nodded. “Yeah, he said they were sinful, and that we needed to follow a higher, purer law for God.”

“That’s bullshit.”

Abby made a face at the expletive, but then she nodded. She laughed. “Yeah. Yeah, I think it was.”

I held out the guitar.

She took a deep breath, and then she reached for it.

Something came over her once she was holding the guitar. A peace and happiness that I hadn’t seen in her since back before this whole thing started with us. She seemed young and carefree as she plucked the strings experimentally.

“Play something,” I urged.

“Yeah,” said River. “Play something.”

“I only know songs from the community,” she said.

“Well, then that’s what we want to hear,” said Jack.

She smiled shyly. “You sure?”

“Play something,” said River.

And she did. Abby’s sweet voice mingled with the guitar, and I was entranced, the way I’d been right from the start. I watched her as she played. She closed her eyes and her fingers moved with the guitar as if it was an extension of her.

She was beautiful, and her voice was beautiful, and my heart swelled with love for her.

Later, as we lay twined together in my bed, my arms wrapped around her, feeling the warmth of her skin against mine, she turned and pressed her lips into my neck.

I sighed.

“Jesse?”

“Mmm?”

“We’re free, aren’t we?” she murmured.

I pulled her as close as I could get her. “Yes,” I said.

And I kissed her.

EPILOGUE

Abby

Living outside the community was strange and frightening at first. I think the hardest thing for me to get through was the lack of rules. I’d spent my whole life with someone telling me what to do, and at first, I looked to Jesse to fill that space for me. I wanted him to give me guidance.

One of the first things that was the toughest was to change my clothes. I knew that I’d never fit into the regular world in my community clothes, but I was afraid to wear anything else. I hadn’t been able to bring anything with me because we left so quickly.

The women on the ranch gave me things, but Jesse found me sitting on our bed, going through all the articles of clothing and rejecting them because they weren’t modest enough.

“You don’t have to follow those rules anymore, you know,” he said.

“Do you want me to dress like them?” I said, figuring I’d do whatever made him happy.

He shrugged. “I don’t care how you dress, Abby.”

That drove me insane. I wanted him to give me the answers, but he wouldn’t. When I got upset, he tried to explain to me that it didn’t matter what I was wearing. But all I knew was that I had no frame of reference to make decisions about things like this. I desperately wanted Jesse to give me some guidelines, to tell me how I was supposed to dress.

But he wouldn’t.

Desperate, I picked out the most scandalous outfit that I could find. I put on a tight, tight little shirt. It dipped low in the front, so low that it exposed a little bit of my cleavage. And then I paired it with a pair of jeans. They clung to my legs, and every curve on my body was in plain sight.

I expected Jesse to scold me for showing so much of my body to everyone else, but he simply took in my outfit, grinned, and said he liked it.

That terrified me. Did he want me to dress like a whore? Didn’t he want me to be modest, to keep back my body only for him? When I got angry and yelled that at him, though, he got very quiet.

“I get it now,” he said, taking hold of both of my hands. He rested his forehead against mine. “Abby, your body belongs to you, and only you. You’re the only person who has the right to decide what to do with it. It’s just not my decision. You have to decide this yourself.”

And finally, I understood. For the first time in my life, I realized that I had ownership of myself. Something belonged to me. My body was mine. It wasn’t my husband’s or my father’s. It wasn’t even God’s. It was mine.

I sat sobbing at the wonder of it, at the sheer freedom. I had never felt anything like that in my life. I had never felt worth enough to make a decision about anything, even about my own body.

And then…

Well, then I was angry, because I began to realize just how much the Life had stolen from me. They’d stolen my self. They’d taken my essence. Out here in the world, children were brought up believing in themselves. They were taught to think for themselves and to make their own decisions. I was taught that doubt was a sin. I was taught that acceptance was transcendence. I was thought that my own thoughts and feelings were evil.

Once I was able to realize that it was up to me to dress myself, and only me, and that I was worthy and capable of performing that task… well, then it got fun.

The other women on the ranch took me on a shopping spree, and I tried on armfuls of clothes—things I’d never thought I’d ever be able to wear. I began to discover my own tastes, to build my own ideas about my clothes. And I realized that it was an expression of myself.

And I realized that I could change that expression any time that I needed to.

Freedom was heady.

I decided—
me
—that I didn’t want to be exceedingly provocative in my dress, but that I also didn’t like to be covered up. I chose clothes that flattered me, but that weren’t outlandish.

The revelation that I was in control of my body also led me to another conclusion, but I was terrified to broach it at first. I knew that if Jesse and I continued to have sex, I could get pregnant again, and I…

Well, I didn’t want to.

I felt guilty about it, because I knew it was horribly selfish, and that I was supposed to want babies as a woman, but… I didn’t feel ready for it. It was too much trying to navigate the world without trying to have a baby on top of it.

When we first arrived at the ranch, I was still on my period, so I knew it didn’t matter (and I was rather pleasantly surprised to find that Jesse didn’t seem to care about that. Bob would never have relations with me if I was bleeding, which had been a relief, but I liked being with Jesse, and it was nice that he didn’t find it gross). But after my period was over, the next night, Jesse and I were in bed, and it had become a matter of course for us to make love before we went to sleep.

I stopped him.

He seemed a little surprised, but he backed off immediately. “Nothing you don’t want, Abby.”

“I…” I lay in the darkness and stared up at the ceiling, rallying my strength to tell him this. “I do want to do it, but I don’t think we should.”

He seemed confused. “Okay.”

It was my body, and I owned my body, right? So, if I could decide what to wear, then I could also decide whether or not to get pregnant. Right? “I don’t want to have a baby yet,” I blurted.

“Oh,” he said. “I guess I wasn’t thinking about that.”

I sat up in bed and glared at him. “How could you not think about it?”

“Uh… I don’t know.”

“Seriously?”

He laughed a little, sounding embarrassed. “I just… I’m sorry, Abby. No, you’re right, it’s not the right time for babies.”

I took a deep breath and lay back down. “Good. So, then, we just have to keep from doing it.”

He wriggled close to me. “Well, we won’t do it tonight. But that doesn’t mean we don’t do it ever again. We just need condoms.”

“What are condoms?”

He explained them to me. I thought they sounded very, very strange.

“I think there’s a pill or something,” he said. “I don’t really know about it. We should ask someone.”

I was mortified at the thought of doing that, and I wouldn’t let him.

At first, then, it was just condoms, and once we used them, they didn’t seem that weird at all.

Jesse and I spent six months living on the ranch, and during that time we worked for River and the others and were paid for our jobs.

The idea of getting money was so strange to me. Women in the Life
never
had money. As Bob’s wife, I’d been given a certain amount, but it had only been ostensibly for buying groceries and personal items. It wasn’t a lot, and I had to turn over all my receipts to Bob. He claimed it was for taxes, but it was also a way to make sure that he kept tabs on me.

Any money that I ever had was Bob’s money, and before I got married, any money I had was my father’s money.

Having money that belonged only to me was enough to nearly make my head explode, and I had a hard time spending it. Jesse and I got free room at the ranch, but we were required to help out with food and other important items. We contributed by making dinner once a week, and sometimes we were required to buy things like toilet paper or light bulbs.

(Electricity was another thing that fascinated me. All the plugs in the walls, never having to fill up lamps with oil, and never having to refuel a generator. It was almost magical to me.)

I spent my money on food, but precious little else.

It was both a good and bad thing. It was good because it meant that I saved up a lot of money, and I was able to use that when Jesse and I decided to move out and be on our own. But it was bad because once we were away from the ranch, living alone, I often got in fits of terror about having to spend money, and I wouldn’t want us to do anything except things that were necessary. Spending money seemed so strange to me that I often didn’t want to do it. I especially had problems buying little treats for myself. Going to the movies or splurging on a milkshake seemed wasteful to me.