The Righteous (32 page)

At last he lifted his head and nodded. “Okay. I’ll go.”

It was a terrible business, wrenching babies from the arms of their mother. The women had taken the girls without knowing their origins. They had been gifts from God, presented by Elder Kimball as rescued orphans from Romania. That they belonged to some other family, that they had been brutally acquired, did not ease the pain of losing those children.

Eliza’s heart broke for the women.

Tess, who everyone had assumed had either been one of Elder Kimball’s favorites, or had simply become pregnant very easily, lost two of her three children. One of the girls was almost five, and the other only eight months. Tess had begged and pleaded, had threatened to kill herself if they took her children, and had even tried to flee in the middle of the night for parts unknown.

Brother Joseph had spoken to her, given her a blessing, and told her that it was the Lord’s will that the girls be returned to their biological families. In the end, Tess had gone with Jacob and Eliza to New Mexico and California, and when the time came, had handed over the children herself.

Finally, there was Sophie Marie. She was four. Old enough to understand. Gideon had killed her mother, but the girl still loved her aunties, and her many siblings. It was the only life she had known.

Jacob, Eliza, and Fernie drove Sophie Marie to the Bay Area. It was a long, uneasy trip. They would spend the night in San Jose before rising the next day for the meeting with Sophie Marie’s biological aunt and her husband.

Something passed between Fernie and Jacob during the drive from Utah. Eliza had picked up on it less than five minutes from Blister Creek. They were awkward when they spoke to each other and always conscious of Eliza in the car with them.

“River of sperm,” Jacob said without warning somewhere in the middle of the sagebrush expanse that was Nevada.

“River of what?” Eliza asked from the back seat, where she took her turn sitting next to Sophie Marie.

Jacob turned off the radio. “A river of sperm. Enoch said that to me when I found him dying in the Celestial Room. I couldn’t figure it out. There was something else. He said the genes flowed in two directions.”

Fernie said slowly, “Maybe he’s talking about the Lost Boys? They kidnapped girls for Zion, but in turn were expelled themselves. Surely, some of them have fathered children with gentile women. River of sperm is just a metaphor.”

“Maybe.” Jacob didn’t sound convinced.

Eliza thought this was more about Jacob wrestling with the death of his brother than from any lingering mystery. He couldn’t let it go. She said, “He was dying, Jacob. You can’t expect a dying man to make sense.”

“Except that I do. He was trying to tell me something, and it wasn’t just a metaphor.” He reached over and turned the radio back on. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

That night, they took two rooms at a Motel Six. Eliza and Fernie turned on the television. They watched a show that starred a dozen women and a man living in a house together. The women degraded themselves on camera for the affections of the lone man. At the end of the series, the man would marry one of the women. While the women bickered, gossiped, and back-stabbed each other, the man stood aloof, feigning interest in each of the women, and sorrow when he had to send one of them home. The more vacuous the woman, the more artificial her appearance and manner, the more the man seemed interested.

“Here’s the solution,” Eliza said. “He can marry them all. Problem solved.”

Fernie sat on her bed with her head propped against the pillows. She turned with her mouth quirked into a half-smile. “Sister wives. I like it. That’ll put an end to the bickering, eh?”

Eliza laughed. She found that she liked her sister’s dry sense of humor. It reminded her of Mother.

“So you’ve narrowly avoided marriage,” Fernie said, turning off the television. “Elder Johnson dead, Stephen Paul Young uninterested, and Taylor Junior is nowhere to be found. What now?”

Taylor Kimball, Junior, that pasty-white, raspy-voiced weasel, and the architect of his father’s fraudulent activities, had disappeared. He’d stolen money from the church, had filed fraudulent tax returns for his father’s wives, and had organized a string of dummy bank accounts, most of which the FBI had punctured, but not before Taylor Junior had cleared out several of them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The FBI was looking for him, but since he’d apparently been uninvolved in the murders, he was not a high priority. More important was tracking down a handful of Lost Boys who’d fled for Las Vegas. With Elder Kimball’s assistance, authorities were arresting the remaining conspirators one by one.

“I don’t know,” Eliza said. “Jacob is a member of the Quorum now. Father is still simmering over what happened when we met the FBI agents, but I don’t think he can pressure Jacob anymore about marrying me off. I’ve got a few more years, anyway. Maybe I’ll go to college.” It was an exciting thought, albeit only half-formed.

“Sounds great. I wish I’d had that opportunity.” Fernie shrugged. “Maybe some day. Life, I’ve discovered, is a lot longer than you think it is when you’re a teenager.”

Eliza watched. She got the impression that her sister had something else she wanted to talk about.

“I need your advice, Liz.” Fernie had picked up on Jacob’s nickname for Eliza somewhere in Nevada. “You know my husband is going to prison. Could be ten years before he gets out on parole, according to Manuel Cardoza. Maybe longer.”

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“He’s lucky it’s not for life. They could have charged him with murder. Probably made it stick.” Fernie shrugged. “Question is, what do I do in the meanwhile?”

“You’re wondering if you should wait for your husband?”

“Well, you know that with his temple ordinances dissolved, he’s no longer technically my husband. I am currently the unmarried mother of three. But Brother Joseph said that if my husband returns humble from prison, he’ll be allowed back into the community.”
“Really? I’d think he’d go the way of the Lost Boys.”

“Oh, he’ll never be a leader again,” Fernie said. “But he’s got children. And wives who are still faithful members. Charity is waiting for him. So are Clara Sue and Dolores. I don’t think the others will.” Fernie stroked the hair of Sophie Marie, who slept on her bed.

“And you?” Eliza asked.

She looked up and her eyes were shining. “Brother Joseph said I could choose a new husband. Can you believe that,
choose?
Would it be disloyal not to wait? I mean, that seems wrong. But then I thought that maybe the Lord is offering me the chance to be happy.”

Eliza studied Fernie. There was a flush on the woman’s face, and Eliza saw a new facet to her sister. She was not just an older sister, or a mother, or some man’s eighth wife. Fernie was a woman. Fernie was in love. And not with her husband. “Who is he?”

Fernie looked at her carefully. “You mean you don’t know?”

Eliza didn’t have to think very hard to piece it together. It explained so much about Jacob’s behavior, for one, as well as the strange vibes she’d picked up between Jacob and Fernie on the drive from Utah.

“Jacob.”

Fernie hesitated, and when she spoke again, she sounded anxious. “Would you be able to accept that? I mean, it’s weird from your perspective, having your brother and sister marry each other, even if they’re not related to each other by blood.”

It would bring Eliza’s relationship with her brother and her sister full circle in a way incomprehensible to the outside world. And Jacob was in the Quorum, now. How long before they pressed him to take a second wife, then a third? Fernie and Jacob’s moment of happiness might be just that, a moment.

Eliza came over to Fernie’s bed and gave her sister a hug. “So you’ll be both my sister and my sister-in-law. Yeah, that’s weird.” She hesitated. “But I’m okay with weird if you are.”

“Thanks, Liz.”

#

They rose early. Jacob drove through the streets of Berkeley while Fernie navigated with a map. They stopped the car at a park. Eliza and Fernie took Sophie Marie by the hand.

They dressed like gentiles, Jacob in slacks and a button-down shirt, Fernie and Eliza in jeans and long-sleeved blouses. The women had braided their hair, so that it wasn’t simply free-flowing to their waists and at least semi-modern in appearance. Eliza had never worn pants before; they felt uncomfortable and immodest. Eliza would have attracted more attention in her ankle-length, wrist-length dress. Still, she fought the sensation that she was walking through the park in her underwear.

A young couple waited for them on a bench next to the playground. The sister of Sophie Marie’s biological mother and the woman’s husband. The couple had a six-year-old son who had just started kindergarten, according to Jacob.

They stood up when the three of them approached with Sophie Marie. They looked wary even though Eliza knew that the FBI had called and briefed them on the exchange.

“Mr. and Mrs. Dennings?” Jacob asked. “I’m Jacob Christianson. The one Mr. Cardoza told you about.”

The woman looked down at Sophie Marie. “Oh my God, she looks just like Sarah,” she said to her husband. “It must be her.”

Eliza and Fernie let go of Sophie Marie’s hands.

The woman hesitated, then picked up Sophie Marie. The girl looked back at Fernie, trusting, not yet afraid. That would change, Eliza knew, when they got in the car and drove away. Poor child.

“You remember what I said, sweetheart?” Fernie said to Sophie Marie. “This woman is like one of your aunties.” She stroked the girl’s hair. “You’ll be with her for a little while.”

“Okay.”

“The girl’s name is Sophie Marie,” Fernie said. “At least that’s what her mother—I mean, the woman who was taking care of her—named her.”

Jacob looked back to the woman and her husband. He held out a parcel wrapped in brown paper that he’d carried from the car. “There are people who love Sophie Marie. We wanted to send her with something from her other family.”

The woman opened the package to uncover a stained glass window made by Brother Joseph. It was a wild rose bush climbing a wall, an intricate and beautiful design composed of several dozen pieces of cut glass.

Ron Chen waited uneasily in the parking lot. His contact had called himself Ezekiel. Always some weird-ass Biblical name with these guys. It had been several months since Chen had heard from them. So long, in fact, that he’d grown worried; he needed the money.

Chen had spent his money quietly, but spend it he had. A new stereo, a remodeled kitchen. More meals out. A trip to Italy with his brother. He’d sold his six year-old Accord and picked up a Nissan Z. Three hundred horses under the hood gave it a nice gallop. Great for picking up chicks, too. Oh, and he wanted to put in a home theater system, but he was still a few thousand short.

In fact, he was a few thousand short just about everywhere. Weird, how he’d taken eighty thousand tax free and now he had a higher balance on his cards and a new home equity loan to worry about. It was like they said, it doesn’t matter how much you make, at the end of the month you always eat beans.

But then the email had come. No explanation for the delay, just another shipment, this one smaller. Less money, too, but Chen had stretched his credit cards to the limit and couldn’t afford to argue.

The man kept Chen waiting for almost thirty minutes in the parking lot before he showed up. It was Wednesday afternoon, the half day at the clinic. Dr. Stephens had gone home, and Grace and Anna as well. But these rendezvous felt risky anyway. Someone might see.

And then the man who’d called himself Ezekiel arrived. Another van. White, unmarked, with Nevada plates. Chen thought he should memorize the plates. Write them down somewhere, with a note in case something happened to him.

A man stepped out of the van. He held a cooler in one hand and a manila envelope in the other. Ezekiel was pasty white, and there was something unpleasant about his eyes and the set of his mouth. He set the cooler at Chen’s feet and held out the envelope, but just beyond reach, as if he would snatch it back should Chen grab for it. Chen reached instead for the cooler.

Don’t be greedy. Don’t make a mistake.

Santa Cruz County Medical Institute, or Scummy, as it was known by its overworked and underpaid employees, was not the biggest fertility clinic in Northern California. And most IVF procedures used sperm from the husband or partner, not donor sperm. But the clinic had produced over four hundred sperm-donor babies—including multiple births—in almost two hundred-and-fifty different women in the previous dozen years.

These days, most of the sperm came from the coolers given him by men like Ezekiel. What’s more, the clinic resold Scummy sperm to a host of smaller facilities throughout the Bay Area and Northern California. Chen pictured billions of tiny swimmers, like salmon swimming upriver to spawn, migrating from the clinic and into the wombs of women.

Chen shook his head in disgust at his own role in this business. Billions and billions of sperm. Only one purpose. Find egg, fertilize. God only knew whose sperm came from those vials.

-end-

Michael Wallace has trekked across the Sahara on a camel, ridden an elephant through a tiger preserve in Southeast Asia, eaten fried guinea pig, and been licked on the head by a skunk. In a previous stage of life he programmed nuclear war simulations, smuggled refugees out of a war zone, and milked cobras for their venom. He speaks Spanish and French and grew up in a religious community in the desert. His suspense/thrillers include The Devil’s Deep, State of Siege, Implant, Mighty and Strong, and The Righteous, and he is also the author of collections of travel stories and fantasy books for children. His work has appeared in print more than a hundred times, including publication in markets such as The Atlantic and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

1. A recurring element of Michael Wallace’s novels is the intensity of family bonds. In The Red Rooster, a young woman sacrifices everything to find her father in Occupied France. In The Righteous series, the characters of the polygamist enclave are sometimes related to each other in multiple ways. In The Devil’s Deep, a successful family hides a terrible secret. What is it about the family bond that can lead to both intense love and intense hatred?