The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (22 page)

I
n the morning, a moth flies into my cell, a floating gray piece of barely anything, rising and falling with irregular wing beats. It finds the flat rectangular fluorescent light set into the ceiling and immediately starts banging itself against the beveled plastic.

I stand and crawl up onto Angel's bunk, waving my arm toward the moth to knock it away. “What the hell are you doing?” she asks.

“Help me,” I tell her, my eyes still trained on the crooked gray body. “Capture it. Set it free.”

“Why?”

“It's going to kill itself up against that light,” I say. “That's what they do. They think it's the sun.”

Angel looks at me in that clench-eyed way that tells me she knows we're brushing against something important, something from the past. She puts her book away and leans out toward the middle of the room, palms curved in cupped shapes. She swings once, then again, and the moth is inside her closed hands.

She leans back onto the bed, bending her fingers to make a crack so I can see its beating wings, held together by scales and veins. Angel carefully swings off the bunk. At the bars, she lowers her hands, then throws them in the air so the moth can fly out of the cell.

“It's gone,” Angel says. “It's free now.”

But I shake my head. “It'll only do it again, somewhere else.”

“You can't prevent that,” she says. “You know that, right? It's not your job. It never was.”

And it's then that I know she can tell what's just fallen into the fingers of my mind: the rememberings I've kept back for months, those frozen moments pushed to the dark corners of my mind. The night Jude and I went back to the Community. The night when everything, all of it, came tumbling down.

• • •

That night, the entire world was frozen, including the air, which seemed to hold all things suspended. I looked to my left, where Jude stood, his breath a milky curtain before him. All around, the rigid trees groaned with human-like voices, their insides frozen in the position they'd held themselves before winter hit. I imagined how it might've gone, one night in November, they were sleeping and suddenly their entire bodies became stuck like steel. I felt like I'd been in that position all my life, frozen. And, now, suddenly, I could pick my head up and face the winter sky and glimpse the tops of trees and move my body in any motion I chose.

We knew we'd arrived at the Community by the tiny squares of dull orange light that materialized through the trees, windows of houses where I knew nobody was home. I could smell the purple smoke. They'd be in the Prophet Hall, and he'd be silly with the smoke, face inflamed, eyes tense and bright.

We circled to the back of my house. In their coops, chickens cooed at us just like they always did at someone they thought might feed them. Jude turned the handle of the back door. We passed bedrooms, the empty kitchen, and climbed the small rickety stairs to the maidenhood room. Jude pushed aside the sliding lock and the door creaked open. Inside, it was dark, but I could make out a small body lying on a pallet. She lay over the covers, her back a slim white sickle in the darkness.

“Constance,” I whispered.

She flipped around, her blond braid tucked between her neck and shoulder. Her lips parted almost imperceptibly.

“You're back,” she whispered.

“Yes,” I said, taking a step into the room.

“To marry the Prophet?”

“No,” I said, in disgust. “No.”

“Then why?”

“To rescue you. To take you with me. To tell you about what it's really like out there.”

“We know all that.”

“No, you don't. You only know his lies.”

“He doesn't lie.”

The room was freezing but I noticed Constance's cheeks were flushed. Sweat dappled her forehead. Something about her was different. Something about her had changed.

“Minnow,” Jude said, his voice low. “Look at—”

“Who's he?” Constance interrupted, eyes darting to Jude for the first time.

“He came with me to save you from this place. That's what I want you to know. There's life outside, Constance. There are people, chances to be happy. Jude and I are going away from all this . . . this madness. And I want you to be there with us.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “I'm getting married.”

“But you don't have to. You can escape.”

Constance's lips turned up at the edges. “But, I don't want to escape. I want to marry him.”

“Minnow,” Jude repeated again, his voice adamant. He tugged vehemently on my shirt sleeve.

His eyes were hard on Constance, but not her face. I followed his gaze to Constance's lap. There, folded like rotting meat, were two crumpled, purple stumps.

The air turned cold. Each cell in my body bucked.

“Your hands,” I breathed. “Your hands!”

I knelt beside her bed where her legs were slung to the side. All she wore was a nightgown, the sleeves barely brushing the thin place her hands used to grow from.

I pictured the scene, Constance wrestled to the ground by those men, her body so much smaller than mine, so much more like a bird than a girl. Did our father cut hers off, too? I hoped she looked him in the eye, like I did. I hoped the look on her face killed him.

“Minnow, don't look so stricken.” The way she said it made me look into her fever-blushed face. “You never were very quick, were you? I asked to have them cut off.”

The entire scene went out of focus. Blurred, then came back again even sharper till I could spot, even from here, the crooked half circle of
X
s stitched around her stumps, hear the fevered hitch at the back of her throat when she breathed.

“After you left, the Prophet repeated God's message,” she said. “That I was to be his new wife, not you. And I knew I had to do something to be worthy. To prove my devotion.”

I stared at her. This girl with blue, blue eyes. This girl who I saw as a baby still, the steam that rolled off her little red body on the winter morning she was born. The tuft of damp blond hair. Her hands that gripped at nothing.

“Do you—do you have any idea what you've given up?” I cried.

“It's nothing when you've got a higher calling.”

I gaped at her, raw panic rising in my throat. “You're crazy!” I bellowed, my voice breaking, tears forming at the corners of my eyes. “You're a lunatic!”

“Me, a lunatic?” she scoffed. “You're the one who broke the rules—knowingly. You understand what happens to girls who fraternize out of wedlock.” She shook her head. “And with a
Rymanite
. You're sick. You've damned yourself for good.” Her eyes were wide open. She was afraid. Of
me
. She lived in a house of horrors, and she was afraid of me?

“You can lie to me,” she said. “You can lie to yourself. But you can't lie to God. He sees straight through you.”

“Shut up!” I screamed. I struck her across the face, and she wheeled back, her arms crossed in front of her, barely able to move, too sapped from fever. Her stumps were new, so when she swung to hit me and her stump connected with my cheekbone, she crumpled in pain. I swiped her with my elbow and her head flung back. When Jude wrestled me off of her, I saw that blood trickled down her cheek.

“Minnow, we have to get out of here,” Jude said. “
Now
. Someone probably heard.”

“She's coming with us,” I panted.

“What?” he demanded. “But she doesn't want to.”

“It doesn't matter. She's—brainwashed. I can't let the Prophet have her.”

“But, she wants to marry him.”

“She's twelve!”

“Fine,” he barked. “Fine, but how do you suggest we convince her?”

I looked down at her, a steely look of defiance wound over her features. “We don't,” I said. “She's not going to come willingly. We're taking her with us.”

“Y
ou're back,” I say when I see Dr. Wilson in the doorway. I thought he might have disappeared again.

“For now,” he says. “I'm going away for a day or two.”

“My hearing is coming up,” I say. “My birthday's at the end of the week.”

He nods.

“So, are you going to make it?”

He doesn't respond. “What are you reading?” he asks instead. I look down at the library book in my lap and move my arm so he can see the title over a backdrop of a whorled galaxy.
“Cosmos,”
I say.

“Any good?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I'm learning things.”

“Teach me something,” he says.

“Teach you?”

“Sure,” he says. “Teach me the best thing you know. The best fact in the universe.”

At first, I don't answer. An unconscious prickle of heat has been filling my cheeks, and I can't figure out why until I realize that no one has ever asked me to teach them something. I never could. I didn't know anything before.

“Most of the energy on Earth comes from the sun,” I explain. “We all run on sun power. And did you also know that everything on Earth, including people, is made of particles of a star that exploded? We're stars who run off stars.”

“Wow,” he says. “That really is the best fact in the universe.”

“You know what I can't stop thinking about? Jude never knew any of this. He's alive out there, I can't tell you how, but I figured it out, and he wants me to find him in the mountains. But I keep thinking that, even if I did find him and told him everything I've learned, he wouldn't understand it in the same way I do now. I don't know how that can be.”

“Nobody's got the same mind. Nobody perceives the same.”

I nod. “The Prophet said stars were God's eyes and all that time I knew he was wrong, but I believed him. How is that possible? Belief shouldn't be compatible with lies, but is.”

“Did you know any of this stuff six months ago?” he asks, and when I shake my head he says, “If another Prophet came, you'd be ready. You have weapons.”

I hold up my hands, but he shakes his head. “I'm not talking about those kinds of weapons.”

“I know some facts about stars, but that doesn't even begin to answer everything. There's still too much I don't know.”

“You know what I heard the other day?” he asks. “I was listening to the radio in the car and I had to pull over, just to listen. They said scientists think there might be other universes, maybe an infinite amount of universes. Maybe a new universe forms every second. And these universes might have different versions of ourselves, making different choices and leading totally different lives. Problem is, nobody knows if any of those theories are true, but that doesn't discourage the scientists. The way they see it, if we keep looking, one day we're bound to find out. We have to be happy to keep searching and not knowing all the time.”

“You're talking about God.”

“No,” he says. “I'm talking about anything you can't see.”

I shake my head. “That's not what Angel thinks.”

“I know what Angel thinks. I'm talking about what you think. It's my opinion that you shouldn't deny your mind the chance to stretch, to go places, simply because you don't have evidence. I think it's high time you figure out what you think.”

• • •

That night, with the dark of the jail unchinked by even a single pinprick of light, I lie on my thin mattress and consider this. I'm realizing that I'm the only person I never asked my questions to. I never thought I could count on my own answers.

I think about the universe, and the earth, and the stars, and I ask myself a question.

Is Charlie there?

No.

But is something there?

Maybe
.

Maybe
.

• • •

In the morning, Benny drops an envelope off at my cell. Inside is an official notice that my parole meeting is on the 15th. My eighteenth birthday. Three days from now. I have prepared myself for it, how I'll look over my shoulder at the meeting room door, hoping Dr. Wilson will show. But he won't. Waiting with held breath for their decision to fall, which will crash over me like a chest of broken china.
Denied
, they will say in their voices of metal. I'll be shackled by some brusque guard who will drive me to Billings and dump me in a group cell block of muscled women with face tattoos and rotten teeth. And suddenly every good thought this place managed to inflate inside me will be punctured, because that cell door will clang shut behind me and nothing will be my choice again. The future is locked in place.

I'll have to say good-bye to Angel, whose work getting me into the Bridge Program will have been for nothing, and Benny and Miss Bailey and Rashida and Tracy, and everyone at juvie I'll miss when I'm gone. I wonder if Dr. Wilson will say good-bye. I wonder if I'm useless to him now that he knows I will never give him the truth he wanted.

And I wonder if I've really lived out my life. If, even when I'm eventually free, a year or two or five from now, I'll still be trapped, just like my parents were in their trailer park lives, in the drudge of everyday, the weeds in the backyard that never died, the rusted-out truck that broke down every morning. The only thing that blurred that to the periphery was the Prophet, who cast a new kind of clean light on their lives with every step he took closer to them.

And I almost understand now how you can be so trapped you'll throw the whole world away just to get free.

But I didn't understand it then, the last time I saw the Community, before the fire ate it all and ruined everything. That night, there was no room for anything but one thought: get Constance. Save her.

• • •

Jude lifted Constance in his arms. She was bucking and fighting, her screams cutting through the empty house. We ran down the stairs and Jude wrenched the back door open with his free hand. Standing in the doorway was my father. I only saw his face for a moment because Jude kicked the door closed and shouted, “Run!”

We tried the front door, but it was no good. They were all there, filing out of the Prophet Hall and into the courtyard. From their fists hung lanterns. In their eyes burned hatred.

The men came at us quickly. Jude set Constance on the ground and put his hands in the air. This means surrender, in the real world, but we weren't in the real world. We were in some nightmare world where there's no such thing as justice.

The deacons dragged Jude to the center of the courtyard, his boots scraping against the frozen ground. I ran for him, but someone ripped me away and held my stumps with iron grips. I lost all my breath, saw the scene through a gauze of white pain.

My eyes scanned the courtyard, taking in their ruddy scowling faces, and I realized I never could have rescued them. I thought all I'd have to do was tell Constance she could be free, that soon the rest of them would follow us off the mountain. But the offer of freedom doesn't mean anything to people who already think they're free.

The Prophet marched out of the crowd with a kerosene lantern held high. He brought the lantern near Jude's face where he struggled on the ground, then glanced at me, and it was clear in his steel-tipped smirk that he understood.

He walked over to Constance. “What has occurred, wife-to-be?”

“Minnow came back with that boy to steal me away. They live in sin together in the woods.”

A great gasp went up. The Prophet straightened, holding his arms out to the sides. Even though he wasn't standing in the Prophet Hall, I recognized these motions. He was preparing a sermon. He was thinking through a punishment.

He raged on about fornication and sin and damnation and fraternizing with Rymanites, but his face was calm. He looked happy. Overjoyed. This was his moment to smite someone, really and truly. On the ground, Jude jerked beneath the grips of the deacons.

Finally, the Prophet ended his diatribe, and it became so quiet in the courtyard, I could hear the trees creaking. The Prophet savored it. He stretched out the silence, looked at me, then at his deacons.

“Kill the Rymanite.”

I watched the words fall from the Prophet's grizzled lips. I hear those words in my mind still. They are a chant. A hymn. I thumb the words in my mind like prayer beads. That was the moment I realized there would be a cost for all of this. A cost for believing. A cost for thinking there was a way to escape.

The deacons stood and there was a silent moment when Jude might've tried to make a break for it. He levered himself up on an elbow but, in the next moment, Deacon Jeremiah swung back and landed a fist into Jude's face and he flattened back to the ground, a curved crimson wound cupping his eye bone. I traced the trajectory of each pair of heavy boots and tightened fists, the rush of blood that flew from Jude's mouth with the first few kicks to the face, the molar that sailed gracelessly through the air and became lost in the mud, planted like a sunflower seed. His cheek puffed up and bruised with blood, and broke apart like an abscess after a cruelly aimed kick from Deacon Timothy. The deacons each took a turn, their fists and boots and knees and elbows hammering Jude down long past the time he'd stopped moving. I screamed, just to avoid hearing the sound of their fists sinking into Jude's body.

I didn't pray when my hands were cut off—it was much too fast and my mind could only process the basic information of the moment. Now, though, I screamed at God—at Charlie—at anyone—to make it stop.

“Samuel!” the Prophet shouted. My father had been standing to the side with his wives. “Are you a deacon or not?”

My father's mouth was clenched. He swallowed with difficulty, then marched toward where Jude lay. He swung his leg back for a kick and I shut my eyes, screaming still, because Jude had stopped screaming. He'd stopped making any noise at all.

The women started to look uncomfortable and covered their children's eyes with large hands. The rabid energy in the crowd gradually bled away as Jude began to look less like a boy and more like something butchered. The deacons panted, their kicks growing feebler and feebler. In the clearing, it became so quiet practically the only thing you could hear was my sobs.

And then my father, of all people, uttered, “That's enough,” barely loud enough to hear. The deacons looked from him to the Prophet, their faces shiny with sweat and flecked with blood. The Prophet nodded and the men stepped away. It felt awkward then, those men covered in gore standing in a loose circle, shifting their weight from foot to foot. The outsider's body on the ground was like a spotlight on every ludicrous aspect of the entire place. The men who'd been holding me let their grip go slack, and I ran to Jude. I knelt beside him.

His eyes roved around, unfocused. It was hard for him to wipe the fear off of his face. He tried to smile but the teeth were broken in his mouth, protruding in different directions. He tried to talk but it came out like a gargle. He swallowed some of the blood and said—and said—

“Every morning, every evening, ain't we got fun?”

His voice echoed around the clearing. Tears fell from the bridge of my nose and cleared a path through the blood on his cheek. “Not much money, oh but honey, ain't we got fun?” he continued.

“The rent's unpaid dear, we haven't a bus,” I began, but Jude had stopped singing. He was struggling to breathe.

“But smiles are made dear, for people like us,” I sobbed.

His eyes slid shut, and I heard the Prophet pronounce, “The Rymanite is dead,” and my father's impossibly strong arms pulled me from the ground.

“No!” I screamed, jerking against my father's grip, but he didn't let go.

The ground was so frozen, the blood just pooled on the surface and rolled over to where they were standing, touching the hems of their dresses and pants. They backed away from it, like death was catching.

And I beat against my father's arms the way I should've years and years before, because all I wanted was to keep looking into Jude's face, but by then the tears were obscuring my vision, and the white-hot rage was coloring my periphery, and so I contented myself with sobbing his name over and over so if he lived, he'd know I was still there.

The last thing I remember, before they dragged me away, was looking into the woods and catching sight of Waylon, his face a half-moon behind the trunk of a tree. He must have followed us. His mouth was open in a silent scream, fingers gripping his face like claws.

His eyes latched onto mine. I opened my mouth and screamed.

“RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!”