I drop into a seat at the table. No baby, no pregnancy, never again will I give birth in this world. What is that feeling, bubbling up in my throat?
Laughter. I really want to laugh.
But laughter would be inappropriate, because Clementine is asking her father about the food now. “Do you actually grow any of your own food? Or are you just as bad at farming as you always were?”
He glares at her. “You’ve become hateful,” he says. “A spiteful woman.”
“I take it that means no,” she says breezily. “It’s interesting—I knew the boys had some creepy little cabin out here, I knew they still saw you sometimes, but I didn’t know they were keeping you allalive.”
Mary speaks before Caleb can. She raises a hand. Her expression has such emotional velocity to it that she looks suddenly like a mirror of Clementine. “Are you saying that the neighbors are my brothers?”
Do you think you have a mental illness, Natalie?
What about your husband?
What about yourfather-in-law, and your sons, who helped you manage this fantasy for over a decade?
What about your followers, the ones who thought your life was like this from the jump?
The neighbors are our sons. Samuel, Stetson. They are the ones who have been, for years now, supplying us with vegetables and fruits and big frozen hunks of grocery store butcher’s meat when the traps come up empty and the fish don’t bite.
This is the part I have never known, not even in the farthest recesses of my flickering lightbulb mind. I never knew. It’s a delight to be able to say that honestly.Can you hear me, your honor? I really didn’t know!I suppose a normal person would have wondered how their incompetent husband could have managed to provide food, year after year, but do you know what? I didn’t wonder once. I have become—hear me when I saythis—a good motherfucking Christian woman. I do not, anymore, ask questions of my husband that he does not want to hear, and my husband—oh yes, a very good Christian man—does not tell me things I do not need to know.
Every few days, for the better part of ten years, my husband has left the house and wandered out into the fields, and I have watched him go. I have said to myself,He’s going to work the fields,when what he really has been doing during that time is walking out, out, out into the woods, until he reaches the small cabin a full mile away and steps inside, dusting off his shoes to sit on the couch and watch a football game. Then he has accepted a crate of dirt-smeared grocery store vegetables and carried them home to us.All in a day’s hard work.
No wonder Abel was grinning so hard when he came home that first day. What a delicious secret for a young boy to have.
Since she arrived here, Clementine’s face has been a carefully constructed mask of disinterest. Now she looks at me like I’m the most pitiful thing in the world. “Did you honestly never suspect?”
I know what she’s thinking: how blind and stupid her mother is. How crazy. My daughter is so modern, so she’s probably trying to think of the correct diagnosis for me. That’s what liberal women doin the face of what they can’t understand. Bipolar, maybe. Schizophrenia. Multiple personality disorder!
Bitch,I think.Spoiled little brat.
“I don’t know how to answer that!” I say cheerily. I am smiling like a game show host.
She looks at Caleb. “Why did you go along with it?”
“I didn’t want to leave your mother and the children alone out here,” he says passionately. “I didn’t have a choice, Clemmie. You have to believe me.”
I roll my eyes. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that this is a lie.Your father went along with it because it was a perfectly fine deal for him. Better than fine. Ideal. Because it allowed him to escape from the pressure and criticism and disappointment that has followed him his whole lousy life. Because he became crazy, a doomsday prepper loon of a conspiracy theorist, and because he always dreamed of a world where he could do absolutely nothing and have no one say boo, and I, theever-loving wife, offered this to him on an increasingly large silver platter until finally we reached the grand finale. Because Shannon, it turned out, was completely right: he had so little to give up, and so very much to gain. And if I really think about it, he’s always been a stupid fucking asshole to begin with.
Caleb is about to continue, he looks ready to give a stump speech, but then Clementine holds up a hand. “I want to talk to Mom,” she says. “Alone.”
This might be, of everything, the thing she has said that shocks me the most.
Mary locks herself away with Maeve and the boys in the bedroom, and Caleb skulks outside, glancing inside at the windows every few moments while I make lunch. Clementine watches me from the table. She doesn’t seem to be in any rush. With trembling hands, I slice the loaf of bread, then spread butter across the sides. I set the plate of bread down on the table. Clementine looks at it. I know what she’s thinking: it’s a far cry from the elaborate meals I used to make, which always turned out ready just after she’d gone to sleep.
She takes a bite of my buttered bread. Chews. “Jesus,” she says. “This is terrible.”
Some of your children have, as adults, become passionate activists against child exploitation on social media. How does that make you feel?
“Mother,” Clementine says, when she’s finished eating, “do you remember Shannon?”
I smile. “Of course I do.”
Bitch fucking homewrecker cunt.
“She and I have … kept in touch, let’s say, over the years. When I told her I was going to try to see you, do you know what she said?”
