My dad walked in to discuss my assertion that I didn’t have a voice anymore. “Are you happy?” he asked Jael. She nodded. “Do you think you have a voice?”
“Through my husband,” Jael said. Simpering.
“And is that acceptable or unacceptable to you?”
“That’s the way it should be,” Jael answered. “She has a voice through you. She has to submit to her father. That’s her lot.”
And that was how the elders had managed to pull this off, I thought. The conflation of parental and ecclesiastical authority was only possible in a church like ours, where nearly everyone was related. By rendering us “children” so long as we were unmarried, they thwarted all possible challenges to their control. There was no need to listen to what anyone else thought, because as our parents, they would tell us what to think. I shook my head involuntarily. My father had never been like this. I hated what this church had done to him. I hated what it had done to my mother. I hated what it was doing to our family, and to everyone we had taken aim at outside.
This place was toxic.
I ran downstairs to sort out my desk and found Bekah. She held out her arms and I fell into them, both of us openly weeping. She was getting ready to head out the door.
“I have to go drive with Jayme,” she said, “and you gotta do what you’re doing, so I guess we’re parting ways.”
“I love you so much, Bekah.” Why didn’t better words exist? Your voice will follow me like a shadow for the rest of my days and I’ll never be whole without you and The nights I dream of you will be my happiest. I couldn’t let her go.
“I don’t know how you can say that and be doing this,” she cried, “but Mom says you’re always welcome back here.”
“I tried to talk to you about all this…” I wept into her shoulder. Someone was playing a hymn on the piano.
“I hoped you just needed to get the right words from the right person,” Bekah said.
We clung to each other until it didn’t make sense, and then she tapped me three times—the way we always signaled the end of a massage—and she turned to go.
Noah texted me: “Pls turn around.”
I looked up, and he stood there looking nervous. Afraid to speak to me.
I turned, and I saw Zach’s computer from across the room. Noah often used it to play Minecraft, but now he’d set it up with a message for me. “MEGAN, LOOK” it read, with an arrow pointing to the second monitor. I moved closer. He had pulled up the Kansas City Star article from a year earlier. I’m all in. I wanted to tell him how often I had wished to go back to that place. How much I’d wanted to un-ask the questions, to un-see the contradictions. Instead, I hugged him. He was only thirteen. Maybe one day he would look back at this moment and understand. The way I had with Josh.
I texted him back. “I love you, my brother. Forever and ever. I’m so sorry.”
One by one, I said goodbye to my siblings as I came upon them.
Three hours after my father walked into my bedroom, he was helping us load the minivan with our things. We’d have to come back the next day with a U-Haul. We couldn’t stay in the house that night—our lifelong home was not our house anymore—so he would leave us at the motel next to our old middle school. He checked us in, helped us unload the minivan, hugged us, and left.
Room 108 was cold and sterile, entirely devoid of life, warmth, or happiness. It was everything I was afraid the world would be, and I couldn’t bear to stay there, not then. I sent a message to Newbery asking if Grace and I could stay with his family that night, and then Grace and I sat on the bed, waiting.
A few minutes passed, and then my cousin Libby arrived with her husband. I hadn’t spoken to her in the years since she’d left the church—she’d been cast as “Libidinous Libby” upon her exit, a selfish, self-important whore—but along with so many other of Westboro’s judgments, I’d started to question their thoughts on her, too. I’d worked up the courage to reach out to her a few weeks earlier—a phone call to her office, because I was afraid she’d turn on me and publish