tears.
8. Strangers and Pilgrims
We’d been on the road for a few hours by the time I realized I was white-knuckling the steering wheel. There weren’t many cars at that early hour, but the image would have seemed comical to anyone passing me driving north on I-29. Leaning forward with my face hovering just behind the dash, whole body clenched, I looked like the stereotypical grandmother with poor vision trying to navigate during rush hour. Had my sister not been sleeping in the passenger seat, she surely would have made fun. I unclenched my fists and tried to relax in my seat—only to realize a few minutes later that in the absence of conscious effort, my body had resumed its original position. I gave up.
It was mid-December, and Grace and I were more than ready to get out of Kansas. Just over a month had passed since I’d last seen my parents, and confusion had reigned in the interim. After so many years of a life micromanaged by my mother, I now felt paralyzed each time I had to render an opinion about what steps to take next—as if decision-making were a muscle that had long since atrophied from disuse. At home, everything I did, everywhere I went, how long I’d be gone, everything had been pre-approved, double-checked, and tightly controlled. The multiplicity of rules was sometimes cause for frustration, but it was also a source of great confidence: I’d known what was required of me. I’d known who I was, and where I fit into the world. What did it mean to be the good girl in a world with no rules? I was unmoored. Outside of Westboro’s rigid system, fear and uncertainty now consumed me, a physical weight that I felt from the first morning I awoke in my cousin Libby’s house and every day thereafter: a boulder sitting on my chest, crushing my lungs, blocking any attempt to see around it. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I was terrified of making a decision that would land my sister and me in some horrific situation. Homeless. Friendless. Penniless.
At the same time, the pressure to make every decision right now was staggering. I was keenly aware that Grace and I had a little bit of time and a little bit of money, and that both would be gone in no time at all. I needed to find a way to take care of us. I needed to be responsible. I needed a job immediately—since I’d graduated from Washburn four years earlier, I’d only worked for the family law firm, which was clearly no longer a possibility. And if the apocalypse wasn’t imminent, as Westboro had been proclaiming for years, then I was behind in heeding the counsel of my business professors by nearly a decade already. Two days after leaving Westboro, I panicked to Newbery: “I need to start saving for retirement!” It was a stand-in for my every failure to prepare for this life, and the adrenaline coursing through me was not appeased by Newbery’s assurances that I had plenty of time to figure things out.
And beneath the urgency and the loss and the yawning chasm of uncertainty, there was a deeper sort of terror: that no matter what I did, I was spinning my wheels in a futile effort to outpace the wrath of God reserved for the children of disobedience. My grip on the steering wheel tightened as I imagined my little black Pontiac spinning off into a ditch, smashing into a concrete divide, crumpling into a mass of metal and broken bones protruding from torn, sizzling flesh resting in pools of blood after a head-on collision with a southbound semi and—
Stop! I ordered myself.
I unclenched my fists again. Sat back. Slowed my breath. Tried to still the tremors in my limbs.
I looked out the window, where no grisly scene awaited. The sun was bright and the fields along the interstate were vast and glistening with frost. Iowa, just after 8 A.M. I glanced over at my sleeping sister in the passenger seat. Though we shared our grief and fear, Grace’s disposition could not have been more of a contrast to mine. Where I wanted to cautiously reason and agonize over each decision, she seemed possessed by every emotion that came over her. Whatever she felt in any given moment was a call to action that needed no review and no revision, and she didn’t appreciate my offering them. When Grace had first suggested an escape