believe he’s going to die,” Grace said. “He thinks Jesus will return while he’s still alive. People think the church will fall apart if Gramps dies … but if the church ever did fall apart and our family still believed the church’s doctrines—that would be awful. We’re not sure how the church could come to an end without destroying the lives of everyone inside.”
“We’re still hopeful, though,” I said. “We think our best chance is that someone will be able to get through to the people in the church. What we really hope is that we can find a way to do for our family what David helped do for me.”
* * *
Two days later, having been unofficially adopted by both David and the Bookstein family, I returned to Deadwood alone. I loved the new members of our southern California family, but part of me was wounded that Grace had chosen to stay in Los Angeles with Rabbi Yonah and Rachel and the kids. I remembered that Libby had felt the same way when I’d chosen to stay in Deadwood. “I feel like you’re choosing strangers over family,” she had accused me during a phone call, her voice breaking. Don’t you understand? I’d thought. It’s not a decision meant to hurt you. I just can’t be there. When it came to Grace, I wouldn’t keep repeating the pattern we’d learned at Westboro—the tendency to moralize every decision as good or evil, the wielding of guilt and the withholding of affection to control the people I loved. Sometimes, a person just needed to do what was right for them.
I tried to focus on the good that might come of my sister’s absence. Maybe it would lift some of the pressure off our relationship. Maybe we needed a little space to grow on our own, rather than trying to live as a unit. Because we shared a bank account and the car I’d bought a few years earlier, our sisterhood sometimes felt more like a marriage, and the confusion was a source of strife between us. Sometimes it seemed that Grace wanted me to be a big sister, sometimes a substitute parent. She resented needing me for anything and was desperate for independence, but she relied on me for practical skills she hadn’t yet developed. My need to take care of and protect her was so strong that I was having a hard time distinguishing between us, always speaking in terms of “we” and “us” and “ours.” Sometimes it felt like we were the same person.
“No,” Laura said emphatically when I told her this, “the two of you are so different.” I was bewildered by this declaration, honestly believing the exact reverse. “I think this will be good for both of you.”
And it was. Even though I felt awkward and anxious without Grace by my side, even though I would never have chosen to be apart from her, I realized that it was nice to have some space to myself. I started spending time with my coworkers at TDG—long conversations about politics and human nature with Jack, fierce games of volleyball with Brittany and Amanda and the boys. I was heartened when a man claiming to be a member of Anonymous called the office to threaten me, and one of my coworkers responded by lambasting him, standing up for me and telling the man that I was a good person. I also became closer with Dustin and Laura, who would remain two of my closest friends long after I left Deadwood, long after they left the Jehovah’s Witnesses and joined me in the wandering path of doubt and skepticism and confusion and wonder and awe at how different the world was than we had believed. When we compared stories of our unraveling faith, I was struck by the similarities. In the same way I had been perplexed by the arbitrariness of the different modesty standards among Westboro families—How could the standards of God differ from house to house?—Dustin had been confounded by the Witness prohibition on movies with an “R” rating. In the United States, that meant The Matrix was forbidden—but when he saw the film on the shelf of a Witness in the U.K., an elder explained that the rating system in that country was different. For both Dustin and me, one of the earliest sources of doubt had been incredibly trivial matters that highlighted internal inconsistency and a deeper issue—a dawning awareness of human perception coloring and altering apparently divine