He believed, said Kirsten, realizing it as she spoke it, he was entitled.
Beth assured her it had been the devil talking, not Carl.
Yeah, okay, but in that case the devil’s still doing the talking. Because you don’t hear him when he talks to me, Beth, he isn’t repentant. I mean, he tells me he is, but when I say, Well that’s not good enough, he goes crazy. He curses at me, Beth. He threatens to take the kids. Not sue for custody but just take them. And disappear.
I can see Beth’s face as Kirsten says this. Sorrowful; jowls fluttering as if windblown. Beth told her that she loved them both, so much, and this was killing her — which Kirsten believed, and I believe it too, hearing it in retrospect. She told Kirsten they had to try to work it out for the sake of the children and for, of course, Lord Jesus.
“So, my heart kind of broke then,” Kirsten told me. “Because I knew I was going to have to let Beth down. And if I let Beth down — if I didn’t do what Beth asked — because ultimately, you know, I believed Beth was wrong and I was right — then that would mean —”
“I know,” I told Kirsten. “I know what that would mean.”
(When I, your humble narrator, left our church, I didn’t go see Beth first, even though I’d always promised her I would if I were ever entertaining “doubts.” But it wasn’t an issue of doubts at that point — I was too far gone, no doubt about it. And there was no way I could show my doubtless, godless face to Beth, the woman who’d found me when I was lost and wanted so much to see me saved. So I left without saying goodbye, or even thanks. Fortunately I had practice at this sort of thing. I stole away like the criminal I had long been, carried off on a mighty gust of grief and guilt, exactly the same way I disappeared when you knew me, Adam. It was kind of my forte by that time.)
The kidnapping threats were pretty much the breaking point for Kirsten. Once Beth, despite all her love and sorrow, had proved herself of zero use as mediator, Kirsten decided to pack up the twins and book herself a trip to Alberta to visit the town engineer, whom she hadn’t seen since she was eleven. Practically the day she turned eighteen, however, letters had begun to arrive for her. He had sent them care of the church. Which made her think either her mother had been intercepting them up to that point, or else he had been politely waiting for Kirsten’s adulthood to occur before reintroducing himself.
For a long time, she didn’t answer him. Her mother had told her that this was a man who luxuriated in sin, who had gleefully opened himself to Satan and refused to shut the gates unto the evil one, even if it meant losing his own family.
“It’s hard,” Kirsten told me. “To overcome that fear when you’ve had it cultivated in you your whole life. And have cultivated it in yourself. Even when you start to know better. It’s like those fizzy candies.”
“Pardon?” I said after a moment of trying and failing to put her last sentence into some kind of context.
“When we were kids,” she said. “And there were those candies that fizzed in your mouth. And people said if you drank pop with one of those candies in your mouth, it would explode in your head and you’d die.”
I’d been lying on my side in bed with my cell phone squashed against my ear as we had this conversation. But at that point I rolled onto my back and bellowed laughter.
“Wow,” I said, “you are such an apostate now! You’re comparing the tenets of our faith to, like, urban myths about Pop Rocks!”
“What I’m saying is, if you gave me even one Pop Rock and a can of Coke to this day I probably wouldn’t put the Pop Rock in my mouth and take a swig. I just wouldn’t. Because I just spent so many years being afraid of it as a kid.”
“So it was the same with your dad.”
“It was the same with my dad. There was a part of me that was convinced we’d get off the airplane in Edmonton and he’d be standing there with horns growing out of his head.”