told her. “That you did that. That you just said, Damn the theological torpedoes, I’m going to Alberta.”
“The day after I got there,” she told me. “I woke up and my lips were cracked. And I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror in our hotel room and it was as if I’d aged overnight. I had all these little spider-wrinkles I’d never seen before. And I realized, It’s because it’s so dry here. It’s the prairies and it’s dry. And the minute I figured that out, Rank, this weird wave of nostalgia I didn’t even know I had washed over me. And I realized I liked it, I’ve always liked dry climates. When I went to Arizona on my honeymoon to see the Grand Canyon, I remember standing there in the desert and heat and every cell in my body was going: Yes, yes, yes. This is what I like. This is home to me. And it didn’t even occur to me that I came by that liking honestly — because of where I had grown up. I forgot I was a prairie girl.”
I didn’t say anything. I was picturing her happy in the desert.
“So that was like my dad too,” she said. “I forgot how I felt about my dad. I forgot my dad was sweet. The girls and I spent a week with him and he drove us all over town. He brought me down to his old office, where he used to show me off to the secretaries. I remembered they kept toys for me in a box in the closet. He took us to Drumheller on the weekend so the kids could see the dinosaurs. I tried to talk to him about what happened and he kept saying, I won’t say a bad word about your mother. And I was like, No, come on. I’d love you to; I’m dying for you to. Jeepers, if you won’t I will. And he’s like, No, honey, no. Let’s just leave all that in the past where it belongs.”
“So that was Satan.”
“That was Satan. Or, Satan’s backscratcher, as Mom used to call him.”
“Satan’s backscratcher?”
But that hadn’t been the final nail in the crucifix. That wasn’t what ultimately sent Kirsten packing from the faith. The final nail occurred not long after they got back from Alberta and one of her daughters staggered up to her after Sunday school as if punch drunk and announced to her mother that she was really, really sure she didn’t want to go to hell and then burst into tears.
And Kirsten had said, like any mother would, Honey, that’s not going to happen.
And the daughter, whose name was Gabrielle but who mysteriously had at some point managed to nickname herself Giddy, replied in that breathless, hysterical way of sobbing children, How is it not going to happen? I don’t see how it can’t. I hit Tyler with a block. I wanted to hit him. He smashed my tower and I wanted to hit him.
But even that hadn’t been the final nail exactly. The final nail was when she spoke with Beth about it, and Beth told her: Baby, this is good. We want her to be afraid of hell. We want her to be terrified.
It was like dominoes, Kirsten told me. Something happened in her head that was like dominoes.
She thought: No.
Then she thought: But, yes. Of course. Of course I want her to be afraid to go to Hell.
(No.)
But, yes. That’s how I was raised. To love Jesus. To fear Satan.
She remembered how she sobbed and rolled around on the floor of the dining hall at summer camp, while other kids performed variations of the same activity, howled and babbled on all sides. Ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-old disgusting sinners all. Hapless, helpless carriers of original sin, as rats once toted plague across Europe. Each of them panicking, Please Lord. Please Jesus. Oh my God. I can’t do this. The flames practically blistering their heels. Save me! What can I do? Name it, Jesus!
(Not my daughter.)
But, yes.
Yes, agreed Beth. You know how Satan works, baby, as well as I do. He lies in wait.
(Like my father. Patient. Abandoned.)
No, thought Kirsten.
But, yes, thought Kirsten.
The way she tells it, it went like that for a couple of months. But each No constituted another domino. The Yeses weren’t managing to set any of the dominoes upright again — the Yeses just stalled the dominoes’ inevitable toppling — and never for very long.