think I could wear anything in here.”
Mother Sarah has found a pattern for my dress. Long sleeved, to the floor, high on the neck, the eyelet material covering it all. (Joshua? Is it going well?)
“I know what you mean,” I say. I hold Mariah now. She slaps at the models in the McCall’s pattern book.
“Can you believe this?” Laura points to a purple satin dress. The back is bare, and the front plunges low. I’m surprised I can’t see the model’s belly button.
“Or this?” I say, tapping a picture of a girl in a short skirt. Mariah grabs my hand and I kiss her face. “How do girls wear stuff like this?”
Laura shrugs. Then she draws her hands into claws, and in a deep voice says, “It’s Satan.”
I laugh. Mariah laughs, too, like she understands what we’re talking about.
In the van on the way to Applebee’s, I wonder if this, the stores and people milling about and tattoos, is really all influenced by Satan and his Dark Angels. Can it be, I wonder, a new thought, a scary thought, that everyone in the world is wrong, and just The Chosen Ones are right? There are so few of us and billions of them.
_________
ONCE, two years after Prophet Childs took over and closed us into our community, people started peering in.
“They are Satan,” Prophet Childs told us.
Television crews came, men and women to interview him. He said he would talk to no one unless God instructed him to do so. God never did tell the Prophet to talk to them.
Lots of people stopped by to watch when the fence went up. Families in cars and old couples and the reporters. They all stared as the men and boys dug holes and mixed concrete and set the chain-link fence at the front of our property. Week after week they came, begging for interviews. They were met with the God Squad, guns on their hips, black suits, no matter the weather.
“When you see them, with their all-seeing eyes, with those cameras, you run,” Prophet Childs told us during meetings. “They are Satan, here to try and steal you from us. To take babies from their mothers’ breasts. To teach you the ways of the world. To lead you all to hell.”
I cried when Prophet Childs warned us.
“Father, they want to take us from you.” And Father would hold me, pet my face, pull Laura onto his lap, kiss our cheeks. “They can’t take you away,” he said. “I’m here.”
I had seen the men and women, coming close to the fence, filming. So I ran.
“Laura!” I screamed for her. Grabbed at her, grabbed at Emily to bring her along, and ran away from the cameras. For a while we couldn’t go outside without the eyes of the world, all those cameras, watching. I quit walking, quit going to my tree.
And I dreamed. Of Satan, with black horns on his head and eyes red as fire.
“Mother,” I cried out more than once in the night.
“What, Kyra?”
“Satan’s in my room. In the closet.”
“He’s not,” she’d say, and turn on the light to show me.
Another night. “He’s under my bed.”
Another. “I saw him at the window.”
“I’m here,” Mother said every time. “I’m here. You’re safe. No one’s taking you away from me.”
“WE HAVE TO HURRY,” Mother Claire says when we sit down for lunch in Applebee’s. “We have to get you home in time for your meeting with Brother Hyrum.”
“Please,” I say, my voice sounding sharp. “Don’t remind me.”
“Watch your tone,” she says.
Laura lets out a sigh.
I am sure Mother Claire’s words have ruined my appetite until the waitress sets a plate of chicken and shrimp in front of me. This food is so delicious I can hardly stand it.
“No wonder you wanted to come here,” I say to Mother Victoria and she smiles so big I can see her back teeth.
The five of us, plus Mariah in a high chair, sit at a round table. It’s the first time, I realize, that I’ve seen our mothers all sitting at the same time, not including church services.
“You’re laughing and smiling,” Laura says to them.
They look at us, then at each other, and they grin.
“I don’t want to marry Uncle Hyrum,” I say. I blurt this out right as a waitress passes with a pitcher of water.
Mother Sarah, her belly hidden by the table, says, “Not now, Kyra.”
Mother Victoria holds her finger to her lips.
“We do what God says,” Mother Claire says. And I know she does because