THAT NIGHT I had a dream and in that dream I called my mother. She said, What can I do to hold your heart still?
I don’t love you anymore, I told her. A lie.
What can I do? she said again.
Help me, I said. And then leave me alone.
Chapter 25
The morning of the Birthing Day the sky opened up cloudless and everlasting. They loaded me in the backseat of the car. I wore my white gown. The neck came up to my chin in an itchy lace collar. It covered my body to the floor, sleeves falling past my wrists. Under this gown I disappeared.
We rode in silence, Vern’s fingers drumming the steering wheel. Trinity Prism sat next to me, pressed into her side of the car, hands praying under her chin. We drove out and out on Old Canal Road. The Holy Ghost machine gun was in the trunk. Every time we stopped I could hear it shift, feel the bump of it against the seat. We neared the turnoff for the Diviner house and the car slowed then stopped.
Out the window, in the dry lands, I saw the bones of dead animals sticking up from the ground like stakes and I allowed myself finally to understand I would not be alive for much longer. I had known it for some time but I’d buried it. I could not be a prisoner with them forever. I could not be bound and gagged living in their basement and I could not be trusted to be released back to Cherry. There was no place for young girls.
A calm shrouded me. I felt the sun burn my hand through the car window. How I’d miss that ruthless sun, how I’d long for one more day of dryness, grateful only for breath. Soon I would not know the pleasure of my own exhalation.
God, I thought, please take me in your arms. I know you aren’t the God of Vern. I know you aren’t the God of man. If you’re there and you’re a sinner’s God like I’ve come to hope for, will you bless me one more time? Will you let my baby be taken far from here and into another bright life? Not here. Not here.
When we stopped I opened my eyes. Cars were parked every way through the field, the girls of blood in white gowns being led by their fathers toward an unseen belly of the expanse. Mothers trailed them tight-lipped and rigid. I strained to see where they were going. Vern pulled me from the car, gripped my arm. The gun was strapped to his back, huge and gold. He’d adorned it with rhinestones. His hair gleamed in the sun, glitter twinkling on his scalp. I reached up and touched a tight curl, pulled it, and it bounced back up. Tears streamed down my face. “You could just let me go,” I heard myself say.
“No longer a bastard, Lacey,” he said. “You’ve got fathers all around.” He kissed my temple. We went deep into the field beyond the swarm of cars, following the line of the Body. Cherry walked past me arms outstretched toward what she must have envisioned as God, her head shaved bald and gleaming with jelly and bronzer. All I wanted was water before I died.
I looked up and before me like a blessing was the red house. I saw the tallness of it, the leaning structure. I thought I smelled Daisy’s incense. But I blinked and it wasn’t the red house. It was a skeleton frame. The red had turned to char. The walls had begun to fall away. I thought of the velvet chairs, ruined. The silk robes in tall ornate dressers. Daisy’s matches on the back of the toilet and Florin’s moon chart.
“No,” I said. My legs went weak. I leaned into Vern and he stumbled and the gun swung around and hit me in the head. I dropped to my knees and gripped the earth, white dress ruined. I tasted smoke in the air.
“Tell me they weren’t inside,” I said.
“Whether they meet their devil now or in fifty years, does it really matter?” he said.
I looked up for someone to help me, but the crowd walked past, eyes ahead, carrying lawn chairs and bags of chips like they were going to watch a football game. Vern pulled me up and we joined. When we came to the clearing, the full-bellied girls like me were kneeling in a circle on a clean white