mother, then suggested she and I talk outside. She’d taken my arm and explained that she was grateful for what I’d done, that I’d helped reunite the family. As she’d talked, she’d kept guiding me toward the road. When we reached my Suburban, she’d smiled at me and said, “Clara, as I have explained to you before, you aren’t welcome here. We can’t have you influence the children.”
In my mid-thirties, I wasn’t a child, and cops get pretty good at hiding their feelings, but I’d felt crestfallen. I’d fought the tears that threatened to spill from my eyes. Maybe I should have expected this reception. Maybe I had. But the disappointment felt like a slap across the face. “Why? Are you afraid that by seeing me they’ll realize that there’s another life and a big world out there? That they’ll want the freedom to choose their own futures?”
Mother had assessed me as if I were a spoiled bowl of milk.
“Clara, I’m worried that you’ll put false ideas in their heads, ones that will make them question their faith and our ways.” With that, Mother had dropped her hand from my arm, and I’d thought I’d seen sadness in her eyes. I was, after all, still her daughter. Perhaps she hadn’t completely forgotten that? “In another world, it might be possible for you to visit. But not in this one. Not when you’re a deserter who has turned your back on our faith, all our beliefs,” she’d said. “This very moment, by talking with you, I am disobeying our prophet and committing a grave sin.”
I had no argument to counter that. As a child, much of what mother taught me revolved around the faith of Elijah’s People, about the importance of adhering to our strict ways. I’ve understood for nearly all of my life that her religious beliefs ruled Mother’s world. That they were more important to her than my father or any of us children. Despite it all, I loved her. On that afternoon, I’d leaned forward, and before she could stop me, given her a peck on the cheek. While Mother had looked surprised, she didn’t pull back. Then, I did as she had asked; I’d left and never gone back.
As I drove through town, I passed the police station again, and the protesters had multiplied. I noticed the crowd had become predominantly men, with only a half dozen or so women, in all counting maybe thirty or more, most carrying some kind of poster-board sign. The women had started it, but it didn’t surprise me that the men had taken over. As a wife who’d defied her husband and run away, I was a threat to the men more than to the women. The sight of them milling about in their heavy coats reminded me of a meeting of the faithful from my childhood, when I’d seen groups of men congregate intent on a common cause. Usually it involved driving someone from the community—a wayward woman, a teenage boy, a man who they judged as not living up to the standards of the faith. I stopped reading the placards after the first: Outsider Go Home!
My pulse sped up, and I cleared my throat. It felt as if something had lodged there. Then I put my head down and kept driving. I willed myself not to consider the men with their bitter signs. Not now. Later would be time enough. More to prove to myself that I wasn’t rattled than because I was hungry, I stopped at the diner and grabbed a ham and cheese sandwich to go. I ate it behind the wheel as I drove past the big, two-story house I’d grown up in. The sun not yet high, it still had frost on the roof. I thought about how I’d come home, but not really home. That might never happen. Maybe I should leave, but was that the answer? At least I understood Alber. Strange to the rest of the world, no doubt, the town and its way of life were familiar to me. For the first twenty-four years of my life, until I fled, it was my normal.
I kept driving toward the mountains, heading to the trailer park that lay at the foot of Samuel’s Peak. I passed under the gate with a horn-blowing angel at the top and turned to the right on the final road, the one that backed up to the cornfield. The stalks had been cut down and hauled away, and