“I was a bad kid,” I shrugged. “I was disobedient, disrespectful…occasionally violent. And Auden…he was mute. He never said a word until my mother left. His silence unnerved her, I think. His tantrums, too. I think she believed that because we weren’t angels, we were devils.”
“Did you believe it?”
“What?”
“That you were possessed by the Devil?”
I waited, expectantly, for the Devil’s voice in my head. His taunts. His laughter. But he was silent, his absence more unnerving than his presence.
“No, of course not,” I lied. “That would be crazy.”
“You were a kid, though. It would have been understandable if you did start to believe it.”
“I’m not crazy,” I said defensively.
Nathaniel threw his hands up in the air. “I never said you were.”
I fell silent and reached for my glass of water, swallowing it all in one go to avoid further commentary on my history with my mother and the Devil.
I wanted to blame my mother, and the cult, for the Devil inside my head. But he was there long before the God’s Soldiers Church, long before my mother’s psychological manipulation. The truth was that he had always been there. And my mother had always known. She’d seen him, too.
Nathaniel typed something on his laptop, scrolling for a few minutes before he turned his screen around to face me. “Is this him?”
I stared at the photo of Joe. He looked just as I remembered, only older. A shiver spread from the top of my neck down to my tailbone, the memory of Joe standing beside my mother, speaking in tongues, one I had not wanted to revisit. “Yes.”
“He looks like a politician,” Nathaniel commented.
I snorted.
Nathaniel proceeded to scroll through the God’s Soldiers social media account until he found a group photo. “Come look at this,” he said. I moved around to stand behind him, peering over his shoulder. “Can you see your mum?”
I studied the photo, scanning faces for my mother. There was a woman with long brown hair flowing down her dark green cardigan and a taller woman with blonde hair wearing a pink floral dress. Three men in suits, nearly identical in their balding scalps and their lifeless eyes, stood behind them, one woman with dark curls and pale lips in between them.
“No,” I sighed. “She’s either just not in this photo or not there at all.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t want an online presence,” Nathaniel suggested, “you know, since she disappeared and…”
His voice trailed off, my discomfort evident in the way I peeled myself away from the computer.
“Have you ever tried to contact him?” Nathaniel asked, gesturing to the photograph of a smiling Joe. “To find your mum?”
I shook my head. “No. My dad must have when she first went missing but he didn’t really talk about it so it mustn't have led to anything.”
“Weird.”
“Hm?”
“You said he validated her delusions. If she ran away, leaving everything she has ever known, wouldn’t it have made sense to go with the one person telling her she is right?” Nathaniel shook his head. “It’s weird. I think he knows something. He probably lied to your dad.”
Not surprising,the Devil spoke up,considering he was sleeping with his wife.
I grimaced at the memory.
“You should contact him. Even if she wasn’t there at the time, she might be there now,” Nathaniel said.
“They both think I have the Devil in me,” I reminded him. “And I won’t put Auden through that again. She almost killed us during that exorcism. I want nothing to do with her.”
“Wait,exorcism?” Nathaniel asked in alarm.
