All I can do is—well.
You know.
Producer Shannon. Nanny Louise.A good wife doesn’t speak to her husband that way.Weekly Sunday school, warm pool water. Young Caleb, Old Caleb, Smart Caleb, Stupid Caleb (one fish, two fish, red fish, blue!). A pantsuit, ordered online, for a court hearing I would never attend.Do you swear to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?Baby-blue sneakers, a senatorial grin.What’s an ocean?American-flag lipstick. Holy rodeo lights.
Shannon sued us, Shannon is suing us, Shannon will sue us.
A million voices in collective reply:Apologize.
I believe you’ve already been prepped on the talking points of this interview, so I’ll just run through a quick overview of what we plan to cover tomorrow. What we’re really curious about is what happened after your former producer accused you of assault. Your social presence really changed after that. It became increasingly … intense, I guess you could say, in terms of your homesteading lifestyle. And then when you chose to delete your account so abruptly … well, let’s just say your followers have a lot of questions! We’ll spend some time today unpacking that time period, and then after that we can talk about yourfather-in-law’s failed presidential campaign, andthen—well, you can drive that part of the conversation. How does that sound?
“Clementine,” Caleb says, “why are you here?”
Ah,I think distantly.Yes. Good question, idiot!
“Why areyouhere, Dad?” Clementine says. “Have you ever even asked yourself that? Why you’re still here, after all this time?”
“We were trying to be good Christians. We really were. Trying. Good Christians.” It’s only here when I realize I’m speaking, and so I forge onward, stumbling and stuttering like a radio channel moving in and out of frequency. Something about being a good wife, a good mother. Something about God. Something about love.
Clementine watches me with an expression like flat soda as I trail off into silence, and then she turns to her father. “Is she always like this now?”
He pauses, then says, in the kind of diplomatic tone that would really make his father proud, “There are good days and bad days.”
Good days, bad days, dirty, clean—
Welcome, y’all!
On good days I am calm. I believe that if I do a good enough job, if I prove to the world that I really am living out here on the land as an honest woman, a good Christian, a traditional wife, then the Angry Women will eventually forgive me, and the momentum will swing back in my favor, and the state of Idaho will drop all its pending charges against me, the ones the lawyers warned would come before Doug paid them all off: sexual assault, aggravated assault, improper working conditions, wire fraud, animal abuse, child abuse.
Do you see? If I finally, actually and truly, became the thing I claimed so long to be, then no one could call me a liar anymore. A liar anymore. A liar anymore. A liar anymore. A liar anym—
And then there are the bad days.You don’t need to know about those, Clementine. You don’t need to know about the panic attacks and the conspiracy theories, the tests from the Lord, the producers in the trees, the pebbles, the microphones, the mornings I wake up and feel so spun around that I think I’ve been kidnapped.
“We’re so happy to have you!” I blurt out.
Clementine’s face twitches, and my heart sinks. It was the wrong thing to say.Bad Natalie.My Online Natalie sensors fizzle and spark.
“She takes pills sometimes,” Caleb says. “To calm down.”
“Pills,” I say. “Pills?”
“We crush them into a tonic,” he tells Clementine. “They help,but we’re always running out of them. Samuel gets them when he can, but with all the external scrutiny, we have to ration them.”
“So she’s constantly moving in and out of a pharmaceutical haze,” Clementine says. “Perfect. That’s just perfect.”
“Clementine,” Caleb says again. “Why are you here?”
“Stetson called,” she says. “He said that Mom stumbled into his house, rambling about needing a doctor, then ran off just as quickly. He was really freaked out.”
“No, no, no,” I say. “It was nothing like that. It was—well, it was obviously—” I pause. “Did you say Stetson?”
There is a name I haven’t allowed myself to say out loud in a very, very long time.
But Clementine is looking past me now. I turn to see Mary, standing by the door of her bedroom, staring at Clementine like she’s just caught a glimpse of the afterlife.
So tell me if I understand this correctly: Yourfather-in-law resolved Shannon’s lawsuit out of court and then paid the media to stop covering the story. Any person who spoke about you on social media in any speculatory fashion received acease-and-desist order from his lawyers. Hestrong-armed local law enforcement to drop the case they were building against you, and then you, Natalie, began again. You ripped out the hardwood floors, renovated the walls and ceiling, and removed all signs of modernity from your barn and farming areas. You decided to live like the oldendays—for what, though? To prove a point? To protect yourself from your legal troubles?
You’re going to need to help us make sense of this, Natalie. You’re going to need to help us understand.
