The fact that Mary and Clementine are now standing next to each other is too much for me. For the first time in months, maybe ever, I see Mary with a critical eye: she’s short for her age, undernourished, her complexion grubby and sallow. Her teeth are yellow and crooked. Even the blank look of terror on her face feels somehow antiquated; she looks like a Victorian woman who has stumbledupon a ghost. By contrast, Clementine looks impossibly modern. Her expression is so bright and penetrating, her clothes so clean and colorful, that I suddenly feel like I’m staring into the sun. What I am thinking, what I am trying not to think:They look so much alike.
“I’m Clementine,” she says to Mary. “I’m your sister.”
I look at Mary, who looks at Clementine. For a split second, two compartments in my mind become one.
My sweet little sea creature.
“Mary,” I say.
My sixth child, my fourth daughter, looks at me the same way she always has: like I’m her mother. Like she’s disappointed in this fact.
Then her gaze flickers past me to the kitchen window. She whispers, “What is that thing?”
“That’s a car.” Caleb clears his throat, and all three of us turn to look at him. “You’ve seen it before,” he adds. “You were young.”
A memory, fluttering past: me and Caleb, in the early days of the experiment, explaining the game to toddler Mary. That was how we talked about it then. A game, an experiment,just a fun little trial!It was gradual. Sometimes deliberate and sometimes instinctual. Like checkers. Like chess. Cowboys and Indians. Barbie Dreamhouse, but backward.We’re going to pretend it’s the olden days, sweetie pie.The pioneer days!Justplay-pretend!Just a summer activity. Just a creative way for the family to bond over traditional values while we hid from the outside world and figured out a plan. Just, just, just. There was a greater plan, I swear. But at some point over the years—I really can’t remember when—the hiding became the plan. The beginning and the end.
But the clothes—were they the beginning or the end? It was the winter I gave birth to Mary. I spent my breastfeeding hours ordering piles and piles of pioneer reenactment outfits on my phone. I got them shipped to the ranch.100 percent cotton,the labels read.Hand-dyed for lasting use!
Labels. I haven’t thought about those clothing labels in years.They’ve long since been ripped out, and all that clothing has since been hemmed and patched within an inch of its life. Authentic, now. It really does look authentic.
Another memory, alive and twitching in my hand: “It’s fun,” I would say angrily at night, scrubbing furiously at some stupid iron pan while my children whined for a trip to Target, a weekend ride to a rodeo, anything to get out of the house, and Caleb stared wildly into the fire, his eyes alive and dead at the same time. They didn’t yet realize that those days were over for good.
“This is fun,” I would shout at them in the darkness. “Don’t you realize we’re having fun?”
The children left when Clementine turned sixteen. A month earlier, we had finally sold our car, the last piece of modernity we’d been holding on to.Time to live off the land, kiddos!
Clementine must have known what was coming. She took the kids one morning for a walk and they never came back. She knew those woods so well. Better than anyone. It would’ve been easy for her to find her way out.
Suddenly Caleb and I were parents of an only child, a little girl.
That is, of course, until we had more.
For what it is worth: I do not recommend giving birth in the pioneer days.
“The girls,” I say, thinking of Jessa and Junebug. “Are the girls okay?”
“In some way or another,” Clementine says evenly. “The girls aren’t doing well. But they’re alive. And the boys—well. The boys are here.”
I don’t know what to say to that. There are whole universes inside that response, but every firing neuron in my brain is hissing and sparking against the idea of inquiring further. So I say nothing, and Clementine, who is watching me carefully now, lets out a huff of breath and smiles an angry smile. Like she had made a bet with herself seconds earlier and is disappointed to learn she has won.
“Where do you live?” Caleb asks Clementine, and she shrugs and says simply, “Nearby. All of us live nearby.”
And now I am thinking of something my mother said in my early parenting days, back when Clementine was just a little thing:They watch every move you make.It’s true. For decades now, my children have been watching me. They’re the only ones who never stopped.
Clementine turns to look at me. Her attention is almost unbearable.
“Tell me,” she says. “What did you say to Mary? Where did you say we all went?”
Mary is watching me now, a careful frown on her face. Like she is remembering something for the first time in a very long time. Remembering what we said.
Dead. We told her they were dead. Gone to heaven. She was so young. A toddler. Milky mouth, moldable brain. It was easy. She barely understood what we were saying, and soon—thank you, Mother, for theinspiration—we didn’t say they were dead, but simply that they were no longer with us.
They were dead, and then they were gone, and then they were not discussed at all, and soon we moved through each day as if they had never been here to begin with.
Children are amazingly flexible creatures. They can move through the centuries, adjust to new living conditions, transport themselves into new realities with surprising ease. She was so flexible, our little Mary, so capable of adjusting to this new life, where she was not the youngest sibling but the oldest, not the child of a famous woman but the child of a homestead family in the nineteenth century.Good girl,I would say on the days she didn’t cry, or scream, or glance wildly around at the empty house like she was surrounded by ghosts.Look howgrown-up you are.
For every detail of her life we snatched away, we added a new one to fill the vacuum. I taught her how to make soap, how to bake biscuits, how to snap at children when they don’t do their jobs. I made up fake recipes for bullshit tonics. I gave her brothers, and asister, and so much work to do. And Caleb? He told them stories about faraway battles, cowboys and savages, good and evil. “Prepare for battles,” he would say. “Civil war is coming.”
