I think carefully.Why is it inevitable that people must lie?It’s technically the Christian thing to do to say people should never lie, butthatin itself feels like a lie. For example: If my mother hadn’t lied to me about motherhood, I might never have had children. And wouldn’t that have been a greater sin than the sin she made in lying to me?
The Lord is staring fiercely at me now. There are little pinpricks of pink on His cheeks from the cold, or maybe from His intensity of feeling.
Answer me, Child, He says.
The words slip out of my mouth like someone is pulling a string. “People lie for all kinds of reasons. They lie to hurt people and to help people and sometimes because they can’t bear the truth.”
The Lord is watching me closely now. I feel the heat of His love on my face.
Go on, Child, He says. Keep talking.
“It’s never okay to lie, but we do it anyway. That is the nature of sin. That’s why we confess, and the Lord forgives us for our sins. We were made broken, and only in the light of His loving grace can we ever become whole.”
And do You, Child, have anything to confess?
A cold, dark fear takes grip of me. I nod. I am trembling as I whisper, “Lord, help me, I have so very much to confess.”
Well then. Go forth. Confess.
I open my mouth and a small choking sound comes out.
Try again, Child.
“Shannon,” I manage. “Caleb. My father-in-law, bastard man, andClementine—” The words pour out of me in a nauseous rush, and then suddenly I am empty, empty and cold, and the shimmering light around Mary is gone. Her face looks dull and dead, her mouth drawn and sad. She looks less like a girl and more like a clay mold of a girl. “Clementine,” she says after a moment. “Did you just say—Clementine?”
The Lord is gone. I’m alone again, sitting on this porch across from Mary, who is staring at me with a strangely urgent expression on her face. I imagine telling the truth. Instead, I say, “No.”
“Yes, you did. You said Clementine.” She leans forward, expression almost pained. “Who is she? Clementine?”
“I said no one,” I snap. Mary leans back like she’s been slapped. We stare at each other. She looks like she’s deciding whether to push me, to ask me again. Instead, she shivers and stands up, staring out into the black of the woods for a long moment. Then she walks back inside without another word.
I stand up, too, and follow this daughter who is not my daughter, this teenager who is also my mother, my captor, my savior, in this cold, unforgiving world.
34
“Hey, everyone!”Reena sang out. “I’m usually not big on this kind of thing, but I just wanted to share with my community that I was unfortunately involved in the recent round of consulting layoffs and am now looking for a new opportunity.”
I was sitting at the kitchen table when her video popped up on my feed. As she went on about the state of the economy, I wondered vaguely if she’d gotten Botox. She looked like a stereotype of a modern woman: poreless and lip-lined and shrill. She must have layered a filter onto this video. Her skin was too beige, her teeth were too white. Her positivity was so obviously fraudulent that I felt a pinprick of empathy for her. Poor stupid Reena. She was older, but none the wiser. She had no one to blame but herself.
“… so if anyone has any leads, please let me know! I’m based in New York right now, but I would happily relocate to the West Coast for the perfect fit.”
How embarrassing for her. How desperate. Flaunting her failures online like this. Pretending she was totally fine with how her life was turning out, when she so obviously wanted to step into the bathroom, shut the door behind her, and scream into a—
I paused.
Reena and I were not alike.
No. Definitely not.
Whatshewas doing, practically begging people for attention and money, was totally debasing, a complete humiliation, and what I was doing was—
I set the phone down on the counter. Smiled at my children.
In retrospect, it feels like divine coordination that the day Reena announced she had lost the one job she’d always wanted was the day I finally got hired, so to speak, for mine.
Reena and I were both twenty-six years old that morning. I had three thousand followers and was nine months pregnant with baby number four. Clementine was sitting quietly at the other end of the kitchen table, drawing. Her brothers were playing on a blanket spread out on the kitchen floor, Samuel holding two plastic building blocks and occasionally clashing them together, baby Stetson lying on his tummy and craning his head up from time to time like an old, wizened lizard.
Then Caleb threw open the door, letting in a rush of spring air. “Come quick!”
