“Who are you, really?” The question comes out before I can stop it. And suddenly it’s there, floating over the table, for all of us to see. That’s all it takes: four words, a single question, for a lifetime of faith to snap.
“Ma’am—”
“I’m being held here against my will. This man isn’t my real husband. These children aren’t my real children. I was kidnapped. Taken from my home.Stolen.”
Silence.
I look wildly around the table, though no one will meet my gaze. “Are you going to help me? Or are you part of the group who are keeping me here?”
There it is, the crescendo of my life. Gone in an instant.
I expect Old Caleb to stand up and drag me, kicking and screaming, to the bedroom, and methodically beat me to death. When that doesn’t happen, I expect him to slam his fists on the table and say, “That’s enough.” But he does neither. He doesn’t do anything. He just stares at me with a strange expression on his face.
The taller neighbor looks to Old Caleb. “That chicken coop is coming along nicely, don’t you think?”
“It is,” Old Caleb says. “It’s coming along real nice.” He lets out a long, slow sigh. “Mary, would you pass the peas?”
46
At first,I told myself I was seeing things. I saw Shannon whispering something to Nanny Aimee in the living room, the two of them exchanging a conspiratorial look, and I said to myself:It’s nothing.I watched her go on long walks with Clementine through the fields and the woods on her weekly day off, and I thought,How nice!I clocked her having lunch alone with Caleb on the front porch—first every once in a while, and soon practically daily—and I thought,Don’t think about it.I saw the way Caleb looked at her when she rolled her eyes and laughed at some dumb thing he said, and I noticed how their fingers sometimes touched when they had lunch, and then I looked the other way.
I ignored all this and more because I needed to, because I was four months pregnant with my sixth child and gaining thirty thousand followers a week; because Shannon was less of an employee, if I was honest, and more like my own two hands; because she could lock me out of my own account if she wanted to; because of the most basic rule of social media, as grounding and essential as the laws of gravity: you cannot fall backward in terms of quality.
For all those reasons and more, it was not a consideration I felt particularly eager to interrogate: why Shannon would suddenly be working so hard to seduce everyone on the ranch but me.
It went like this for months. Clementine started talking about oceans and cities. She wanted to go to California. She wanted to see the Pacific. As a form of compromise, I started taking her to Target once a month. Then the nannies came to me one day and asked for a raise, and even though I wanted to slap the lip gloss off their ungrateful little faces, I said yes immediately.All you had to do was ask!
And then one day, Caleb walked up to me and said, “Do we really need two nannies?” and I knew another woman had taken full control of Yesteryear Ranch.
Still—mercy—I didn’t let her go. And then Caleb walked into our bedroom late one night after the final milking of the day (ha,I would think later: a milking indeed) and said, “We need to talk.”
47
“We need to talk,”Mary says.
She’s standing by my bedside. I groan and pull the quilt higher over my shoulders. You would think the benefit of being stuck on a ranch in the middle of nowhere would be a little bit of peace and quiet, but no. A child is a child is a child. In every world, in every possible scenario, they are programmed to drain you.
Unfortunately for Mary, I’m not in the mood to be drained today. Yesterday was terrible, one of the worst days in recent memory: something got into the chicken coop and killed all but one of the chickens. Abel thinks it was a fox. Noah thinks it was a wolf. Regardless: Captain Eggerton was the lone survivor. When Maeve and I arrived in the morning to collect eggs, the sad little chicken squawk-waddled straight into Maeve’s arms. Poor terrified thing. And Maeve—the way she looked around the mangy coop, the shivering bird in her arms, all the blood and the feathers and bits of guts and muscle reflected in the whites of her eyes—and the scraps of fabric from the custom hats—
I don’t think I’ll forget that look for the rest of my life. Little girls should not be required to be so brave.
Between that, and the dinner with the neighbors, and the realization that Mary is on the precipice of departure: I’ve decided I’m going on strike. Forming a one-woman union with myself. Notleaving bed until prospects improve. I think I have a very good chance of getting my demands met—the demands in question: to be left alone—and I think I can do so without getting the shit kicked out of me, since Old Caleb is so busy rebuilding the chicken coop right now.
“Maeve is sick,” Mary says now.
“She’s not sick,” I say patiently. “She’s mourning. All her friends are dead, Mary. Have a little respect.”
“She’s been coughing nonstop!”
“Give her one of your strange little tonics, then.”
“They’re not working. What if she got some sort of infection from the chickens? From all that … blood?”
“That’s not a thing,” I say, though I have no clue if it is or is not a thing. This bed is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of coziness, but I find if I keep myself warm enough and still enough, I can imagine I’m somewhere else. Buried beneath down comforters at a five-star glamping resort. Yes, that’s where I am. Dozing away at some Ritz-Carlton in Montana, not engaging in a conversation about the relative infection rate of poultry blood on a decrepit homestead.
Mary’s voice takes on a note of suspicion. “What’s wrong with you? Are you sick, too?”
“I’m fine,” is all I say. What I am not going to say to Mary: In a few weeks, it will be deep winter, and I will be stuck here. Stuck on this ranch while my belly grows, and grows, and grows, until it’s impossible to hide anymore. Which means it’s time to go.
