2. Res
2
Res
H aving dinner with my family and trying to have any meaningful discussion is about as easy as navigating a minefield. But it’s a minefield I’ve been navigating for the better part of a decade now and am more or less an expert in.
Rule number one. Everything is somehow political or religious. So rather than trying to avoid talking about politics and religion, just talk about things that if they turn political and religious won’t lead to my parents demeaning and insulting me or me stomping away from the table in frustration.
Talking about how the incompetents at my job nearly cost the firm I work for ten million dollars is a relatively safe topic as far as that goes.
“And wait. The person who did this. They were the vice president…” my mother asks.
“No. They were the fu—freaking president! The only reason I managed to catch the error is because I was going over the vice president’s emails and saw it. Then we spent hours on a call trying to convince him the problem wasn’t the problem that he insisted it was, and now I’ve been spending upwards to twenty hours a week on an audit and sifting through records going back five years and am behind on my regular day to day,” I snap. I’m not. I’m actually caught up on all my work and then some. But in order to maintain the lie at work so they don’t give me more to do, I have to maintain it outside so I don’t slip while at work. “And the vice president is being an entire bitch about it all.”
“Res,” my mother warns at the vulgar word I didn’t manage to catch.
I roll my eyes. For fuck’s sake, I’m twenty-seven. But that’s not an argument I’m going to have with her.
“Sorry,” I say halfheartedly.
She accepts and then says, “You constantly complain about that job.”
“That’s because I’m smarter than about ninety-five percent of the people I work with. And the president and vice president are in that ninety-five percent.”
“If you’re so smart, why haven’t you gotten a promotion?” my older brother asks.
Rule number two of having dinner with my family. Avoid talking to my older brother, David. Definitely don’t tell him to go shrivel up in a corner and die for no reason.
“One, because I refuse to buddy up and ass-kiss—I’m not sorry mother—to anyone, and two, I’ll be damned before I answer calls and do work until one in the morning. I don’t work more than eight hours a day if I don’t have to,” I say.
Work for more than eight hours a day for my accounting firm anyway. My podcast. Well… that’s a different story. A story I can’t talk about to my family. I burned enough bridges leaving Loving Eden. I'm not going to burn bridges with my family no matter how much I want to sometimes. I don’t have the luxury.
“Why don’t you do something with that damn psychology degree. It cost enough,” my dad grumbles.
As if he knows how much it costs when he didn’t pay for it. Not to mention I am doing something with my psychology degree… Just not something they’d approve of.
“Tough market. Can’t really get a decent job anywhere without the right contacts, and I don’t have them,” I mutter with a shrug.
“You would. If you did more than work and go home to watch YouTube and eat all day,” David says.
“Coming from the guy that sits at home and plays video games all day,” I snap back.
“I thought you were one of those proponents that doesn’t see the harm in adults enjoying their childhood hobbies.”
“I am one of them. But if you’re going to throw shots about my hobbies, I’m going to throw shots about yours,” I snap back.
“Res. David. That’s enough,” our mother says firmly.
“He started it,” I point out.
“I didn’t start anything. You’re just sensitive,” my brother mutters.
“And you’re—”
“Res. We don’t insult another woman’s husband in front of her,” my mother snaps.
I glance at my sister-in-law, Abigail. A woman who I hardly know seeing as my brother married her four years ago while I was still mostly on the outs with my family. She looks so young. Waif-looking, with blonde hair and wide blue eyes. Almost childlike in her appearance and mannerisms even though I’m sure she’s at least in her early twenties. Not that much younger than me.
Being reminded Abigail’s there just makes me more irritated with my brother.
“Well, she wouldn’t have to listen to me insult her husband if she hadn’t married him,” I say with a shrug.
“You’re such a bitch. Things were more peaceful when you weren’t talking to the family,” my brother says.
“Don’t talk to your sister like that,” my mother chides, notably not correcting my brother because he said it.
I groan and push back from the table. “Okay. I’m going to my room. I’ll come back down when your son leaves.”
David scoffs as I walk away and says, presumably to my parents, “See. Sensitive.”
I ignore him in favor of stomping to my childhood bedroom. No sooner than I’ve settled on the old full-sized bed and pulled up the schedule of interviews I have set up for my podcast, High Demand, do I hear my mother knock on the door.
I sigh and put my iPad away.
“Come in,” I grumble.
My mother comes in and sits on the bed beside me.
“You okay?” she asks.
“Fine,” I say, despite the fact that she’s not going to believe me .
Sure enough, she doesn’t and says, “Your brother could have been more tactful about the way he said it, but I can’t help but agree with his sentiment.”
“You always agree with his sentiment,” I begin, but my mother raises her hand to interrupt me.
I sigh, tempted to go back to my iPad and ignore her even as she sits next to me. I’m even more tempted when my iPad pings with an email notification.
“Only because sometimes you’re too harsh on him. I don’t know where all this childish anger toward your brother comes from. You’re usually so mature about everything else but lose it with him. You used to worship him, and then all of a sudden…” My mother trails off. “Anyway. You two need to work out your own relationship. I’m here to talk about you. Going to work and being locked up in that house.”
“Mom,” I say with a roll of my eyes.
“All these girls I watched grow up next to you are getting married and having babies, and I want that for you. I want that for our family.”
“I’m twenty-seven, Mom. There’s no rush. I have plenty of time. I’m fine where my life is. I’m not unhappy.”
“It’s not just about that. It’s about you being connected. Having purpose. Community.”
“I do have purpose. I do more than just work. You know that. I coordinate with Loving Eden for One Humanity all the time.” I say with a sigh.
“I notice you didn’t dispute the community thing. ”
“I do have community. I have Lyssa. And Mara,” I add. Never mind that Mara and I haven’t talked in years. The most interaction we have nowadays is liking each other’s posts and an offhand comment or two on Instagram.
“I’m talking about people you can call if you need a ride. People who will cook for you if you’re sick. People that aren’t just me and your father. We won’t always be here, Res, and I want to make sure—”
Mara would, if she didn’t live halfway across the country and have her own kids and husband. And Lyssa… Well, she would if her own life weren’t so dysfunctional.
“Planning on going anywhere any time soon?” I joke instead of admitting that my mother is right. Because this is the last thing I want to talk about with her. Because talking about this will end with her saying I should come back to Loving Eden. That if I come back, I can change things from the inside and make friends while doing it.
“No,” my mother says. “I’m just saying.”
I smile at my mother. As out of touch as she can be sometimes, as much as we don’t understand each other, she means well. Most of the time, it’s not enough. Today? Today, I let it be enough.
“I’m fine, Mom. Besides. I am dating someone. If you want—”
“I don’t want to know anything about it until you’re sure it’s going somewhere,” my mother says, shaking her head.
I roll my eyes and swallow a sigh as she demonstrates her ability to mean well, and it not be enough. Like when a daughter wants to talk to her mother about the guys she’s seeing, even if it’s not serious .
“Watch a movie with me? When your brother leaves?” my mother asks.
I do sigh this time. “Yeah. Sure, Ma.”
My mother presses a wet kiss to my cheek and then laughs when I rub it off before leaving.
I war between allowing my ever simmering frustration and anger at my family overwhelm me and just choosing to put it aside and not bother.
In the end, I don’t have the time or energy necessary to be angry and choose to pick up my iPad and check the email that came in. I sit up when I see that the sender is one Jaxson Devine requesting to do an interview with me for High Demand.
I back out my email, making sure to completely close the app before opening it again to see that the email is still there and the sender is still the same. Sometimes the images and wires get crossed on these things and display the wrong name or email and a hard restart is needed. So I back out again, close the app, restart my iPad, and open my email again.
The email is still there.
I sit up fully this time, go over to my desk, take out my laptop, and hook my iPad to it. Over a series of several tests, I figure out that it’s not a scam and Jaxson Devine is actually emailing me for an interview.
Interview requests are not out of the ordinary. I get them all the time. From people who left high-demand religions, organizations, and cults, escaped them, and even ones, like Jaxson Devine, who are in some position of authority and desire to clear the air and any misconceptions. For the most part, I ignore the latter requests. My platform is for victims and survivors. However, Jaxson Devine reaching out to me is a unique opportunity.
He's the son of Abdiel Devine, the current leader—the Oracle—of the Sovereignty. His mother is one of the many unnamed supposed wives that his father took on after he rose to power, and he’s been groomed from birth to serve the Sovereignty and usher in some new world order like most cults think they will. While Jaxson Devine has no official position in the Sovereignty, he’s definitely a leader of some type. One of their priests, I’ve heard they call their ministers.
There’s shockingly little known to outsiders about the Sovereignty. Of all the cults and high-demand religions that I’ve learned about, they’ve done one hell of a job silencing detractors and keeping people who have left quiet. The only thing public is their mission statement, the answer to some commonly asked questions that more or less line up with more accepted and progressive expressions of religion, and a handful of their leader’s lectures. But anything else about the way they operate is sparse, and the only things I’ve got are the things I’ve been able to deduce or infer based on the coded dog whistles on their website.
The last time I talked about them was months ago in an interview with a survivor from another cult, and I found out Abdiel Devine was doing a college tour in California for some nebulous reason. I didn’t even really talk about them specifically. It was an offhand five-minute tangent. The episode aired a few weeks ago and the audio clip has gone around in cult watcher circles. It must have caught the attention of the Sovereignty.
That’s a little nerve-racking. I know better than most people how dangerous it is to get mixed up with a high-demand religious cult, even if that danger isn’t physical. But this is also a unique opportunity.
If Jaxson Devine is willing to tell me more than the accepted spill… At best, like most cult leaders, he would sound so ridiculous and unbelievable that most of my listeners would instantly see the Sovereignty for the sham it is. At worst he’ll be as charismatic and smooth-talking as many other cult leaders tend to be that someone listening in my audience and beyond might be convinced and converted. Thus, I would do the responsible thing and not post it. It would just be a good reference for when I can actually get someone who’s left to talk to me.
Knowing how these leaders tend to work, it probably won’t be anything worth discussing. It probably won’t be anything worth posting.
But also… it might be worth something , and I’m too curious to delete the email and forget it.
Against my own intuition, I press respond and type, Can we video chat?
I send the email, ignoring the gnawing intuitive feeling in the back of my mind that I’m going to end up regretting this.
Only a few minutes later, the response comes.
Are you available now?