Chapter 27
In Yesteryear, time passes in a slur of good days and bad days.
On good days, I wake up feeling rested. Determined.
Optimistic. Confident I can win over the world.
And so I move through the hours as the best possible version of myself, the most obedient wife, the most loving mother.
When Maeve appears in my doorway, I’m already wide awake and smiling, arms outstretched.
Good morning, darling. Together, we pick out my outfit for the day (The same gray, stained, catastrophe of a dress as yesterday?
Fabulous!), and then I limp outside to retrieve the stupid fucking eggs from the stupid fucking chickens.
At this point, I usually need to pause to have a quick, hard sob, before I wipe the tears off my face and say, “Hello, ladies!”
Then I help make breakfast. I crack the eggs into the frying pan and sit by the fire, nudging the pan around the coals so they cook evenly.
When I bring the pan to the table and set it down proudly, showcasing my perfectly scrambled eggs, no one is impressed.
No one even says thank you. But I don’t mind!
Of course I don’t mind! A good wife never minds!
Instead, I think, with the blunt cerebral force of a spaceship hurtling through the atmosphere, How lucky am I? This life! Such a blessing.
On good days, I amaze myself at my own bravery.
I take on each new chore and assignment with the obedient pluck of a picture-book pioneer woman.
Ironing and sewing and mopping and wood tending and udder cleaning and potato peeling, la di da, what a life!
I ignore the fact that our meals are tasteless and beige and usually consist of two or fewer food groups.
I ignore about half the thoughts that pop into my head.
Instead, I focus on being a tender mother and a cheerful wife.
I never let them see me cry, especially not Maeve, whom I’ve nicknamed my little shadow, a metaphor that works on the visual level but falls flat on the auditory level.
Shadows are quiet. Shadows trail behind you and never remind you that they’re there.
Maeve, on the other hand, never stops talking.
She always has some new observation to share, some new reason to tug on my dress and say, “Mama? Mama,” with genuine insistence.
Do you see that cloud, Mama?
You missed a spot on that shirt, Mama.
Mama? Are you hungry, Mama? Want a snack?
On good days, Maeve’s sweet little voice is a comfort.
A soundtrack to my cheer. Together we say hello to all of it, the clouds and the sky and the fields and the trees, Old Caleb and the boys and Mary, the cow and the chickens and the horse and the muck and the grime and the rain and the soot and the shit.
On bad days, I don’t wake up so much as I lie there, staring wordlessly up at the ceiling, while night bleeds away into morning.
On bad days, hope is a four-letter word that floats limply in my thoughts, and life on this ranch feels less like a life and more like a nightmare, a contrived stage performance, a scene that never ends.
On bad days, my thoughts swirl in eddies of relentless panic:
I have to leave.
I cannot leave.
I think he might kill me.
I think I might kill him.
I know someone is watching.
I know no one is watching.
I’m worried I’ll die here.
I cannot die here.
I think I would rather be dead.
And then I get up anyway. I drag myself out of bed and limp self-pityingly through those swirling thoughts and into the horror of another day. I grin fiercely at the children, I give a deep curtsy to Old Caleb, and then my face melts into a frigid glare as soon as they’ve gone past.
A single bad day feels like nine good days packed into one.
Time moves so slowly that I often worry the clock in this world might break altogether, leaving me frozen in a single sepia-toned moment.
On bad days, I wake up in a panic—I cannot stay here—and so to calm myself down, I tell myself that today must be the last day; today must be the day some celebrity runs up the driveway, interrupting me in the middle of one of my terrible chores, laughing hysterically at my anguish, a man with a massive video camera on his shoulder recording the whole thing.
Tomorrow, I will return to a house that smells of lemon-scented cleaning supplies.
Tomorrow, I will wake up to a round pregnant belly and the sound of the nannies making breakfast. Tomorrow, I will not have to shit in a rickety old shed outside.
And then the day passes in the same dreary rotation as the day before—chicken coop; hello, ladies; breakfast boule baked to the opposite of perfection; chores; chores; chores; hemming; ironing; sweeping; dinner prep; dinner; stare exhaustedly into the fire until I’m about to fall asleep on my chair—and then the day is over and I walk slowly back to my bedroom, stunned with exhaustion, my clothing pounds heavier from all the sweat and dirt, and I get into bed before I remember, for the millionth time: It didn’t happen today. Nothing changed.
Language fails to describe how this feels. Depression, the very concept of it, falls flat in the face of this experience. The best word I can come up with is purgatory, and even that feels a bit too tame.
On good nights, Mary brings me tonic to help me sleep. On bad nights, she barely even looks at me, and the darkness of the night, the darkness of this life, threatens to swallow me whole.
Which brings me to the laundry.
Oh, the laundry.
The laundry!
Even on a good day, the laundry threatens to drown me.
If a person had told me, before I ended up here, that the simple act of washing clothes could take you hours, that it could cause your fingers to crack and bleed from the cold, I would’ve laughed and said they must be doing something wrong.
I would’ve said that I would find a way to do it in half the time, and do you know what? I would’ve been fucking wrong.
Every few days, good or bad, rain or shine or frigid goddamn cold in the early afternoon, Mary positions me outside in front of three large aluminum tins of water.
She hands me a broom, one of her homemade bars of soap, and a pile of laundry large enough to defy the senses.
The soap is made with lye; my fingers begin to sizzle within minutes of use.
First, I drop the laundry into the first tin, and then I scrub, scrub, scrub—sizzle, sizzle, sizzle—and then I use the broom to lift the hulking pile of soaked clothes into the next tin to wash the soap off.
If I didn’t hate the clothing here enough before, I hate it doubly now.
And so I have to sit all afternoon long and scrub, scrub, scrub, until my fingers become so burned and numb that they lose the ability to grip the washboard tightly, or until the clothes are clean.
I have yet to finish the chore due to the latter reason; so far, it’s always been the former.
I am waging a daily battle against the inherent dirtiness of this farm, and I am losing.
The worst part (besides the bleeding fingers and the freezing water and the screaming pain in my lower back and the blinding fury I feel within fifteen minutes of getting started) is the location.
By which I mean: the spot by the front porch where I do the laundry allows me a perfect view of Caleb and the boys whenever they’re working in the nearby fields, which means that I get to watch those fuckers in real time as they grow dirtier and dirtier throughout the day.
I sit there and watch—with an outrage that froths and bubbles in all the ways that my sourdough starter now refuses to—as the boys wrestle one another to the ground, rolling around gleefully in the mud until their father picks them up by the scruffs of their collars and sets them back on their feet.
The long dresses I wear are heavy and thick.
Poorly sewn and covered in stains. They make me clumsy; I trip and swear each time I step outside.
I stub the toe on my bad foot and scream like I’ve been shot.
I find myself caked in dirt by midday. The only remotely nice part of the day is evening time, when dinner is over and I get to sit by the fire with Mary and Maeve.
I’m still required to be doing work, to be clear—but stitching up rips in clothing is a walk in the park compared to plunging my fingers into the frigid cold.
While they talk, I focus on the stitching in my lap.
The topics they cover are sweetly inane.
Maeve will ask Mary about her dreams, for example, and Mary will very obviously fabricate the kind of dream scenario that a child would enjoy.
I fell into an ocean of pancakes and then syrup fell like rain.
When they reach the bounds of their own impossibly limited imaginations, they talk about chores and weather and barnyard animals.
I can feel myself getting stupider by the day.
Regardless, I stay silent. I sit in my chair and focus on my stitching and try to take solace in the warmth of the fire. I think, but don’t say, This life is an exercise in insanity.
I’m being watched, I remind myself, on good days and bad days, again and again.
Like a mantra: someone, somewhere, has to be watching me right now.
They have to be. There’s no other option I can accept.
And whoever’s watching me? I want them to see how helpless I am.
How beautiful I can be, even in the ugliest-possible situation.
It’s always the helpless and beautiful ones who are kidnapped, sure—but it’s also the helpless and beautiful ones who are saved.