Chapter 33
Mary has been acting strangely all week, and as a result, the whole farm has tilted on its axis.
One morning, breakfast is an hour late. Old Caleb drums his fingers impatiently on the table while Mary, who slept in, casually makes eggs in a nightgown with her hair unbraided.
Another morning, she sleeps straight past breakfast. “I’m tired,” she mumbles, and slaps at my hand when I try to pull her from bed.
The atmosphere is uneasy. Mary’s fuse of patience—usually a mile long for everyone but me—is now tripped up at the smallest indiscretion.
She snaps at the boys for dragging mud into the house, even though they do it every day.
She snaps at Maeve for humming, even though Maeve hums every day.
As for me, she ignores me entirely. She’s barely said a word to me since the day she called me Natalie.
And whenever Old Caleb is inside, his gaze floats between Mary and me.
He watches her short temper, her angry knife-chopping as she prepares potatoes for dinner, and then his gaze falls on me with an anvil-drop thud.
I know what he is thinking. Do something. But what?
We suffer five nights like this. Then one night, after dinner, I’m sitting by the fire with Maeve when I see out of the corner of my eye: Mary, wrapped up in a blanket, walking silently past the kitchen and out the front door.
Abel says, “Where’ya going?”
“Out,” she says. Just like that: out. Like she’s a teenager about to hop into the back seat of someone’s car. She shuts the door behind her. Distantly, beyond the wood and glass, I can hear the porch creak beneath her feet.
“Hmmph!” Noah says.
“Women,” Abel adds, and the two boys shake their heads.
“Go talk with her,” Old Caleb says to me.
I give him an annoyed look. “Why don’t you go talk to her?”
“This is women’s business. Go.”
When I step outside, I find Mary sitting on the stairs, her form shrouded in blankets, her face as quiet and pale as the snowy fields, which look almost blue beneath the moonlight.
I sit down next to her. I brought my coat, but it’s patched and threadbare, and already the cold is settling into my bones. It can’t be warmer than ten degrees tonight. “Tell me,” I say.
“Tell you what?”
Little puffs of breath color the air between us.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then she says quietly, “Has anyone ever lied to you?”
I consider the question, which feels structurally like a thin sheet of ice over a deep body of water. Any movement, and we could both fall through.
I think of my mother, sitting at the edge of the hospital bed when I was twenty years old.
Soon you’ll feel like yourself again. Young.
I was so young then. Young enough to think my mother was telling me the truth.
But she was pretending, wasn’t she? Always pretending.
Though I don’t blame her for it, or for waiting until just the right moment to let me in on the secret.
It’s all some vital game, isn’t it? No—more than a game.
It’s the long, golden string of insincerity that threads together the entire human race: a shared agreement between women to insist back and forth in endless conversation that this thing we spend our whole lives preparing for—this thing we were born for—is anywhere close to what we thought it would be.
And do you know the truth beneath that secret?
The water beneath the ice? It never stops.
You never age out of it. Your mother lies to you, and then you lie to your children, and then your children lie to their children, and then you are an old woman, looking back at your own life, lying to yourself.
A lifetime of drowning, and then you are dead.
“Everyone lies,” I say.
“Why? Why must everyone lie?”
I’m about to reply when I notice the shimmer in the air. Not just breath. Mary’s face is glowing, practically fluorescent with moonlight, her hair levitating in the air around her face, and this is when I realize: He’s here.
A shiver runs through me. Hello, Father.
I feel Him on this porch. I see Him in her, speaking to me. It’s happening right now: the test.
Everything comes together. The walk in the woods, and Mary’s face, strangely blank, like she was experiencing some ecstatic vision—like some holy force had entered her—and that strange moment when she called me Natalie, and how terrified she looked, like she hadn’t been in control of what she said.
The Lord has been visiting me through Mary.
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, but that in 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, and Clementine—” 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.