Chapter 1 #8
The code on the safe in my father’s church office was 3--7--12--40.
Three for the Holy Trinity, seven for the number of days of creation, twelve for the disciples and the tribes of Israel, forty for the number of days Jesus wandered in the wilderness.
Every couple of months I broke into it and stole twenty dollars from his stack of bills.
I’d use the money for paints, or for romance novels from the used bookstore, or for a ticket to see an R--rated movie.
At seventeen, I accepted that Satan was in me, and I figured if I could placate him with these few acts of sin, maybe he’d leave the rest of me alone.
I had to time my thievery for when the church building was open but my father wasn’t likely to be there.
Just after a service was usually a sure bet, when he was chatting with members of the congregation.
Sometimes I went on the nights that the Ladies’ Bible Study group met.
But this time, I went after Youth Group.
My father usually puttered around the church while we met, but he’d taken Adie home after she got sick.
Except when I gently opened his office door, it wasn’t empty.
My father was leaning against his desk, eyes rolled back in his head. His pants pooled at the ankles. Kneeling in front of him was a woman, hair braided with a white ribbon, her mouth bobbing on his penis.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Heat flooded my face as I thought I had walked in on him and my mother. Except the woman was too small, and her hair was not the rich brown of my mother’s.
My mind short--circuited. This is fornication. This is evil.
I must have made a sound because my father’s eyes flew open. At the same moment, the woman kneeling at his feet turned to look at me, and I realized it wasn’t a woman at all.
It was my thirteen--year--old sister.
Adie wasn’t sick. My father wasn’t bringing her home.
I ran so far and so fast, but still, Satan was able to keep pace. When I finally reached the shore of Beecham Lake, I ripped the white ribbon out of my braid and threw it into the water.
By the time I made my way home, night had fallen. The house was dark and quiet as I padded upstairs, past the closed door where my parents slept. I slipped into Adie’s room. My hand found hers under the covers.
“How long?” I whispered.
“He says I’m his temptation.” Adie had been crying; I could hear it in the words she spoke against my shoulder. “A test from God.”
I pulled back just enough to be able to see the shine of her eyes. “How long?” I repeated.
She told me it had started two years ago, even before her own purity ceremony.
As she said this, she twisted the ring my father had given her around her finger.
He would summon her to his office at first, and have her take off her shirt, and he would just stare at her.
Then it was her underwear. Then he wanted her to touch herself.
Then he touched her. The challenges got progressively darker, all to see if he could withstand Satan.
“Does he?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” she admitted. “But sometimes no.”
That night, I slept in Adie’s room. In the morning, we heard my father moving around downstairs. He was talking to my mother about visiting a parishioner who had broken her hip. I watched him leave the house, get into the car, and drive off.
I held tight to Adie’s hand as we went downstairs to the kitchen.
Adie was in her nightgown. My hair was a rat’s nest. My mother, as always, was at the stove stirring a pot, clean and neat in her starched white dress with an apron over it, a white ribbon woven through her braid.
“Girls,” she said. “Cleanliness is godliness.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
“Daddy’s doing things to Adie that . . . aren’t right,” I said, blushing fiercely. “He’s touching her in places he shouldn’t and making her touch him and you have to stop it.”
My mother didn’t turn, but her shoulders tightened, as if someone had pulled a drawstring inside her. “God has a reason for everything,” she said evenly.
My jaw dropped open. “That’s all you have to say?”
Her face was as white as her dress. “What am I supposed to say, Eloise?”
You’re supposed to say, I will help you.
I grabbed my sister’s elbow. “Come on,” I muttered, dragging her out of the kitchen.
I took one last glance at my mother, who had continued stirring, as if we had never interrupted her.
Her white skirts gleamed, as did the ribbon in her hair.
I used to think of her as an angel, I realized.
And all this time, she was just a ghost.
I was going to have to rescue Adie myself. We would leave, I decided. We’d get as far away from Borden Springs as possible. I could get a job, and I’d enroll Adie in public school. I just needed the money to do it.
I knew that the church would be open for praise team practice that evening. I left Adie at home and went to the church. While they were singing, I hid in the room used for the nursery during Sunday school until I heard my father leave his office. Then I slipped inside.
Moonlight silvered the room, outlining the desk where my father had sinned.
I would never see this place again. Not the Bible on his desk, not the cut--glass bowl of M&M’s, not the jacket hanging on the back of the door.
I moved the painting of Jesus that covered the safe and punched in the numbers.
This time, instead of only taking twenty dollars, I took every last bill.
Beneath the money was a yellowing piece of paper, ink faded like soft denim. God is sovereign over the universe, it said. Satan rules over earth.
I didn’t know why my father kept that locked up. I didn’t know what it meant. But I dropped the scrap of paper as if it were on fire, slammed the safe’s door, and ran home.
When I knocked on Adie’s bedroom door, she didn’t answer. I knew she was still awake, because the light seeped out from beneath her door. Turning the knob, I found her lying on the bed, fast asleep. “Adie,” I said softly. “Wake up.”
I shook her shoulder, but Adie didn’t stir. “Adie?” I sank down on the mattress. She rolled toward me then, and her arm fell across the bed. A familiar brown medicine bottle spilled from her hand. My mother’s pills.
I fumbled with the childproof cap. Childproof. But Adie hadn’t been one of those in a while.
There were no pills inside. Just Adie’s purity ring.
That’s when I started to scream.
Grief was its own kind of calendar. Entire days passed where I couldn’t get out of bed.
Nights, I’d restlessly walk the halls, trying to find the fingerprints Adie left behind: her favorite cereal still in the cabinet, the strands of strawberry--blond hair caught in her brush in the bathroom, mud caked on her rain boots in the closet.
It is always a tragedy when a young person dies, but to lose the daughter of the pastor was a whole different level of anguish.
We were barraged by parishioners bringing hot dishes.
The ladies’ auxiliary sat daily with my mother, who had not spoken a word since the funeral director took Adie’s body away.
My father had locked himself in his office, declining food or company while he read the Bible and invoked God’s grace. I didn’t know if he was praying for Adie or for himself.
The night before Adie’s funeral, I slipped out of my own room and slept in hers.
The ladies’ auxiliary had stripped the bed and put on clean sheets and a new quilt, as if my sister was just at summer camp and coming home soon.
I tried to feel for the dips in the mattress where her body had been.
I closed my eyes, wishing I could hear her, but there was only the creak of the bones of an old house.
Then, as if someone were whispering in my ear, there was another voice. A different voice. Satan rules over earth, it said. I came for her and I will come for you.
I gasped at the same moment that Adie’s bedroom door cracked open. My father stood there in shock. In the dark, I realized, he couldn’t make out my features. He thought I was my sister.
I thought he was the Devil.
Just like that, I burst into tears. My father’s arms banded around me. “Adie’s with Jesus now,” he vowed, although I knew that dying by suicide was a sin. “And God will help us find the strength to get through this . . . together.”
I had lost too much, and I was too scared to keep fighting.
I let myself sag into his embrace, remembering when he had been the most godly man in the world to me, when he hid butterscotch candies in his pockets for me to find.
We did not discuss what I had seen in his office that day.
Maybe if we never did, I could go back to convincing myself that when bad things happened, there was a divine reason.
He gentled me, stroking my hair. I felt his shirt, damp beneath my cheek, his breath at my temple.
His hand on my breast.
I froze, and immediately he backed away. “I know you’re a good girl, Eloise,” my father said. “Get some rest.”
When he closed Adie’s door, I stared at the ceiling, heart thundering. I could still feel his fingers like a brand.
I wondered if I had imagined it.
I decided I didn’t want to wait around to see if I was wrong.
At first, I think the voice is just me, an inner narration.
Then I think it could be my conscience.
But eventually I realize who it is, and why I was so desperate to believe it was anyone but that.
(God is sovereign over the universe. Satan rules over earth.)
(I came for her and I will come for you.)
I am sitting in our diner, the Hudson View, with Molly asleep in the stroller.
Maeve has brought me a glass of orange juice while I wait for Adam, who’s once again flying in from California on a red--eye.
The NY1 weatherman on the television says we are finally going to get a break from this incessant heat.