Tenderness

Chapter 1

Shay was no longer in the cult, but still, it made her wedding guests nervous that she was bringing them to an island. A place that would be difficult to escape from. They did not know it wasn’t her idea.

The island was a thumbprint off the coast of Virginia, the population less than a thousand.

It had a name no one had ever heard of: not Nantucket or Sanibel, but Wakefield.

Most of the guests had to take a plane to a plane to a ferry.

Several got sick on the boat, attempting to be discreet as they vomited their flight’s vodka and orange juice into the lapis current.

Shay’s family came from Chicago, their bodies unfamiliar with the Atlantic’s endless heave, accustomed to the gentler surf of Lake Michigan.

Most of them had never flown before. Once they arrived, golf carts shuttled them from the dock to the hotel.

No cars were allowed on the island, the roads too narrow.

On the route, local children skirted the edges of the gravel, damp beach towels draped over their tanned shoulders.

Old men passed the guests on rickety bicycles, grocery bags knotted to their handlebars.

When they had time, the guests were told, they should look for arrowheads in the sand.

There were so many scattered around the island that just a gust of wind would unearth dozens.

“Look closely,” the ferry captain had said. “Train your eyes to sharpness.”

The island was beautiful, lush with flowering crepe myrtle, rimmed by pale sand, but the guests sensed a feral undercurrent.

The wealthy guests, on the groom Andrew’s side, felt it instantly.

They noted the cats without collars stalking through fields of high grass.

How the hair of the women weeding in their front yards was flat with home dye.

The squat wooden houses could have been quaint if it weren’t for the gardens littered with ceramic statues of deer and fake wells.

Metallic gazing balls rested in birdbaths, reflecting it all back and magnifying the cheap treasures. The grain of poverty.

But where the wedding would be, they’d see none of this.

The reception would take place on the back lawn of the summer home of Andrew’s family—one of the only structures on the island taller than two stories.

Haven House. A residence large enough to name.

They’d dance for the first time as a married couple in a tent pitched near the coastline, waves of grass dropping off to a cliff face, so at night all their guests would see was dark water and sky.

As they were ferried to the hotel, calling out to cousins and nephews in neighboring golf carts, lapsing into the layered language of family, it was impossible not to talk about Shay.

Everyone knew the story, though Andrew’s relatives were more reluctant to speak of it, to even mention the cult’s name—Synanon—craning their necks to see if any members of her family were close enough to overhear their speculations.

If she could really be done with it all.

If Andrew wasn’t making a huge mistake. It had only been four months since she left.

Shay’s family expressed disbelief that someone from their unremarkable Midwestern family could be entangled in such a thing.

Some of the younger cousins admitted to finding it a bit glamorous.

The uncles murmured that if it were to happen to anyone, it would be Bridget’s family.

The aunts just hoped Shay had left before they cut off all her hair.

That was what everyone remembered from the papers: the cult women with their shorn heads, buzzed down to milky skulls.

Like the men, the women all wore overalls, shapeless shrouds of dark denim.

No one knew why, exactly; some said it made them look like infants, others like laborers.

It was 1976, and everyone had become a stranger.

The article photographed a room full of the women, heads thorny with stubble, smiling wildly off to the side at someone not in the frame.

Poised for movement. Shoulders hunched forward, chins lifted, as if they were a pack of hounds pulled back by the collar, about to sniff out a fox.

And Shay had such beautiful hair. A true auburn, shimmers of rose gold, the thick sheet of it hanging heavy from her crown.

The girl cousins said she must dye it now, as no one’s hair kept that richness of color into adulthood.

One said she had noticed the gray seep of roots two Christmases ago, even though Shay was only twenty-five.

But regardless of whether the color was natural, her family all imagined that flame of hair beneath a chiffon veil, and they feared finding something else: someone they could not recognize.

They didn’t want to be reminded of those women in the newspaper, smiling so severely you could see slivers of gum.