Chapter 69
Night Zero—Four Years Ago
Patience
Patience hated setting up for Sabbath, but her father had determined that it was her duty, even though she was twenty-four and should have aged out of parent-mandated chores years ago.
She hated being pregnant again when the other three kids were still so little; she hated that Matthew thought her father could literally walk on water, and if for some reason he couldn’t, if he slipped under the water and drowned, that Matthew would happily accept his fate as lead pastor.
Betty was turning eighteen next week, and their father had selected Silas to be Betty’s husband.
Patience snapped off flower stems and put them in vases.
Patience hated Silas. Never mind that he had a drinking problem, never mind that he liked to gamble.
Silas was stupid and more often than not, unkind, and liked to comment on Patience’s breast size when she was pregnant or nursing, which was basically all the time.
In high school, Patience had been part of the chemistry club.
She never told her parents and begged her teacher not to put her name in the yearbook.
But she was good at science, and she liked the rational way that experiments unfolded.
The exact opposite of what her dad preached, of faith.
She found that she could live with both, as if the contradictions between the two made each more interesting.
Her sophomore year, they were tasked with exploding balloons.
Nothing harmful, nothing too large. “I don’t want to lose my job, get on an FBI watch list,” her teacher had joked.
Most of the ingredients for explosives were found right in the kitchen.
Patience was also an exceptional baker, which pleased her mother and seemed to validate her father, as if he’d been right by telling women that their place was in the home, subservient to men.
When it was her turn to blow up her balloon in the science lab, her explosion was so loud and so fierce that the fire department showed up, and the school was evacuated thinking there had been a bomb.
Which gave her two ideas.
She asked her dad if she could start holding bake sales around town and at church, with the donations going to the tithe.
She donated half and stuck the rest in a flour tin in the back of the pantry.
Her mom had delegated nearly all the baking to her by then, and she knew the money was safe. When she had enough, she’d run.
The bake sales were the first idea.
The explosion, the fire, was the second.
When she turned eighteen, however, her dad surprised her with a wedding the night of her birthday.
She knew Matthew from around the church, and though he was charismatic and handsome, he was also ten years older and a fanatical opportunist. Within a month, Patience felt nauseated, and then she peed on a stick, and she was pregnant.
Sixteen months later, she was pregnant again.
She thought of the money in the flour tin, she thought of her growing resentment toward Matthew and her father, who had now roped her into monitoring the behaviors of other women in the church—including Betty, a task she reviled but did all the same, and one day, in a fit of rage, she dumped her personal Bible in the tin and slammed the top shut.
On the Sabbath, when Matthew asked her why she hadn’t brought her Bible, she lied and said she donated it to a homeless woman at the shelter.
Her dad teared up. She wanted to scream.
Three kids later, the flour tin and the plan had all but been forgotten.
And then her dad asked her what she thought of Silas.
For Betty. Levi was already gone, and she knew that he’d prepped Betty for the moment an opportunity to escape presented itself.
Patience couldn’t abandon her kids, not now, not with Matthew, not with her dad.
Maybe one day it would be her chance to get out, but for now, she could keep pretending because pretending meant she could at least do this much for Betty.
The night of the Sabbath, when she was snapping off flower stems, Betty showed up underdressed and unprepared for what her father was planning with Silas. Once they were married, it would be exponentially harder to leave. Patience well knew this. Patience had lived this.
She barked at her little sister, chiding her for her appearance, sending her home to change.
She knew she had one shot, one chance to do this.
So she tucked the flowers into a dry vase and placed a balloon filled with her chemistry formulation between the stems. Matthew had only recently allowed for nail polish, and nail polish remover, Patience knew, was flammable enough to burn the place down.
She carried the balloon out of the kitchen and into the maintenance room, set it down right by the boiler, which was faulty, emitting steam and shooting off sparks every so often.
Earlier that week she’d heard Matthew tell her dad they needed to call a repair guy.
Her dad had told him that he’d try to fix it himself first, his way of saving money, which was absurd because Patience knew her dad was squirreling away fistfuls of cash with shady accounting and likely a lot of illegality on his taxes, not to mention the suspicious carbon monoxide poisoning of the treasurer a few years back.
She dumped nail polish remover all over the floor.
She feigned a terrible case of morning sickness, and since the kids were her responsibility, too, planned to bring the three of them home with her as soon as she walked out the boiler room door.
She hadn’t meant, honestly, to blow up half the building and start a fire that would reduce the entire place to ash, but she hadn’t been devastated when it happened either.
She mourned her mother, who had never stood up to her husband, only briefly. She grieved her dad not at all.
She gave Betty a chance to run, and Levi had trained her well. She did.
A few weeks later, Levi called. She might have been the scientist, but he was always the disbeliever.
So, of course, he would be the one who discovered that their dad wasn’t dead after all.
They agreed that as long as he left them alone, left Betty alone, then they could live with this tenuous tightrope.
It worked for four years. And then her dad, a narcissist who could never ease his grip on his youngest, a girl, who dared defy him, decided that she needed to come back to him.
Levi called again yesterday, last night. She walked out of her home in the woods and got on a red-eye flight. They had a plan.
“I want him to know it was me,” she said to Betty, just like she’d vowed in her Bible years back.
You can never tame a woman into submission, she would say to him if he made it out alive, though she suspected that he had not. This was what happened when you tried.