Yesteryear
This is the last day of the life I imagined for myself.
This is a day I imagined for myself.
This is a day I imagined.
This is a day.
Imagine.
This is a day I—
“Clementine,” I say.
My grown daughter doesn’t smile at the sound of her name.
Online Natalie, Offline Natalie.
Good days, bad days.
Dirty, clean.
Lost, found.
Hello, ladies!
Clementine’s hair is the shortest I’ve seen since she was two years old.
It’s cut into a severe little bob. A tattoo, some sort of symbol, is inked into the soft of her wrist. She’s my height, my weight.
She stands the same way I stand: straight and still, like a blade of grass.
She’s wearing an expensive-looking winter puffer coat, dark blue jeans, and waterproof boots.
At the sight of so much modern clothing, my heart gives a double-panged squeeze.
Then my eyes travel to my daughter’s face, and the breath leaves my body.
This is my daughter, the child who made me a mother. A fully grown woman. No ring on her wedding finger. She’s never given birth. I can’t explain how I know that. I just do. A mother always knows.
I turn to my husband. “Well,” he says. “What a wonderful surprise.”
Clementine cocks her head, gives her father a funny expression, one that tells me they haven’t been colluding behind my back. He didn’t ask her to come here. He’s as surprised to see her as I am. Good.
“When you live without a telephone or internet, then everything must be a surprise,” she replies evenly.
There’s a noise by the porch. All three of us turn to the house. Mary is looking at us through the window. She sees us and disappears quickly out of frame.
I turn back to face Clementine, who’s now staring at the house with a nakedly emotional face. Her first sign of distress.
Run, Natalie. Take your chance. Push her to the ground and take the keys and get into the car and go.
Instead, I behave courteously. “Do you want to come inside?”
It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Heller Mills. I’m Lucy, one of the producers assigned with preparing you for the interview tomorrow. Before we get started, though: Are you comfortable? Can we get you anything? Coffee? Water? Kombucha?
And while I have you—this might be rude, please tell me if it’s rude, but I just need to know: Is it nice, having so much access to choice after so many years of living so sparsely? Or are you overwhelmed?
“So this is how you live,” Clementine says.
She’s standing in the doorframe. She leans forward to get a good look around the kitchen, but her feet stay planted on the threshold.
Like Shannon all those years ago, who seemed so obviously afraid to take a single step farther into her bedroom, lest she get sucked into the swirling vortex of this ranch. Good instincts, these women.
I stand by the kitchen counter, seeing the world through my daughter’s eyes.
This shabby little shithole. The fire in the corner; Maeve’s sock puppets on the kitchen table.
The cracks in the ceiling, little slivers of bright blue sky.
I note, in relief, that it’s not so cold today; the house feels warmer than usual.
I hope she doesn’t have to pee. I’d hate to have to show her the outhouse.
Clementine shivers. She pulls her zipper up to her chin. She shakes her head in sadness, or maybe disbelief. Then she looks at me, and her expression twists with anger. “My God, Mother, do you seriously still smile all the time? For what? For whom?”
All I can do is—well.
You know.
Producer Shannon. Nanny Louise. A good wife doesn’t speak to her husband that way.
Weekly Sunday school, warm pool water. Young Caleb, Old Caleb, Smart Caleb, Stupid Caleb (one fish, two fish, red fish, blue!).
A pantsuit, ordered online, for a court hearing I would never attend.
Do you swear to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
Baby-blue sneakers, a senatorial grin. What’s an ocean?
American-flag lipstick. Holy rodeo lights.
Shannon sued us, Shannon is suing us, Shannon will sue us.
A million voices in collective reply: Apologize.
I believe you’ve already been prepped on the talking points of this interview, so I’ll just run through a quick overview of what we plan to cover tomorrow.
What we’re really curious about is what happened after your former producer accused you of assault.
Your social presence really changed after that.
It became increasingly … intense, I guess you could say, in terms of your homesteading lifestyle.
And then when you chose to delete your account so abruptly …
well, let’s just say your followers have a lot of questions!
We’ll spend some time today unpacking that time period, and then after that we can talk about your father-in-law’s failed presidential campaign, and then—well, you can drive that part of the conversation. How does that sound?
“Clementine,” Caleb says, “why are you here?”
Ah, I think distantly. Yes. Good question, idiot!
“Why are you here, Dad?” Clementine says. “Have you ever even asked yourself that? Why you’re still here, after all this time?”
“We were trying to be good Christians. We really were. Trying. Good Christians.” It’s only here when I realize I’m speaking, and so I forge onward, stumbling and stuttering like a radio channel moving in and out of frequency.
Something about being a good wife, a good mother.
Something about God. Something about love.
Clementine watches me with an expression like flat soda as I trail off into silence, and then she turns to her father. “Is she always like this now?”
He pauses, then says, in the kind of diplomatic tone that would really make his father proud, “There are good days and bad days.”
Good days, bad days, dirty, clean—
Welcome, y’all!
On good days I am calm. I believe that if I do a good enough job, if I prove to the world that I really am living out here on the land as an honest woman, a good Christian, a traditional wife, then the Angry Women will eventually forgive me, and the momentum will swing back in my favor, and the state of Idaho will drop all its pending charges against me, the ones the lawyers warned would come before Doug paid them all off: sexual assault, aggravated assault, improper working conditions, wire fraud, animal abuse, child abuse.
Do you see? If I finally, actually and truly, became the thing I claimed so long to be, then no one could call me a liar anymore. A liar anymore. A liar anymore. A liar anymore. A liar anym—
And then there are the bad days. You don’t need to know about those, Clementine.
You don’t need to know about the panic attacks and the conspiracy theories, the tests from the Lord, the producers in the trees, the pebbles, the microphones, the mornings I wake up and feel so spun around that I think I’ve been kidnapped.
“We’re so happy to have you!” I blurt out.
Clementine’s face twitches, and my heart sinks. It was the wrong thing to say. Bad Natalie. My Online Natalie sensors fizzle and spark.
“She takes pills sometimes,” Caleb says. “To calm down.”
“Pills,” I say. “Pills?”
“We crush them into a tonic,” he tells Clementine. “They help, but we’re always running out of them. Samuel gets them when he can, but with all the external scrutiny, we have to ration them.”
“So she’s constantly moving in and out of a pharmaceutical haze,” Clementine says. “Perfect. That’s just perfect.”
“Clementine,” Caleb says again. “Why are you here?”
“Stetson called,” she says. “He said that Mom stumbled into his house, rambling about needing a doctor, then ran off just as quickly. He was really freaked out.”
“No, no, no,” I say. “It was nothing like that. It was—well, it was obviously—” I pause. “Did you say Stetson?”
There is a name I haven’t allowed myself to say out loud in a very, very long time.
But Clementine is looking past me now. I turn to see Mary, standing by the door of her bedroom, staring at Clementine like she’s just caught a glimpse of the afterlife.
So tell me if I understand this correctly: Your father-in-law resolved Shannon’s lawsuit out of court and then paid the media to stop covering the story.
Any person who spoke about you on social media in any speculatory fashion received a cease-and-desist order from his lawyers.
He strong-armed local law enforcement to drop the case they were building against you, and then you, Natalie, began again.
You ripped out the hardwood floors, renovated the walls and ceiling, and removed all signs of modernity from your barn and farming areas.
You decided to live like the olden days—for what, though?
To prove a point? To protect yourself from your legal troubles?
You’re going to need to help us make sense of this, Natalie. You’re going to need to help us understand.
The fact that Mary and Clementine are now standing next to each other is too much for me.
For the first time in months, maybe ever, I see Mary with a critical eye: she’s short for her age, undernourished, her complexion grubby and sallow.
Her teeth are yellow and crooked. Even the blank look of terror on her face feels somehow antiquated; she looks like a Victorian woman who has stumbled upon a ghost. By contrast, Clementine looks impossibly modern.
Her expression is so bright and penetrating, her clothes so clean and colorful, that I suddenly feel like I’m staring into the sun.
What I am thinking, what I am trying not to think: They look so much alike.
“I’m Clementine,” she says to Mary. “I’m your sister.”
I look at Mary, who looks at Clementine. For a split second, two compartments in my mind become one.
My sweet little sea creature.
“Mary,” I say.
My sixth child, my fourth daughter, looks at me the same way she always has: like I’m her mother. Like she’s disappointed in this fact.