Yesteryear #3
“I take it that means no,” she says breezily. “It’s interesting—I knew the boys had some creepy little cabin out here, I knew they still saw you sometimes, but I didn’t know they were keeping you all alive.”
Mary speaks before Caleb can. She raises a hand. Her expression has such emotional velocity to it that she looks suddenly like a mirror of Clementine. “Are you saying that the neighbors are my brothers?”
Do you think you have a mental illness, Natalie?
What about your husband?
What about your father-in-law, and your sons, who helped you manage this fantasy for over a decade?
What about your followers, the ones who thought your life was like this from the jump?
The neighbors are our sons. Samuel, Stetson. They are the ones who have been, for years now, supplying us with vegetables and fruits and big frozen hunks of grocery store butcher’s meat when the traps come up empty and the fish don’t bite.
This is the part I have never known, not even in the farthest recesses of my flickering lightbulb mind.
I never knew. It’s a delight to be able to say that honestly.
Can you hear me, your honor? I really didn’t know!
I suppose a normal person would have wondered how their incompetent husband could have managed to provide food, year after year, but do you know what?
I didn’t wonder once. I have become—hear me when I say this—a good motherfucking Christian woman.
I do not, anymore, ask questions of my husband that he does not want to hear, and my husband—oh yes, a very good Christian man—does not tell me things I do not need to know.
Every few days, for the better part of ten years, my husband has left the house and wandered out into the fields, and I have watched him go.
I have said to myself, He’s going to work the fields, when what he really has been doing during that time is walking out, out, out into the woods, until he reaches the small cabin a full mile away and steps inside, dusting off his shoes to sit on the couch and watch a football game.
Then he has accepted a crate of dirt-smeared grocery store vegetables and carried them home to us. All in a day’s hard work.
No wonder Abel was grinning so hard when he came home that first day. What a delicious secret for a young boy to have.
Since she arrived here, Clementine’s face has been a carefully constructed mask of disinterest. Now she looks at me like I’m the most pitiful thing in the world. “Did you honestly never suspect?”
I know what she’s thinking: how blind and stupid her mother is.
How crazy. My daughter is so modern, so she’s probably trying to think of the correct diagnosis for me.
That’s what liberal women do in the face of what they can’t understand.
Bipolar, maybe. Schizophrenia. Multiple personality disorder!
Bitch, I think. Spoiled little brat.
“I don’t know how to answer that!” I say cheerily. I am smiling like a game show host.
She looks at Caleb. “Why did you go along with it?”
“I didn’t want to leave your mother and the children alone out here,” he says passionately. “I didn’t have a choice, Clemmie. You have to believe me.”
I roll my eyes. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that this is a lie.
Your father went along with it because it was a perfectly fine deal for him.
Better than fine. Ideal. Because it allowed him to escape from the pressure and criticism and disappointment that has followed him his whole lousy life.
Because he became crazy, a doomsday prepper loon of a conspiracy theorist, and because he always dreamed of a world where he could do absolutely nothing and have no one say boo, and I, the ever-loving wife, offered this to him on an increasingly large silver platter until finally we reached the grand finale.
Because Shannon, it turned out, was completely right: he had so little to give up, and so very much to gain.
And if I really think about it, he’s always been a stupid fucking asshole to begin with.
Caleb is about to continue, he looks ready to give a stump speech, but then Clementine holds up a hand. “I want to talk to Mom,” she says. “Alone.”
This might be, of everything, the thing she has said that shocks me the most.
Mary locks herself away with Maeve and the boys in the bedroom, and Caleb skulks outside, glancing inside at the windows every few moments while I make lunch.
Clementine watches me from the table. She doesn’t seem to be in any rush.
With trembling hands, I slice the loaf of bread, then spread butter across the sides.
I set the plate of bread down on the table.
Clementine looks at it. I know what she’s thinking: it’s a far cry from the elaborate meals I used to make, which always turned out ready just after she’d gone to sleep.
She takes a bite of my buttered bread. Chews. “Jesus,” she says. “This is terrible.”
Some of your children have, as adults, become passionate activists against child exploitation on social media. How does that make you feel?
“Mother,” Clementine says, when she’s finished eating, “do you remember Shannon?”
I smile. “Of course I do.”
Bitch fucking homewrecker cunt.
“She and I have … kept in touch, let’s say, over the years. When I told her I was going to try to see you, do you know what she said?”
I don’t reply. At the mention of Shannon, I am suddenly so furious I’m worried I might pass out.
“She told me to go easy on you. She said it would be hard for you, seeing me. Seeing how I’ve moved forward.”
I nod, but I’m not quite listening. I’m stuck on Shannon—who’s in her late thirties now. Amazing. For the first time in almost twenty years, I realize something strange: the world didn’t stop when we left it. Clementine didn’t die. She grew up. And Shannon—
And the world—
I shake my head. Clementine and Shannon and the world and Clementine and Shannon—
“Civil war?”
Clementine doesn’t answer. She just looks at me, like she’s deciding how to respond. Finally she leans forward on her elbows and says seriously, in a tone that is not unkind, “Do you know, Mother, what the hardest part of leaving you was?”
I say nothing.
“It wasn’t walking through the woods with the kids, or waiting for a car to stop.
It wasn’t moving in with Grandma, all five of us in a single bedroom.
It was months after I’d gotten to the other side, when I realized that every single thing you told me about the world was a lie.
” Her hands are shaking. She’s staring at her own fingers as she says, “Everything was so much … better than I thought it would be. The people were nicer. The cities were cleaner. I was right: it was better living with Grandma and Abigail than it was with you. And when they took us to see the ocean—” She stops, her breath suddenly shaky.
She inhales deeply, then exhales. Speaks again.
“I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get why my family never wanted to be a part of it.
” Her eyes meet mine. “Why did you never want to be a part of it?”
WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR YOU TO BE KIND?
“Forward,” I say. “Forward?”
And just like that, her fury gives way to sadness. “Time only moves in one direction, Mom.”
Then Caleb throws open the door, startling both of us. “That’s enough girl time,” he announces. He’s agitated now. He’s probably been fuming outside, working himself into a froth imagining what we were talking about inside the house, without him. Welcome to the Ladysphere: Where the Women Go!
He points a finger at Clementine. “I think that it’s time for you to leave.”
Clementine looks perfectly peaceful now. “I agree,” she says. She stands up. “Where are the kids?”
Caleb and I speak at once. “The kids?”
“Oh, yes. Did I forget to mention that? Silly me. I didn’t come here for lunch. I came here for the kids.” She pulls a folded-up paper out of her jacket pocket. “I have a warrant, if you’d like to see.”
She hands it to Caleb. He doesn’t read it, just shakes it and says, “What is this?”
“Something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time, but couldn’t until Doug ran out of money and Stetson called the officers and agreed with everything I’ve been saying for years.” Clementine looks at me. “So thank you, Mother, for reminding my brother how crazy you truly are.”
I open my mouth but nothing comes out. Think, Natalie, think. The kids are leaving. The kids—leaving. Which means—
No fucking way. I will not stay at this ranch alone with my husband.
“Well,” I say lightly, “a warrant is a warrant. No fighting that. I’ll just go pack some of my things and then we can—”
“Oh no, Mother. You’re not coming with us.”
My smile falters.
“Why?”
She shrugs. Her eyes are red, but no tears fall. “Because I said so.”
“You cannot leave me here,” I say quickly. “Clementine. Clementine. Listen. You cannot leave me here, alone. You cannot leave me here with him.”
She cocks her head, and I see an ounce of sympathy in her gaze. “You’re the one who built this place, Mom. You don’t need anyone’s help to leave it.”
It happens so quickly that it feels like I’m skipping along the surface of my own life.
Clementine, down the hall, knocking on a bedroom door, telling the children to come out.
Introducing herself softly to Maeve and Abel and Noah, and then guiding them toward the car.
In minutes, they’re inside, buckling their seat belts, too stunned and terrified to fight.
Caleb and I stand on the sidelines, looking equally helpless.
It’s like the force of Clementine’s presence alone has short-circuited the whole family.
“You should say goodbye to your children now,” Clementine says to Caleb and me, when they’re all in the car. “You probably won’t see them again for a very long time. Maybe not ever.”