Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 55

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.

Then her gaze flickers past me to the kitchen window. She whispers, “What is that thing?”

“That’s a car.” Caleb clears his throat, and all three of us turn to look at him. “You’ve seen it before,” he adds. “You were young.”

A memory, fluttering past: me and Caleb, in the early days of the experiment, explaining the game to toddler Mary. That was how we talked about it then. A game, an experiment, just a fun little trial! It was gradual. Sometimes deliberate and sometimes instinctual. Like checkers. Like chess. Cowboys and Indians. Barbie Dreamhouse, but backward. We’re going to pretend it’s the olden days, sweetie pie. The pioneer days! Just play-pretend! Just a summer activity. Just a creative way for the family to bond over traditional values while we hid from the outside world and figured out a plan. Just, just, just. There was a greater plan, I swear. But at some point over the years—I really can’t remember when—the hiding became the plan. The beginning and the end.

But the clothes—were they the beginning or the end? It was the winter I gave birth to Mary. I spent my breastfeeding hours ordering piles and piles of pioneer reenactment outfits on my phone. I got them shipped to the ranch. 100 percent cotton, the labels read. Hand-dyed for lasting use!

Labels. I haven’t thought about those clothing labels in years. They’ve long since been ripped out, and all that clothing has since been hemmed and patched within an inch of its life. Authentic, now. It really does look authentic.

Another memory, alive and twitching in my hand: “It’s fun,” I would say angrily at night, scrubbing furiously at some stupid iron pan while my children whined for a trip to Target, a weekend ride to a rodeo, anything to get out of the house, and Caleb stared wildly into the fire, his eyes alive and dead at the same time. They didn’t yet realize that those days were over for good.

“This is fun,” I would shout at them in the darkness. “Don’t you realize we’re having fun?”

The children left when Clementine turned sixteen. A month earlier, we had finally sold our car, the last piece of modernity we’d been holding on to. Time to live off the land, kiddos!

Clementine must have known what was coming. She took the kids one morning for a walk and they never came back. She knew those woods so well. Better than anyone. It would’ve been easy for her to find her way out.

Suddenly Caleb and I were parents of an only child, a little girl.

That is, of course, until we had more.

For what it is worth: I do not recommend giving birth in the pioneer days.

“The girls,” I say, thinking of Jessa and Junebug. “Are the girls okay?”

“In some way or another,” Clementine says evenly. “The girls aren’t doing well. But they’re alive. And the boys—well. The boys are here.”

I don’t know what to say to that. There are whole universes inside that response, but every firing neuron in my brain is hissing and sparking against the idea of inquiring further. So I say nothing, and Clementine, who is watching me carefully now, lets out a huff of breath and smiles an angry smile. Like she had made a bet with herself seconds earlier and is disappointed to learn she has won.

“Where do you live?” Caleb asks Clementine, and she shrugs and says simply, “Nearby. All of us live nearby.”

And now I am thinking of something my mother said in my early parenting days, back when Clementine was just a little thing: They watch every move you make. It’s true. For decades now, my children have been watching me. They’re the only ones who never stopped.

Clementine turns to look at me. Her attention is almost unbearable.

“Tell me,” she says. “What did you say to Mary? Where did you say we all went?”

Mary is watching me now, a careful frown on her face. Like she is remembering something for the first time in a very long time. Remembering what we said.

Dead. We told her they were dead. Gone to heaven. She was so young. A toddler. Milky mouth, moldable brain. It was easy. She barely understood what we were saying, and soon— thank you, Mother, for the inspiration —we didn’t say they were dead, but simply that they were no longer with us.

They were dead, and then they were gone, and then they were not discussed at all, and soon we moved through each day as if they had never been here to begin with.

Children are amazingly flexible creatures. They can move through the centuries, adjust to new living conditions, transport themselves into new realities with surprising ease. She was so flexible, our little Mary, so capable of adjusting to this new life, where she was not the youngest sibling but the oldest, not the child of a famous woman but the child of a homestead family in the nineteenth century. Good girl, I would say on the days she didn’t cry, or scream, or glance wildly around at the empty house like she was surrounded by ghosts. Look how grown-up you are.

For every detail of her life we snatched away, we added a new one to fill the vacuum. I taught her how to make soap, how to bake biscuits, how to snap at children when they don’t do their jobs. I made up fake recipes for bullshit tonics. I gave her brothers, and a sister, and so much work to do. And Caleb? He told them stories about faraway battles, cowboys and savages, good and evil. “Prepare for battles,” he would say. “Civil war is coming.”

Together, we taught our children how to pretend.

And do you know what? If I had been as flexible as Mary, everything would’ve turned out fine. But I was not flexible, and over those years those years those years those years those years those years—

Pause, Natalie. Take a deep breath. Try again.

Over those years my brain began to whine and smoke from the pressure, until finally it snapped in half like a twig.

There really was no other option.

You believe me, don’t you? That there was no other option?

Doug was on board with the idea, and then he wasn’t. He couldn’t believe we sold the car. Came to visit one day and saw Caleb digging a hole for an outhouse. Said we had lost our fucking minds. But by then, it was too late. The hole we had dug—too big. And so he reversed slowly down the hill and never visited us again.

And my mother—we weren’t speaking much by then. By the time she realized what was happening—she was—and we were—

“It happened slowly,” I say. “The transition. The—believing. It happened so slowly, and then—”

And then?

What then, Natalie?

“And then I found out I was pregnant again, and everything changed, and I realized I had to leave.”

There’s a long silence in the room.

“I couldn’t, I can’t, give birth in this place again,” I add firmly, looking around at everyone. “The last time…” I trail off, suddenly sick.

The last time. The last time with Maeve. Was. Terrible.

“Oh, Mom.” Clementine sighs.

“Are you saying—” Caleb shakes his head. “Are you saying you think you’re pregnant, Natalie?”

“I’m saying I am pregnant,” I say. “And I need to—well, I need to get rid of it.” I pause, letting the full weight of their shock sink in. They must both be so shocked, hearing their mother talk openly about the need for an abortion. How modern of me. See, darling? Look at this old dog with her new trick! “I know it’s awful. But I just—well—I need to get rid of it. And soon. I must be twelve weeks along by now.”

“Mom,” Clementine says, “you’re fifty years old. You’re not pregnant.”

Now it’s my turn to fall silent. Come again?

“It was unbelievable that we could have Maeve,” Caleb mutters softly. “And that was ten years ago.”

Yes. Right. Sorry! So many compartments in my mind, so many mirrors of myself grinning back at me, it’s hard to keep track of—I can’t always find my—

Maeve, sweet thing, is ten years old. Yes. That’s right. That sweet girl, my little shadow, is—how would a modern woman say it? My daughter has learning deficiencies. My daughter is developmentally challenged. My daughter was born blue in the face, not breathing for minutes, and my husband is not a midwife, and I am not a doctor, and so we wasted precious time screaming at one another, a dead child on the floor between us, until eight-year-old Mary thought to breathe into her little sister’s mouth.

“I will not give birth here again,” I say a second time.

“You’re not pregnant, Mother,” Clementine says. “You’re going through menopause.”

There’s another long pause. Then Mary says hesitatingly, “What’s menopause?”

Someday you won’t be able to have children.

That was what my mother said of menopause when I asked her about it as a young woman. At the time, the thought panicked me, made me sick with fear, and so she reassured me that this time of decay was a long way away for me; that I had plenty of time to have plenty of babies. A whole life ahead of you.

Well. Here I am, on the other side of a whole life. When I was a child, and I was forced to imagine a world where an adult woman couldn’t have children, I felt a terrible heaviness in my chest, a crushing sadness. But now that I’m here, I feel very light. Like a weight that settled onto my shoulders as a child has finally, decades later, been lifted.

Welcome to the afterlife.

I drop into a seat at the table. No baby, no pregnancy, never again will I give birth in this world. What is that feeling, bubbling up in my throat?

Laughter. I really want to laugh.

But laughter would be inappropriate, because Clementine is asking her father about the food now. “Do you actually grow any of your own food? Or are you just as bad at farming as you always were?”

He glares at her. “You’ve become hateful,” he says. “A spiteful woman.”

“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.”

“I don’t understand,” Caleb says, but I do, and so I walk over to the car and open the back door. Little Maeve peers up at me. “Mama?” On her other side are the boys, limp in their seats, pale with fear. They’ve spent their whole lives preparing for battle, these boys, they’ve been waiting and wishing and planning for enemy intruders, and now, in a single instant, the battle has been waged and won. The boys have lost before they had a chance to pick up their imaginary swords. They are prisoners to the victor, now—or maybe, I think numbly, they’re prisoners who are suddenly set free.

I shake my head of those thoughts, turn away from the boys and look at Maeve. It feels like a cruel trick that the last child I ever had is the first one where the love came easily. “I love you, Maeve,” I say. My tears fall all over Maeve’s face as I kiss her cheeks and forehead and nose. I grab at Noah next to her, but he pulls away. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” I say to them. “It’s not my fault. Do you hear me? Don’t believe what they tell you. Do you hear me, Maevie? Don’t listen to them.”

Maeve doesn’t reply. She won’t remember this. I know that. There’s too much novelty all around her. When I step back, she’s looking around the inside of the car with a blank expression, like all the emotion has been stunned out of her. Finally, her gaze reaches me, and she seems to realize for the first time that I’m not in the car with her. “Mama, come,” she says. She starts to cry.

“I love you, honey. Do you hear me? I love you so much.”

In the background, I can feel Mary and Clementine watching me, silent.

I shut the door, waving brightly at Maeve. Now Clementine is guiding Mary to the passenger seat of her car and helping her in. Mary’s eyes are wider than I’ve ever seen them. Clementine shuts the passenger door. I watch as my daughter leans forward wordlessly and traces her fingers softly along the radio buttons.

Soon all the children in the back seat are crying. I can hear them through the paneled glass: the boys are calling for their papa, Maeve is screaming for her mama. Mary is sitting in the passenger seat, her face as white as the winter sky.

Suddenly I feel sick. I tell myself Mary’s off to something better; that someday not too far from now, she will run through an outdoor shopping mall, laughing and shrieking with other girls her age. She’ll be a normal girl, with normal problems and a normal life.

This is a lie, of course. Mary will never be normal. All our children will suffer, but it is Mary, I think, who will suffer the most.

And then they are leaving.

In one moment, Clementine is telling me that animal control will be here shortly for the animals, and in the next minute the car is backing down the hill, Clementine looking over her shoulder to steer, Mary staring at nothing, all three younger children sobbing in the back seat. Finally, right as the car is about to drop out of sight, I realize what I’m supposed to be doing. I fix my expression into a smile and lift my hand into the air. I wave at my babies. I shout lovingly, “ Goodbye! ”

And then we are alone.

Caleb is standing next to me in his stupid pioneer husband outfit. Impossibly, he looks as lost as I feel. “The children are gone,” he says. “I can’t believe the children are just—gone.”

I wonder: How many disappearing acts can a single family survive?

I look at my husband, who looks sorrier than I’ve ever seen him, and I think: chicken, egg. Lord, I’m so tired of thinking about chickens and eggs.

Lord. I pause. Where is the Lord? I crane my ear toward the sky and strain to listen.

Nothing. I hear nothing. Strange. Now that I think about it, I can’t even remember what He sounds like.

“I think you were right, Caleb.”

He’s still staring at the bump of the hill where Clementine’s car vanished from sight. The dust is still floating in the air. “Right about what?”

“I think,” I say slowly, “that we should’ve gotten a divorce a very long time ago.”

He turns to look at me.

“I think I hate you,” I say.

“I think,” he says slowly, in a stunned sort of voice, “that I might really hate you too.”

I turn back to look at the house. It really does look, from this angle, like a cardboard cutout. Like I could step forward and knock it over if I wanted to.

“I think we should go,” I say suddenly.

“Go? Go where?”

“Away.” Yes. That is right. I nod decisively. “I need to get away from this ranch before I—well, before I lose my mind again.” I can feel it, the force of Clementine’s arrival, how she magnetized all my thoughts into momentary order—and I can feel it just as powerfully, how the momentary order is already shivering and straining from the effort to hold on.

There will be consequences if I leave. But none so great as the consequences of staying.

“Well?” I say impatiently. “Do you want to come with me or not?”

A long moment passes.

“Yes,” he says. “I think I do.”

I reach for his hand, and together we walk.