It did sound nice. It was also not at all what I had planned for the day.
I’d spent the previous evening, after my return from my sister’s house, doing deeper internet searches on GenFem. There wasn’t much to be found. I started with their website, searching for clues, but the pages offered no insights about what I’d seen at that Ojai compound. None of the photos featured women with shaved heads or identical dresses, just ones that looked like people you might run into in the Whole Foods produce aisle. The group’s website copy didn’t help, either: It could have been taken from a corporate marketing newsletter, full of anodyne promises about building internal strength strategies and reenacting critical moments in order to transcend past choices and building an international matriarchal sisterhood.
I read it over and over, trying to figure out how this generic pabulum had convinced my sister to walk out of her life. Then I plugged GenFem and cult into Google, just to see what came up.
It spit out a few results, most of them posts from a subreddit titled “r/cults.” I clicked on a post by a woman who identified herself only as “a former member.”
I’m not putting my name here bc GenFem is litigious AF and I don’t want to end up being sued but I spent $67,000 over the course of a year on “seminars” and one-on-one sessions that were supposed to launch me up some ladder to enlightenment & success and instead all I ended up was broke. Dr. Cindy just kind of…gets into your head. And not in a good way. The women do whatever she tells them to do out of fear of pissing her off and getting a Sufferance. Like, she thought my boyfriend was holding me back and when I told her that I didn’t want to dump him, she told me that I was just insecure because I was overweight and didn’t have any self-confidence. And maybe she was a little bit right but it all felt so intimidating. My punishment was losing 20 pounds so fast that my hair started falling out. Oh, and she encouraged me to do all kinds of vengeance shit to him that was borderline illegal, too. All in the name of some kind of perverse female power. STAY AWAY.
I found a few other mentions of the group online, primarily on self-help bulletin boards where members attested to positive life changes that they attributed to their membership in GenFem—I’m so much happier and more confident! I was bankrupt and now I’m a millionaire! A Yelp page for the Canadian center had a few one-star reviews, mostly from people who complained the program didn’t produce the miracles they’d expected, especially considering the cost. But these had been drowned out by a deluge of five-star reviews, all suspiciously similar.
A little further digging and I learned that Dr. Cindy Medina had previously owned a therapy practice in Connecticut, but had abruptly shut it down a decade back. A local Connecticut court website listed a lawsuit that had been filed against her by three former clients, but there were no details. GenFem had sprung up a few years later, thousands of miles away on the opposite coast. Dr. Medina did have a degree in psychiatry, and a PhD in psychology, from colleges I’d heard of; but she also had certification in hypnotherapy and “neurolinguistic programming,” which Wikipedia categorized as a pseudoscience.
After that, the well ran dry. GenFem had managed to exist under the radar, as far as the internet was concerned.
I wondered if I should enlist Caleb’s help—he’d been a reporter once, maybe he knew more about detective work than I did. And then I wondered if I was just trying to come up with an excuse to call him because I liked him. And since I could already count all the ways that might spin out badly and lead to further disappointment, I froze up entirely. Instead, our last correspondence had been a shrug emoji, which I’d sent as a cryptic response to a text he’d sent: How’s it going? Any news from Ojai?
Even sober, I was the queen of self-sabotage.
Anyway—this was what I had to work with: a missing binder, a bizarre-seeming compound in Ojai, an eye-popping list of expenses, and a sister who wouldn’t return my texts. It didn’t add up to anything concrete. It didn’t give me anywhere to start looking for answers.
Except for those three addresses.
I pulled the list out from the pile of folders I’d stolen and studied them. Perhaps the list was a clue to understanding my sister’s situation. Then again, it could also be an irrelevant memo that was intended for the trash: an aborted Christmas card list, the addresses of former clients, people she’d met in an internet forum. Desperation and paranoia often manifest patterns where there are none: We think we see meaning in scraps. But I had nothing else to go on, and two of the addresses were a reasonable drive from Santa Barbara. Why not go check them out, at the very least?
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was something.
I’d stayed up past midnight, reading up on cults and mind control, and then woken up early with Charlotte; so now I downed a third cup of coffee as I shoved Puffs and sippy cups into the diaper bag. I had no intention of telling my mother what I was up to. Stirring up trouble, she’d call it. That’s what I remained, even now: the troublemaker. I wondered how long Elli would have to remain missing before my mother would start to question her trust in my sister’s good sense. Better to wait until I had firm proof that my sister was involved in something unsavory.
Instead I left my mother marinating in her own blind optimism, limping back and forth across the kitchen while the healing crystals clacked in her robe pockets. I figured, let her be happy for one more day.
* * *
—
Charlotte and I headed south, toward Burbank and the first address on Elli’s list. Ninety minutes later, we descended into the hot haze of the San Fernando Valley, turning off Interstate 5 and up into the sun-parched hills that loomed over the suburban sprawl below. The house at 17344 Catalpa Way was an enormous Mediterranean, a modern beige salute to a villa in the Riviera, but with a three-car garage and a pool with a waterslide out back. Below, in the valley, a procession of airplanes took off from the Burbank airport, banking right and over the green belt of Forest Lawn cemetery, before disappearing out toward the sea.
I parked, extricated Charlotte from her car seat, and carried her up to the front door. When I rang the bell, I could hear chimes echoing in the hall beyond, and then, moments later, the tumble of footsteps, a voice shouting, and finally a fumbling at the door.
When it opened, chaos erupted. First a small white dog with a leopard-print collar came bursting through, barking shrilly at me, nipping at my ankle. This was followed by a little girl in a cropped T-shirt that spelled Mommy’s Superstar over a protruding round belly, her blond hair caught up in a rhinestone tiara. She clutched at the dog’s tail with dirty fingers while the dog snarled and whirled around.
Holding up the rear of this parade was a college-aged girl who pursued dog and child with her arms outstretched.
“Bella, no! You know you’re not allowed to open the door! Leave the dog alone!” She burst past us and grabbed the dog’s collar in one hand, the little girl’s shirt in the other. She took a few steps backward into house, dragging her charges with her. I got a glimpse of a long hallway, tiled in shiny black stone, and a spiral staircase carpeted in red. Only once the girl had the dog and child stashed safely behind her in the foyer, the door half-closed to block them from leaving again, did she turn her attention to me.