“Are you sure? It might help.”
I shake my head, my face contorting as though it doesn’t know whether to laugh or burst into tears. There is nothing, I am confident, nothing my father could say to fix anything.
“Go on then,” I say.
“He asked me to tell you how sorry he is. How terribly sorry. For everything that happened.”
I freeze where I’m sitting, like the moment after a bone is broken when you know the pain is coming but you foolishly hope it won’t. And the full force of the words slams into me. My head begins to shake back and forth, my hair whipping the orange canvas of my jumpsuit. I want so badly to scrub my fingers against my face, to take great fistfuls of my hair and pull until I have a real reason to scream.
This is what thinking about my father does. Into my head comes the picture of him swinging the hatchet, the picture of the Prophet’s dry lips speaking into his ear. But there’s also the memory of those aluminum benches at the greyhound park, him smiling, leaning forward so his belly thrust out, eyes following the dog wearing the bib labeled lucky number seven. And how he’d rise up off the stands when the dogs neared the finish, dirt flying beneath paws, and my father’s fingers clenched in fists that weren’t for punching but for thrusting into the air when he won.
More often, he lost. I guess that’s what it comes down to.
I never knew my father like I knew my mother, hadn’t memorized the curve of his hip with my body, but he meant something to me, down deep. Before the Community, when he railed about his boss, and his face turned florid against his black mustache, I’d sit in my place in the plushest part of the carpet and feel my small world teeter. His voice could do that.
And then my father stopped gambling and started attending rallies with other men from work. Just drinking with the boys, he called it, though he’d stopped drinking by then. And shaving. He came home with new ideas and the word “Prophet” on his tongue. And soon it was like my father had stepped into a new identity. He wasn’t Sam anymore. He was Deacon Samuel, suddenly sober, suddenly bearded, suddenly righteous.
My mother became pregnant with Constance, and the house grew quiet with my father’s praying and my mother’s sitting in silent rooms not moving. I thought she was praying, too, but now I wonder if it was something else. The Prophet told us soon after that we were to take the bus to a rest stop, walk into the trees and never return.
By the time we got to the Community, my mother was round and immovable. While the men raged against the trees and the earth, the wives gathered in a circle in front of the A-frame structures of the first versions of our houses to sew simple baby garments for her.
One of the wives handed me a tiny muslin dress to bring to my mother where she sat on a felled log. I held it to her ballooned stomach. “My baby,” I said.
“No, Minnow, your sister,” my mother corrected in a voice like a croak.
“My baby,” I said again. Nothing belonged to me, not really. My mother belonged to my father and my father belonged to the Prophet. This baby, I knew, was supposed to be mine. She was the closest thing to mine I’d ever had.
The day she was born, her hot body made steam in the frigid morning air. My mother passed out on the dirt floor of the new-hewn house so I was the first to hold her, all scum-covered and wailing with her flat livid gums, tongue waving like an angry fist. Holding her felt like cradling a part of myself, my liver or kidney, outside my body.
When my father ran outside to shout, “Another saint is delivered to the righteous establishment of the Lord,” I held Constance tighter. I decided, right then, that I would protect her like the vulnerable, screaming thing she was.
Chapter 21
The next day, after showering and stuffing myself, half damp, back inside my jumpsuit, I sit on my bed and try to pick through my hair with a large yellow comb held between my stumps. Benny offered again to cut it for me. Easier to manage, she says, and I know she’s thinking a handless girl ought to have priorities above vanity. But it’s more than that, something muddied that I can’t sift out. Jude never knew me without hair like this.
“Bly!” Officer Prosser calls from the skyway. She’s holding a thin piece of paper. I throw down the comb and catch the paper as she drops it inside the cell.
I turn to Angel. “Can you read it?”
“It’s a class schedule,” she says. “Looks like they’re finally making you go to school.”