“Shooting stars?” someone in the crowd asked.
Abruptly, the Prophet stopped clanging, and his arm hung in the air where it had rung the bell, so for a moment it looked as though he was reeling back for a punch. “No!” he shouted, walking out into the crowd. “War! The Gentiles are attacking. And look! God is stopping them. Those lights are bombs aimed at us, meant to kill us, burning out in the dome of God’s protection.”
Another light flashed across the sky and some of the children made scared noises and cowered behind their mothers’ skirts, but the Prophet told them in a reassuring voice that they were safe, this was proof of God’s power and protection and love for us. I looked down into Constance’s face. She was nine and her hair was tied in a slippery braid down the side of her head. Her mouth was wide open in wonder, and I could see where the corners of her lips were chapped, her neck hinged as far backward as it could go. Soon, everyone was sighing amazedly, even the adults who had, moments before, called the things in the sky a different name.
Everybody went to bed that night with an ache in their necks and a fullness in their hearts and a certainty that God loved them. That we were doing the right thing. All except me.
“Why not you?” Angel asks.
“I remembered something,” I say. “I must have heard it on TV or in preschool the few times my parents took me, before the Prophet, before the Community.” I take a breath. “I remembered those things had a name.”
“Meteors,” Angel says.
I nod. I remembered the word, and I knew the adults must have, too. And knowing that sowed something uncertain in my mind. I didn’t know what it meant—still don’t—only that it made me confused. Not doubtful, not yet. Just a feeling like something in me was broken, something that in everybody around me was whole.
Chapter 30
“Philip Lancaster wants to see you,” Dr. Wilson says during our next visit.
I look up. I blink twice, hard.
“What are you talking about?”
“I interviewed him,” Dr. Wilson says. “He said he’d like to talk to you.”
“That’s not happening.”
“Are you afraid you’d lose control again?”
“No,” I say firmly. Because that’s not what makes me afraid. I’m afraid of looking him in the eye. It’s his eyes, more than anything, that terrify me.
“Do you ever think about that night?” he asks.
“Only sometimes,” I say. “Try not to.”
“Why?”
“I’d just escaped the Community, just seen Jude die. Walked for hours in the darkness not knowing if I’d see another person again. There’s a lot about that night I don’t want to remember.”
“Don’t let it become a part of your mind that you’re afraid to touch,” he says. “Remembering doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”
I know he’s right. The more I ignore the memory of that night under the bridge, the more space it takes up in my mind till I fear at some point I won’t be able to ignore it anymore. Philip Lancaster’s eyes will be all I can see.
“It was so cold that night,” I say. “I can’t believe it really happened sometimes, but then I remember that feeling of cold. Cold enough I worried I’d never thaw out.”
It took me hours and hours to find the city from the Community. By then, the ground had been blanketed with pristine snow. I followed the dull glow of light along the horizon and the vague smell that engines make, so different to the brisk, clean air in the high mountains. In the darkness, lit windows of buildings materialized, the faint rattle of a car whizzing past on the freeway.
I followed the river through the night, stopped to rest beneath an old rusting bridge. I learned later that what murders happen in Missoula happen here. Teenagers beat a homeless man to death. Two meth heads have a falling out over a half-empty bottle of cough syrup. Beneath the bridge, there was none of the manicured, easy wilderness I always pictured when I remembered the city, young families plodding in their sneakers down wood-pelleted trails, coffee smells from shops, and the barking of Labradors nearly always audible. This wasn’t the place I’d spent years imagining. Beneath the bridge, the water was brown and the bank was made of muddy gravel, and there was a rimless tire threatening to take off into the river, but never quite making it.
“Hey!” a man’s voice called over my shoulder. My heart guttered to a stop. I’d been leaning against a rusty leg of the bridge, completely lost in the movements of the river. I hadn’t noticed the man behind me.