You probably don’t even know how wonderful you are. You were always offering to help out. You even got along with Nikki. She rode you on the handlebars of her bicycle while you shouted through a bullhorn, “The Holy Dove Parade is the place to be on Sundays!” There was the sound of a card in the spokes of the wheel, like machine-gun fire. A police officer told you guys to knock it the hell off.
Maybe we just liked having a kid around. Then it really felt like we were a family. We could all do away with the memories we had of our other families. They were nothing to us. And you were always so sad when you had to go “home” to those horrible people who claimed to own you.
Your parents did not worship you properly. They were not very spiritual or enlightened people. One day you came in with a black eye and Edward just about went crazy. He went to speak to your father, but he wouldn’t listen to Edward. He slammed the door in his face.
I had never seen Edward lose his temper the way he did when he came back from your apartment. He upturned the kitchen table. He didn’t like me seeing him like that. I was staring! He went into the bathroom, turned on the faucet and screamed. I think that it had reminded him of things that he was pretending not to remember from his own childhood.
Why did we go along with Edward’s final plan if we hadn’t been brainwashed? the newspeople asked. Nikki and Jimmy came along with us because there was no way to get rid of them. Jimmy generally didn’t give a shit about anybody’s feelings, so long as he was doing good. And Nikki had been breaking the law since she was in diapers. And the only meaning that they had in their whole lives was the Holy Dove Parade Church. So if Edward said that we were picking up and moving, then they were picking up and moving too. They couldn’t imagine a life without Edward. Although I guess that’s what they have now.
And why did I get into the van? everyone wanted to know. Why did I even hook up with such a character to begin with? Well, he made my life exciting.
There was something else too. Edward said that we could never, ever have a little kid of our own because he didn’t believe in biological families. He thought that the root of capitalism was that when we were born, our parents owned us. And he said that biological families had a knack of teaching people to band together and hate outsiders, which was essentially just getting them prepared to wage war against others. It taught us that we had no responsibility to anyone that wasn’t related to us and so we could go around treating everyone like dirt.
If we were ever going to have a child together, this was the way that we were going to have to do it.
You got very upset about being taken away from your parents that first night. The moon was light brown like a slightly roasted marshmallow. And there were so many stars.
I was surprised that you started crying when you were separated from a family that treated you so badly. But that was probably because you were so confused. Sometimes we cry and it’s only because we are bewildered and not because we are sad at all. When we told you that your parents had said that it was okay for us to take you, you stopped crying. I know it was a lie. But you see, you weren’t really missing them. You were only worried about their feelings because you were sweet and compassionate.
You were happy in the country. We rented a big house in the middle of nowhere. We stayed up at night collecting fireflies in a jar, and it was like those bugs were writing gold letters in the air. You had never even seen fireflies before, and it was wonderful to watch your expression. I had never seen anyone look that way before: you were bewitched. We made a big collection of butterflies that we pinned behind a frame. We had always been so busy in the city that we never had time for all of that.
We once saw a baby deer and it looked like it had just learned to walk, like it was wearing leather cowboy boots that it hadn’t had a chance to break in. The raccoons were all wearing their sunglasses.
In a funny way, we were all having the kind of childhood that we had wanted through you.
Your photograph was everywhere! You were on the television. You were on the front page of every newspaper. Everybody in the whole province was wondering where on earth you were. Everyone thought that you must be dead.
Edward said that this was exactly as it should be. Because when you re-emerged, it would be like the original Jesus coming back from the grave. People would think that you were the Second Coming and, oh my goodness, they would listen to your words then. And they would be the words that Edward had taught you. He became convinced that he was going to teach you to be a much, much better preacher than he was. He had such high hopes for you.
I was lying in bed once and I woke up and Edward was staring at me. The light from the kitchen door behind his head made him look like he had a halo. And he was looking at me with so much love. He was happy. He didn’t care about anybody in the whole world except me and you.
Maybe it was because it was the first time that Edward had ever had a family of his own that he became protective of it. He became defensive of us all in the way that he had always criticized other fathers for being. He bought himself a rifle and began staying up all night keeping guard. Then Edward began stockpiling weapons. He had the whole area rigged with explosives. It was crazy. He spent every cent we had.
Maybe it was his childhood abuse that was pushing him over the edge, even though he always swore black and blue that it was nothing to him. He had spent his entire childhood locked away. I guess it was only natural for him to think the enemies would be coming back to put him in prison. How could he not figure that it was only a matter of time?
Nikki went around with a holster and a gun on her at all times. Even when she was singing in the backyard while hanging up laundry, she still had a gun hanging around her waist. I began to find her terrifying. Jimmy was always practising with a rifle at blowing the head off a scarecrow. He was a really good shot, which figured, seeing as how he was a jock in high school. I guess judging by their actions out in the woods, it might be accurate to call them sociopaths. But who am I to judge?
I didn’t have anything to do with all that. I would bring you down to the river to swim and read you a copy of Winnie-the-Pooh that I found in the house. (You used to say that you were Piglet and I was Pooh Bear. Remember? You must.) But I was probably the most delusional of all of us, because I believed that we were safe and that no one was going to come find us. I thought that we could live that way forever.
We were running low on money. And then Nikki was caught soliciting a police officer while she was in town. They found a shotgun in the trunk of her car and your little sweater in the back seat. Two police officers were blown to pieces by booby traps when they surrounded the place. Three others were shot dead.
Why I’m writing all this to you now is because you are a little bit older, and I thought that maybe there’s some possibility that you would want to carry on Edward’s teachings. Because whatever the papers say, he had some wonderful, wonderful ideas.
The world needs more preachers. And if Edward saw that in you, then it probably was inside of you. Because Edward was never wrong about what he saw in people. Edward always saw the best thing about a person.
But even if you don’t want to take over the Holy Dove Parade Church, you could just carry around some of his ideas in your heart. They will make you live in a much bigger way. No matter what other people are saying.
Love, Pooh Bear