When they lied about their crimes, their mother closed her eyes and said, “Fine. Whatever you say.” Then she retreated to her dark room, which was empty by then except for her bed and her new books. She vanished from their lives, and their father, preoccupied with his newly pregnant new wife, seemed to vanish as well. When their mother took off on three-day retreats with her fellow believers, Wendy and Win skipped school and filled the house with stray classmates, falling deeper and deeper into trouble that neither of them enjoyed.
A few weeks after Courteney’s birth, their mother had come home early one day and found the garbage cans smoking with pillows they’d accidentally set on fire, and the upstairs bathroom window smashed, and a twelve-year-old friend of Win’s throwing up on the living room rug. She had gazed at the overflowing ashtrays, the soiled walls, the broken records, and half-filled cups, and then she’d smiled strangely and said, “This doesn’t exist.”
She had walked out the door; Wendy and Win had found her, hours later, sitting against a tree in the woods at the end of their street. They’d had to help her back to the house. They’d had to watch helplessly when the two men from the Church arrived for the evening’s planning session and found Wiloma on the floor repeating, I have nothing. Nothing is mine. The men had made phone calls while Win and Wendy watched. They’d arranged for Wiloma to visit the Church’s Healing Center in Boston for a few months, and they’d offered to board Wendy and Win in the home of a local Church family while she was gone. Both men had eyebrows so pale and fine as to be almost invisible.
Wendy had called her father then, not knowing where else to turn, and he’d taken them into the horrid house he’d built for Sarah. He’d been furious with Wiloma at first, blaming her for her weakness; then, as he began to discover all that Wendy and Win had done, furious with them. He missed nothing. He smelled smoke on their hands, beer on their breath, lies on their tongues. He told them that even if their mother got better, they couldn’t live with her again unless they straightened out. They had looked at each other and gone underground as smoothly as snakes.
He was firm, not cruel, but they couldn’t bear living with him. All that attention, Wendy remembered, as the mound of leaves rose up to her waist. All those eyes. Sarah had monitored their meals and grades and friends, counting their clothes when she did the laundry and wanting to know where this blouse had come from, how Win had torn those pants. Waldo had named the baby Courteney, setting her off from the matched set of W names he’d found so charming the first time around. Courteney reminded Win and Wendy daily that they had no part in their father’s new life.
They’d dreamed of escape almost constantly during the four months their mother was gone; they’d dreamed, too, that she was in danger and needed their help. They did whatever their father and Sarah asked, hoping to convince them that they’d changed. Win signed up for soccer league and let the shaved sides of his head grow out. Wendy wore the prissy clothes that Sarah bought her. They shed their dangerous friends and brought up their grades and prayed that their father would accept their offerings and fail to discern what churned inside them. When their mother returned from Boston, smooth-faced and clear-eyed and seemingly sane, they sat down with their father and told him they wanted to go home.
“I want you to be happy,” he said. “I want you to live where you choose.” He made a show of being reluctant to let them go, and of acting hurt over their decision, but in the end he’d given in without much fuss. Wendy recalled how she and Win had both felt, secretly, that he’d let them go so easily because he wanted to be alone with his new family.
“Remember,” he said when they left. “Any trouble and you’re coming back here.”
And because of that threat, and because they felt so guilty over their role in their mother’s collapse, they’d kept up their good behavior even after they moved back. Which meant, thought Wendy now, pretending to accept the Church and pretending not to be embarrassed by her mother’s friends and by what her mother had become.
Harmon Bayer, snipping away on the other side of the fence, didn’t have to pretend about anything; Wendy almost envied his easy, self-righteous rudeness. He had built a small deck off his back door the summer after he moved in and then found that he objected to the view from his newly raised seat. He objected to the ragged lawn behind Wendy’s house, which was full of weeds and seldom mowed. He objected to the trellis, which had shattered during a storm and never been repaired. He objected to the unraked leaves and the rusting lawn furniture, but most of all he objected to the people from the Church of the New Reason, who sometimes gathered at the house on weekend afternoons.
Thin men in oversize shirts, overweight women in droopy skirts, all of them sitting cross-legged in the long grass and sipping herbal tea while they took turns reading passages from their Manual — it was shabby, Wendy thought. It was infuriating. Of course Harmon had objected. She objected herself, she hated it, but she never dared say a word to her mother. That was the price of peace, and she and Win paid it so their mother wouldn’t crack again and so they wouldn’t have to return to their father. But on the day the fence started going up, she had wanted to slip through what was left of the hedge and tell Harmon she understood how he wanted to wall them off.
She wondered, now, if she’d made a mistake not saying anything to her mother. The lives she and Win had lived these last eighteen months had been as false as the lives they’d lived at their father’s, and the strain of trying to act like angels had told on both of them. They backslid, now and again; Wendy knew that Win had started drinking beer with his friends, and she’d stolen a few things she hadn’t meant to, when her hands had reached out as if they’d had minds of their own. So far, they’d successfully hidden these acts from their mother. Win did well in school now and appeared in photos in the local paper with his legs kicked high as he shot a soccer ball toward the goal. No one would guess that he’d once started small fires all over town. And she’d gotten into college and had a decent summer job, and if she could just manage not to be trapped by this thing with Grunkie, she’d be gone in three months.
All was quiet on Harmon’s side of the fence. Wendy scrambled up the heap of leaves and peered over the boards. Harmon was gone, at least for a while; the grass he’d been clipping was so neat it looked like AstroTurf. She dropped back down and stretched full length in the pile of leaves, letting herself sink into them until she was almost buried. Tomorrow, when Grunkie arrived, everything was bound to change. A dying man in their spare room, with her mother bent on converting him — it made her queasy just to think of it. She liked her great-uncle and longed to spare him from her mother’s interference, but that was only part of the reason she dreaded his arrival. Buried below that was the fear that he might take months or years to die and that her mother wouldn’t be able to manage him alone. And below that was panic at the prospect of being trapped here, balancing her mother’s fragile equilibrium and her great-uncle’s desire for peace while her own life remained perpetually on hold.
5
ROXANNE’S HANDS SLIPPED GENTLY OVER THE BONES OF BRENDAN'S left wrist, moved with long strokes up his forearm to his elbow, cradled the distorted joint, and then sailed along his upper arm and tapped and squeezed the shoulder blade under the fragile skin. When she paused at the back of Brendan’s neck, aligning her thumbs on his spine while her fingers embraced his weakened neck, Henry feared he might faint.