by Julie Kibler
But Lizzie had to come clean soon. Mattie had no intention of losing another sister.
CATE
Grissom, Texas
1998
I was sitting alone in the school cafeteria the day River placed a full lunch tray across from me and slid in without scoping out which groups sat where, without asking or waiting to be asked.
“So, what does anyone actually do around here for entertainment?”
I nearly dropped my book on my half-eaten lunch. My best friend, Jess, and I had different schedules, of all years. We were seniors, and lunch was lonely, but I was used to it. The question, the way it was worded, could only have come from someone new, someone who didn’t fit the Grissom mold. But that much was obvious. While the rest of us wore boot-cut jeans and T-shirts, River wore work pants sewn tight all the way to the ankle and a pearl snap shirt that could have come straight from someone’s granddad’s closet—the sleeves rolled multiple times. Nobody else I knew could have pulled it off, but the full effect was, in a word, disarming.
I promptly lost all abilities of intelligent dialogue.
“Sorry.” River smiled. “I’ll start over. I’m River. And I didn’t mean to sound condescending. You’re Cate, and you’re a native, right? I assume you should be able to tell me what you do for fun, anyway.”
Native. I half laughed at the description. “Well…I’m a library assistant?” I felt my cheeks flame.
I’d arrived late for lunch after the librarian asked me to handle a task that ran past the bell. I hadn’t even cared. I loved the library, helping wherever I was needed—not to mention the break from my frustrating peers. Some days, I thought if another smart girl morphed into the village idiot around the football players, or if one more obnoxious boy grabbed his crotch behind a girl’s back while his friends howled, I’d walk out the front door and never return. The librarian called me an old soul. I wasn’t completely sure what that meant—but if it meant I could hide out in the library, I was on board.
My answer to River, however, with the uptick at the end, as if I wasn’t even certain, sounded lame. River didn’t abandon the conversation, though, even with that perfectly good excuse. “What about after school? Or weekends?”
“Read? Hang out with friends?” I shrugged, increasingly frustrated by my lack of conviction. “I…used to run track. I still like to run when I have time.” I shrugged again in apology for my lackluster answers.
“I can see how you’d be too busy,” River said bitingly, but added a repentant smile.
The truth was, my church was a big commitment. The biggest. When the doors were unlocked, my family was there. We had keys. My dad had been a deacon since I was two, and my mother had taught Sunday school to every third grader for eighteen years, including me. Sundays and Wednesday nights were standard. Fall meant Christmas music, spring meant fund-raisers, and summer meant camp, mission trip, and Vacation Bible School. Youth group kept us busy and, usually, out of trouble. Being a church kid was practically a full-time job, no time for anything else. No time for track.
But how could I explain all that?
While we—mostly River—talked, other students glanced our way, as if still trying to place the new kid, though the school year was more than half over. Because of the tech boom, unfamiliar faces in our small town northwest of Austin were becoming more commonplace, and it was no longer a given that we’d known every student in our class since before kindergarten. I pointedly ignored the looks. River seemed oblivious, as if not seeing them were the most natural thing in the world. Starting a new school senior year couldn’t have been easy. I was intrigued.
The next day, River staked out a seat in the library after pulling a Texas history book from the stacks. Most kids came in only for required reading or sources for research papers. River, having moved from Colorado, cited cluelessness about the state’s history beyond the Alamo. It didn’t seem so off the rails—especially with what I knew after only one lunch: River’s rails went where they wanted to.
I wondered at first if it was genuine interest, or just an excuse to be in the library—maybe near me. I was flattered but slightly uncomfortable with the thought. My classmates didn’t need extra reasons to hassle me. I wasn’t sure my already dubious reputation as the quiet, conservative church girl who worked in the library could tolerate any more. But when we walked to lunch together, I was suddenly elated to have a companion. I’d been lonelier than I’d realized.
After two weeks of the same—library, lunch, and casual conversation—River found me in the hallway after the Friday dismissal bell, carrying a battered guitar case and a flyer advertising an open mic at a new coffee shop. “There’s this thing I’m playing tonight. You can come if you want to.”
River hurried off, as if avoiding the possibility I might turn down the invitation. As if generally caring—despite nonchalance toward other students—whether I actually showed up.
So I dragged Jess with me that night, claiming I wanted to check out the new place. I didn’t mention the open mic—or River. While Jess ogled community college boys, mostly already paired up with girlfriends, I watched the performers from the vantage point of a dark corner. When River stepped up to sound check, then began playing without further introduction, I leaned forward—not easy in a shabby wing chair with broken springs—caught up in the lyrics of the first stanza:
“Nobody notices you, not the way that I do…not the way that I do…”
It was a simple song, folky in rhythm and tune. My parents still listened to their old records—John Denver, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, and more—though they’d never admit it to their church friends. I’d cut my teeth on love ballads and quiet protest songs from the sixties and seventies. I’d pretended to tolerate them for years, but listening to River, I realized my parents had instilled an actual love for folk music in me despite my efforts to reject it.
And performed by a peer, the nostalgic lyrics and melody were mesmerizing.
In the car, on the radio, at youth group parties, at camp, pretty much everywhere, the only music my friends and I listened to was contemporary Christian. It was not so different from the Top 40 everyone else listened to, except instead of obsession and heartbreak, the songs were about unconditional love and Jesus. But I’d had no idea people my age were writing and playing music like River’s. I’d been living in a bubble, but there was a separate one I didn’t even know existed.
The music transformed River from a quirky, gangly teenager to an adult. An adult I was drawn to in ways I couldn’t clearly articulate. It terrified me. River was not someone I was supposed to consider this way. I’d told myself we could be friends, someone to pass time with at school, but certainly nobody I’d ever view as more. Beyond the obvious, River’s religious life seemed nonexistent, or at least, not the right brand—or we’d have met in church. Church was the only place to meet someone acceptable for dating. Plus, I’d been crushing hard on a former member of our youth group since well before he’d left for college two years earlier. Now Seth was back as our church’s youth intern, and I’d been hoping to connect more meaningfully.
At least that was what I’d told myself until this moment in time, what I’d told my best friend, and even what I’d told my mom when I let her wiggle into my business.
But watching River lean close to the microphone, confiding the deepest of secrets into its depths, I felt something different than I felt when I was around Seth. I struggled to even recognize it for what it was, but I knew I was headed for trouble.
By the next Saturday, when I agreed to spend the afternoon driving to an abandoned train depot in a ghost town, with no second thoughts about whether I should ask my parents’ permission, I was already half gone.
We drove nearly a hundred miles west into the Pedernales Valley in the Hill Country. River wanted to see the remains of a once-thriving resort town where, in the early 1900s, city dwel
lers from San Antonio, Houston, or Austin had taken in the scenery and the cool breezes that flowed through hotel galleries. The depot building was deserted but still standing. Could it, or anything else, reveal what a brief description and a few photos in an old Texas history book couldn’t? Why had people gone to the trouble of building a town only to abandon it to the elements? River was full of curiosity but also loved photographing places where time, literally, seemed frozen. I’d always loved history. Most of the books I read were set in the past. Our mutual interest intensified my attraction to River, though I didn’t admit that at first.
We almost missed it. But from studying the map and watching the odometer on the dash of River’s battered Honda Civic, I knew it had to be coming up soon. “Slow down,” I said, peering at low piles of rubble and ruins. Farther afield, scattered farmhouses looked as if they might or might not be occupied.
“Okay, Bossy Pants.” River’s smile convinced me not to be offended.
“That’s Miss Bossy Pants to you. Pull in there.” A road perpendicular to the two-lane highway was little more than a rutted path, but wide enough to park. The farther you looked into the distance, the more the path disintegrated, tall weeds growing up in the center fifty yards or so away. Nobody had driven this road for months—maybe years.
While I stretched, River retrieved a thirty-five-millimeter camera from the trunk.
“This is crazy,” I said, as we walked toward the one remaining building.
River’s responding smile was tight, and I backtracked. “I mean how little is left. What used to be a whole town is just being absorbed back into the dirt. Like scraps in a compost pile.”
River’s face relaxed again. “You know what compost is? I thought maybe it was just a Colorado thing.”
“Before my parents found religion, they were hippies.”
River raised an eyebrow. I found it hard to believe too.
“Maybe not like Colorado hippies, but definitely counterculture for around here. They lived in a little commune in Austin from the midseventies until right after I was born. I think it embarrasses them now. My dad had really long hair and—actually, so did my mom. Macramé. Bell-bottoms. The works. They even drove a VW van.” I laughed nervously, as if I were telling a made-up story. I struggled to imagine them that way, but I’d seen the photo album on the lowest corner of Mom’s bookshelf. “They probably even smoked a little weed back in the day, though they’d never admit it now. I think it was only a phase.”
“What are they like now?” River said.
“Well, we have a garden and a compost pile, but you wouldn’t know they were the same people. And they would definitely not approve of me taking off like this.”
“You didn’t tell them?” River seemed genuinely surprised.
I shrugged. “Some things are better left unexplained.”
Leaving town without telling my parents would have been an act of rebellion, even if they’d known River. Taking off along a highway winding west from Austin and then an even windier road to abandoned Carr City, however, was an outright violation of trust. In spite of my outward nonchalance, I felt guilty. I’d suggested we meet at the coffee shop’s parking lot without explaining that I was basically sneaking away. The shop stayed open late on Saturdays, and we would return before it closed. If my mom saw my car there, she’d assume I was inside studying for AP exams—just as I’d told her that morning.
But River deserved a better explanation. I took a breath. “My parents are the opposite of hippies now. When I was a baby, they went to this huge religious revival in Florida. Now they’re as devoted to church as they were to being hippies. They are nothing if not passionate.”
I braced myself. I knew where the conversation would go next.
“What about you?” River said. “I mean, are you into church? How often do you go?”
We’d paused near the buildings, and I sighed. This was where things would get sticky. River’s eyebrows furrowed more the longer I hesitated, and that feeling rose in me that so often came with the territory when I had to explain my life to kids who lived differently. It seemed foreign to them—and usually not in a good way.
I definitely hadn’t been up front about how I spent my free time. But I’d learned something from my God-fearing parents I absolutely agreed with: Honesty really was the best policy, in every situation. It had been easy to pretend I wasn’t deceiving them that morning—I had studied in the coffee shop for an hour before I left with River. But it was a lie of omission, just as this had been. Now I regretted it.
“Sunday morning,” I said. “Sunday night. Wednesday night. Lots of times between.”
I started walking again, and as we arrived at the abandoned train depot and the small building that flanked it, River slowed to lift the camera, focused on the rusted hardware on a door at the side, then pressed the shutter, shifting several times to get the shot at various angles.
“I don’t know anything about any of that. I’ve never even been inside a church. My grandparents used to try to convince my mom to take me, but she refused. I guess around here, people would probably consider us, like…heathens? I’d just say agnostic. But that wasn’t uncommon in Colorado. No wonder you didn’t tell them we were hanging out—I mean, you’ve probably figured me out at least a little by now.”
I had. It was me I was all confused about.
I shrugged. I couldn’t deny it, and I wasn’t sure I cared. That scared me. In fact, this whole day was beginning to scare me more than I wanted to admit. The funny thing, though, was that when I thought of Seth now, I hardly felt anything.
River lowered the camera and reached to test the doorknob in spite of the obvious black-and-orange No Trespassing sign posted on it. The door was not locked, but I hung back.
“You don’t have to go in,” River said, shrugging indifferently, “but I want to see what’s in there and take some pictures.”
This happened all the time. When people learned how involved I was in church, they treated me differently. A bit defensive on one hand, as if they felt continually judged, but slightly patronizing on the other, as if I were some cute, slightly exotic zoo animal in a cage, lacking the freedom to live a real life. It didn’t help to explain that for the most part, I actually loved my life, and that my church friends and I would do almost anything for each other. That we had fun together. That my parents never forced me to go, and I’d never used them as an excuse.
I had chosen that life.
But something made me brush aside the caution I usually felt when tempted to do something forbidden—and the guilt at entering this off-limits place.
“I want to see what it’s like,” I said.
I followed River through a door clinging to hinges barely attached to the frame. Inside, an almost eerie half light poked through several holes in a ceiling that had been solid at some point in the past but seemed now as if it could cave in at any minute.
“Are you scared?” River said.
“I might be.”
“We’ll be fine. Do you think anyone is going to haul two people like us off to jail?”
I looked at River, then down at myself, and conceded it wasn’t likely. I took the hand I was offered and allowed myself be tugged along, deeper into the murky light.
LIZZIE
Arlington, Texas
1905
Lizzie understood Mattie’s wishes to make a new life outside the Home more than Mattie could guess, even if she did not relate to it. Mattie could find a respectable job, with only herself to support, and a room in a boardinghouse with the protection of a careful landlady.
Lizzie worried about Mattie’s health, though, and her smart mouth and her rapid, sometimes reckless decisions, here or anywhere else. Mattie’s fury at Gertrude last night had only increased that unease—even if Mattie’s determination to help May seemed equal now to Lizzie’s. If Mattie had
any hesitation left, you’d never know it.
After scripture and prayers the next morning, with little time before they’d expect her in the nursery, Lizzie barreled along the central hall, fast as her clumsy legs would take her, toward Brother JT’s study. He’d encouraged her to bring questions for him to comb through, instead of leaving them all tangled in her head. She couldn’t examine the scriptures like the others could, and Brother JT was patient and kind when she couldn’t find understanding through prayer alone.
Today, though, she reckoned she might stump him.
As she neared the end of the hall, hushed voices drifted around the doorway to the tiny reception area for Brother JT’s office. One male. One female. Lizzie slowed. Lizzie had left the dining room ahead of Sister Susie, and Brother JT’s wife was rarely at the Home so early. She was generally across the road getting her older kids off to school.
The woman laughed softly, and Lizzie realized it was just Miss Hallie, who arranged the newsletter each month and helped with the money. She seemed to love her work, but she kept the fallen girls at arm’s length. Their talking seemed private, though. Nearly intimate.
Eavesdropping was sinful, yet Lizzie struggled to move her feet. Miss Hallie herself had an essay in The Purity Journal that warned of the perils working girls faced. Mattie had read it to her. But Brother JT was a man of high morals and character. Lizzie knew it herself, beyond a doubt. Miss Hallie would never be in any danger with him.
Lizzie exaggerated her uneven gait, allowing her foot to drag heavier than usual against the floorboards. Miss Hallie’s laughter cut off abruptly and a chair scraped the office floor, louder than Lizzie’s shoe. Lizzie rounded the last step into the office. Miss Hallie and Brother JT stood behind her desk.
