The Believer's Daugher - [A Treadwell Academy - 02]

by Caitlyn Duffy

  I speed-dialed Mama.

  To my shock, she answered. As if nothing was wrong.

  “Hi, honey bun,” she greeted me, sounding very tired.

  “Mama,” I said sternly. “Why didn’t you tell me about Aaron?”

  There was a long pause, during which I could imagine the wheels in Mama’s head turning as she realized I had heard the news.

  “Oh, Grace,” she sighed. “There was nothing to tell. These kinds of things are far too complicated for someone your age to comprehend.”

  Oh, she was going to treat me like a baby. My temper, which had been dormant since I had been at least nine, was threatening to flare.

  “Mama, that’s bull, and you know it,” I said, pushing my luck with my language. “Aaron’s my brother. How could I not comprehend? Don’t you think this has an impact on my life, too?”

  “It doesn’t have to impact your life, sugar,” Mama said. “Daddy and I are going to take care of this. It’s a very sad and unfortunate thing, but we have to keep in mind that a lot of people could be affected by this if we aren’t careful in how we handle it.”

  For a long moment I digested what she had said, and then I was fuming. Was she really talking about idiots like Rick Davies? People as in members of my father’s church who might stop donating money?

  “Mama,” I began slowly, with anger rising in my throat. “There are four people in our family. And Daddy kicked one of those people out. What do other people have anything to do with this?”

  There was a gaping silence before Mama continued. She was probably in shock. I had never dared to mouth off in my whole life. I was glad I had decided to call her instead of Daddy because never in a billion years would I have had the guts to talk back to him.

  “Grace, maybe you should come home for a while. Daddy and I thought it might be best for you to be back at school and away from all this but I can see now that maybe we were wrong. We should be together as a family at this time,” Mama said.

  There were so many things wrong with her point of view, I didn’t know where to begin my counter-attack. They had thought it might be best for me at Treadwell, being skinned alive by the long-lashed gossip machine? Were they really so ignorant about how teenage girls behaved? They wanted to be together as a family? What about Aaron? Wasn’t he part of our family?

  “I cannot even believe you right now,” I snapped. I knew this was the angriest I had ever been with Mama, and I felt immediately bad for the sharp tone I was using with her. Mama was so sweet and gentle. Never before in my life had I treated her with such disrespect. “Mama, why are you doing this?”

  “Your brother did something unthinkable,” Mama said, sounding cold. “He threw away every lesson we ever taught him since he was a little boy and he violated the life of a defenseless baby-î

  I wasn’t sure what possessed me to do it, but I hung up on Mama just then.

  All I could think was that she and Daddy were being absolute hypocrites. My father would forgive anyone else’s son guilty of being in the same exact situation as Aaron without blinking an eye. He would counsel another father on the importance of forgiveness and acceptance. But his own son, he had disowned. And the only plausible reason I could think of as to why was pride.

  Aaron had done the one thing that could possibly unsettle Daddy: he had threatened the loyalty of the Church following with disobedience.

  I loved my brother. Daddy had always told us growing up that all you really have in life is your family. Friends come and go, riches are earned and lost, jobs stop and start. Only family is forever. Obviously Daddy didn’t heed his own advice. But that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t. I couldn’t turn my back on Aaron; not as remorseful and as desperate as he sounded.

  I called Aaron back and he didn’t answer until the fourth ring.

  “So, can you meet me in Boston?” he asked.

  “Aaron,” I began, wanting to tell him I couldn’t, but knowing inaction wasn’t an option. “We can’t run forever.”

  Aaron heard my reluctance in the way I was breathing. He’s always been more independent than me; he was the one who looked forward to boarding school when it was time for high school, not me. He was the one who wanted to have a profession unlike our father’s and make a name for himself on his own terms, not me. He knew I liked to watch Daddy’s sermons on TV and help out at the chapel on our property. Asking me to leave all of that behind, especially True, whose big brown eyes and long horse eyelashes I loved more than anything else in the world, meant that he was desperate.

  “Please, Gracie,” he insisted. “I’m scared.”

  We agreed that I would take the next bus into Boston and meet Aaron at North Station. I couldn’t just let him run off to an unknown destination by himself. And I also couldn’t face Biology in the morning knowing that my parents were livid and my brother was going off the grid and my whole life was practically over. If the girls of Treadwell had a lot to say about a financial scandal in Juliette’s family that they could barely understand, I could only imagine how much they’d have to say about my extraordinarily good-looking Christian brother getting his girlfriend pregnant. I was mortified but I knew I had no time to let shame slow me down.

  I wasn’t sure how I was going to get off-campus at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Technically permission to leave campus had to be obtained by the RA of your dorm before noon on the weekends, and residents were expected back in their dorms safe and sound by six p.m. There were only two formal ways on and off campus, through the north gate or the south gate, and Treadwell was a good two miles on foot away from the nearest town, which was too small to warrant its own bus stop on the line that went to Alewife Station, where I could transfer to the Red Line on the T. I was going to have to call a cab and have it meet me at one of the gates.

  Luckily, for once, I had cash in my wallet since I had just come through Customs earlier in the day and had traded my Colombian pesos for American dollars. A trip down to the student lounge to use the ATM would have been unthinkable.

  When I hung up the phone with Aaron and dialed the number for a cab, I was focused on just getting into the city to see him. But by the time the wheels were in motion and the cab was on its way to campus, I realized more fully that I had no intention of returning to Treadwell that night. I felt violently sick, as if I were going to throw up, but knew there wasn’t any time for such nonsense. I couldn’t remain at Treadwell and attend classes with the vultures around me. I also couldn’t fly home and listen to my parents berate Aaron.

  I began re-packing my suitcase as quickly as I could with whatever clean clothes I could find. All too quickly, thoughts were flying into my head that I would have to navigate more thoroughly in the backseat of my cab. I was surprised at my own serenity as I made plans. I was holding it together, for Aaron’s sake; certainly not my own.

  Daddy had always told us that God would forgive anyone who truly sought forgiveness. Aaron sounded genuine in his remorse about the entire situation. Couldn’t Daddy forgive his own son?

  The worst part was, I vaguely suspected, that the full extent of Daddy’s rage probably had little to do with his disappointment in Aaron. It probably had much more to do with what the members of his church would think of the situation. A Christian leader’s son being accused of aborting a baby was serious business. Both of my parents marched on Washington against abortion. They attended Christian rallies and picketed outside the offices of senators in Arizona that supported a woman’s right to choose. My father had petitioned to keep a man who had shot and killed a doctor who provided abortion services off of death row.

  Aaron’s situation was going to give every single one of Daddy’s enemies a reason to point a finger and laugh.

  I packed my laptop, underwear, my music player, two novels, my diary, pajamas, and a couple t-shirts and jeans. That was enough to make my suitcase almost too heavy to carry. I stepped outside of my dorm room and into the hallway and didn’t even waste twenty seconds locking the door behi
nd me. Whatever I was leaving behind could be raided by nosy freshmen; I didn’t care.

  I took the back staircase from the sixth floor down to the first. My assumption was that I would run into fewer girls by taking the stairs instead of the elevator, but I still ran into Ameerah Thompson and Stacy Davidson on the landing of the third floor, where they were breaking rules and smoking Dunhill cigarettes out the open window.

  “Uh oh,” Ameerah said at the sight of me.

  “Don’t go and tell on us for breaking the rules, church girl,” Stacy teased.

  Typical. Those girls would never utter a word in my direction in the dining hall when I had Giovanna and Juliette around to back me up. But on my own, I was a perfect victim.

  I avoided their eyes as I lugged my suitcase down the stairs directly past them.

  “What’s the rush?” Ameerah asked. “Are you late for church?”

  I was already halfway down the next flight of stairs. I could hear them whispering, presumably about my brother.

  “Freaking religious hypocrites,” I heard Stacy cackle.

  I exited the back door of Colgate and waited for a moment, hoping that an alarm would not sound. I rushed out into the quiet back parking lot, crossed it, and made a split-second decision to make my way to the front gate by walking through the woods instead of following the road that wound its way around campus past all of the dormitories. I wanted as few witnesses to my departure as possible.

  I stepped through the woods, which were soggy and cold, and out onto the highway, moments before a white taxi pulled up to the front gate. My timing had been impeccable even though I had pretty much destroyed my suede boots with mud. If the cabbie had seen me step out of the woods surrounding an elite boarding school, he might have been reluctant to take me off campus. And if other vehicles had seen me lingering on the side of the road with a suitcase, I might have been returned to the headmaster’s office before getting very far.

  “Where to, little lady?” the cab driver asked.

  “Alewife Station,” I responded, deciding to skip the bus since I had over $80 in cash in my wallet. It was already starting to get chilly in Massachusetts and the heat of Arizona seemed far, far away. That cab ride was one of many financial splurges I would regret in the weeks to come.

  I relaxed in the back seat of the cab, finally breathing easily. My fingers reached for the gold, diamond-encrusted cross that I wore constantly. It had been my thirteenth birthday gift from Daddy and it was my nervous habit to run my fingers over it when I was under stress. The cab driver was listening to the classic Oldies’ station and Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee was playing.

  One, two, three, look at Mr. Lee!

  I closed my eyes and tried to block the music out of my thoughts. Naturally I wasn’t sure that I was doing the right thing. Running away for one night was one thing; running away for an undetermined amount of time, but presumably a lot longer than one night, was a completely different thing.

  A memory returned to me of a time when Aaron and I had been backstage at a large convention of evangelical Christian leaders at a convention center in Texas, long before Daddy had founded The Church of the Spirit and he was just one of many speakers at the event. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old at the time, and I could recall distinctly a little boy in a brown suit approaching me with a smirk on his face, accompanied by two girls who were older than me.

  “Why is your hair so orange?” the little boy had asked me.

  I remembered freezing, terrified of him, knowing that even though his question was harmless enough, he wasn’t asking me out of any curiosity about my hair color. He was asking with an edge to his voice, and even at that young age, I had known he was suggesting that there was something about me that was worthy of ridicule.

  “Why are you so small? Is there something wrong with you?” one of the girls chimed in.

  I was cowering there, in my fancy sea foam green Sunday dress, the target of teasing, desperately searching the crowd for my mother with my eyes. I had never been bullied by kids older than me like that, and I was so afraid, I couldn’t even open my mouth.

  “Didn’t you see the sign outside? This is a no redhead zone,” the little boy continued in a stern voice. “You’re going to have to leave right now.”

  Suddenly, Aaron was there. I wasn’t sure how he had found me, but the second he saw me, paralyzed, my lower lip trembling, he had known exactly what was going on.

  “Get lost, Brian,” my brother had said.

  I couldn’t remember exactly what words had been exchanged, but I remembered with clarity what had followed: my brother’s small eight-year-old fist socking Brian in the nose, the squeals of mothers, a blood-soaked handkerchief and my brother glowering in the back seat of our car on the drive back to our hotel. It was the first event in which Aaron had given my parents an inkling of his potential for disobedience, and the first time my heart had swelled with pride because I knew that my brother would never, ever let anyone hurt me.

  Hi God, I thought to myself, reaching out to the Lord’s spirit for help. Why are you doing this to my family? I mean, I’m sure you have your reasons, but I have no idea what your plan is for me. If you don’t want me to go with Aaron, could you like… send me a sign or something? Because my natural inclination is to help my brother, but if you think that’s stupid, it would be pretty helpful if you could let me know. Like, maybe give this cab a flat tire or something.

  I was exhausted. I would have liked to have turned back time by a week to have been in Phoenix in my bedroom with the sun low in the sky. But there’s no such thing as back-tracking. Whatever journey was ahead for Aaron, I would be along for the ride.

  Chapter 5

  Aaron was waiting for me, as he said he would be, in the food court at North Station. He was wearing a gray fleece hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, drinking a soda. He had a little bit of soft blond stubble on his chin, and his eyes looked red, as if he had been crying. A huge duffel bag was on the chair next to his.

  “Hi,” he greeted me with a trembling lower lip, and stood up to hug me.

  We hugged for at least two minutes, and I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing that none of this was happening.

  “Aaron, what are we going to do?” I asked.

  The station was a flurry of passenger traffic; presumably people returning home from weekend trips around New England. I felt very exposed standing in the middle of the food court of one of the largest train stations in the country. I was hardly a recognizable celebrity, but anyone who watched The Spirit Channel might recognize me from Church of the Spirit televised specials. My picture also sometimes appeared in Daddy’s magazine, which usually contained nothing more than a handful of articles about his latest activities and then stories of charity submitted by church members. In every month’s issue, Mama would publish short letters to me and Aaron, which were intended to serve as inspiration for parents everywhere. Anyone who recognized me or Aaron as Chuck Mathison’s kids, and was familiar with the breaking headlines, would have immediately seen that something strange was afoot given that we were both carrying luggage in a city where neither of us resided.

  “I have money,” Aaron announced, as if that was the answer to our predicament. “I haven’t touched any of my summer money yet. Almost five thousand dollars.”

  He patted the top of his duffel bag and I almost had a heart attack.

  “In cash?” I exclaimed in a whisper. Aaron had worked the summer at a golf course near our house, caddying and driving golfers from their resorts to the green. Daddy had respected his decision not to work for the cable network that summer and to spread his wings a little outside the family business.

  “I emptied my account before I left Massachusetts,” he said matter-of-factly. “I don’t want Mama and Daddy to be able to find me, and that means no bank cards.”

  He wasn’t joking around. Five thousand dollars seemed like a great deal of money to me. Certainly enough to get a reasonable head start on a new lif
e. I was incredibly torn. Part of me really wanted to talk some sense into him, but the other part of me was baffled by what he had claimed our parents’ response had been to his dilemma, and my discussion with Mama certainly seemed to back up Aaron’s story.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Aaron?”

  Aaron leaned back in his seat next to the duffel bag and spoke in a low voice so as to avoid attracting a lot of attention.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot the last two days, Gracie, and you know what conclusion I’ve come to? Our parents are full of crap. They preach about all these rules that apply for everyone except themselves. Daddy didn’t even hesitate a second to tell me that I wasn’t his son. He didn’t even consider my position at all. And you know what? I don’t even think he cared that much that Heather had aborted the baby. I think he would have been just as angry even if I were going to become a father.”

  Aaron’s eyes began welling up again. More than being upset that our parents had abandoned him, Aaron seemed destroyed that his opportunity to become a father had been taken away. It seemed like a weird notion that a boy would be grieving about a pregnancy, but that’s just how Aaron is. He’s the most sensitive boy, like… ever.

  It occurred to me that almost four hours had passed since I had hung up on Mama, and neither of my parents had called me back. To give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they were undecided on how to approach the topic with me. But did they think I lived in a bubble with no access to television or the internet?

  And then it hit me: that was what they thought. They thought as long as they preached that music videos were bad and pop music was bad and reality TV was bad, those elements of culture would never reach me and Aaron. They had believed that simply sheltering us from mainstream media was enough to lead us into adult lives just like theirs: single-focused, with unwavering devotion to The Church of the Spirit.

  They had never taken into consideration that we might be curious and want to make up our own minds. Or that we had our own minds in the first place. It had never occurred to them at all how hard it was for us to be out in the world, seeing how other kids lived without parents who preached the word of the Lord with each breath. I was offended by their lack of respect for me; I was fifteen and old enough to understand how the world operated.