Devoted

by Jennifer Mathieu

  When I peek out the bedroom window, I see a dusty red Honda parked in the yard, its engine still running. Two more honks.

  Come Out. Come Out.

  I grab my bag. I head for the door. I open it.

  Without looking back, I race down the stairs.

  13

  It’s been over a week since I moved in with Lauren, but I still haven’t gotten used to the smells I’ve encountered in her one-bedroom apartment. Sriracha sauce. Cats. Peppermint-scented body lotion. And something Lauren calls Nag Champa incense.

  “I promise, it gives off good vibes, good energy,” Lauren says as she lights a second stick of the strange, sweet-smelling stuff and gray smoke starts to make cursive letters in the air. “That sounds corny, but I’m trying to make you laugh.” She watches me from the broken-in pink arm chair in the corner. It’s like she’s counting how long it will take for me to start crying again.

  One.

  Two.

  “Rachel,” Lauren says, her face falling as I burst into tears, her voice dropping into a whisper, “I wish I could make this all easier.”

  I sniffle and let the tears flow for a minute. I’m curled into the corner on the couch, which is in no better shape than Lauren’s pink armchair. But the couch is comfortable, which is good because it’s where I’ve been sleeping at night.

  “I just needed to cry,” I say out loud. “Again.”

  “I know,” Lauren says, nodding. “It’s normal. I think I cried every day for weeks after I left, I was such a wreck. But I have an idea. Diet Coke. That always cheers me up. You want one?”

  “Sure.”

  I’ve had soda before on a few rare occasions. Wedding receptions at church. The one time my parents took me to Red Lobster for my birthday. But mostly it’s an indulgence we can’t afford. Lauren says Diet Coke is her “one vice” since she left the city. When she told me that, I had to ask her what a vice was. Something not so good for you, she says. But of all the vices, she tells me, soda is probably the least bad one.

  We sip our drinks, and I let the fuzzy, cool bubbles pop against my tongue. The cold can feels good in my hand. Finally, I’m calm enough to really talk.

  “I keep picturing what happened when I left,” I say. I can’t forget the way I grabbed my purse from the hook near the door and turned to tell my parents and Pastor Garrett in between sobs that I couldn’t—wouldn’t—go to Journey of Faith. I can’t forget the strange, contorted expression on my mother’s face that I tried to unsee the moment I saw it.

  “Where are you going?” my father bellowed, raising his voice for the first time in my memory. “How can you abandon Christ’s path for you?” And Pastor Garrett prayed in a loud voice, “‘To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan unto God!’ Open your servant Rachel’s eyes, Father God! Open her eyes, we pray!”

  I couldn’t find the words to answer or explain, and I was afraid if I tried I would lose my nerve, so I ran outside and found myself inside Lauren’s red Honda, crying so many tears I thought I’d never have enough to cry again. The first night at Lauren’s apartment I’d only been able to calm down after I’d called home from a phone we borrowed from her next-door neighbor. Lauren didn’t want anyone from Calvary to be able to reach her.

  My father answered when I called, and when I told him where I was and that I was safe but I just needed some time away and that he could reach me at this neighbor’s number, he used a voice he’d never used with me before. But I recognized it anyway. It was the detached, measured voice he uses with worldly clients who hire him to trim their crepe myrtles. The careful, better-than-you voice he pulls out with the cigarette-smoking mechanic—the only one in town who can keep our van running.

  “Rachel Elizabeth,” he said, “when you are ready to return to the Lord, to His service, to walk with righteousness and be healed by attending Journey of Faith, you will contact us. Until then, you are not permitted to communicate with this family. We’re praying for you, Rachel Elizabeth.”

  And he hung up the phone, just like that. I held the receiver for minutes after, sure I was mistaken. Certainly that wasn’t all he could have to say to me, his own daughter.

  “That’s what I keep running over in my mind the most,” I say to Lauren. “What my dad said when I called. That my own dad said that.” I wait for tears to start again, but my body won’t have it anymore.

  “It’s like how I couldn’t picture that my own dad could beat me up like he did, but he did,” says Lauren, her black fingernails tapping against the edge of her soda can. “Just because our dads are our dads doesn’t mean they’re perfect or even right. I know that’s weird to hear, but I think it’s the truth.”

  I curl my knees up under my chin. I want to tell Lauren that at least my dad never hit me. That maybe my dad just needs more time to understand me. But I keep quiet and nod.

  Lauren picks up the little black cat that’s clawing at her chair. He’s the one she calls Frankie. She rubs one of his ears, and he purrs contentedly.

  “Tell me again what makes Journey of Faith so bad?” I ask Lauren. Maybe there’s some small part of me that’s still considering toughing it out—just to be able to see Ruth again or hug my mother, however briefly.

  “You know the stories,” Lauren says. “But I can show you a website where kids from all over the country talk about having gone to camps like Journey of Faith. Waking up at four in the morning, forced hikes and these weird survival exercises, constant memorization of Scripture. They wear you down so they can force you to think the way they want you to think. It’s brainwashing, basically. Plus, they serve runny eggs. I’m talking seriously disgusting food.”

  Lauren likes to make jokes when she’s been serious for too long, and I’m not sure if I appreciate this or if it bothers me. But I remember James Fulton confessing to all of us after looking at pornographic images on the computer, and I remember seeing him hiding out alone after services, the shame on him as thick as Pastor Garrett’s personal copy of the King James Bible. Even after his return James was still looked on as an outsider, as someone who deserved our sympathy but who earned our sidelong glances and gossip masked as prayer requests instead. Lauren is right about Journey of Faith. I can’t go there.

  Lauren gives Frankie one last cuddle and stretches her arms. “My lunch break is almost over. I’ve got to get back to work,” she says. Clayton Animal Hospital is a few blocks down the street, not far from this little eight-unit apartment complex Lauren’s been renting her place in since early spring.

  “I’ll do the lunch dishes,” I say. I can’t be a bother to Lauren as long as I’m staying here.

  “I already did them,” Lauren answers. “There were only two dishes and two glasses.”

  I grin in spite of everything. “That’s a lot less than I’m used to,” I say.

  “I figured,” Lauren says, and as she walks past me toward the front door, she gives my hair a gentle ruffle like I’m one of the cats she loves so much.

  After she’s gone, I stare around the empty apartment for a moment. The second day I was here, Lauren showed me how the television worked, but the few times it’s been on, I can’t think straight because watching it feels like being with someone who won’t stop talking to me. I’ve been around televisions a few times, like in the waiting room at a doctor’s office. But I don’t see how anyone can handle having one on all the time. Fortunately, Lauren only turns it on once in a while. Last night she and I watched one episode of Law & Order. Lauren explained it’s set in New York City and is about criminals and the attorneys who try to put them in prison. The women on the show had such short skirts and immodest clothing I couldn’t believe anyone with a television could just turn it on and see something like that whenever they wanted. Out of habit, I kept averting my eyes whenever the female district attorney walked into the room, then I’d glance back to see what happened next.

  Now, alone in the apartment, I stare at my reflection in the big, black TV sc
reen.

  “Get up, Rachel,” I tell myself. “You have to get up off the couch. You can’t just lie here all day long.” I think back to my mother in the bedroom after the miscarriage. Maybe this is what great sorrow does to you. It makes you unable to move. To do anything.

  Everything around me is so unfamiliar I decide to try and find some peace in something familiar. By the time it’s almost the end of Lauren’s shift, I’ve dusted, straightened, and cleaned every last bit of her tiny apartment, and I’ve only thought about my parents and Ruth and everyone else back home every other second instead of every second. Lauren’s apartment is full of distractions. As I tidy her bedroom, I find a photo of Lauren kissing a boy with jet black hair tucked into the frame of her bedroom mirror. I first notice it while making Lauren’s bed, and I quickly look away, just as I did while watching television. But then I glance back, more than once, and with each glance back I stare for a few more moments until I’m inches away from the photograph, studying it carefully. Lauren and this boy kissed with their mouths wide open and their eyes closed. Their whole faces just full of wanting. Staring at it too long makes my heart race, and I finally force myself not to look at it anymore. I don’t know what to make of a kiss like that, but the truth is I don’t know what to make of most kissing. When Faith and Paul kissed for the first time on their wedding day, I looked down at my maid of honor bouquet, embarrassed at their awkwardness on display for everyone to witness. My stomach turned at the hoots coming from the congregation.

  In the kitchen there are no photographs, just a refrigerator full of strange magnets that say things like “Meat Is Murder” and “Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History.” Lauren’s bookshelf is full of mystery novels and all these thick books with titles like Sisterhood Is Powerful and Quivering Daughters: Hope and Healing for Daughters of the Patriarchy. Part of me wants to read them, but I don’t know if I should touch them yet. I don’t think Lauren would mind me reading them, but something about the titles frightens me, like they might be more than I want to think about right now. As I sweep the closet-sized kitchen, I wonder what Ruth is doing. Getting supper ready? Finishing her schoolwork? Maybe attending an emergency prayer meeting for me? Rachel, stop it. You can’t keep asking yourself these questions if you have any hope of not crying for at least a few hours a day.

  As I finish making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for supper—because I can’t find much else in the kitchen—I hear Lauren’s keys in the front door.

  “Such a dutiful daughter,” Lauren says, when she finds me in the kitchen, hands on her hips, one eyebrow raised.

  “I’m not trying to be dutiful,” I say, blushing. “I’m just trying to help.” I take the dish towel I was straightening and toss it on the counter instead. I want to show Lauren I don’t think I have to be perfect all the time, but I don’t think it’s very kind of her to call me dutiful. Even if she was just trying to be funny in her own strange Lauren way.

  Lauren raises both eyebrows. “Wow. Very good, Rachel. I pissed you off and you called me out on it. Keep doing that.”

  I take my plate and follow Lauren out to the living room where we’ve been eating our meals. I take a bite of my sandwich but I’m thinking about Lauren’s words. She was right. I guess Lauren did irritate me, but I don’t understand why she thinks I should tell her about everything she does that irritates me. Speaking about your emotions so often seems like it would only cause arguments or hurt feelings.

  “Thanks for making these,” Lauren says, taking a bite. Lauren doesn’t pray before we eat, but I still offer a rushed blessing over my meals privately inside my mind. Praying before meals hasn’t ever been something I’ve minded; I actually like the idea of it. Except for when Dad asked Paul to offer the blessing and the food was practically cold by the time we started eating.

  “You really don’t eat any meat or cheese or anything?” I ask.

  “Yeah, well,” Lauren says with a shrug. “I try not to. Because I feel really strongly about animal rights. But I don’t think it’s going to be very easy to keep that up living here where there’s only one grocery store. Tom Thumb doesn’t exactly stock soy milk and fake chicken nuggets.” She rolls her eyes.

  “When’d you start? Not eating meat, I mean.”

  “When I moved to Houston. Some of the kids I’d gotten to know had friends there. I ended up renting a room in this big house and a lot of them were vegetarians and everything. Then I started working and putting myself through vet tech school and the more I started to work with animals, the more I just couldn’t eat that stuff anymore.”

  I nod, not even able to visualize moving to the city and living with almost total strangers. I’ve rarely even been into the city, and whenever I have it always seems so big and swarming and overwhelming to me. At least I’m only a thirty-minute drive from home. And Lauren isn’t really a stranger. Not like that.

  “Why’d you come back?” I ask. Now that I’m staying here—I can’t say living here—maybe Lauren will tell me why she moved back to Clayton.

  Lauren pushes her sandwich around on her plate. “Honestly, I never thought I would come back here. Too close to everything that happened. But money was one reason. It’s so much cheaper here. The vet office I was working at in Houston closed, and I hadn’t found a new job yet. Some of the other kids I was hanging out with could, like, go and ask their parents for help or move back home for a few months with their families if they had to. And I couldn’t. Obviously.”

  I nod and wonder how close Lauren came to having nowhere to go. The idea makes me shiver a bit.

  “Anyway, remember how I told you about Dr. Treats, the vet I work for?” Lauren continues. “He’d always been so nice to me when I was younger, when I would bring him all these stray animals I’d tried to take care of. He knew I was part of Calvary and he never made a big deal of it or anything. I think he was worried about me even. A few months after I ran away I got him to write my letter of reference for vet tech school, and he told me if I ever needed a job, I was welcome back here. So here I am.”

  She gets up to take her plate to the kitchen and keeps talking. “Plus, I needed to leave the city because there was all this stuff with this guy I was dating … but that’s a long story…” Her voice trails off.

  I think about the boy with the black hair, his lips on Lauren’s, the picture still tucked in a spot where she can see it every day. If she keeps his picture up then was the stuff that happened between them good? Or bad? It had to have been bad if it made Lauren move away, but then why keep the picture up? Suddenly, Pastor Garrett’s threatening voice is in my head. The Bible reminds us that dating is just practice for divorce. How can we fully commit to our future partner if we have the attitude that it is all right to spend time with someone only until we tire of them?

  If Lauren hadn’t dated that boy, would she be happier? Was Faith happier for having courted Paul under the watchful eyes of our parents?

  “So, remember the other afternoon how we kind of talked about how you have to get out of this apartment?” Lauren says, walking back into the living room. “I think it would be good for you. And I think I’ve found you the perfect opportunity.”

  “Oh,” I say, putting my sandwich down, suddenly too anxious to take another bite.

  “What about a job?” she continues, giving me a hopeful smile. “I think I found you one.”

  Now I really can’t eat. Of course I’ve seen how Lauren keeps careful track of her money, adding and subtracting numbers on a piece of paper she keeps along with her bills in a file folder by the television. I can’t expect to simply live here, stay here, and have her pay for everything. I can’t be a burden to her. Perhaps I’ve already become one.

  “What kind of job?” I ask. I can’t possibly be qualified to do anything.

  “Dr. Treats’s wife is a real estate agent,” Lauren says, tucking her feet underneath her as she sits down again. “I was telling him about everything that’s going on, and he said he had an idea, so he ca
lled his wife. It turns out she needs help rearranging her entire filing system and updating stuff on her computer and some other random stuff in her home office. It was supposed to be her big summer project, but it’s not going well. She needs serious help. I’ve met her a couple of times and she’s super nice, plus it’s perfect because I can walk to work and you can use my car to get to her house.”

  “Does she know I’m only seventeen?” I ask.

  “You’ll be eighteen at the end of the summer, Rachel,” Lauren reminds me. “That’s not so far away. The job would only be a few days a week, but she doesn’t have any problem paying you in cash. Ten dollars an hour.”

  In a few weeks I’ll be eighteen. It means I’ll be a legal adult, and my parents can’t do anything to me if I keep staying here. Even though I can’t imagine them coming after me since they made me leave in the first place, it still hurts that my own parents don’t want to at least come and check on me. Do they truly not care? My throat starts up with that old familiar ache. It’s been a few hours since I cried last, and I’d like it to stay that way. I swallow hard and ask Lauren, “Do you think I can do it? The job, I mean.”

  “Yes, Miss I-Learned-to-Navigate-the-Internet-All-By-Myself,” Lauren says, taking her laptop from where she keeps it by the side of her chair. “You can totally do it. You’re a smart cookie, and not just about housekeeping and babies, all right?”

  “Okay,” I say. “Then I’ll do it. Thank you, Lauren.”

  “Sure,” Lauren says. “Diane—that’s Mrs. Treats—says you can come by tomorrow around ten in the morning. I’ll give you the directions later.”

  “Wait, tomorrow?” I say.

  “Yes, tomorrow,” Lauren says, shaking her head at me and smiling. “You know the saying. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.”

  “I don’t know that saying,” I say.

  “That’s because it’s not in the Bible. But seriously, there’s some truth to it. Don’t stress, Rachel. Mrs. Treats is crazy nice. She even baked me a vegan cake as a housewarming gift when I moved back to Clayton. Hey, wouldn’t it be so hilarious if her first name was Candy? Then she’d be Candy Treats.”