The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  In the end, I agreed. Maybe if he saw what it looked like when people build up secluded lives for themselves in the wild, the stink of bodies living close together, tiny wooden rooms where they lock away what might hurt them, Jude would understand why the last thing I wanted was to live the rest of my life alone in the forest, whether he was there or not.

  Chapter 51

  All week, my mind flits on a loop between Jude’s broken-up face in the pear orchard and Wilson’s words the last time I saw him. You never planned on telling me the truth. Like one of the warden’s old movies, they pass over my mind, frame by frame. Except for reading class, I don’t move from my bed, lying on my side with my back to the Post-it on my affirmation wall, only getting up to relieve the periodic pang in my bladder. Angel sits above me, humming, not asking any questions. When she adjusts her body weight, the bed frame creaks.

  “Special delivery.” Benny stands on the skyway, holding a white envelope in her hands.

  “For me?” I ask, rising from the bed slowly.

  “That’s what it says.” She shows me where my name is written in blue ink across the front.

  “Can you open it for me?”

  “Already did,” she says. She turns the envelope over, and I see a finger’s been run beneath the seal. I take it between my stumps and walk back to my bed. I tug the paper out with my teeth and spread it on my lap.

  Dear Miss Bly,

  We are pleased to inform you that you are a finalist for admission to the Bridge Program. Over one thousand young women from juvenile detention centers across Montana applied, and only five spots will be granted this year. Several representatives from the program will be present at your parole meeting at which time a decision will be made regarding your acceptance into the program. Earning parole is one of the requirements of the program, so your admission will be contingent on your satisfactory exit from detention.

  I scan the letter again, uncertain whether I’ve really learned to read after all. The black-printed words on the page don’t add up. I notice Angel has stopped humming.

  “How?” I ask aloud.

  Angel steps down from her bunk and scans the letter.

  “I didn’t apply,” I say. “I never completed an application.”

  She shrugs, her pale eyes not meeting mine. I remember, then, the application that I found on the floor in her handwriting. “So that’s why I’m deserving. Not because I need your help. But because I am going to make it with or without anybody’s help.”

  My mouth drops open. “You did this,” I breathe.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  “You did this,” I repeat. “You applied for me.”

  She crosses her arms, her eyebrows thrust together.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Why?” She shrugs. “Why not? Because I was bored. Because you weren’t going to. Because there’s nothing good in this place except the possibility of you getting out and making it.”

  She sits heavily on the floor, her back to the cinder-block wall. Her hand covers her forehead.

  “Why won’t you tell me how long you’re in for?” I ask.

  “It’s too depressing.”

  “I can handle depressing.”

  “You’ll just cry.”

  “I won’t,” I say. “Or, I’ll try not to.”

  She sighs. “You know, after I did my uncle in, I got sent to a holding cell at the police station. The pastor from my uncle’s church came to visit. Did you know they can give you religious counsel whether you want it or not? He started lecturing me about how I needed to repent, how I’d done a sin only Jesus was capable of forgiving. He was so specific. What hell smells like and what it feels like to have all your skin burned off, and how you never breathe the same when God leaves your body for good. All I could say was, ‘You’re about ten years too late.’”

  She scoffs. “He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about so I explained to him what my uncle did to me. I used details, too. Anatomical details. I made him squirm, watched his face fill up with heat and his temples go all slick with sweat. He stood up to leave and I told him I had the right to religious counsel, didn’t I? I said ‘Listen. I have a confession,’ real quiet so he had to come back into the room. I told him how I’d crouched in the dark, and when my uncle opened the bedroom door, I held the gun to his Adam’s apple and pulled the trigger. The blood came spurting out of his throat and covered me, head to toe. And it felt good, because I knew it was the last time my uncle would ever touch me again.

  “Well, the pastor’s face gets all disgusted at this, but I could tell it wasn’t disgust at what my uncle did, no. He was disgusted by me.”

  She’s quiet for a long time. She squints like she’s thinking hard.

  “You wanna know how long my sentence is? It’s forty years,” she says. “Forty years. And assholes like my uncle never get caught. The entire system is so fucked.”

  Her brow folds and a tear slides beside her nose. I’ve never seen her cry. She covers her face with her hands. “Fuck!” she shouts.

  The word reverberates around the cinder-block walls. For no reason, I shout it, too. “Fuck!”

  She looks up, surprised.

  “Fuck!” she shouts again, staring at me.

  “Fuck!” I shout.

  She lets her head fall back and closes her eyes. “FUUUUCK!” she screams.

  “A MILLION TIMES FUCK!” I scream with her.

  “What on God’s sacred green Earth is going on?” Benny calls from the skyway. She approaches the bars, her arms crossed.

  “Nothing,” Angel and I say in unison.

  “Didn’t sound like nothing. Sounded like I should give you both solitary for a week.”

  “We were doing group therapy,” I say.

  “Yeah, it’s on doctor’s orders,” Angel agrees. “You can’t punish us for that. It’s against the law.”

  “We could sue,” I say, nodding.

  “I better just let you off with a warning, then,” Benny says. “But if I hear another piece of profanity leave either of your mouths, I’ll get up in your molars with a bar of Irish Spring, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” we chant back.

  Benny recedes back to her post.

  I smile at Angel.

  “Fuck,” I whisper.

  “Fuck,” she whispers back, a smile creeping onto her face. And, inside that smile is the knowledge that some things are just too sad, too screwed up. Sometimes there’s nothing for it but shouting “Fuck” with your best friend at the top of your lungs.

  Chapter 52

  In the morning, a moth flies into my cell, a floating gray piece of barely anything, rising and falling with irregular wing beats. It finds the flat rectangular fluorescent light set into the ceiling and immediately starts banging itself against the beveled plastic.

  I stand and crawl up onto Angel’s bunk, waving my arm toward the moth to knock it away. “What the hell are you doing?” she asks.

  “Help me,” I tell her, my eyes still trained on the crooked gray body. “Capture it. Set it free.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s going to kill itself up against that light,” I say. “That’s what they do. They think it’s the sun.”

  Angel looks at me in that clench-eyed way that tells me she knows we’re brushing against something important, something from the past. She puts her book away and leans out toward the middle of the room, palms curved in cupped shapes. She swings once, then again, and the moth is inside her closed hands.

  She leans back onto the bed, bending her fingers to make a crack so I can see its beating wings, held together by scales and veins. Angel carefully swings off the bunk. At the bars, she lowers her hands, then throws them in the air so the moth can fly out of the cell.

  “It’s gone,” Angel sa
ys. “It’s free now.”

  But I shake my head. “It’ll only do it again, somewhere else.”

  “You can’t prevent that,” she says. “You know that, right? It’s not your job. It never was.”

  And it’s then that I know she can tell what’s just fallen into the fingers of my mind: the rememberings I’ve kept back for months, those frozen moments pushed to the dark corners of my mind. The night Jude and I went back to the Community. The night when everything, all of it, came tumbling down.

  • • •

  That night, the entire world was frozen, including the air, which seemed to hold all things suspended. I looked to my left, where Jude stood, his breath a milky curtain before him. All around, the rigid trees groaned with human-like voices, their insides frozen in the position they’d held themselves before winter hit. I imagined how it might’ve gone, one night in November, they were sleeping and suddenly their entire bodies became stuck like steel. I felt like I’d been in that position all my life, frozen. And, now, suddenly, I could pick my head up and face the winter sky and glimpse the tops of trees and move my body in any motion I chose.

  We knew we’d arrived at the Community by the tiny squares of dull orange light that materialized through the trees, windows of houses where I knew nobody was home. I could smell the purple smoke. They’d be in the Prophet Hall, and he’d be silly with the smoke, face inflamed, eyes tense and bright.

  We circled to the back of my house. In their coops, chickens cooed at us just like they always did at someone they thought might feed them. Jude turned the handle of the back door. We passed bedrooms, the empty kitchen, and climbed the small rickety stairs to the maidenhood room. Jude pushed aside the sliding lock and the door creaked open. Inside, it was dark, but I could make out a small body lying on a pallet. She lay over the covers, her back a slim white sickle in the darkness.

  “Constance,” I whispered.

  She flipped around, her blond braid tucked between her neck and shoulder. Her lips parted almost imperceptibly.

  “You’re back,” she whispered.

  “Yes,” I said, taking a step into the room.

  “To marry the Prophet?”

  “No,” I said, in disgust. “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “To rescue you. To take you with me. To tell you about what it’s really like out there.”

  “We know all that.”

  “No, you don’t. You only know his lies.”

  “He doesn’t lie.”

  The room was freezing but I noticed Constance’s cheeks were flushed. Sweat dappled her forehead. Something about her was different. Something about her had changed.

  “Minnow,” Jude said, his voice low. “Look at—”

  “Who’s he?” Constance interrupted, eyes darting to Jude for the first time.

  “He came with me to save you from this place. That’s what I want you to know. There’s life outside, Constance. There are people, chances to be happy. Jude and I are going away from all this . . . this madness. And I want you to be there with us.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. “I’m getting married.”

  “But you don’t have to. You can escape.”

  Constance’s lips turned up at the edges. “But, I don’t want to escape. I want to marry him.”

  “Minnow,” Jude repeated again, his voice adamant. He tugged vehemently on my shirt sleeve.

  His eyes were hard on Constance, but not her face. I followed his gaze to Constance’s lap. There, folded like rotting meat, were two crumpled, purple stumps.

  The air turned cold. Each cell in my body bucked.

  “Your hands,” I breathed. “Your hands!”

  I knelt beside her bed where her legs were slung to the side. All she wore was a nightgown, the sleeves barely brushing the thin place her hands used to grow from.

  I pictured the scene, Constance wrestled to the ground by those men, her body so much smaller than mine, so much more like a bird than a girl. Did our father cut hers off, too? I hoped she looked him in the eye, like I did. I hoped the look on her face killed him.

  “Minnow, don’t look so stricken.” The way she said it made me look into her fever-blushed face. “You never were very quick, were you? I asked to have them cut off.”

  The entire scene went out of focus. Blurred, then came back again even sharper till I could spot, even from here, the crooked half circle of Xs stitched around her stumps, hear the fevered hitch at the back of her throat when she breathed.

  “After you left, the Prophet repeated God’s message,” she said. “That I was to be his new wife, not you. And I knew I had to do something to be worthy. To prove my devotion.”

  I stared at her. This girl with blue, blue eyes. This girl who I saw as a baby still, the steam that rolled off her little red body on the winter morning she was born. The tuft of damp blond hair. Her hands that gripped at nothing.

  “Do you—do you have any idea what you’ve given up?” I cried.

  “It’s nothing when you’ve got a higher calling.”

  I gaped at her, raw panic rising in my throat. “You’re crazy!” I bellowed, my voice breaking, tears forming at the corners of my eyes. “You’re a lunatic!”

  “Me, a lunatic?” she scoffed. “You’re the one who broke the rules—knowingly. You understand what happens to girls who fraternize out of wedlock.” She shook her head. “And with a Rymanite. You’re sick. You’ve damned yourself for good.” Her eyes were wide open. She was afraid. Of me. She lived in a house of horrors, and she was afraid of me?

  “You can lie to me,” she said. “You can lie to yourself. But you can’t lie to God. He sees straight through you.”

  “Shut up!” I screamed. I struck her across the face, and she wheeled back, her arms crossed in front of her, barely able to move, too sapped from fever. Her stumps were new, so when she swung to hit me and her stump connected with my cheekbone, she crumpled in pain. I swiped her with my elbow and her head flung back. When Jude wrestled me off of her, I saw that blood trickled down her cheek.

  “Minnow, we have to get out of here,” Jude said. “Now. Someone probably heard.”

  “She’s coming with us,” I panted.

  “What?” he demanded. “But she doesn’t want to.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s—brainwashed. I can’t let the Prophet have her.”

  “But, she wants to marry him.”

  “She’s twelve!”

  “Fine,” he barked. “Fine, but how do you suggest we convince her?”

  I looked down at her, a steely look of defiance wound over her features. “We don’t,” I said. “She’s not going to come willingly. We’re taking her with us.”

  Chapter 53

  “You’re back,” I say when I see Dr. Wilson in the doorway. I thought he might have disappeared again.

  “For now,” he says. “I’m going away for a day or two.”

  “My hearing is coming up,” I say. “My birthday’s at the end of the week.”

  He nods.

  “So, are you going to make it?”

  He doesn’t respond. “What are you reading?” he asks instead. I look down at the library book in my lap and move my arm so he can see the title over a backdrop of a whorled galaxy. “Cosmos,” I say.

  “Any good?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m learning things.”

  “Teach me something,” he says.

  “Teach you?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Teach me the best thing you know. The best fact in the universe.”

  At first, I don’t answer. An unconscious prickle of heat has been filling my cheeks, and I can’t figure out why until I realize that no one has ever asked me to teach them something. I never could. I didn’t know anything before.

  “Most of the energy on Earth
comes from the sun,” I explain. “We all run on sun power. And did you also know that everything on Earth, including people, is made of particles of a star that exploded? We’re stars who run off stars.”

  “Wow,” he says. “That really is the best fact in the universe.”

  “You know what I can’t stop thinking about? Jude never knew any of this. He’s alive out there, I can’t tell you how, but I figured it out, and he wants me to find him in the mountains. But I keep thinking that, even if I did find him and told him everything I’ve learned, he wouldn’t understand it in the same way I do now. I don’t know how that can be.”

  “Nobody’s got the same mind. Nobody perceives the same.”

  I nod. “The Prophet said stars were God’s eyes and all that time I knew he was wrong, but I believed him. How is that possible? Belief shouldn’t be compatible with lies, but is.”

  “Did you know any of this stuff six months ago?” he asks, and when I shake my head he says, “If another Prophet came, you’d be ready. You have weapons.”

  I hold up my hands, but he shakes his head. “I’m not talking about those kinds of weapons.”

  “I know some facts about stars, but that doesn’t even begin to answer everything. There’s still too much I don’t know.”

  “You know what I heard the other day?” he asks. “I was listening to the radio in the car and I had to pull over, just to listen. They said scientists think there might be other universes, maybe an infinite amount of universes. Maybe a new universe forms every second. And these universes might have different versions of ourselves, making different choices and leading totally different lives. Problem is, nobody knows if any of those theories are true, but that doesn’t discourage the scientists. The way they see it, if we keep looking, one day we’re bound to find out. We have to be happy to keep searching and not knowing all the time.”

  “You’re talking about God.”

  “No,” he says. “I’m talking about anything you can’t see.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not what Angel thinks.”