by Katie Henry
“Downstairs,” she says. “Now.”
I swallow my pride. I swallow all my terrible thoughts. I leave her in the doorway.
Eleven
OUR COUCH ISN’T as nice as Martha’s. I’m sure it was more expensive. I’m sure it ties the room together. But I can’t sink into it. And sitting here alone, while Mom is upstairs systematically destroying my room, it’s never felt more uncomfortable.
When Dad comes in the door, it’s obvious Mom texted him, because he heads straight for the stairs.
“Dad,” I call out to him, half rising from the couch. If he’d stop, I can explain before Mom sets the stage for Our Daughter’s Downward Spiral, a three-act tragedy ending with me selling my teeth for black-tar heroin. If he’d stop, I could make him understand. But he only throws me one sidelong look before continuing up the stairs. The disappointment in his eyes socks me in the stomach. I slump back down on the couch.
After ten minutes of hushed conversation and a couple of disconcerting thumps, Dad comes back down. He sits in his favorite chair. I avoid his eyes, focusing on the dark wood of the table between us.
Upstairs, something solid and heavy lands on the floor.
“What’s she doing?” I look up at the ceiling.
“She’s looking at the things you bought.”
Oh no. “Do you mean my new books?”
“I mean your new subzero sleeping bag.”
There’s another bang upstairs. My temper crackles again.
I meet Dad’s eyes. This time, I don’t look away. “Why aren’t you stopping her?”
He does an honest-to-goodness double take. “Excuse me?”
“She’s trashing my room, she’s going through stuff I bought with my own money. It’s not fair.”
“Fair,” he repeats, like he’s never heard the word before.
“They’re my things.”
“They’re in our house and you’re our sixteen-year-old daughter.”
That only adds heat to the brush fire inside my chest. “So you and Mom own me like you own the house?”
“We have a mortgage, Ellis.”
That’s fine. The bank can raise me. I’d prefer it.
“Is this okay to you?” I ask. He shuts his eyes. Sighs. “Do you think what she’s doing is okay?” I ask again, willing my voice not to crack.
“I wish she wouldn’t handle it like this.”
“Then do something about it.”
He shakes his head, like, Not going to happen. I wonder if it’s hard sitting upright, with absolutely no backbone.
“You’re my dad.” And this time, my voice does crack. “She’s awful to me, all the time, and you know she shouldn’t be, so why don’t you ever do anything about it?”
Dad opens his mouth, but stops when we both hear the stomp of Mom’s shoes on the stairs. With flinty eyes and perfect posture, she lowers herself next to me. I shrink away.
“Explain,” Mom says.
I explain. Or, I explain as much as I need to. I tell them about Hannah, a girl who has dreams about the end of the world. I tell them about the way she seems to know things before I say them. I tell them that the last days are coming soon, with snow and ice.
I don’t tell them what day it’s coming. I don’t tell them Hannah is a client of Martha’s. I don’t tell them Hannah has secrets she hasn’t yet shared. I’m exactly as honest as I need to be, and nothing more.
When I’m done, Mom and Dad just look at me. Bewildered, a word that implies being lost in the wild. That’s exactly how they look. Totally lost.
Mom sighs, long and heavy. “You bought these things because your friend told you the world was ending.”
“Yes.”
“And you believed her.”
“Yes.”
Mom blinks at me. “Why?”
What an odd question, coming from her. I’ve heard Mom asked the same question, by family friends who are secular: Why do you believe what you do? And I’ve seen her smile serenely and say: Because first I felt its truth, and then I lived its truth.
There’s no other answer to give.
“I had a personal revelation.”
Mom and Dad look at each other. Then back at me.
“I prayed to know if it was true. And it is. Because when I prayed, when I asked if it was true, I felt the Spirit.”
More silence. More staring.
“I felt the Spirit,” I say again, because clearly they didn’t hear me. “I asked for a revelation, I got a revelation, I felt the—”
Mom waves her hand, pushing the words away. “No, honey, you didn’t.”
My throat constricts. I force it open. “Yes, I did.”
“I’m sure it seemed like the same thing,” Dad says, “but it wasn’t, not if it you made you afraid like this. ‘Faith is the opposite of fear,’ didn’t we teach you that?”
I have faith. And I have fear. I believe in my religion. And I believe in Hannah.
“I prayed to know the truth,” I say. “You taught me that, too. And I received an answer.”
“Because you wanted to, Ellis,” Mom insists. “Because this is something that worries you and you want to feel like you’re in control of it.” She throws up her hands. “And apparently, you’d believe any crackpot on a street corner who said you could be in control of it.”
My eyes sting. Who is she to talk about control? If I want control, at least it’s for something bigger, something that matters, not policing how my daughter looks and talks and feels. When I look back up at Mom, her face has softened, just a bit.
“What you felt was not the Spirit,” Mom says. “What you felt was your anxiety.”
I don’t believe that. If she were right, how could you ever know what you were feeling was real? How could anyone trust a revelation or prompting? How could anyone trust someone else’s revelation? The church is built on new revelations. If I can’t trust my own promptings, how can I trust any at all?
“How do you know this isn’t the Spirit?” I say, my eyes flicking from Dad to Mom, then back to Dad. “How am I supposed to know it isn’t real, when it feels so real?”
“The next time you have a ‘revelation,’” Mom says, and I can hear air quotes around the word, “you should tell Bishop Keller.”
“Or I can pray with you,” Dad offers, “and tell you whether this is a real prompting.”
Oh, of course. Men. Men with power and Y chromosomes and righteous dominion over me. The only people who could possibly tell me which of my own feelings to trust and which to dismiss as hysteria are men.
I stare at Mom. “Why would Bishop Keller automatically know better than me? Because he’s a priesthood holder and I’m just a girl?”
“Of course not, that isn’t—” Mom flounders. “This is his job. He was called to be our spiritual leader.”
“Yeah, well, a year ago he was just your accountant.”
“Ellis!” Dad gasps.
Mom shakes her head. “What’s the matter with you?”
I have no idea what’s the matter with me.
But I also know what I felt was real. And true. And mine.
“I don’t care what you say,” I tell my mom. Her jaw sets. “I don’t care what Dad says. I don’t care what Bishop Keller or the stake president or every priesthood-holding seventh-grade boy says. The end of the world is coming, and it’s coming soon.”
I push myself off the couch and storm toward the stairs. Mom springs up and grabs my upper arm in a death grip.
“I am not letting you do this to yourself,” she says. “You are not going to hurt yourself like this. It ends now, Ellis, do you understand me? Right now.”
“December, actually,” I tell her. “It’ll all end in December.”
I feel a cold kind of triumph at the flicker of real fear that passes over her face. She steps back a half inch but doesn’t let go of my arm.
“From now on,” she says, and I can tell she’s working to keep her voice even, “you will come straight home after scho
ol. Therapy, church, or home. That’s it. No internet, no hanging out in parks, and no seeing Hannah ever again.”
“Fine!” I yell, when what I really mean is try to stop me. Her grip tightens.
“I mean it,” she says, soft and deadly. “Don’t push me on this.”
“Or what? You’ll take away all the freedom I have? You’ll trash my room again? You’ll yell at me, you’ll make me feel horrible and worthless?” I lean in. “Or will you come up with something new?”
Then Dad is there, prying Mom’s hand off me finger by finger. “Go to your room,” he orders me.
“Fine!” I yell again. This time I do mean it.
Dad knocks on my door an hour later, and opens it without pausing for me to invite him. I guess I’ve given up any kind of privacy. He sits down on the bed next to me. I wait for him to say something. I guess he’s waiting too, because we sit like that, in silence, until finally I can’t take it anymore.
“Why does she hate me?” I blurt out.
Dad looks stricken. But he doesn’t have to ask who I mean. “She doesn’t hate you.”
“She does.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?” I demand.
“Because it’s not nice.”
“What does it matter if it’s nice, it’s true!”
“It’s not.” I look away. He touches me on the shoulder, but I don’t look back. “Elk. You don’t believe that.”
He doesn’t know what I believe. I rub at my eye.
“Your mom doesn’t hate you. She loves you, she loves you like you can’t even imagine. She just . . .” He sighs. “She just wants what’s best for you.”
But how is she so sure what that is? How does everyone seem so sure of what’s best for me? And don’t I get a say in that?
“She doesn’t always handle it the right way,” Dad acknowledges, “but it’s never because she hates you. Just before she got pregnant with you, she had this dream—”
I screw my eyes shut, because I know this, of course I know this, they’ve only told me a thousand times.
“We’d only talked about having a baby—hadn’t made a decision or anything—but she dreamed of being in a green, beautiful garden, with sky all around her, and a graceful, beautiful young woman sitting beside her. Your mom could feel how special this girl was, how pure and precious. The girl said her name was Ellis, and that they’d see each other again soon.”
When I was little, I loved this story. I loved the idea that my mom had met me when I was still a spirit just waiting for a body. I loved the idea that I was fated to be born into my family, that my very existence was ordered and planned. But the older I got, the more distant I felt from the girl in the garden. Beautiful? Not especially. Graceful? Almost never.
The older I got, the more I thought my mom was given the wrong daughter.
“She doesn’t like me as much as Em,” I tell Dad. “You can’t argue with that, even if she doesn’t hate me, Em’s her favorite.”
“Your mom doesn’t have a favorite,” he says.
“Just an unfavorite.”
“That’s not true.”
“But that’s okay,” I say, blinking my eyes until they stop stinging. “That’s okay, I don’t need her to like me as much as Em, it’s okay that I’m her unfavorite. Because—” I take a gulp of air. “I’m your favorite. Aren’t I?”
His shoulders sag as if I’ve thrown him something heavy. “I don’t have a favorite, either.”
I used to be. He can say that all he wants, but I remember. Me on his shoulders at Disneyland, even though Em was smaller. Me helping him fix the kitchen sink, even though I only made the mess worse. Me telling the whole story of the First Crusade at the dinner table and him not once stopping me, even though everyone else was bored. “I used to be your favorite.”
Dad clears his throat. He clasps his hands. “Before you were born—”
“Don’t tell the dream story again, please, I know.”
“This isn’t that one,” he says, suddenly gruff. “Just listen.”
I listen.
“Before you were born,” Dad says, “I didn’t know a single person on Earth with my eyes.”
His eyes? They’re brown. Like mine. Nearly the whole world has brown eyes, and I tell him that.
“Not my exact eyes,” he says. “Same shape, same color, same dark lashes. Everyone in my family has blue eyes, every single one. I never knew anyone with my eyes.”
Dad is my grandparents’ only adopted child, their longed-for son, a hand-picked boy chosen after the birth of their fourth daughter and my grandma’s hysterectomy. His parents love him. His sisters adore him. Aunt Karissa used to dress him up like a doll; I’ve seen the pictures. But they don’t have his eyes.
“But with you . . .” He trails off. Looks up. Tries again. “That first moment I held you, Ellis, it was—you were early, you know, and so, so small. But your nose was my nose. Your ears were my ears. And when you opened your eyes . . .” He breathes out. “It was something holy.”
In my family, we don’t call something holy unless we mean it. Unless we really mean it.
“You don’t know what that’s like,” he tells me. “To see yourself in another person, for the very first time.”
I grab his hand, and hold on tight, the way I used to do when he’d read to me at bedtime. Like if I gripped his thumb hard enough, he’d never turn the light off. Like if I never let go, he wouldn’t, either. “Dad,” I whisper.
“I don’t have favorites,” he says. “I mean that. I don’t love you the most, I couldn’t love either of you kids more than the other. But maybe—” He squeezes my hand. “Maybe it’s true that I needed you the most.”
Twelve
“SO, I KNOW this isn’t our usual day and time,” Martha says. “Do you have any feelings about that?”
I feel like it wasn’t necessary. After sleeping the night in my still-trashed room, I came down for breakfast the next morning and told my parents that I’d thought about what we’d discussed. I’d prayed about it. And I’d decided they were right, after all. If they were skeptical of the sudden change of heart, they didn’t say anything. Maybe because Em was at the table too. But Dad texted me at lunch and told me to go to Martha’s after school, all the same.
“Your parents and I had a conversation this morning,” Martha says.
I bite my lip.
“Do you have an idea of what we talked about?”
“Snowshoes?” I say. “Global cooling patterns?”
“We did talk about your recent purchases.”
“I don’t know how my mom made it seem,” I say, “but I didn’t steal, and I didn’t even lie, because no one asked me about it.”
“Do you think that’s what made them concerned enough to call me?” Martha asks. “The money?”
“They think it’s stupid. They think caring about it makes me stupid.”
“It sounds like the way they reacted to it really hurt you,” she says. “I’m sorry that happened.”
It only makes me feel worse, when someone tells me they’re sorry. I know it hurt. But if I’m the only one who knows that, I can shove that hurt deep inside my chest cavity. I can nestle it right next to my parents’ disappointment, and Tal touching my arm, and the way the light hit Lia Lemalu’s hair—
I dig a fingernail into my palm. I picture sewing my insides shut with my mom’s embroidery thread, pulling each stitch tight.
“Would you like to talk about what happened yesterday?” Martha asks. “Your mom didn’t go into a ton of detail, but I’m thinking it was probably a tough night for you.”
If you talk, you might tell her about Hannah. You might ruin your only chance at survival, just like you ruin everything.
I shake my head.
“Are you sure?”
If you tell her, she won’t understand. Your own parents don’t understand. You can’t trust them and you can’t trust her.
“I did more research,” I say, a
nd ignore the disappointment on her face. “I think we should talk about my eschatology research.”
“Okay,” Martha says, but doesn’t look thrilled. “Maybe you can tell me about a time when it didn’t happen.”
“But that’s every time,” I say. “Because it hasn’t happened yet.”
“That’s true,” Martha says. “Just tell me about one.”
I don’t even have to take out Kenny #14. I know the one I want to talk about.
“There was a woman named Thiota. And she lived in—we’d call it Germany now, but it was the Carolingian Empire. It was before the first millennium. And Thiota lived in a world where the Catholic Church ruled, totally. The Church was the Empire and the Empire was the Church and you didn’t get to pick your beliefs. You didn’t get to pick anything, really, if you were a commoner, like Thiota. Or a girl, like Thiota. You did what your priest told you. And he did what the bishop told him. And the bishop did—well, you get it, right?”
“Yes,” Martha says. “A rigid society with lots of rules but not a lot of freedom.”
“But then—and we don’t know how old she was, or why she started, or even what she said, but Thiota started prophesying about the end of the world.” I pause. “People listened to her. Even though she was a girl. And a nobody. Even though they could have listened to wealthy men with power and the whole church behind them, people listened to her. They brought her gifts. They asked for her blessing. Not just other women, but men, even some priests. She had a following.”
“Do you think they were scared, her followers? Maybe they needed someone to tell them it would be all right?”
“Maybe.” But I also wonder—is that all she was preaching about? Was it just the end of the world, or was it Judgment Day, too? About the meek inheriting the Earth and the rich being turned away? About justice, and fairness, and rightness?
