The doorbell rang.
Liesel swiped at her face, listening. They lived too far out in the woods to ever get random guests, not even by proselytizing religious groups. She wasn’t expecting a package delivery.
The doorbell rang again, then again. Liesel quickly got a tampon and took care of herself, wiping her nose with tissue this time. She washed her hands quickly and threw on a robe, belting it as she hobbled down the stairs. She thought for sure whoever was interrupting her self-indulgent weepfest would’ve left by the time she got there, so when she opened the door and saw the young woman standing there holding a baby, two small children beside her, Liesel blinked several times. The vision didn’t waver or disappear, which meant it was real.
“Hello?” Liesel said. “Can I help you?”
The girl, who couldn’t have been any older than sixteen or seventeen, opened her mouth but no words came out. She wore a nightgown and a hooded sweatshirt with a broken zipper. Work boots that were too big for her, Liesel noted with growing concern. The baby in her arms had no coat, just a ragged blanket tucked around it. The kids, a towheaded boy and a matching little sister, weren’t dressed any better.
Liesel clutched the throat of her robe closer to her neck. “Are you okay? What’s wrong? Can I help you?” she repeated.
“I hope so,” the girl said finally in a hoarse voice that sounded as if she’d spent her share of recent time crying, too. “I’m here to see Christopher Albright.”
Chapter 2
S
unny is thirteen when the new girl arrives with her mother in Sanctuary. New people do show up sometimes, but it’s usually single women or men, not families. The women are almost always already pregnant from one of the Family Superior men. That was how Sunny’s mom had joined the family. It wasn’t a secret or anything. John Second had brought her to the light, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to her, that’s what Sunny’s mom says. Always with a smile.
The new girl doesn’t smile very much. She’s tall, with supershort hair like a boy’s that she wears spiked up for the first few weeks, until she runs out of the hair gel she hides under her bed and discovers wet soap doesn’t work the same. She has freckles and dark eyes she smudges with lots of black liner until John Second calls her up to the front of the chapel and makes her wash her face in front of everyone. Women in the Family of Superior Bliss don’t cover what the Maker gave them with makeup that hides their light. The girl definitely doesn’t smile then. She cries, loud and long and hard, and they make her go to the silent room for it. When she comes out, she talks even less than she did before.
There are lots of kids in the family, but all of them, like Sunny, were born into it. This new girl’s name is Bethany, and she doesn’t change it. Her mother changed her own name from Joyce to Joy. Nobody made her, she just did because she said she wanted to fit in. Her daughter doesn’t seem to care about fitting in.
This fascinates Sunny, who’s never had a choice about fitting in or not. She does what she’s told. She lets her hair grow long and braids it, she dresses modestly, she keeps her face clean and scrubbed. But secretly, down deep inside the place she would never let anyone see, she wants to be more like Bethany and less like Sunshine.
Bethany won’t talk to Sunny. Not even to say “leave me alone,” though it’s obvious that’s what she means when she turns her back and walks away without even looking at what Sunny’s holding in her hand. It’s a cookie Sunny pinched from the kitchen, not a homemade kind but one from the stash way back in the pantry, behind the bulk bags of flour and rice. Sunny doesn’t actually like them. The cream in the middle is too sweet, the outer chocolate cookies almost bitter compared to the ones Neveah makes from oats and peanut butter, honey and raisins. Sunny stole the cookie for Bethany, who eats hardly anything and complains all the time about how much she misses McDonald’s. Sunny’s never eaten there, though she’s passed the golden arches and knows what it is. It’s junk food. Bad for the vessel, bad for the soul.
Sunny thought Bethany would like the junk-food cookie that’s hidden away from everyone. Nobody’s supposed to know it’s for John Second to nibble at along with his equally secret coffee in the morning. When Bethany walks away, her shoulders hunched, her once-spiked hair flat down on the back of her skull, Sunny follows her.
“Wait,” Sunny says.
Bethany pauses.
“Where are you going?”
“I hate it here.” It’s not the answer to Sunny’s question. Bethany still doesn’t turn, but her voice gets harder. Rougher. Her shoulders shake and her fists clench. “I hate it. I want to go home. Living with my dad would be better than living here!”
“So…why don’t you?” The cookie is half crumbled in Sunny’s palm. “Go home, I mean.”
Bethany turns then. “Are you kidding me? You’re kidding, right? I mean, even you can’t be that stupid.”
Sunny blinks rapidly. Takes a step back. Her mouth opens and shuts without letting out a single word.
Incredibly, Bethany laughs, though it sounds awful. Like hinges squealing. “First of all, my dad doesn’t want me to live with him. He got remarried to a complete bitch, and they have some kids now. Together. There’s no room in his house for me. Second, don’t you get it? Walk away from this place? How’m I supposed to do that?”
“The front gate,” Sunny says.
Bethany shakes her head. Laughs again. It sounds worse this time. “You think I could just walk out the front gate?”
“Well…” Sunny looks down at her hand. Crumbled cookie. Smears of dark, white bits mixed in it. “Why not? It’s how you came in, right?”
“You’re an idiot.”
Sunny blinks again, feeling the sting of tears and forcing them away. “You shouldn’t call names.”
“Right. You’ll…what?
Make a report
on me?”
Sunny shakes her head. “I won’t.”
“It won’t matter if you do. Go ahead.”
“I don’t want to,” Sunny says. “Really, I don’t.”
“Why are you so sweet?” Bethany shouts, sending Sunny back another step. Then another. And another. “You wacko? You believe in all this stuff? You like it here, you love it! You love this place!”
“Of course I do!” Sunny’s not sure she’s ever shouted, not in thirteen years, though probably as a baby she screamed, at least a little. Babies do that before they learn to hush and shush. It hurts her throat to shout, but not as bad as the pain inside her from what Bethany is saying. “Of course I love it here. It’s my home!”
“You like going to bed with old men? You want to be what…the one true wife or whatever it’s called?” Bethany’s mouth twists, making her ugly. “You like getting knocked up with their babies, right? You like spending every day in this place scrubbing floors, starving or eating spoiled food? Well, I don’t! I hate it! I hate it!”
“So leave!” Sunny cries and claps a hand over her mouth. Words squeak out between her fingers anyway. “If you hate it so much, then leave.”
Bethany walks away.
Two days later, she’s gone. John Second calls a meeting in the chapel while Papa looks out over all of them with bleary eyes. Papa stares at them a long, long time without saying anything, though his mouth is open. Papa coughs so hard he drools. Finally, he crooks a finger; John Second leans close and listens.
When he straightens up, he says, “If anyone knows where she went, you’d better make a report now.”
Saying nothing would be as bad as speaking with a liar’s tongue. Worse, even, because John Second’s asked right out loud for an answer. Besides, Bethany said Sunny was stupid. Sunny tells them about Bethany’s dad’s house. This makes Bethany’s mother snort with laughter. Bethany’s dad lives four hours away. Without money or a ride, there’s a good chance her daughter didn’t get very far.
Not far enough, anyway. Sunny doesn’t know how they find her, but they bring her back and put her in the silent room. Bethany isn’t quiet. She screams for a long time while the rest of them pretend they hear nothing. They walk past and ignore the shrieks and sobs. They make their faces like stone.
When the crying stops, John Second says there will be another day before they can let Bethany out, so she understands what it really means to be silent and learn to listen. And the day after that, Sunny is in the wrong place at the right time to see them pull Bethany out of the silent room. She’s limp and still and pale except for the parts where there’s blood.
Nobody speaks of it. Ever. Not even Bethany’s mother. It’s like Bethany never existed except in some made-up place inside Sunny’s brain, and she knows that can’t be true because if she’d made her up, Bethany would never have called Sunny stupid. She’d have been Sunny’s friend. And she wouldn’t have killed herself, either. She’d have stayed inside Sanctuary the way Sunny does, scrubbing floors and waiting for the rainbow to take them through the gates.
Sunny has thought of Bethany often over the years. Her freckles. Her smudged eyes. Her hair. Most of all, the things she’d screamed when she was in the silent room, about how she hated the family. Hated Sanctuary. She’d screamed out lists of places and things she
didn’t
hate. McDonald’s, Starbucks, Hersheypark, Walmart, Ocean City. Cheeseburgers, cable television, rap music, video games, Coca-Cola, sugar, cupcakes, French fries. Eyeliner, lipstick, tampons, birth control.
Those were worldly things, and Sunny thought of them now. What had been so wonderful about worldly things that had made having them so much better than being in Sanctuary? What was it about the world that had made Bethany willing to give up any chance she had of going through the gates?
Here in this tiny, pink-painted bathroom in her father’s house, her
biological
father’s house, the man she hadn’t even known existed before yesterday, Sunny wondered how long it would be before John Second discovered where she’d gone and came to take them back to Sanctuary. She washed her hands over and over again. They were almost raw with clean, but she washed them again anyway. Her children were in the kitchen with her father’s wife. Her children were outside, and Sunny was inside, and she should go to them, but instead she squirted more soap into her palm and ran the water so hot it turned her skin red.
She ought to go out, but all she could do was look at her face in the mirror and wonder what in this world was so wonderful it was worth dying for.
Chapter 3
“H
ere,” Liesel said to the little boy sitting propped up on one of the kitchen bar stools. “Do you like chocolate milk?”
“He’s never had it. But he will probably like it. It’s sweet, right?” said the boy’s mother doubtfully.
She’d been in the bathroom so long Liesel had started to worry, but now she was out. She’d said her name was Sunny. Sunshine. It was a ridiculous name but suited her, with the blond, blond hair and those blue eyes.
Chris and Liesel both looked at her. It had taken him almost forty minutes to get home, and that had been after twenty minutes of Liesel trying to reach him. Close to two hours had passed since Liesel had opened the door to find Sunshine and her children on the doorstep, and it already seemed like a lifetime.
“Yes,” Liesel said. “It’s sweet.”
The little boy’s name was Happy. Liesel had misunderstood at first, thought the girl said the boy was happy. She’d laughed when she saw Sunny meant it was his name. The baby sleeping in her arms she’d called Bliss, and the toddler sacked out on the leather couch in the family room was named Peace. Liesel wasn’t a fan of trendy, strange names—if she ever had a baby, she intended to go with something classic. Maybe Ava for a girl. Edward for a boy.
“Babe,” Christopher said. He leaned against the counter with an empty bottle in one hand, looking as if he wished it were a bottle of whiskey. “Can you get me another beer?”
Liesel opened the fridge and handed him one, then focused on her husband’s daughter. His
grandchildren
…bitterness rose in her throat, but she swallowed it. Hard.
Happy sipped cautiously at the milk. He touched the tip of his tongue to the milk, then looked up at his mother. She smiled at him.
“Is it good, my sweetheart?” Sunny asked.
He nodded with a grin, then tipped the cup to his mouth and drank. When he took it away, he left a creamy brown mustache behind. His mother leaned forward to wipe it clean with her thumb, which she then licked. Liesel’s mother had done the same thing to her as a child. Liesel had always been repulsed, but knew she’d probably have done the same if it were her son.
“Mmm,” Sunny murmured. “It
is
sweet.”
Liesel found her voice again. Too bright, too shiny. Her mouth tasted metallic from it. “Happy, would you like to watch some cartoons while your mommy talks to me and Christopher?”
The little boy looked to his mother for confirmation. She bit her lower lip and pushed her waist-length braid over her shoulder. “We don’t watch television,” Sunny said.
Liesel shot Christopher a look. No television? She ran a hand over Happy’s hair, blond and long like his mother’s, though his hung in thick curls just past his shoulders. Her husband ran a hand over his own hair, grown a little longer in the front than his usual style. It kept getting in his eyes.
Christopher’s daughter drew in a breath. “But I guess it would be okay. Go ahead, my sweetheart. Mama will be right over here.”
Liesel took the little boy by the hand, the cup of chocolate milk in the other, and led him over to the television in the family room. She set it to the cartoon station. Sunny twisted on the bar stool to watch them, but seemed satisfied enough that her son was safe to turn back to look at Christopher. Her father, Liesel thought as she heard Sunny talking. Christopher was her father.
“He’ll probably fall asleep like Peace did. We’re all very tired.”
Christopher drank deeply from his bottle of beer. Probably one too many for him. Liesel didn’t like it when he drank too much. He started telling jokes, thinking he was funny. Getting frisky and fumble-handed, but his kisses were always sour.
“I made up the guest bedroom for them,” Liesel said when he didn’t speak. “Sunny, maybe you want to take a shower or something? I have some clothes that will fit you. I don’t have anything for the kids—”
“I brought some things for them. Just a few. We didn’t have much time.” Sunny’s voice cracked, and for the first time the cool mask of her expression crumpled. She put a hand over her eyes and drew in a few hitching breaths.
Liesel looked at her husband again, trying to tell him something without saying it out loud. Like that ever worked. When he didn’t say anything, she rolled her eyes and turned to Sunny.
“Shh. Don’t worry about it. The guest room has a queen bed. You’ll be okay until we can make other arrangements.” Liesel squeezed Sunny’s shoulder again, waiting until the girl took her hand from her eyes to look at her. “Sunny. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Sunny blinked rapidly, her eyes large and so, so blue. The shape of her eyes was different than Christopher’s, but the color was the same. An unusual shade of blue with white spangles around the iris—a family trait he’d told her had been shared by his father and two of his uncles. Liesel had always hoped to see eyes that color in a child of her own.
If there was any doubt this girl belonged to Liesel’s husband, those eyes chased it away. Christopher had given some other woman what he was willing to give his wife only by a lack of prevention, not effort. How many times had he told her that he didn’t want children? That he didn’t like kids. How many times had his lip curled at the sight of a toddler running rampant in a restaurant while he pointed out to her that was exactly why they were better off without any rugrats. A thousand memories washed over her like waves of broken glass, each one stinging and leaving behind a wound.
“Thanks, Liesel. Christopher,” Sunny said quietly. “Thank you.”
Liesel didn’t ask him to help her with Sunny or the kids. Cartoons forgotten, she took them upstairs and showed them the guest bedroom, which had been used only the few times when her mother came to stay. It seemed suddenly too small, stuffed with three children and a young woman who seemed also very much a child.
Liesel went to the windows to open the curtains and let in the light. “The bathroom’s through this door, the shower—” Liesel stopped, stunned when she turned around to see Sunny had already begun stripping out of her clothes. The casual nudity was surprising enough, but the scars were really what set her back a step.
White slashes like claw marks on Sunny’s pale back.
She turned, giving Liesel an eyeful of her nipples while the baby in her arms sucked greedily from one of them. Her tuft of pubic hair was thick, ungroomed; Liesel couldn’t remember the last time she’d been face-to-face with a naked woman who’d had more than a landing strip.
“I’ll take Bliss in with me,” Sunny said as though nothing at all was out of place. “Happy, Peace. Come with Mama and wait in the bathroom while I take a shower, okay?”
Happy and Peace stared at Liesel without smiles. Big wide eyes, solemn faces. Peace had a finger stuck in her mouth. She hadn’t spoken a word the entire time she’d been here.
“The shower has to run for a minute or two before it gets hot,” Liesel managed to say. “There’s soap, shampoo, towels and stuff under the sink. I’ll be downstairs with your…with Christopher. Will you be okay?”
Sunny stared at her so blankly, Liesel knew she’d asked a stupid question. What did okay even mean to a girl like Sunny? Instead, Liesel backed out of the room and went downstairs to her husband.
“I’m sorry,” Christopher said before she could even speak.
Liesel’s laugh was low and without much humor, but it surprised her anyway. “I just don’t get it, Christopher. Why didn’t you tell me?”
His mouth worked, and he drew in a breath or two. “I didn’t really know.”
There’d been a number of times in their marriage when he’d pissed her off. Mostly doing the sort of dumb stuff husbands always do that rub their wives the wrong way. He never answered his cell phone and he made plans without asking her first; he couldn’t put a towel in the hamper even if it would’ve saved a basketful of kittens. But she’d never thought he was in the habit of lying to her, at least not about important things. So as soon as the words slipped out of his mouth, she knew he could tell she thought he was so full of shit his eyes had turned brown.
“Not really,” he added quickly, like he could somehow salvage this.
There was no saving it. Liesel gave him a look of such bone-deep disgust her face ached with it. Her lip actually curled.
“I never… I didn’t… I’m sorry,” Christopher said miserably. “There’s not even any proof she
is
my daughter.”
Again, it was the absolute wrong thing to say. “All you have to do is look at her. Or her little boy. Christopher, my God, he looks just like that picture of you, the one your mom had framed in her living room.”
Christopher shook his head, fingers squeezing Liesel’s arm until a glance from her made him let go. “I mean, Trish told me the baby wasn’t mine. She swore to me that she’d been sleeping with that guy she ran away with, that the baby was his. She never told me otherwise, how was I supposed to know? She never came to me for money or help or anything.”
Trish. Christopher’s first wife, the one he never spoke of, not even in the most casual of ways that Liesel sometimes talked about her college boyfriend. Stories about places they’d gone, things they’d done together, in that time before she met Christopher. It wasn’t that she hadn’t known about Christopher’s brief first marriage. Just that she’d never really had to deal with it. With Trish.
“She never came back to me, Liesel. Once she left me, that was the last I heard from her. All I knew was that Trish had gone off with that guy, and they were living in that…place.”
“That cult,” Liesel whispered. “We all know that’s what it is. I mean, they say it’s a church, but you know it isn’t, not really.”
“A cult is technically a church, I guess.”
“What, for tax purposes?” Another humorless laugh wormed its way out of her. “You’ve driven past there, the big gates and that fence all around it. I’ve heard that the police have been out there half a dozen times on reports of child abuse and stuff. They don’t send their kids to school or to the hospital if they’re sick or anything.”
She thought of the marks on Sunny’s back. The thought turned her stomach. “Oh, God, Christopher, do you think those children have been abused?”
Christopher pulled her close so that her cheek rested against his chest. “I don’t know.”
She shuddered. “She has marks on her back.”
“What kind of marks?”
“Like scars. Like…whip marks.”
Christopher grimaced. “God.”
“She says you’re her dad, that her mother told her to come here. If they were being abused it makes sense that she’d send them here.”
“There has to be a way to find out.”
“If they were abused? You can’t just…blurt it out. I don’t think you can just ask them.” She shuddered again. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“No. I meant a way to find out if she’s really mine.”
Liesel frowned. “Like what, a DNA test or something?”
“Sure. Of course. Something like that.”
Liesel pushed away from him, her frown twisted into a scowl. “How can you say that? Even if she’s not genetically your kid, Christopher, she
thinks
you’re her dad. Her mother obviously thought so. And you can’t just… What are you going to do? Turn them away? Put them out? Oh, my God, you can’t even think of that!”
Christopher shook himself and reached for her, though she didn’t let him touch her. “I didn’t say that. What the hell kind of man do you think I am?”
“Apparently,” Liesel said coldly, “the sort who had a kid almost twenty years ago and never bothered to have anything to do with her.”
“That’s not fair.” His jaw tightened. He emptied his bottle into the sink and tossed it into the recycling container, where it landed with a clatter. “So not fair.”
She softened, but didn’t touch him. “I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s not fair. None of this is. You didn’t know. But they’re here now. She came to us. We’re not turning her out, at least not tonight. Not until we find out more about what’s going on.”
Her husband frowned. “I didn’t say I thought we should turn them out.”
He didn’t have to say it. She could see it in his face. Still, she let him lie, just this little bit, so that neither of them had to admit he was being a bastard. She nodded once, sharply. Above them, the shower stopped. Silence.
“I’m sorry,” Christopher said again, no lie in him this time. “I really am.”
“Can you heat up some soup or something for dinner? Make some grilled cheese. I’m sure they’re probably starving. I’ll go check and make sure they’re okay.” She paused, then stood on her toes to kiss his cheek. At the sound of small feet on the ceiling, something lifted inside her that had been heavy for a very long time.
“They can stay until we figure out what’s going on,” he said. “I’ll try to get in touch with Trish… Ah, shit. Shit.”
He looked so miserable she had to take pity on him, even as something went a little gleeful inside her at how stricken he seemed to be at the idea of even calling Trish on the phone. She squeezed him.
“It’s too late now to do anything tonight except let them get some sleep. They’re exhausted and honestly, so am I. We can work this out in the morning.”
“Yeah,” her husband said. “Okay.”
On the way upstairs, a slow wave of cramps rippled through her guts, the monthly aches in her womb sudden and profound. Every part of her still hurt from her fall, but the pain inside her was worse than any of them. Liesel thought again of those tiny faces, the big eyes. What had she been hoping for so desperately? And what had shown up, literally, on her doorstep?