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coat. A belly rub was all it took to make her love me.
    That’s when someone said, “What do you want?”
    I looked up. It was Sister Rita. “I don’t know if you remember me.”
    “I remember you. You shouldn’t be here.”
    To be perfectly honest, Rita was never one of my favorites. She used her position as first wife to boss everyone around. You can’t marry a new wife without the first wife’s permission. So every time my dad wanted a fresh bride he went groveling back to Rita. I don’t even want to think about what he had to do to get her to say yes.
    “I’d like to see my mom’s room.”
    “No.”
    “Please. Just for a few minutes.”
    “No. God sent you away. The Prophet revealed it. I can’t go against his will.”
    I know it’s hard to believe people really talk like that, but consider this: if you didn’t know anything else, if your only source of information was the Prophet, if you spent seven hours in church on Sunday listening to a man who claimed to have a direct line to God, who your father and mother swore was a Prophet, and your brothers and sisters, and your teachers, and your friends, and everyone else assured you, promised you, his word was the word of God, and those that he damned were damned for all of eternity, you’d probably believe it too. You wouldn’t know how to form a doubt. The Prophet told us all sorts of shit and we believed it, all of it, just ate it up.
    Like once he told us that Europe had been destroyed in a battle of good and evil. He said it didn’t exist anymore. France—no longer on the map. He described the fires of Paris, the bodies in the Seine, the cathedrals reduced to rubble, the wolves that had returned to the Champs-Élysées. I had no reason—no ability—to doubt any of it. Everyone around me said it was true. We didn’t have tv, there was no internet when I was a kid, everything we knew came from the Prophet. The first time I met a Frenchman in Vegas, I was shocked. I actually said, “How did you survive?” That’s the level of brainwashing I’m talking about. When I first told Roland all this, he said, “Oh honey, you’ve
got
to be kidding? You should go on
Oprah
or something.” But I’m not kidding.
    “I’m sorry about my dad,” I said. “I’m sure this is really difficult for you.”
    “Go on, the Prophet doesn’t want you here. You’re scaring the kids. Turn around and go.” The windows had started to fill with faces, eight or ten coming to look down at the stranger in the yard. Did any recognize me? Did any wonder how I fit into all the lies? I imagined one child, at least one, whispering,
Take me with you.
I imagined a tiny finger tapping on the glass.
    Rita was now standing before me. I could smell the summer peaches on her breath. I’ll try to be nice, but let’s just say she was the complete opposite of sexy in her prairie dress and drooping hair bun. The sun had puckered her skin into a gray hide and the grim line of her mouth suggested she hadn’t had a good laugh, or fuck, in fifty years.
    “Jordan, my duty is to protect them. You know that. Now please go.”
    “Protect them from what?”
    “Please. Before I have to call the police.” And then, “I’m sorry.”
    The Mesadale police. You don’t want to run into them. I said good-bye to Rita and Virginia and walked back to the van. Before I got in I looked back to the house. There were two kids in every window now, noses fogging the glass. As I drove down Field Avenue I thought about them. Who were they? Did even Rita know their names? I started thinking about the fate of my siblings: Jamie would be eighteen now, so probably kicked out. Charlotte would be seventeen, most likely married. And Queenie—she’d be twenty. No chance she still lived in the house. It was just a matter of how many sister wives she had by now. And the younger kids? I never got close to them. They were mostly anonymous to me—dozens of girls and boys I passed in the hall, all of them blond