The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (20 page)

A
few days later, Dr. Wilson's back in my cell, looking haggard, stubbled and hollow-eyed.

“What happened to you?” I ask.

“I went to Deer Lodge for a couple days.”

“The prison?”

He nods. “Your father tried to kill himself. I spoke to him two days ago and told him we had reason to believe he was responsible for the Prophet's death. He tried hanging himself that night.”

“He's alive?

He nods.

“So, you've got him, then. This proves he's guilty.”

“He's not guilty,” Dr. Wilson says. “We're not charging him.”

“Why?” I sputter.

“We've interviewed all the wives again, some of the older children. They all say he was in the house the entire night.”

“They must be lying.”

“It's improbable they'd all have the same exact story.”

“You can't give up,” I say. “I'll testify that I saw him. Maybe I did. Maybe I'm remembering something.”

“But you've always attested that you were long gone at that point, Minnow,” he says, eyes boring into mine. I look away. “Anyway, I don't even know if your testimony will be usable anymore.” He rubs his eyes hard. “A few of them said they saw a figure watching from the trees. Someone who looked a lot like you. Your father was . . . very certain.”

I press my eyelids closed. “You think I killed the Prophet?”

“No,” he says. “But I think you know who did. And I think it's time that we stop running around in circles.”

I feel myself slowly unwind, like yarn from a skein, pooling on the floor. I'm so close to losing it, the control, the grip. Because I think I want to tell him. I think I want to spill it all right now and damn the consequences.

The consequences. Angel said Dr. Wilson would put me away for life if I told him what really happened. But he's different, he's here to help me. He's
 . . . he's a cop
, I hear Angel say, as if that's all there is to know about him.

“What motivates someone to kill?” I ask.

He smiles a tired smile. “Haven't we already discussed this?”

“I want to know what you think.”

“I think it's control. I think that's why anyone does anything.”

“So, who was the most controlling person in the Community?” I ask.

“You tell me.”

“The Prophet. You know he was.”

“I can't exactly make a case that he'd be a suspect in his own murder.”

“Why not? Why aren't we considering suicide?”

“He had no motivation to kill himself.”

“He was mentally unbalanced. You've said so yourself.”

“He didn't have the kind of mental unbalance that would've resulted in suicide.”

All I can think is that Dr. Wilson is going to feel really stupid when he learns the truth. Because he's wrong. The Prophet did kill himself, in a way. He created the weapon of his own demise.

“I almost forgot. I brought you a present.” He pulls something out of his bag and places it on my bed. It's a used paperback copy of
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
.

“What is it?”

“I thought you'd've learned by now what books are.”

“I
know
it's a book,” I say, insulted. “Why did you get it for me?”

“My son loves Thomas Hardy. I thought you'd like it.”

“Son?” I ask.

He nods. “Jonah.”

“I'll . . . I'll check it out,” I say. “If I have time.”

After he leaves, I turn the cover of the book. It still has the price sticker from a secondhand bookstore in Missoula, revealing he'd paid a whole two dollars, but I'm still grateful for it in a way I can't quite articulate.

There's plenty in the book I don't understand, and those parts stay behind, bolted to the pages, but there are things I can skim from the surface like fat from a milk pail, and I sort through all the information with something like fingers, fingers inside my mind.

I read one paragraph over and over again.

“I don't know about ghosts,” Tess says, “but I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we're alive. A very easy way to feel 'em go is to lie on the grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to want at all.”

I lie on my bed and stare up at the bunk above me, but the effect isn't at all the same. Even looking out the milky skylight doesn't do it. And, I wonder for the first time, when will I see the stars again? Where can I find some on short notice? I want to know if it would work for me, like it did for Tess. I want to know if there's even anything left inside me that could fly so effortlessly.

“H
ey,” Angel whispers after lights-out. “Check it out.”

She's crouched beside my bunk, holding a key card between two fingers.

“Did you steal that?” I ask, squinting at her groggily.

“Hardly,” she says. “You know I'm in good with the guards.”

“What did you do?” I ask warily.

“Christ, I'm not dealing drugs or something. So maybe I worked out a deal with Benny that I wouldn't open up anybody's head for a month, and maybe I made good on the bargain today, and she had to make good on hers or risk me telling Mrs. New she watches soap operas in the back office when she's supposed to be supervising group therapy, but whatever, a good magician never reveals her secrets.” I can tell Angel is excited, but not the agitated kind of excitement like after she takes her medication.

I push aside the covers of my bed. “Where are we going?”

She looks over her shoulder at me. “A holy place.”

• • •

We tiptoe out of the cell—Angel must have spent some time planning this, because somehow it's unlocked—and walk up a set of stairs that end at a heavy metal door. It's been propped open by a brick.

“We have to be quiet,” Angel whispers. “If we wake any of the girls, Benny'll have my balls.”

She shoves her bulk into the door, and a warm breeze touches my face.

We stand on the jail roof, a flat surface covered in popcorn-looking concrete that crunches beneath my shoes. Before us, Missoula stretches in a flat grid of lights, bisected by the slick black of the river. Red taillights twine through streets in an infinite swirl.

“It's perfect conditions to see the Perseid meteor showers.” She walks across the roof to sit on the edge, her legs dangling over the side. She tilts her head skyward.

I duck instinctively when I see the first light flinging itself across the sky. A dozen more streak past in the first minute and, even though they are less brilliant than out in the forest, the way they have to fight through a gauze of light from the city, they still could almost be missiles crashing toward us.

“Those are meteors,” she says. “They're balls of rock that fling across the galaxy. The Earth's atmosphere, it's like this invisible cocoon. Millions of meteors hit the atmosphere every day, but we're protected.”

“Why'd you bring me up here?” I ask.

“It's part of your education about the universe.”

I shake my head.

“What's wrong?” she asks.

“The Prophet said the Community was covered in a bubble that God made, and these lights were bombs the Gentiles sent toward us.”

“So? The people in olden times thought meteors were the tears of God. They needed something to explain it.”

“Why?”

“I guess people can't be content without answers, even if they're wrong. We'd rather have a lie than a question that we can never know the answer to.”

I nod. “You know one thing the Prophet never answered? That nobody ever wondered about but me? People. What made us. Where we came from.”

“But you know that already,” Angel says. “From the stars.”

“What?”

“Remember the Big Bang? Everything in the universe comes from stars. Before anything else existed, there were just stars. Stars are like ovens,” she says. “Inside, they're cooking planets and asteroids, and when they explode, out spews all this, like, space vomit that's been cooking all these years. And solar systems formed, and Earth formed, and algae and eventually oxygen. And small organisms evolved into big animals and after about a billion years we came out, so that's your answer. We come from the stars.”

“That's impossible,” I say.

“You're only saying that because the idea that you exploded out of a star is scary.”

“The Prophet said stars are God's eyes.”

She rolls her eyes. “And what did he say the sun was? A really, really big eyeball?”

“Just . . . the sun. He didn't talk about the sun.”

“The sun is a star,” she says. “And every star is a sun, so far away from us they seem tiny.”

In that moment, I feel the Prophet's canvas ceiling lift away from my head, walls flying off me, and a pressure I've never put into words hisses somewhere at the back of my mind as the size of the universe assembles itself in my mind. If I close my eyes, I can see it, the endlessness beyond my ears, and knowing I'm only in a corner of that vastness doesn't make me feel tiny. It is amazing that, though I am small and ungifted and barely educated, even I can appreciate the scale of the universe.

And from this perch in space, for this moment at least, it seems unimportant whether someone made it, or if it made itself.

T
he stars bump around in my chest for days and days afterward, light as carbonation against the edge of a glass, and I start waking up in the morning thinking about stars or cities, or nothing: entire seconds spent not remembering to touch the hurt spot where Jude and Philip and Constance live for entire seconds, minutes even.

I have started to think this isn't such a bad thing.

• • •

“Did you like the book?” Dr. Wilson asks when he visits again.

I shrug in agreement. In truth, besides picturing the sky every moment I can, I've done little but read
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
since he gave it to me.

“What did you like about it?”

“Tess isn't a victim,” I say. “I mean, she is. For, like, the whole book. But she fights back in the end.”

“How does she stop being a victim?”

“She kills the man who abused her.”

He nods. “What do you think about that?”

“He deserved it.”

“And, by that logic, didn't she also deserve her punishment?”

“No,” I reply. “He made her life miserable. He earned the knife in his belly.”

“Still murder, though.”

“But sometimes murder is justified, and don't look at me that way, that's not a confession or anything. Sometimes circumstances are . . .” I search for the word.

“Extenuating?” he asks.

“Yes, extenuating. And the fact that the law didn't see that makes
it
cold-blooded, not Tess.”

“You seem very certain.”

“I am.”

“And just consider how a few months ago you said you weren't certain of anything. Now you're almost too much the opposite. What do you suppose is responsible for that?”

“If I had to guess, Angel.”

“I agree,” he says. “I think Angel is becoming a negative influence on you.”

“She's a good person.”

He laughs. “Is that so?”

“Angel's the best person in here.”

“Angel is a convicted murderer.”

He says it as though that's all there is to know about her.

“It was self-defense,” I say.

“She told you that?” he asks. “She waited in her uncle's bedroom for three hours, a loaded gun in her hand. When he got home, she crouched behind his bedroom door until he was less than a foot from her, and do you know what she did?” he asks. “She shot five bullets into his neck.”

I look away, unconsciously pressing my stumps together. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you're not like her. You shouldn't aim to be.”

“Angel fought back against a man who made her life a nightmare.”

“Do you know how many murderers try to excuse their actions by saying they were victimized? It explains their actions, but it can't excuse it,” he says. “There is no justifying murder.”

He sees things so clearly. But he's never lived in fear. He's never had to dread the choices of big men with their large, dark-haired hands. “I'm just sick of the victim being judged for fighting back.”

“It was a victim who killed the Prophet, wasn't it?” he asks. “That's why you won't talk to me. Because you think whoever did it doesn't deserve consequences.”

I clamp my lips together. If I answer, the entire story might fall out of my mouth, and that can't happen, not yet.

“People like you see murder and motive and malice everywhere,” I say instead. “Whatever I tell you, you'll take it and twist it and make it sound wrong. Just like they did at my trial. That lawyer made me out like a monster, and I'm not gonna let that happen again. And don't try telling me you wouldn't do it. You're a—”

“Don't say cop.”

“Well, you are.”

“And you're a convicted felon. Have I ever treated you like one?”

I wince, the image of Philip coming into my head, the understanding that I'll never, as long as I live, not be a criminal.

“You never planned on telling me the truth,” he says. “I figured that out the moment we made our deal. But I'd hoped that by now I would've gained your trust. I can see I've fallen short.”

He sighs and stands, taking his stool with him.

“But I do trust you,” I whisper when he's gone. More than almost anybody, I'm realizing.

But not enough. Not when he still has all the power. Not when I've still got none.