Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (9 page)

“Yeah? Well, that makes one of you.”

Fewer than ten page views yesterday. We had Suzy examine the stat counter, thinking maybe it was broken, but she claimed the number was accurate. (“I think you just have a really unpopular blog,” she told us apologetically.)

“You think your dad is really dead?”

My body jolts, like I'm waking from a dream about falling. I haven't thought of my dad in a while. “I can't know for sure, I guess. I know he was at Point Reyes. I doubt he made it out.”

“But there are a lot of people missing, right?” Robbie has dropped his monotone; he sounds curious, hungry. “Maybe he went somewhere else. Maybe he's still alive.”

“We don't know that the missing people are alive,” I remind him gently. “And even if they are . . . I guess I thought when I found my parents, that would fix things. I would find them alive—and I figured they'd be
sorry.
They'd become themselves again. But I don't think it works like that. Because even if they had been alive and sorry—that's three people who end up okay. And I don't think I could be content anymore, to be whole when so many others are broken. You know?”

“I get you.” Robbie throws the silverware in a box with a metallic clang. “And even if they were
all
alive—they already made their choice. They chose Not Us.”

He glances up from under his shaggy hair with a defiant expression, but there's a question in his eyes he still wants answered.

“Just choose your own family, Robbie,” I tell him. “Choose the people who choose you.”

We fall back into comfortable silence, broken finally by the sound of approaching footsteps. I look up and see Diego, looking weirdly unsettled.

“Vivian? Could I borrow you a second?”

I follow him through the main hall, into a cluttered back office I've never been in before. I've never seen him so uptight—he acts, more than anything, like a troublemaking student about to face the principal. Winnie stands just within the door, and Harp lounges in a chair, her legs kicked lazily over the side. Behind the desk in front of her is a woman in a wheelchair who can't be much older than Winnie. She has raven-black hair and severe bangs brushing the tops of her eyelids; she scrolls through her tablet, looking as if she is literally biting her tongue.

“Vivian,” Diego says. “I'd like to introduce you to Amanda Yee.”

“Hi,” I say.

Amanda doesn't look up. I turn to Winnie, confused, and she gestures to the chair next to Harp with pleading eyes. I sit. We watch Amanda for what feels like five full minutes before she folds her hands on top of her tablet and turns a piercing stare upon us.

“I've just been reading your blog.
Very
fascinating stuff.”

Harp and I glance at each other, and I see my best friend wondering the same thing I am: Is this a compliment? Before we can ask, Amanda continues.

“Here are my top three favorite things about it, in ascending order. One: I love the humor. So fresh, so clever. Two: I love that you spent so much time cozying up to Taggart's son. Does part of me feel like, why am I paying for these girls' room and board when they had Peter Taggart in their back pocket but weren't able to deliver him? I promise you I'm not bothered by the significant part of me that feels that way.”

My cheeks burn and I've opened my mouth to protest—his name is Peter
Ivey,
I want to say—but though I know Amanda sees me, she keeps talking.

“Three, and this is the big one: I love that you went ahead and posted this extremely incendiary missive on Cliff House's servers. I love that I poured the better part of my fortune into the creation of the only instrument in the country that could theoretically take down the Church of America, and that said instrument is currently in jeopardy thanks to two fugitive minors who took it upon themselves to publish the sort of thing for which the Church
murders human beings
using the Wi-Fi for which
I pay.
”

“Suzy—” I start to explain.

“Suzy's good,” Amanda interrupts. “She can keep you cloaked for the time being. But she's not a miracle worker. And that's what you'll need once the Church decides to take action.”

“It's the truth,” Harps insists. “It's what we saw.”

“Do you think I doubt it? My point is only that you could have fashioned that truth into a far more effective weapon than the one you did. It's more powerful as a secret. We could've blackmailed the Angels. But you gave it away, and now it's a toss-up: Will the story gain traction? Will people believe you? If so, what will they do? Get angry enough to fight back? Because I think the best-case scenario is, you'll get a couple hundred who say, ‘I'm never shopping in a Church of America megastore ever again!' And get a couple hundred more who say, ‘I knew it!' but keep shopping there, because it's got everything, and for such low prices.”

I don't like the reprimand, but I know Amanda is right. I look to Harp—the blog is her baby; she'll be crushed to realize we've ruined our chance with it. But to my surprise my best friend looks perfectly calm.

“You know what we need, right?” she asks.

“A time machine,” Amanda supplies sarcastically.

“Money.”

Amanda snorts, but she doesn't interrupt when Harp continues.

“Let's say you do, by some secular miracle, manage to kill everyone in the Church's LA headquarters. How many people is that? Maybe two hundred? The Believers who remain will spin it. You'll be terrorists; they'll have the Peacemakers hunt you down. Then your money's gone and so's your army. And so, most importantly, is the narrative about who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. It seems”—Harp sounds sympathetic—“like a really dumb investment.”

Amanda taps her fingers on the table in a bored way, but I can tell she's listening. “So what would you suggest?”

“I suggest you pour your money into
me
,” Harp says. “Into my fresh, clever voice. I've shared that post as far as I can, but I don't know how to get it read. I bet you could buy its way into the right channels. You could put it on news sites. You could put it in tabloids. You could probably afford to get it carved onto the moon, for all I know.”

Amanda shakes her head. “It'll still be your word against theirs. You must know the Church will find a way to retaliate. They can be clever too.”

“They can say whatever they want about me.” Harp sounds a little rueful. “As long as I can keep writing. The only thing they've got that I don't is an audience.”

There's a long pause. Amanda stares at Harp through narrowed eyes, and I feel Harp grow still beside me, like she'll lose her hold on Amanda if she so much as flinches. Just when I think the moment is about to end, that Amanda will demand we find another place to hide, she speaks.

“Okay. You keep writing your story, and I'll make sure it gets read. But understand this: the attack is happening.” Amanda leans forward, gripping the table with her hands. She's a slight woman, but I find myself drawing away, afraid. “You don't get a say in that. Your new job is to get public opinion on our side. You're going to make it so that when the bomb goes off, the country understands that it was the only way.”

Harp's mouth drops open. “No! That's not the point of the blog. That's not why I'm telling our story!”

“It is now,” Amanda says evenly. “If you want to stay under my protection, that's exactly the story you'll be telling. Unless, of course, you've got somewhere else to go?”

The next day, Harp has eight hundred comments. Amanda has had the story reposted as an op-ed on all the major secular news sites. We wade through the responses together.

“‘You're a dumb bitch and probably ugly and fat. Jesus hates you. Go back to Iraq I hope we drop a nuke on you God Bless USA,'” Harp reads out loud. “Well, that one covers all the bases.”

I read another. “‘This story is bullcrap lol tell your friend to watch her back no one does harm to the prophet Rick and lives to tell about it long story short I'll kill her.' The Prophet Rick? Oh,
oh!
He means me. He wants to kill
me!
”

“Well, he'll have to get in line. Pretty much everyone does. Wait, here's a nice one: ‘Lord help these heathens by drowning them in their own filthy lies and suffocating them on the scum that is their foul transgression.' Signed UtahGrandma98.”

“This is awful.” I lean back in my chair after nearly all of the first hundred comments prove to be some variation on a racist death threat. “I didn't expect the most positive reaction to your post to be ‘Saw your pic on the Church's feed you're hot message me.'”

“I knew the first wave would be angry.” Harp scrolls through the hundreds of comments that remain. “It's getting under their skin. There was nothing like this on the alien abduction forum. They're mad because it seems possible.”

“Well, that's a good thing! Right?”

But Harp looks unconvinced. I know she's thinking of our meeting with Amanda—the justification Amanda wants Harp to provide. Now that Amanda has done exactly what Harp asked, and helped to spread our story at a level we couldn't reach on our own, it seems as though Harp has no choice but to fill her end of the reluctant bargain. But my best friend is still set against the attack on Church headquarters. Reading the hateful bile of these Believers has done nothing to sway her. I'm far less sure. If the Believers across the country won't listen to Harp, isn't it possible they need something bigger, some drastic, unimaginable action, to work as a shock to the system?

I decide to walk the trails on the opposite side of the cliff, to gaze one last time in the direction of Point Reyes. Ever since Harp voiced her crazy fears about Peter, I've had endless nightmares where he's chasing me. Last night, though—I blush, remembering it—I dreamed we made out at a party in front of a room full of people, and when we pulled away, the other partygoers were filming us, streaming the footage directly to the Church of America's news feed. I have to go and stare at the mass of land where I last saw him, to remember the person he truly is. Stepping outside, drawing my hoodie tight around me, I watch Winnie and Diego pull up. I haven't seen either of them since this morning, when they left before sunrise on a mission they didn't discuss. There are only seven of us left in Cliff House now: Frankie, Karen, Suzy, Julian, Diego, Harp, and me. The rest are in LA. There's something unsettlingly vast about the building now that it's nearly empty.

“Where have you two been?” I ask as they get out of the car.

But Diego just makes a face, as if to say,
You know I'm not going to tell you.
He pushes past me to enter Cliff House. Winnie watches him go, spinning the car keys around one finger; after a moment she gives me a sad smile.

“We were moving Mara,” she tells me. I feel my blood go cold at my mother's name. “She can't come to LA, but she can't stay here—not in an apartment under my name, anyway. Amanda paid for a little house in the suburbs. We brought her there this morning.”

I look away, up at the rocky cliff side, trying to collect my thoughts. It's not as if I imagined some tearful reunion—I'm too angry for that still, and anyway, I can't stray farther than the area immediately surrounding Cliff House. But some part of me must have thought my mom would seek me out, that she'd sense my presence here at the edge of everything and come to find me. Because the knowledge that she's no longer in the same city as me feels like an impenetrable wall falling down. I realize that I'll never see my mother again.

“I'm sorry.” Winnie touches my arm. “I tried to arrange to bring you with us—to give you a chance to say goodbye—but Diego and Amanda thought it would be too dangerous.”

I shrug off her hand. “That's fine. I didn't want to see her anyway.”

“Come on, Viv. Of course you did.”

There's something gently insistent in Winnie's tone. I bristle against it. What right does she have to tell me how to feel about my own mother? I remember the morning we met, how she scolded me to cut Mom some slack. “Don't forget you're the one she kept,” she told me. Like it was a competition: Who did Mara Apple treat worse? But I'm the real daughter. I'm the one who thought for seventeen years that she was there for me. I'm the one who had to find out the hard way that she wasn't.

“No, actually,” I say, increasingly annoyed. “I didn't. Do you seriously not get it? She left me alone to fend for myself. I didn't know she was alive; I didn't know where she was! I nearly got myself killed looking for her. And when I gave her the chance to save my life, to actually
be my mother,
she blew it. She cares more about getting on the second boat than whether I live or die.”

Winnie's face blurs—I've started to cry. Embarrassed, I cover my face with my hands. I feel her put her hands on my shoulders to hold me steady, and I'm crying too hard to wrench away.

“I'm sorry I'm in the middle of this, Viv. I don't want to be. I want to be neutral, okay? I want to be Switzerland. You have every right in the world to be furious with Mara. She's been rash and immature and unreliable. But she loves you, I swear. Her love is flawed—it's really fucking flawed—but I don't think it's worthless.”

I take a shuddering breath, slowly calming down. When I lower my hands, I see Winnie's face, close and troubled.

“But you know what?” she says softly, shaking her head. “You grew up with her. I didn't. You know best. So if you want to stay angry, stay angry. Just remember: you and I, we can be a family now. I want that, and at some point, I hope you'll want that too.”

I'm too stunned to give her an answer, but Winnie doesn't wait for one. She squeezes my shoulders and walks into Cliff House. I make my way toward the trails. What Winnie suggests is exactly what I hoped for when I first learned she existed, exactly what I imagined as I climbed the stairs to her apartment the morning we met. Now the thought of it creates a weird, hopeful buzz inside me, but something else, too—a fear I can't bring myself to fully contemplate.