to burn. How she’d missed them. It had been forever since she’d last seen her family, but she’d carried them in her heart into a world that had little idea about who polygamists were or how they lived or—most especially—why they did the strange things they did.
Because of her background and her allegiance to these people, Hope had always stood apart. Alone. That aching loneliness had occasionally tempted her to return. But she could never rejoin them. If she couldn’t live the principle at sixteen, she could never live it now.
“Hope, is it you?” her mother said, her voice faltering when Hope drew near.
Hope stopped a few feet away and tentatively offered Marianne the flowers, along with a tremulous smile. “It’s me,” she said. “Happy Mother’s Day.”
Her mother pressed one shaking hand to her bony chest and reached out with the other, as though to accept the bouquet or cup Hope’s cheek. But Raylynn interrupted. “Good, here he comes,” she said. “It’s okay, Marianne. You don’t have to deal with this negativity. Jed’s here.”
Her mother’s hand dropped, and dread settled in the pit of Hope’s stomach as she looked up to see her father entering the park. A scowl generally served as his customary expression—anything less would have been frivolous—but his face darkened considerably when a little girl ran up to him and brightly announced, “Her name’s Hope, Daddy. I heard her say it. Ain’t she pretty? Ain’t that a pretty name, Daddy?”
Her father passed the child without acknowledging her. Tall and imposing in an Abraham Lincoln sort of way, he still wore his beard untrimmed. Two gray streaks broke the black of it at each corner of his mouth, accentuating his frown. He’d lost a good deal of his hair; his face, on the other hand, hadn’t aged a bit. Time couldn’t soften his granitelike features any more than it could soften his granitelike heart.
“What is this? What’s going on here?” he cried, his long legs churning up the distance between them. Next to him hurried her two uncles, Rulon, a taller version of her father, who had eight wives at last count, and Arvin, the runt of the family—and the man she’d refused to marry. Arvin was almost skeletal in appearance. The bones of his hips jutted out beneath a tightly cinched belt, and his chest appeared concave beneath his wrinkled white shirt. But at fifty-six, he still had his hair. Black and stringy, it fell almost to his shoulders. He was older than her father by a year, yet she would have been his tenth wife.
Hope’s grip on the flowers instinctively tightened. She wanted to leave, but her feet wouldn’t carry her. Not while Charity was standing in front of her looking so haggard and careworn at twenty-three. Who had her father arranged for Charity to marry?
“Hope’s back,” her mother volunteered in a placating tone as Jed reached them.
Her father’s eyes climbed Hope’s thin frame, the frame she’d inherited from him. She knew he was taking stock of the changes in her, making special note of her khaki shorts and white cotton blouse. She was dressed like a Gentile, an outsider, and he wouldn’t like that any more than he’d approve of the fact that her apparel showed some leg. She’d considered wearing a long dress, but that was too great a concession. She was part of these people, and yet she wasn’t. She was an outcast. As much as she missed her sisters and her mother, the years she’d spent here seemed like another lifetime. She now knew the freedom of driving and making her own decisions, the power of education, the joy of being able to support herself. She lived in a world where women were equal to men. She could speak and be heard and have some prospect of making a difference.
That was what she wanted to give her sisters. A chance to know what she knew—that there were others in the world who believed differently from their father. A chance to get more out of life.
“Father,” Hope murmured, but the old resentment came tumbling back, making the word taste bitter in her mouth. If not for his final betrayal, if not for his favoring Arvin’s salacious interest over her happiness, maybe she wouldn’t have done what she’d done in the barn. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to pay the terrible price she’d paid.
“You have a lot of nerve showing up here on a day meant to honor mothers when you’re guilty of just the opposite,” her father snapped.
“I’ve never meant Mother any disrespect.” Hope glanced meaningfully at Arvin. “I would have dishonored myself had I done anything different.”
“You flouted God’s law!” Arvin cried, her acknowledgment of his presence enough to provoke him.
“God’s law? Or your own?” she replied.
“That’s sinful,” her father said. “I won’t have you talking to Arvin that way. He’s always loved you, was nothing but good to you. You were the one who wronged him.”
Briefly, Hope remembered her uncle’s eager touches when she was a child. His long, cool fingers had lingered on her at every opportunity, and he’d always been quick to take her to the potty or clean a skinned knee. He’d scarcely been able to wait until she was old enough to bear children to ask her father for her hand.
“He had no right to press his claim once I refused him. I was only sixteen,” she said.
Her father waved her words away. “Your mother was only fifteen when she married me.”
“That doesn’t matter. I would have been miserable.”
“Heaven forbid I should do something to displease such a princess!” her father bellowed. “Was I supposed to support you in feeling too good for a worthy man? Was I supposed to give in to your vanity? God will strike you down for your pride, Hope.”
“God doesn’t need to do anything,” she said. “What you’ve done is enough.”
“Hope, don’t say such things,” her mother pleaded.
But the old anger was pounding through Hope so powerfully now she couldn’t stop. “What you’ve done in the name of religion is worse than anything I’ve ever even thought about doing,” she told her father. “You use God to manipulate and oppress, to make yourself bigger than you really are.”
Her father’s hand flexed as though he’d strike her. He had beaten her a few times in the past—like the night she’d fled Superior—but Hope knew he wouldn’t hit her now. Not in front of everyone. If he assaulted her, she’d have a legitimate complaint to file with the police, and the Everlasting Apostolic Church wanted no part of that. Though it was next to impossible to enforce the law, polygamy was, after all, illegal and there had been a few isolated cases in which polygamists had actually gone to prison, though mostly for related crimes and not for polygamy per se.
Still, the murmuring in the crowd that was quickly gathering told Hope she’d gone too far. She’d come with the intention of being diplomatic, of reassuring herself of her family’s well-being and seeing if she could do anything to help her sisters. Instead, she’d disparaged the church and her father. But she couldn’t help it. She was viewing their lifestyle with new eyes, and too little had changed.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” her father said.
It was a public park, but Hope didn’t bother pointing that out. Her father had always believed that his power extended beyond the normal domain. Among his family and in the church, it did. For him, there was no world outside of that and, if she stayed, she’d only make matters worse for the others.
She glanced at Faith and Charity.
