The Survivors

Chapter Five: Homecoming, pt. 2

5: Homecoming, pt. 2

 I picked up on Lizzie's thoughts and feelings. She had not imagined this reunion would ever come. When I left, I hadn't told Lizzie I was going. Her responsibility as an elder would have forced her to warn the others. This was the first time I had a chance to even partly justify my reasons or to apologize at all.

  "Oh, Sadie! I can't believe you're here," she said, wrapping her strong arm around my waist and tucking her head into my shoulder. I squeezed her back.

  "Did you miss me?" I asked, smiling.

  "So much, my dear," she said, tightening her grasp. "I was so worried about you. We all were."

  "Oh, yes, I could tell how glad John was to see me," I joked, with traces of hostility in my voice, as we emerged from the church into the fresh air.

  "You're a daughter of this family. Whether we agreed with your choices or not, you are still our flesh. We didn't know what would become of you," she said.

  "I'm sorry I worried you," I said, choosing my words carefully. "That was not my intention. I just had to go."

  "Are we that terrible?" Lizzie asked. Her voice was light but her question serious.

  "It isn't that. I wanted to know about the world out there. Humans interested me. All we care about here is procreating, building the family for whatever purpose God has in mind. I wanted something else," I said.

  "I should have known the night you told me about the book you'd read in Bigfork," she said. "I guess I did, in a way." Memories flashed across Lizzie's mind. "I suppose we made a mistake letting you go," she said. I looked at her with heavy eyes as intense waves of guilt washed over me. I hadn't anticipated that she would blame herself for my leaving. "The books led you away from us," she said sadly.

  "Lizzie, I hadn't lived until that day. And I didn't leave until twenty years later. If it were the books that made me go, I would have left immediately," I said, hoping this would convince her that she was not the cause of my exodus. In truth, I would have gone that first day if I had felt ready. But I waited until I had read enough to understand what I would be walking into. My twenty-five-year excursion to the bookstore in Bigfork, reading four or five books a day, meant I had read over 35,000 titles by the time I left-at least every one that ever cycled through the doors of Books and Ladders. And yet, somehow, I was still unprepared.

  "What made you go, then?" Lizzie asked. I felt a bit of hope in her mind.

  "I wasn't turning out to be what I was supposed to be, Lizzie. Some of the others-the elders, I mean-were getting impatient. They wanted me to mate. I could sense it. They were growing hostile because I hadn't had a child for them yet."

  "And what's not what you wanted," Lizzie said. It wasn't a question.

  I sighed and bit my lower lip, trying to decide what to tell her. Having children was considered more a responsibility than a choice in our family. Just before I had left, I overheard several of the elders talking about me. I was the only girl in my generation and in the generation below me who hadn't given birth to several children. They thought something was wrong with me, spoke quietly to each other about how to determine such a thing. Of course, they never entertained the possibility that I had just never done anything that could lead to having a child. And so they began making plans to experiment on me, to poke and prod until they determined just how much of a freak I really was. Then one of them asked what would happen if nothing were wrong with me, if I just hadn't gotten pregnant yet, and John had answered coolly, "Then we will see to it that she gets pregnant and has the child without any complications." I hadn't been able to believe what I was hearing. At that point, I had been planning to leave for quite some time, but that was the thing that pushed me over the edge. I left that night.