I sat on my bed, knees pressed to my chest, and listened to them shout. Was I pregnant? I wasn’t sure. I considered every interaction I’d had with a boy, every glance, every touch. I walked to the mirror and raised my shirt, then ran my fingers across my abdomen, examining it inch by inch and thought, Maybe.
I had never kissed a boy.
I had witnessed birth, but I’d been given none of the facts of conception. While my father and brother shouted, ignorance kept me silent: I couldn’t defend myself, because I didn’t understand the accusation.
Days later, when it was confirmed that I was not pregnant, I evolved a new understanding of the word “whore,” one that was less about actions and more about essence. It was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.
It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.
* * *
—
I STOOD OUTSIDE THE bishop’s office on a cold night in February. I didn’t know what had taken me there.
The bishop sat calmly behind his desk. He asked what he could do for me, and I said I didn’t know. No one could give me what I wanted, because what I wanted was to be remade.
“I can help,” he said, “but you’ll need to tell me what’s bothering you.” His voice was gentle, and that gentleness was cruel. I wished he would yell. If he yelled, it would make me angry, and when angry I felt powerful. I didn’t know if I could do this without feeling powerful.
I cleared my throat, then talked for an hour.
The bishop and I met every Sunday until spring. To me he was a patriarch with authority over me, but he seemed to surrender that authority the moment I passed through his door. I talked and he listened, drawing the shame from me like a healer draws infection from a wound.
When the semester ended, I told him I was going home for the summer. I was out of money; I couldn’t pay rent. He looked tired when I told him that. He said, “Don’t go home, Tara. The church will pay your rent.”
I didn’t want the church’s money. I’d made the decision. The bishop made me promise only one thing: that I wouldn’t work for my father.
My first day in Idaho, I got my old job back at Stokes. Dad scoffed, said I’d never earn enough to return to school. He was right, but the bishop had said God would provide a way and I believed it. I spent the summer restocking shelves and walking elderly ladies to their cars.
I avoided Shawn. It was easy because he had a new girlfriend, Emily, and there was talk of a wedding. Shawn was twenty-eight; Emily was a senior in high school. Her temperament was compliant. Shawn played the same games with her he’d played with Sadie, testing his control. She never failed to follow his orders, quivering when he raised his voice, apologizing when he screamed at her. That their marriage would be manipulative and violent, I had no doubt—although those words were not mine. They had been given to me by the bishop, and I was still trying to wrest meaning from them.
When the summer ended, I returned to BYU with only two thousand dollars. On my first night back, I wrote in my journal: I have so many bills I can’t imagine how I’m going to pay them. But God will provide either trials for growth or the means to succeed. The tone of that entry seems lofty, high-minded, but in it I detect a whiff of fatalism. Maybe I would have to leave school. That was fine. There were grocery stores in Utah. I would bag groceries, and one day I’d be manager.
I was shocked out of this resignation two weeks into the fall semester, when I awoke one night to a blinding pain in my jaw. I’d never felt anything so acute, so electrifying. I wanted to rip my jaw from my mouth, just to be rid of it. I stumbled to a mirror. The source was a tooth that had been chipped many years before, but now it had fractured again, and deeply. I visited a dentist, who said the tooth had been rotting for years. It would cost fourteen hundred dollars to repair. I couldn’t afford to pay half that and stay in school.
I called home. Mother agreed to lend me the money, but Dad attached terms: I would have to work for him next summer. I didn’t even consider it. I said I was finished with the junkyard, finished for life, and hung up.
I tried to ignore the ache and focus on my classes, but it felt as though I were being asked to sit through a lecture while a wolf gnawed on my jaw.
I’d never taken another ibuprofen since that day with Charles, but I began to swallow them like breath mints. They helped only a little. The pain was in the nerves, and it was too severe. I hadn’t slept since the ache began, and I started skipping meals because chewing was unthinkable. That’s when Robin told the bishop.