“I can’t click my heels together and be somewhere else, because there is nowhere else. These things always look easy to a child, and that’s just what you are. I can’t just leave.”
“I did.”
“And how are you getting by, Vern? Do you have a job? An apartment? I don’t even have my birth certificate. Reverend Sherman’s got that. I don’t have yours, neither. Or Carmichael’s. I don’t even exist. Where would I go? How would I survive? Where would I get food?”
“You’d figure it out. Like I did. I’m a mam now, too, did you forget? You best believe I’d never let mine anywhere near the likes of Sherman,” Vern snapped, not that she was a good mam herself. She’d forgotten her babes until this very moment when she’d needed to make a rhetorical point against her mother. Last night they’d slipped from her mind—more accurately and less flatteringly, she pushed them from it. Enticed by bright lights, she’d abandoned them in the woods. She’d given in to the exhaustion of caring for them.
“I got to go,” said Vern.
“Please. Don’t. I didn’t mean to start a fight. That’s why I called you back, because I want to talk to you. I love you, Vern, so much, no matter what you might think,” Ruthanne said.
The bar now was empty aside from Vern, but the barkeep was too busy eavesdropping to want to kick her out. “What was that all about anyway? Why did you hang up on me?”
Mam’s voice dropped to a husky whisper. “I’m pretty sure the phone is bugged. Had to call you back on my burner.”
Vern couldn’t imagine her mother with an illicit phone. “What’s Sherman need to tap the phone for? He’s up in everybody’s business anyway. You can’t take a shit without a deacon reporting it to him,” said Vern.
“Not him. Outsiders. I don’t know who. Feds, maybe. Tryna take the place down, tryna build a case against us.”
Vern filed that nugget away. Feds, or Reverend Sherman’s goons? Feds, or the fiend?
Or maybe Sherman had done it himself, knowing Vern was weak and would try to call her mother.
“You know it’s all lies, don’t you?” asked Vern.
“What’s lies?”
“Everything. About Cainland.”
“Here and everywhere else, baby,” Ruthanne said. She sounded sympathetic to Vern’s plight, her voice gentle and understanding. Where was all that camaraderie when Vern was back at the compound?
“Do you know what the hauntings are, Mam?”
When Ruthanne didn’t answer, Vern checked to make sure the call was still connected.
“Mam?”
“You still getting them?” Ruthanne asked finally. “It’s drugs, I suspect. Hallucinogens.”
Vern spat out a disgusted, half-formed laugh. Her mam had known all this time, while Vern, falsely branded the skeptic of Cainland, had dumbly believed.
Vern wasn’t there in person to see it, but she could imagine her mam’s lips pinched into an offended pucker. “It’s harmless. A way to bring the community together so we can bond over the shared experience. You don’t know what it’s like to be without a real home. You’ve never known what it’s like to be truly without a place, a family. Cainland makes homes for people; it just does it in unusual ways.”
Something was wrong with Vern’s mam if she thought Vern could still be recruited, still be swindled. “You can’t really think after all this time I would trust your opinion. Yet here you are, blah-blah-blahing at me. Maybe you think if you can convince me, you can convince yourself you were justified in keeping me there.”
Vern felt a surge of petty pride to have rendered her mother silent with that gibe. It served her right. Maybe the guilt of it would drive her to drink yet more. Wallowing in her pain, she’d cry, If only I’d done better by my kin!
“It’s not like he poisons us,” said Ruthanne.
No, Mam was not one to wallow. Not one to linger on past wrong, neither those done to her or those she’d done to others. She picked a place and made it her heaven. “How can you say that when he drugged our food and—”
“I don’t know if it’s the food. Might be the air.” Ruthanne’s voice was considered and thoughtful. Her tone gave off the air of a woman deciding whether a stain was best removed with baking soda or dish soap.
“My whole life you made me think I was crazy for hating that place.” Vern could do nothing to disguise the dejected quaver in her voice. “I don’t think I can ever talk to you again,” said Vern, this utterance more resolute.