6
VERN HELD OUT A MONTH before returning to Bert’s and calling Ollie.
She had rules now. She’d only go right after putting Howling and Feral down for their night’s sleep. After one and a half hours, it was time to come home. That way, when one or the other of the children woke up to complain about how horrible it was being a baby, Vern would be there to tell them it only got worse, as well as to give them milk to make that fact less upsetting. Vern memorized and marked the path to the neon-signed wooden shack so she could make her way back to the children quickly and efficiently even in the dark.
Ollie’s apartment was modest and clean. Vern thought a woman as rough around the edges as her would keep a more interesting place, but there was little more to the studio than a gray sofa with a flannel throw, a coffee table, a bookshelf.
“You look disappointed,” said Ollie, filling a glass from the tap and handing it to Vern. Vern had forgotten there was water in the world you didn’t have to collect from a river and hard-boil for an hour in a covered pot.
“I was just expecting something homier,” Vern explained, grateful for the drink. It tasted better than any water she’d had in a year and was delightfully free of sediment.
“I don’t actually spend that much time here,” said Ollie. “I would’ve hired a decorator if I figured you for the type to care.”
Vern dragged her hand along the bar top of the kitchenette. “It’s just the first time I’ve been…” Vern didn’t know how to explain that she’d not been inside anywhere at all in a year, not except for the Bert’s, and that hardly counted. Nobody lived there. “I guess I’m just homesick or something.”
She didn’t miss the compound, but she missed chatter, missed blankets that smelled like something other than woodsmoke, missed biscuits and honey, missed Carmichael needling her with his incessant desire to share whatever he was reading about. Apples are native to the mountains of Central Asia. Xinjiang, China; Kazakhstan; Tajikistan; and Kyrgyzstan specifically. He’d told her it was possible to hear a blue whale’s heartbeat from two miles away, and for a moment Vern had believed in God, the God of Cain and all his creation: Mam, Carmichael, Lucy, candied pecans, the cold lake, deacons smiling at Vern despite her surliness, saying, Morning, sister, how are you this blessed morning?
It was a flaw of the human animal that Vern could feel nostalgic for a place like Cainland, but loneliness was the root of all manner of sin. Reverend Sherman exploited it often, fulfilling a wanderer’s desire for belonging, validation, and purpose. She’d seen how newcomers to the compound fell into the fantasy of perfect love and perfect truth he offered.
Vern wanted to scream at them. There was no church, no philosophy, no school of thought, no nothing that could be trusted in full. To believe too much in anything was to sacrifice your faculties. The only way forward was to embrace the tussle of it all.
Born with a seething righteousness, Vern looked down on anyone less willing or able to put up a fight than she was. If only people were more like her, she thought, the world could be good. There’d be no Cainlands. There’d be no Lucy’s fathers. No Reverends. No fiends.
“Where is home, anyway?” asked Ollie. She’d set a plate of food on the bar top, seedy wheat crackers and some kind of white dip. Vern hoisted herself on a stool and took a bite, letting the dry, bland grains dissolve into her mouth. Did you know, Carmichael asked once, that John Harvey Kellogg believed eating plain foods would prevent people from masturbating? That’s why he invented cornflakes. They were marketed as an antimasturbation aid.
Please don’t use that word at my dinner table, Vern’s mam had said.
“I don’t have a home,” said Vern, “but I grew up on a commune not too far from here.”
“You weren’t a fan?”
“That’s underselling it,” Vern said. Her whole life she’d been drugged and not known it. What else had Reverend Sherman and his goons put inside of her? She thought of the vitamin shots she and other Cainites regularly received. What were they really, and why give them?
Ollie hoisted herself up onto the stool next to Vern. Their shoulders brushed. “I always kind of liked the idea of growing up in a commune. I’m no hippie or anything, but I like the idea of a place to call yours that you can leave and come back to. A home. I had a shit childhood, too, mostly by way of a shit mother. Got shuttled from one uncle or aunt to another. A cousin once. None of them gave a shit about me. Learned to fend for myself, though. There’s that.”