Page 52 of Wrap Around (Forbidden Goals #7)
GIDEON
The whole flight to Tennessee, I agonize about Silas. About the way I purposefully made it sound like the reason I didn’t want him to join us was because of the struggles we’ve been having recently. Because I don’t want him here.
The truth is that I don’t want him here, but not because I don’t want him or because I’m pushing away from him.
It’s to keep him safe.
I can’t think of another reason that my father and Sister Paula won’t accept my phone calls, other than my sexuality.
There have been plenty of signs over the years, not to mention an almost confession in the form of my breakdown after one of his sermons, one that was heavily laden with anti-homosexual ideology.
Neither of us ever said the words out loud, but why else would he have pushed me so hard with prayer and discipline?
Why else would he start supporting me more with hockey, when he’d only ever begrudgingly allowed me to play sports, because he felt they didn’t center and glorify God’s love?
Then there’s the questionable use of one line of scripture I used as an explanation for leaving home the way I did. That one little line is probably what gave it away, if anything did.
And if there’s a chance that Sister Paula knows, that means there’s an even bigger chance that Elder Caldwell knows.
He’s been a high-ranking member of the church, one of my father’s most trusted deacons since before any of us were born.
There’s no way he wouldn’t speak to Abe Caldwell about something he perceives as important, or something that could damage the church’s reputation or his congregation’s trust in him.
Whether or not our fathers actually know anything, I don’t want Silas near that man.
There’s no telling what he’s capable of.
I’ve long suspected that Abe Caldwell was dealing with some form of mental illness.
Not only has he always had a tendency to get irrationally angry over perceived slights, but he’d often speak of hearing whispers.
He’d go on long rants about particularly elaborate and far-fetched interpretations of scripture.
He believes, or at least he did, that God spoke to him directly, that he was a prophet.
In his eyes, his wife suffering and dying in childbirth was part of God’s punishment to women for Eve’s disobedience.
Not only that, he told everyone that his own wife’s traumatic childbirth was a sign that she wasn’t as pure or godly as she professed to be, as her father had advertised her.
Therefore, she deserved more pain and suffering.
To make it even worse, the Elder Caldwell preached that his wife died the way she did, in agonizing pain, for opening her legs for the devil.
He said Silas wasn’t even his son by blood, never mind that he looks like a younger, more muscular version of himself.
That horrible excuse for a father once beat Silas half to death because he dared to question his father’s rigid bigotry. What would he do if he knew the truth?
I don’t want Silas anywhere near that man .
The plan is to spend a couple of days doing what needs to be done, checking in with the doctors and figuring out how bad this thing is for Mom.
Whatever arrangements need to be made to ensure our mother is cared for properly, I’ll make them.
Then we’re getting the fuck out before this place has a chance to taint everything good we’ve built since moving away from here.
And while we’re here, I plan to poke around and see if I can find any breadcrumbs to follow about Lily’s pregnancy and who caused it. I’ll be paying close attention to anyone who so much as looks in Lily and Addy’s direction.
Checking the rearview mirror for probably the hundredth time since leaving the airport, I try to catch my sister’s eyes.
She’s sitting in the backseat with Addy, who is napping quietly after a long, stressful day of flying.
Her eyes flutter closed when the rental car’s tires bump over the dirt and gravel roads that lead us away from the main parts of town.
I honestly thought, or hoped, anyway, that we’d never come back to this place. Without Lily’s sense of duty and wanting to keep her safe, there’s not a chance in hell that I’d have come anywhere near this hell hole again.
Said hell hole materializes in front of us as the church’s land, and our parent’s house, comes into view. It’s an almost serene landscape—if you weren’t plagued by the confusion, self-doubt, and fear of God that were forced onto us from birth.
We pass the main church, then wind down the bend towards our parent’s house.
We head for the trailer at the very back of the property, where Lily and Silas lived after they got married.
As I’m pulling down the drive, I notice my father’s tan truck come down the path from their driveway to pull in behind us. Great.
Dad gets out of his truck and stands beside it, observing us with a displeased expression. He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t welcome us home. Just frowns and acts like we’re late, when we’re actually almost an hour ahead of the expected arrival time we’d given him.
Lily makes an effort to arrange her expression into something pleasant.
“Hey, Daddy.” With one arm outstretched, she moves in for a hug, but he steps back. The way her face falls guts me.
He gives her a quick look of assessment. “You both best get cleaned up and dressed in something more appropriate. Supper’s nearly ready, and sundown will be soon.”
Inside the trailer, Lily locks herself into the small back bedroom while I bring our bags inside. Addy, still sleepy from her car nap, is content to play with a toy construction vehicle. She looks up when her mama steps out.
“Mama sad,” she says, watching Lily with big green eyes.
Lily either doesn’t hear her or can’t find it in herself to pretend otherwise.
She’s wrapped in layers of clothes that used to belong to her, but don’t fit her anymore.
Not so much in size, but in personal growth.
The long cotton skirt with blue flowers and coordinating light blue button-down blouse fastened all the way up to the top button swallows her already smaller stature.
There isn’t much she can do to hide her hair other than wrap a soft scarf over her head, the cream-colored fabric washing her already pale complexion out.
With every button and layer, I watch a little more of her slip away.
Lily holds a bundle of clothes in her arms that are clearly for Addy. I reach for them so she can have a moment to herself, understanding how difficult this must be for her to not only slip back into the roles we were raised with, but to then have to shroud her daughter in those same expectations.
“Come on, Pickle. Let’s get dressed so we can go have dinner with Mamaw and Papaw. ”
She looks suspiciously at the bundle of clothes in my hand, then down at her cotton overalls with her favorite cartoon dog on the front. “Wear this, M’Uncle Gid-On.”
“Those are dirty, baby girl. Let’s put on a pretty dress for Sabbath, yeah?”
The look she gives me suggests she’d rather use a raw onion as a teether, but she comes over and lets me change her clothes.
Her belly laughs over the amount of fish crackers falling out of the pockets of her discarded overalls soothes the sting a little when I have to watch my niece’s personality be smothered with the expectations of our childhood.
Watching it in real time drives home that Silas and I weren’t the only ones that struggled with our identities here.
If it wasn’t just us, how many more of our peers felt stifled?
Addy lets me wrestle her chubby limbs into a long-sleeved cotton shirt dress but draws the line at the pair of ribbed tights.
I try bribing her with her favorite pair of ladybug rainboots instead of the black buckle shoes that Lily put with the outfit, but Addy is having none of it.
Eventually we walk out of the trailer and towards our childhood home with Addy in the dress, no tights or socks, and the rainboots.
Getting a three-year-old out of the house on time without a tantrum is win enough.
As we’re walking towards the house, Lily calls out to her little girl several times, correcting the way she’s running and jumping, instructing her not to get dirty, not to pick up bugs, not to mess up the pigtails Lily smoothed and braided her curly hair into.
I can hear the pain and anxiety in her voice.
I can feel the pressure and expectations that I relate to so much in every word.
And I know it’s hurting her to find herself making her daughter conform to the same rules we’ve so joyfully thrown to the wayside since leaving this place.
It’s amazing how fast it all comes back.
By the time we’re stepping onto our parent’s doorstep, my back is already sore from my rigid posture .
Sister Paula greets us as if this wasn’t the house we grew up in, and shuffles Lily directly into the kitchen with her to finish up the preparations for Sabbath.
From sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday, there is no cooking or chores other than cleaning up behind ourselves, but it takes a lot of preparation to accomplish.
The women work extra hard all day on Friday to prepare meals so the Sabbath can be spent focusing on prayer, bible study, and worship.
Sister Paula doesn’t even allow my sister to go find our mother first, putting her immediately to work.