All Fall Down Read online

  “I won’t.”

  The women were gone by the time Sunny left Wendy’s office, and she was glad. Still, hearing what they’d thought about what Sanctuary had been like stuck with her. She’d always known the blemished didn’t understand the Family of Superior Bliss, but she hadn’t understood just what sorts of misconceptions had run so rampant.

  Sunny finished every day at four, but always went to the library a few blocks away to wait until Chris picked her up at a little after six. Liesel could’ve come for her, but it interrupted nap times, and it was a huge hassle to get all three kids in the car for a fifteen-minute drive. Besides, Sunny liked the library. In those two hours, she could study for her GED. She could sit and read, uninterrupted, which was a luxury she’d never known in Sanctuary. Novels, magazines, newspapers, nonfiction texts on subjects she’d never heard of. She struggled sometimes with the bigger words, because though she’d been taught to read well enough to get through the family literature, reading for pleasure had been discouraged. She struggled more often with references to events and situations she didn’t know. History she’d never been taught. Slang she’d never heard.

  She could also use the library’s computers to get on the internet. She’d have been allowed to use the computer at Liesel and Chris’s house, but there never seemed to be any time and Sunny felt funny asking permission to use what seemed like such a personal possession. At the library, she watched videos of funny kittens or penguins getting tickled or babies laughing. She watched television commercials for products she’d never heard of and caught pieces of movies and TV programs that made little sense. The comments left on these videos made her feel just as confused. The blemished seemed to make a habit out of being anonymously cruel.

  Liesel said The Wizard of Oz had been her favorite movie as a little girl and had played it for the kids and Sunny. Navigating this new world made Sunny feel like Dorothy stepping out from her black-and-white house into a world of color so bright it didn’t seem real. Everything in this world seemed like a dream.

  Sometimes she left the library with her head aching, too full of information she didn’t know how to process. Other times she turned new concepts over and over in her mind and meditated on them until the voice of the stone angel whispered and helped her piece together what had become a very, very big quilt of ideas. There was so much to learn, so much she’d been denied, and she wanted to fill herself up.

  Today at the library, on the internet, she searched for information on the Family of Superior Bliss. One site had long lists of accusations about the family, none of which were true, including the idea that they sacrificed animals to Satan. Sunny could only laugh at such blatant misconception. Another site showed photos of family members, including the only picture of Sunny herself, the one the newspeople had used. It had been taken during one of the visits from the social people who came to make sure the children were safe. Sunny clicked away from that site fast. Too many memories. And then, finally, scrolling through pages of links that had nothing to do with her family but another with a father figure that people had labeled a “cult,” she stopped on a simple website detailing local Lebanon County religious history.

  This site had pictures of Papa as a young man with his wife next to him, baby John in her arms. Pages of text detailing Papa’s background and how he’d founded the family. She found copies of his early words, so different even from the stories she remembered that had changed during her lifetime. The internet called Papa’s teaching his “doctrine,” and described how it had changed over time, beginning as a simple dictate to live a life closer to the earth and as natural as possible and becoming something “twisted,” was what the website called it.

  Sunny felt twisted, reading that. Her fingers moved the mouse, clicking and scrolling, until she had to close the pages and leave the computer to stop herself from feeling sick. If she was still seeing Dr. Braddock, she might’ve asked for advice on how to filter all this, how to file it away into sections that made sense, but Sunny had stopped her appointments when they decided she should get a job. She wasn’t sad about it; Chris and Liesel and Dr. Braddock had met with Sunny and asked her how she felt about her life, and that she should know she could talk to any of them at any time. None of them understood she didn’t need to talk to them when she had the stone angel to listen.

  The stone angel wasn’t real. Her voice was Sunny’s voice. She knew that. Just like she knew from deep inside her heart that not everything Papa taught was wrong. Here in the library was a big can with Reduce, Reuse, Recycle printed on the lid. Liesel talked about being “green,” which didn’t mean a color but things like turning off lights or buying vegetables from the stands on the side of the road.

  And yet…so much of what she’d been raised to believe was wrong. It had to be. Why else would her mother have gotten cancer? Why else would Sunny have three children by the time she was nineteen, something that had seemed natural and normal in Sanctuary and was definitely frowned upon out here. The blemished might be obsessed with sex, but not when babies resulted from it. Why else, she thought as she logged off the computer to go to the parking lot to wait for Christopher, would Papa have died?

  The temperature outside the library was hot. Sunny’d grown too used to air-conditioning. She pulled a bottle of cola from her bag, too used to the sweet taste and bubbles to give it up in place of water. She looked up at the summer sky, blue and cloudless, and breathed in the scent of hot asphalt. Car exhaust. Her own sweat, which she knew enough now to find repulsive and cover with deodorant, though she hadn’t managed to find the courage to utilize antiperspirant. Too many chemicals, the lingering fear of cancers that started when you blocked your body’s natural functions.

  All these things were part of her new life, the one her mother had insisted she have. Sunny’d thought maybe it was so she could bring the light to Liesel and Chris, maybe even lots of other people, but it had been too difficult to convince anyone else, when her own faith had been so shaken. Now she wasn’t sure what her task was supposed to be.

  And how was she supposed to love what she wasn’t sure she was supposed to do?

  Chapter 28

  Date night. It had been too long since they’d gone out to dinner together like this, and Liesel was determined to make the most of it. That dress she knew Christopher liked, pulled from the back of her closet. High heels from way back in her Philly design-firm days. They pinched her toes now, but she’d deal with it. The price of beauty.

  She did feel beautiful, too, holding on to her handsome husband’s arm as he helped her walk across the gravel parking lot to the deck. She could hear live music playing and caught a scent of something mouthwatering. She was going to order the biggest steak they had. Onion rings. Screw the calories and the extra lumps on her hips that had appeared since she’d been unable to find the time to run as long and often as she’d used to. Tonight was a night out away from Candy Land and macaroni and cheese (made by hand because the boxed kind was, of course, full of chemicals). Tonight she was going to be a grown-up.

  “What?” she said twenty minutes after they’d been seated under the huge tree around which the deck had been built. Christopher had been drinking a beer, and Liesel had finished off her first margarita while they waited for their meal to arrive. She’d been talking a lot, she guessed by his expression. “What’s so funny?”

  “Not funny. Just…even when we’re out, you can’t stop talking about them.”

  Liesel paused, running over everything she’d said. In the car she’d given him the rundown on clothes and shoes, since the kids had all needed new things. Sunny had convinced her to shop at the local thrift stores instead of buying new, pointing out how fast the kids grew out of clothes and how much better it was to recycle. It had been an adventure. Led by Sunny, they’d all trooped up and down the aisles, pulling out the most ridiculous outfits they could find and laughing hysteri