Sanctuary

The composed, ethereal Helena, however, who’d lived down the block in an old brick house built when the town was first founded in the early 1900s, was different. Hope had loved her. Unfortunately, Helena had always been Jed’s favorite, too, which made her a pariah among his other wives and children. Hope and her mother had never been able to hold Jedidiah’s partiality to Helena against her. Helena was too sweet, too withdrawn, as though she’d rather not be noticed at all. Even now, Hope saw her standing off to the side, staring into the distance, and wondered, as she often had as a young teen, what was going on behind the serenity of Sister Helena’s face.

Hope forgot all about Sister Helena and the others the moment she spotted her own mother. Marianne was late joining the party and was trudging across the uneven ground in a dress so similar to one she’d owned eleven years ago Hope couldn’t be certain it wasn’t the exact same. Two girls, one about twelve and the other fourteen, tagged along behind her, bearing rolls and a ham, and Hope immediately realized they had to be her youngest sisters.

They’d grown so tall; she doubted she would have recognized them had they not been with her mother. Even Marianne had changed. Her clothes now hung on her like garments on an old wire hanger, and her hair was completely gray. She looked at least twenty years older, instead of only a decade.

Bitterness toward her father and guilt for abandoning her mother swelled inside Hope. She’d always been her mother’s right arm and her only confidante.

Of all the places in the world, her family had to be from here, Hope thought, watching her sisters deposit the ham and rolls on the table closest to them. By some counts, there were 60,000 practicing polygamists living in Utah, northern Arizona, Idaho, Montana and parts of Mexico and Canada. So Superior wasn’t the only place where people practiced plural marriage. Most polygamists existed in relatively small communities made of up several families that espoused the same doctrines. But those doctrines weren’t necessarily the same from group to group and had ventured far from the original Mormon beliefs that had spawned so many breakaway sects. The most conservative insisted sex was only for purposes of procreation. Others, like her family’s church, believed a man could have sex with a woman at any time as long as she “belonged” to him.

Still, there were 1,517 souls in Superior, and only half of those were members of the Everlasting Apostolic Church. The chances of being born here, in this small community, had to be a billion to one.

Unfortunately, the chances of getting out were about the same.

The weight of her purpose finally propelled Hope back to the car, where she retrieved the flowers she’d cut from her yard for her mother. She had to make her presence known as soon as possible. She’d have a much better chance of an honest conversation with her mother and sisters while her father wasn’t around. Considering the years that had passed since she’d last had contact and the way she’d left, it wasn’t going to be easy to reach them, even without her father’s interference. Her mother believed that God’s acceptance required her to submit to her husband’s will, which made it almost impossible to get her to listen to anything that didn’t come directly from him or the pulpit.

Taking a deep breath, Hope walked resolutely toward the picnic area.

Sister Raylynn, with her eagle eye, noticed her first and used her hand for shade so she could see better. Her jaw sagged, and, for an interminable moment, Hope felt the old fear and confusion return. The strictness of her upbringing, the emotional blackmail her parents and the leaders of the church had used to control her actions, the overwhelming competition she’d always felt for any crumb of her father’s attention and the sermons railing about the fiery fate of the wicked—all those feelings and memories closed in, threatening to suffocate her. She could almost feel the flames licking at her ankles….

But then she saw her closest sisters. Charity, five years younger than Hope at twenty-two, had a child propped on one hip and a toddler at her feet. Faith, now almost nineteen, was pregnant.

Raylynn said something and pointed. Her mother stopped wiping the mouth of the child Charity held and they all turned to look, their faces registering alarm or surprise, Hope couldn’t tell which.

Just as quickly, she felt her throat tighten and begin to burn. How she’d missed them. It had been forever since she’d last seen her family, but she’d carried them in her heart into a world that had little idea about who polygamists were or how they lived or—most especially—why they did the strange things they did.

Because of her background and her allegiance to these people, Hope had always stood apart. Alone. That aching loneliness had occasionally tempted her to return. But she could never rejoin them. If she couldn’t live the principle at sixteen, she could never live it now.

“Hope, is it you?” her mother said, her voice faltering when Hope drew near.

Hope stopped a few feet away and tentatively offered Marianne the flowers, along with a tremulous smile. “It’s me,” she said. “Happy Mother’s Day.”

Her mother pressed one shaking hand to her bony chest and reached out with the other, as though to accept the bouquet or cup Hope’s cheek. But Raylynn interrupted. “Good, here he comes,” she said. “It’s okay, Marianne. You don’t have to deal with this negativity. Jed’s here.”

Her mother’s hand dropped, and dread settled in the pit of Hope’s stomach as she looked up to see her father entering the park. A scowl generally served as his customary expression—anything less would have been frivolous—but his face darkened considerably when a little girl ran up to him and brightly announced, “Her name’s Hope, Daddy. I heard her say it. Ain’t she pretty? Ain’t that a pretty name, Daddy?”

Her father passed the child without acknowledging her. Tall and imposing in an Abraham Lincoln sort of way, he still wore his beard untrimmed. Two gray streaks broke the black of it at each corner of his mouth, accentuating his frown. He’d lost a good deal of his hair; his face, on the other hand, hadn’t aged a bit. Time couldn’t soften his granitelike features any more than it could soften his granitelike heart.

“What is this? What’s going on here?” he cried, his long legs churning up the distance between them. Next to him hurried her two uncles, Rulon, a taller version of her father, who had eight wives at last count, and Arvin, the runt of the family—and the man she’d refused to marry. Arvin was almost skeletal in appearance. The bones of his hips jutted out beneath a tightly cinched belt, and his chest appeared concave beneath his wrinkled white shirt. But at fifty-six, he still had his hair. Black and stringy, it fell almost to his shoulders. He was older than her father by a year, yet she would have been his tenth wife.

Hope’s grip on the flowers instinctively tightened. She wanted to leave, but her feet wouldn’t carry her. Not while Charity was standing in front of her looking so haggard and careworn at twenty-three. Who had her father arranged for Charity to marry?

“Hope’s back,” her mother volunteered in a placating tone as Jed reached them.

Her father’s eyes climbed Hope’s thin frame, the frame she’d inherited from him. She knew he was taking stock of the changes in her, making special note of her khaki shorts and white cotton blouse. She was dressed like a Gentile, an outsider, and he wouldn’t like that any more than he’d approve of the fact that her apparel showed some leg. She’d considered wearing a long dress, but that was too great a concession. She was part of these people, and yet she wasn’t. She was an outcast. As much as she missed her sisters and her mother, the years she’d spent here seemed like another lifetime. She now knew the freedom of driving and making her own decisions, the power of education, the joy of being able to support herself. She lived in a world where women were equal to men. She could speak and be heard and have some prospect of making a difference.

That was what she wanted to give her sisters. A chance to know what she knew—that there were others in the world who believed differently from their father. A chance to get more out of life.

“Father,” Hope murmured, but the old resentment came tumbling back, making the word taste bitter in her mouth. If not for his final betrayal, if not for his favoring Arvin’s salacious interest over her happiness, maybe she wouldn’t have done what she’d done in the barn. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to pay the terrible price she’d paid.

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here on a day meant to honor mothers when you’re guilty of just the opposite,” her father snapped.

“I’ve never meant Mother any disrespect.” Hope glanced meaningfully at Arvin. “I would have dishonored myself had I done anything different.”

“You flouted God’s law!” Arvin cried, her acknowledgment of his presence enough to provoke him.

“God’s law? Or your own?” she replied.

“That’s sinful,” her father said. “I won’t have you talking to Arvin that way. He’s always loved you, was nothing but good to you. You were the one who wronged him.”

Briefly, Hope remembered her uncle’s eager touches when she was a child. His long, cool fingers had lingered on her at every opportunity, and he’d always been quick to take her to the potty or clean a skinned knee. He’d scarcely been able to wait until she was old enough to bear children to ask her father for her hand.

“He had no right to press his claim once I refused him. I was only sixteen,” she said.

Her father waved her words away. “Your mother was only fifteen when she married me.”

“That doesn’t matter. I would have been miserable.”

“Heaven forbid I should do something to displease such a princess!” her father bellowed. “Was I supposed to support you in feeling too good for a worthy man? Was I supposed to give in to your vanity? God will strike you down for your pride, Hope.”

“God doesn’t need to do anything,” she said. “What you’ve done is enough.”

“Hope, don’t say such things,” her mother pleaded.

But the old anger was pounding through Hope so powerfully now she couldn’t stop. “What you’ve done in the name of religion is worse than anything I’ve ever even thought about doing,” she told her father. “You use God to manipulate and oppress, to make yourself bigger than you really are.”

Her father’s hand flexed as though he’d strike her. He had beaten her a few times in the past—like the night she’d fled Superior—but Hope knew he wouldn’t hit her now. Not in front of everyone. If he assaulted her, she’d have a legitimate complaint to file with the police, and the Everlasting Apostolic Church wanted no part of that. Though it was next to impossible to enforce the law, polygamy was, after all, illegal and there had been a few isolated cases in which polygamists had actually gone to prison, though mostly for related crimes and not for polygamy per se.

Still, the murmuring in the crowd that was quickly gathering told Hope she’d gone too far. She’d come with the intention of being diplomatic, of reassuring herself of her family’s well-being and seeing if she could do anything to help her sisters. Instead, she’d disparaged the church and her father. But she couldn’t help it. She was viewing their lifestyle with new eyes, and too little had changed.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” her father said.

It was a public park, but Hope didn’t bother pointing that out. Her father had always believed that his power extended beyond the normal domain. Among his family and in the church, it did. For him, there was no world outside of that and, if she stayed, she’d only make matters worse for the others.

She glanced at Faith and Charity. “Anyone here want to leave with me?”

Her sisters stared at the ground. Her mother opened her mouth as though she longed to speak, but then clamped her lips firmly shut.

“All right, I’ll go,” Hope said when no one spoke, but Faith caught her by the arm.

“It’s Mother’s Day,” she said, appealing to their father while clinging to her. “Can’t Hope stay for an hour or two?”

“It’s been so long since we’ve seen her,” her mother added. “She doesn’t mean what she says. I know she doesn’t.”

“Why does she have to leave at all? I think we should celebrate,” Faith said. “You know the story in the Bible about the prodigal son returning. This should be a joyful time.” She hesitated. “Even if she doesn’t plan on staying long. At least we get to—”

“You keep out of it, missy. I’ll not have her poisoning you, too,” Arvin said, and something about the proprietary tone of his voice told Hope that Faith was more than just a niece to him now. Was that his baby her sister carried?

The thought made Hope ill. She’d come too late for Charity and Faith. A profound sadness swept through her as she gazed at her beautiful eighteen-year-old sister.

Again Faith wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“I meant every word,” Hope told her father.

“Then leave, and don’t bother coming back,” he said.

Hope took in the many women and children surrounding her—the adults, the teenagers, the babies and all those in between. “I won’t. You have so many children, what’s one twenty-seven-year-old daughter more or less?”

Dropping the flowers on the ground, she turned and stumbled blindly to her car. She couldn’t save anyone here, she realized, swiping at the tears that rolled down her cheeks. They were too firmly entrenched in the lifestyle, too easily manipulated by the visions and visitations her father claimed to have.

Just as she used to be.

But when she reached the parking lot, the same little girl who’d called her pretty a few minutes earlier hurried out of the bushes and intercepted her before she could open the door of her car. The child had obviously been running and had to pause for sufficient breath.

“Faith said…” pant, pant “…to tell you to meet her at the cemetery…” pant “…tonight at eleven.”

CHAPTER TWO

HOPE SAT ON ONE of the swings in the park, which was lit by a bright moon and the streetlight across the street, while she waited for Faith. Her sister had asked to meet at the cemetery, but Faith would have to pass the swings to get there, and Hope had no desire to go inside. Not because it was spooky in the Halloween sense. She didn’t like Superior’s cemetery because the stooped and weathered headstones represented the people who’d never escaped the yoke of the Everlasting Apostolic Church. Her mother would be buried there, and so would her sisters when they died, even though they’d never really lived….

“Hope? Is that you?”

Faith’s voice came from the darkness behind her, and Hope turned. “It’s me. Come have a seat.”

Her sister moved into the moonlight, one hand braced protectively against her swollen abdomen, and Hope was struck by how far along Faith must be. Eight months? More?

Faith looked carefully around as though she feared being seen. “Thanks for coming.”

“Do you want to talk somewhere else?” Hope asked. “We could go for a drive.”

“No. If I get in that car with you…” Faith let her words fall off and took the swing next to Hope, using her feet to sway slowly back and forth.

If she got in the car, what? Hope nearly asked, but she didn’t want to press Faith. She wanted to give her the chance to say what she’d come to say.

An old truck rumbled down Main Street. Hope could see it stop at the light glowing red near the corner of the park, then take off when the signal changed, but there wasn’t much traffic in Superior, especially this late at night. The Everlasting Apostolic Church didn’t believe in shopping or going out to eat on the Sabbath, so the few businesses that did open on Sunday closed down by five, even the gas station.

“So you can drive?” Faith asked when the rumble of the truck engine dimmed and the only sound was the creaking of their swings.

Hope nodded. “I learned how when I was nineteen.”

“Where did you go today? After you left the park?”

“Up to Provo. I thought it might be more interesting to shop at a different mall.”

“Provo’s pretty far away.”

“I had the time.” With a deep breath, Hope studied her sister. “It’s Arvin, isn’t it?” she asked. “The father of your baby.”

Faith’s face contorted in distaste. “Yes. How’d you know?”

“It wasn’t difficult to guess.”

Silence.

“So how is it, being married to Arvin?”

“How do you think? He pretends to live the Gospel, but he’s really arrogant and mean and stingy.”

Somehow, even as a child, a sixth sense had warned Hope about the existence of a dark side beneath the eager smile Arvin had always offered her, together with the candy he carried in his pockets. Hope had done everything possible to keep her distance from him, which had eventually led to her outright rebellion. Faith, on the other hand, possessed a calmer, more long-suffering temperament. Hope had last seen her when she was only eight years old, but even then Faith had been a peace lover. A typical middle child, she was like a kitten that immediately curled up and purred at the first hint of praise or attention—the most patient and tractable of Marianne’s five daughters.

And this was what Faith’s good nature had brought her, Hope thought bitterly, staring at her sister’s rounded stomach. Arvin’s baby.

“Did Charity refuse to marry Arvin, too?” she asked. “Is that how it fell to you?”

Frowning, Faith cast Hope a sideways glance. “What you did eleven years ago embarrassed Daddy in front of the whole church. I don’t think he wanted to push Charity into doing the same thing.”

“She would have refused?”

Faith shrugged. “Charity’s more like you than I am.”

“Are you saying a woman should marry a man she detests for the sake of her father’s pride?”

“No.” Faith’s swing continued to squeak as she moved. “Arvin always admired you. He’d been asking Daddy for you since you were small, and Daddy had already promised him, that’s all. I’m just trying to explain why Daddy did what he did.”

“I know why he did it, Faith. But that doesn’t make it right. I was in love with someone else.”

Her sister stopped swinging and scuffed the toe of one tennis shoe in the dirt, as though finally cognizant of the fact that the generous skirt of her cotton print dress had been dragging. “That was the other reason Charity didn’t have to marry Arvin,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m talking about Bonner.”

The mention of Bonner’s name sent chills cascading down Hope’s spine. “What about him?”

“His parents came over a couple of years after you left and said they’d been praying about Bonner’s future, and God told them Charity was to be Bonner’s first wife. They said God wanted to reward him for not running away with you.”

Reward him? For clinging to the safety of his parents and their traditions, even though he didn’t believe in them? For breaking her heart?

Hope told herself to breathe, to suck in air, hold it, then silently let it go. The pain would ease…“So Charity’s married to Bonner?” she asked, her voice sounding small and tinny to her own ears. “Those are his children I saw with Charity today?”

“Actually they have three,” Faith said. “You probably didn’t see the oldest. Pearl, LaDonna and Adam.”

Hope thought about putting her head between her knees to stop the dizziness washing over her, but she told herself that after eleven years she could take news like this. What she felt for Bonner had dulled into disappointment long ago, hadn’t it? This was no more than she should have expected. “Does he have any other wives?”

“He had to take the Widow Fields.”

“Because…”

“Because no one else wanted her, I guess. She petitioned the Brethren, and that’s what they decided. It was sort of a consensus.”

Hope didn’t know what to say. Though Bonner wasn’t yet a man when they’d pledged their love, only a boy of eighteen, she’d expected so much more from him. It was as though he’d never whispered those things to her in the dark, as though he hadn’t helped hatch the plan that had culminated in so much heartache.

“He married JoAnna Stapley, too, about three years ago. And he’s already asked for Sarah, when she’s old enough,” Faith added.

Mention of another sister caused Hope’s scalp to crawl. “He wants Sarah?”

“Why not?”

“She’s only fourteen!”

“She’s so excited to get a husband under the age of forty she’s willing to marry him now.”

Hope sighed in disgust and resignation. “That’s crazy, Faith. She’s still a child. And he’ll be thirty-two by the time she turns eighteen, which isn’t so much younger than forty.”

“Maybe to the outside world it seems strange, but not here. You’ve been gone a long time.”

Too long. Or not long enough. Hope couldn’t decide which.

“Why’d you come back?” Faith asked. “Was it because you were hoping that…maybe…Bonner had changed his mind?”

Hope touched her own stomach, once again feeling the phantom kicking of Bonner’s baby in her belly. She’d thought a lot about Bonner over the years, had dreamed he’d change his mind and somehow find her, that the two of them would recover their child and become a family. But she knew that if he hadn’t had the strength to leave before, with their love and their child at stake, he never would.

When Hope didn’t respond, Faith grasped her swing. “I’m sure he’d take you back,” she said. “I saw it in his face when Charity told him you’d been at the park.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“No, I saw regret and…and pain.”

Whatever pain Bonner had suffered couldn’t compare to what Hope had endured. That much she knew. “So you think I should become his…what? Fourth wife?” she asked, chuckling bitterly. “That’d make Jed happy.”

“It would,” Faith said earnestly.

Hope shook her head. “No, it would smack too much of me finally getting my way, and he couldn’t set that kind of precedent. He still has two daughters to coerce into marriages they may not want. Maybe he’s even planning to give them to Arvin.”

Faith visibly cringed. “I don’t think so. He’s not very pleased with…with the way Arvin treats me. Deep down, he knows you were right about Arvin. Daddy’s just not ready to admit it.”

How many daughters was it going to take?

“How’d you get away tonight?” Hope asked. “I can’t imagine that after seeing me in town, Arvin would stay anywhere but with you.”

“He and Rachel, the seventeen-year-old Thatcher girl, were married a week ago, and he hasn’t tired of her yet. He likes his women young—real young, Hope. He would hardly leave me alone the first year we were married. But then I got pregnant. He finds my swollen belly…unappealing, so now he almost always sleeps elsewhere.”

“Does that bother you to know he’s with others?”

“No, I’m grateful. I can hardly stand it when he touches me,” she said with a shudder.

Bile rose in Hope’s throat at the thought of her eighteen-year-old sister not being young enough for Arvin. Or maybe it was the mental image of him touching Faith in the first place that bothered Hope so much. “We should call the police,” she said. “If Rachel’s not eighteen, that’s statutory rape.”

Faith’s shoulders slumped. “I can’t do that to Daddy. It would bring too much negative publicity on the church and hurt families who are trying to live the principle the way it’s meant to be lived.”

Hope had some questions as to how the principle was meant to be lived in this day and age. But she understood that Faith would be much more sympathetic to the church’s beliefs than she herself would, especially after being away so long. “Sexual predators shouldn’t be tolerated in any community. Even one as tightly knit as this,” she said, sticking with a line of reasoning Faith could not refute.

“I don’t think you can call him a predator,” she said. “Rachel married him willingly enough. And he’s careful not to touch anyone who isn’t his wife.”