Promise Me(5)

All to stack the odds.

Male and female birthrates were essentially equal. There were not enough women to allow each man born to the Faithful to take the three or more wives required. So my brothers, and uncounted boys like them, were dropped off on the side of the road like unwanted pets for the crime of being competition.

The temple was plain but it was the largest building in Jericho Valley. As I entered it beneath my veil and on my father’s arm I feared I would vomit.

“Promise,” he said, giving me a satisfied grin, “I am very pleased with you.”

“Thank you, Father,” I said dutifully, though really I wanted to scream at this man and pound on his chest with my inadequate fists. He was giving me away as he’d given daughters away before. As he’d give them away again.

Not Jenny.

I’d made up my mind on that count the moment I realized my lot was set. I couldn’t escape this. But I would make damn sure that my little sister could.

Winston Allred waited for me at the end of the aisle and I tried to smile weakly. As men went he’d never seemed too terrible. He was in his mid-forties, thick-chested and balding. He had already taken four wives. I hoped this would mean an easier time for me.

My stomach lurched at the thought of what would come later as Winston firmly took my arm from my father’s grasp.

I didn’t remember the vows. I figured they didn’t matter anyway as their legality only existed in Jericho Valley and places similar to it. I no longer believed these men were ordered by God. When the words ended Winston kissed me chastely on the lips and he settled his arm definitively about my waist.

The law of the world outside wasn’t pertinent. I was his all the same.

I faced the temple full of people as the fifth wife of Winston Allred. My mother, standing beside my father, smiled at me nervously. Behind them were John Talbot’s other three wives and a mix of my fourteen siblings. In that moment I longed for my older brothers. My father wouldn’t protect me, but they might have.

My head kept sinking and I kept trying to raise it and smile wanly at the wedding guests. This was what I had agreed to. This was my lot. Aston Talbot nodded at me with stern approval as we exited the temple and walked the short distance to my mother’s house where a meal would have been laid out.

My mother kept trying to coax food into me but I could not even fake an interest in my stomach. I closed my eyes and thought about the happy years I’d spent at school. During the course of the four year curriculum, I had been fascinated by the brief introduction to psychology. There were so many unanswered questions about why people did what they did. I had looked at the happy bustle of students surrounding me and felt lost in the mercurial world of people. You could try to sort them out. Apply names to them. Propose to make them neat and orderly. But in the end they still might shock you and behave completely differently than how you’d predicted.

So many times I had told myself that I would not come back. My cousin Rachel had left one desperate night, a penniless and unworldly seventeen year old girl but with more gall in her small finger than I had in my whole body. I certainly should have the gumption to leave too. But I knew what the penalty would be. My parents would never be permitted to see me again. Jenny would be alone. No. I told myself I had to come back.

As I stared into my lap at my primly folded hands, I wondered about Rachel. At school I had been required to use the internet in order to complete coursework. I was shocked to Google ‘Rachel Talbot’ and find her smiling profile on Facebook. My cousin was still beautiful. I knew how any interaction with a disobedient daughter would be condemned if discovered, so we corresponded via private messages. Rachel was living with a man in the desert on the border between California and Arizona. She was free. She was happy. I said nothing to anyone about having heard from her. Not even Jenny. I searched for my brothers as well in the vast online world. I did not find them.

I remembered the last message Rachel had sent me. It was a week before the completion of my studies, a week before I would be returning to Jericho Valley. She’d been trying for some time to persuade me not to go back.

“Promise, they’ll always lie. They’ll always tell you it’s your duty to be whatever sick role they have imagined for you. It’s all bullshit, sweetheart. I knew that. You know it. Leave them. Today, next week, next year. You can always come to me. I love ya hon, Rachel.”

They’ll always lie.

On my wedding day those words kept ringing in my ears as if Rachel herself were standing by my side insistently whispering them. And then the first syllables fell away and became only one, repeated over and over.