Page 106 of Our Last Resort

I chuckled.

“No one in particular,” I said. “Everyone in general.”

“Good. That’s good.”

Annie grew serious then. Her inquiry about my dating life, I realized, had been a warm-up—a gentle nudge to set both of us on the road to deeper confessions.

“Listen,” she said, gazing down at her glass. “I know that we never talk about…things.”

“Things?”

“Life. Before we met.”

Ah.

Annie looked up from her glass. The fire cast its glow on her face.

“What was it like?” she asked, whispering even though it was still just the two of us. “After you left?”

The silence that followed was interrupted only by the occasional pops and cracks of the fire.

Annie placed a hand on my arm.

“He never talks about it,” she said. “We’re married. He’s going to be my husband for the rest of my life. Or his life. And I can’t get him to tell me.”

I opened my mouth, but I was stuck.

What was it like, Annie, to be born in a cult?

To leave?

To exist in the aftermath?

Well.

Here’s what it was like, being homeless: Every time we tried to do something, we bumped up against some complication. We could sign up for a P.O. box at the post office, but we needed a primary address to do so. Ditto getting a cell phone. We could shower for free, but only in other boroughs (which we couldn’t travel to without subway cards), and only during work hours (we needed to work to afford subway cards).

And there was the big one: We didn’t have birth certificates or Social Security numbers. As far as the government was concerned, we did not exist.

Then Gabriel got sick. Not his body, but his mind. So I took care of him. Of us. Back then, I would wake up at night, drenched in sweat, frantically awake with the knowledge that this life—our world—was hanging on by a thread. Me. I was the thread.

By the time Gabriel got better, in December 2009, I knew things had to change.

We needed help.

There are things I can’t explain to you, Annie. Like how, by then, we’d been out for a year. Émile had pleaded guilty to all charges. If he suspected we’d had anything to do with Edwina’s death, he’d clearly failed to leverage it into a proper plea bargain. That made me feel like it was safe to crawl out of our hiding place.

Edwina’s death: I will never tell you about that.

Do you hear me?

You couldn’t waterboard it out of me.

There was an organization. I’d seen people lining up outside for meals. I joined them whenever I could. One Sunday, I spoke to someone who said they could help.

This was a kind of help that would be meted out only in small, imperfect ways. It required patience and bravery, two resources I was running out of. But it was help.

I moved into a homeless shelter, Gabriel into a different one. On paper, we weren’t related, so we couldn’t stay together. It was back to the dorms, girls on one side, boys on the other.

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