Page 100 of If This is Love

“Sounds good.” She paused. “Thanks again for doing this, Gabe. I knew you weren’t an unreasonable person. You’re just a person who’s been pushed too far, too many times. Considering that, I personally think you’re winning at life.”

She offered me a sloppy, half-salute, and I gave her a quick wave. “Thanks.”

I disconnected from the call and then immediately opened a browser, clicking straight to Destination Destiny’s website. Under the About tab, there was a link to Staff, and lo and behold, there was Ruth, just below Skye’s picture, bio, and video testimony.

She smiled her bright, beautiful smile at me through the professional portrait, and my insides felt warm. I’d never loved anything as much as I loved her, and beingso closeto having her, but her being completely out of my reach was starting to grate on me and agitate all the things that always agitated me.

I needed tomakesomething happen, but I couldn’t makeanythinghappen right now because I hadn’t gotten the balls to talk to her about Saturday night yet.

I was all fired up all of a sudden. I just wanted to go to her and sort this shit out already, so I needed to watch this video for recon purposes because I was going to bring up Saturday. I would watch this video, thinkreally hardabout everything she said,attemptto rationally connect any dots, and then I was going to call her. If it still seemed like a good idea after watching the video at least. It seemed like a real possibility that I could learn exactly what I was so afraid of—that I’d pressured her into something that made her uncomfortable and accidentally ruined what we had. There wasno wayit was just that she’d been freaked out about mistaking the rug for an intruder. She was way too upset for it to be just that, and she’d never been upset like that since I’d known her—even when she was talking about Michael. I didn’t know what was really wrong, and everything on the surface seemed to be completely normal.

It was starting to drive me crazy… or maybe I had exerted myself too much on the call just now.

It didn’t matter. I had a mission and a plan.

I picked up the laptop, carrying it out the back door so I could sit on the back porch steps and smoke. My palms were still clammy from my little blink-out, and not to mention, Emma had me straight up freaking out over what all Ruth said in this video. I set the laptop on the step next to me and then lit up, taking a drag before I pulled it onto my lap, and then I clicked play on the video.

Ruth went through the standard introductions of her name and where she was from, and I got a little distracted from her words because of the hypnotic movement of her lips.

God, herlips.

My jeans suddenly felt a little tight, and I set down the laptop again to adjust myself while taking a long drag and blowing out an even longer exhale of smoke.

I really hoped I hadn’t fucked everything up.

“That’s honestly when I started realizing the other people in my life were harmful,” Ruth was saying, holding me in rapt attention. “And it didn’t even start as me realizing they were harming me. They were harming my best friend, and that’s all I could really see. They had me so… tricked… or trained… or justused tohow they were treating me that I didn’t even know they were harming me. I just thought that’s the way the world was…”

Her words trailed off with the film fading out and then fading back in like it was clips edited together. “It was actually my church community, but I want to make sure I clarify that the harmful things were the fault of harmful people who had twisted our faith into something it wasn’t for their own personal gain.”

The video faded in and out again, and she continued. “I became part of the church because of my husband. My mother died tragically and suddenly when I was ten, and I was put in foster care. Michael lived in the same neighborhood as my foster family.” Ruth paused and smiled. “He went out of his way to be my friend. He invited me to start going to church with him and his father, and it was one of the only social activities that my foster mother let me go to.” She elegantly turned her wrist over. “You know, because it’s church.” She laughed her velvety, melodic laugh, causing chills to scatter my forearms and my heart to warm. “Church is supposed to be a good place, you know, a safe place. And it was. It honestly was for a long time it felt like. Mostly because of how well Michael cared for me. He was the most tender, loving soul. And from ten years old, I grew up justlovinghim. In every way you can love someone. We were as close as anyone could be at our age, and anyway.” She waved her hands. “We were close, and he was an only child of a single father, so I was close to his father, too. And his father…”

The video cut again, and Emma’s words from earlier were ringing in my mind.

She didn’t mention sexual abuse, but I wouldn’t be shocked if that had happened, too.

My gut turned.

“His father wasn’t too fond of me after a while,” Ruth continued after a pause. “When Michael and I got to be a little older, his father started talking about purity and holiness and all that sort of stuff, and that’s when the church stopped being such a good place.” She paused delicately, slowly turning one hand in that same elegant sweep. “The closer we were to adulthood, the more…” She paused again. “Dogmatic the elders would behave toward us. Or maybe it was like we were all just opening our eyes to the way things had always been. But Michael’s father decided around then that I was a problem. As a girl, I was a temptation to his son, and he made sure I knew it.

“It started with stuff like, ‘Don’t wear that. Look at the ladies in this church. They’re modest. Your skirt’s too short.’ And you have to keep in mind, my foster family wasn’t a family at all. They weren’t directly harmful, but there was a lot of neglect, so I naturally turned to the closest thing to a father figure I had, which was Michael’s daddy. And I believe he believed he loved me, but he didn’t like me. He thought I was a problem. They’d pull up to my house on Sundays to pick me up, and he would tell me to kneel on the sidewalk so he could measure my skirt. If my skirt didn’t touch the sidewalk while I was kneeling, I had to go change. I didn’t have a lot of clothes, so I usually only wore this one pink dress just because the hem was long enough.

“Anyway, that’s the way it was with the whole church community. When we reached a certain age, they wanted us to mature in our spirituality and taught us about our roles as young men and women. They taught us about ‘spiritual’ financial integrity and making sure we always gave a certain percentage of any money we were earning to the church. They taught us about not giving in to our flesh and its weakness because weakness separated us from God. Weakness was everything from giving in to sexual temptation, thinking impure thoughts, being in debt of any kind, not giving offerings to the church, not recognizing and fighting our ‘generational curses’, and not walking in constant joy and gratitude. Women were expected to fill submissive, domestic roles to serve the men. Single men and women weren’t allowed to sit together in church. They weren’t allowed to be alone together. After I was sixteen, I was never allowed to be alone with a boy without a chaperone at any church functions, and if the elders found out you’d been alone with a boy somewhere outside of church functions, they would deal with you with public humiliation on Sunday morning.

“In retrospect, it’s clear that all of it was its own special type of grooming. They groomed us by teaching us from childhood that ourrealfamily was this church. Our loyalty was to this church because God is withthis specificchurch. This specific church is special. God set it apart. So if you want to be a part of what God’s doing, you’d better fall in place with your role in His church. And so everything outside of that church was secondary. Parents were instructed to discourage their children from going to college because professors would brainwash them with sinful ideas. When abuse was happening in marriages, the couples were expected to attend counseling with the pastoral staff or prayer ministers,neverwith a secular therapist. Teens who weren’t even legal adults yet were advised to marry their boyfriends or girlfriends to keep them from having sex out of wedlock. Michael was pressured by his father and the elders to marry me when we were only twenty for that reason. They said I had picked up what they called a ‘Jezebel spirit’ from my foster home and probably my mother. They didn’t have a favorable opinion of single mothers, and that’s all they knew of her, so they decided she passed it on to me.

“But again, I didn’t really see or understand that any of this was harmful until after Michael passed away. I didn’t realize how much he was shielding me while he was alive. While he was still alive, we had a wonderful home. The house was a wedding gift from his father because we were so young, and it became a refuge from what I just thought was stuffy old religious people being stuffy and old fashioned. My best friend I mentioned… he was me and Michael’s best friend, and he was sorting through his sexuality and gender identity at that time, so his parents and the elders were always targeting him. They thought that with enough prayer and intervention and even shame they could make him fit into the role required of men in the community, but all they did was make him depressed and withdrawn. So our home was a secret refuge for him and others in the church who were struggling to fit. And after Michael passed away, we lost that refuge.

“My father-in-law slowly took back possession of our home within the months that followed Michael’s passing. I had to move into the guest room. The elders hired him for a special job that they created for him. I was scolded for openly grieving and given extra chores. They said joy is our strength and work is a blessing that occupies our minds so we don’t give in to the weakness of grief. When Michael was alive it was merely frowned upon that I had a job, but after he was gone, I had to quit my job to keep the house for my father-in-law. It was his role as the father of his deceased son to provide for me for the rest of my life or until I remarried. And it was my role to obey him.”

The video did that fading transition thing again, and I smashed the space bar to pause it. “Holy mother of fucking fuck,” I mumbled with my second cigarette hanging from my lips.

Emma wasn’t messing around when she put this church in the same category of extremism as the other stuff. Maybe they weren’t into suicide bombings, but everything I just heard was almost as bad. And I knew Ruth was sugar-coating everything a bit because she was too classy to be gratuitous with her descriptions of things, but even the sugar-coated version of it was horrifying.

It sounded like she’d been living in a prison.

I hit play again, and she continued.

“Anyway, ultimately I had started getting called out a lot by the elders and my father-in-law for being alone with my friend,” Ruth went on, her gaze fixed on something beyond the camera. “It just felt like we were being targeted because we didn’t fit in their little boxes, and they were angry because they wanted to control us and couldn’t. They caught us in a prayer room one Sunday morning and humiliated him privately, but then the pastor pulled me onto the stage in front of the whole church. He told me it was time to make a public confession of my sins, and I refused. He then pulled me off the stage to a back room, and he slapped my face—”

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