Page 6 of Liar Byrd
“Bread and cheese,” I whisper.
In our tiny kitchenette, really only one corner with a wooden sink and a shelf above it, I wrap up a small piece of bread fromlunch in a white napkin and the last bit of cheese Mom likes to have with it. She can’t always make it to the dining room. Her leg hurts too much, and there isn’t always someone available to carry her.
The accident with the acolyte and his hoe when Mom was picking potatoes was unlucky. She could have died.
Mom hasn’t moved from the wooden chair in front of the fire. She’s twisted her head to face me, a line between her eyebrows.
Her eyes dip to the bag in my hand.
“Byrdie…”
“We have togo,” I tell her firmly, placing the bag I’ve packed beside the door and hurrying over to her so I can get her up. I peer over my shoulder, checking we’re still alone. “I’m seventeen. Too young to be married. He is almost forty-five. And that he would even think of it…” I shake my head. “This isn’t a good place, Mom.” I glance at her leg. “And your leg is not getting better here. You need a doctor.”
“Jeremiah has been praying for me,” Mom insists, skin white. She’s always pale now, just as the bandage around her left leg is always bloodied and needs to be changed three times a day.
Sometimes it smells.
“You don’t need prayers, Mom. You need medicine. Antibiotics.Something. You haven’t been able to put pressure on it for days. It is not healing.” I look around, thinking hard.
How to get her out of here?
We’re practically in the middle of a desert.
We need a car.
I had just begun learning to drive at school before Mom took me out to move to a different town. That was fine because when we were in remote areas, I sometimes drove my mom’s car even though I was too young.
I can drive, but busy streets scare me. Nothing scares me more than the idea of being Jeremiah’s wife, so I’ll happily takeany highway instead. From Mom’s soft smile and her reluctance to move, she won’t agree to do the driving. With her leg, I’m not sure if she even could.
One of the women badly twisted her ankle, and I recall her hobbling into the dining room using wooden crutches. It was soon after we first arrived, and she didn’t need the crutches for long, but haven’t I seen them before?
Think, Byrdie. Where did you see those crutches?
“Stay here,” I order Mom. “I’ll be right back.”
She doesn’t move as I hurry out of the room.
It’s quiet and getting darker by the minute. Low, muffled voices and faint hints of light drift from the gap beneath the cabin doors I pass. It’s early to bed and early to rise here.
I creep, sticking to the shadows, with each step inching closer to the kitchen. I slip into the back. Wincing at the creak of the door, I hold my breath and count to five. When no footsteps move toward me, I let myself breathe and continue with my task.
There are no locked doors here. If anyone wants to hide something, they can’t.
No privacy. No ability to leave with the iron fences that surround the compound.
Tonight, more than on any other night, I feel the oppressive weight of this place with its hundreds of unspoken rules smothering me.
The wooden crutches are in the pantry, in the last place I saw them. I’d been looking for the broom with the stiff bristles to sweep dust and soil from the back of the kitchen.
Crutches in hand, I creep back to our cabin, still not sure how I’ll get a key for one of the trucks that the men drive into town to pick up supplies, but I’ll do it.
I rush back inside, the cabin door slamming shut behind me. “Mom. I got the crutches. You—” I’m thrusting them at her when a dark figure steps out of her bedroom.
Jeremiah.
His smile is angelic as always. “Your mother said you thought of leaving me. I hoped she was wrong, but I can see she was not wrong. Was she?”
My eyes flick back to my mom, seated in her hard wooden chair in front of the fireplace, the flickering flames throwing strange shadows over her. She looks so odd sitting there, so serene despite having just betrayed me.
