Leaving Fishers (23 page)

Angela stopped at a red light and Dorry jerked the door open and jumped out.

“Wait,” Angela yelled after her. “How will you get home?”

“I’ll take a bus,” Dorry yelled without looking back. The winter wind tore the words from her mouth and whipped her hair into her face. She wasn’t sure if Angela had heard her. But she heard Angela scream back, “You are damned, Dorry Stevens. You are one of the lost.”

And then Dorry heard Angela pull the door shut. Angela drove on with the traffic and Dorry was left standing in the street, shivering, watching the blue car until it disappeared.

She didn’t know where she was.

Chapter

Twenty-six

DORRY STOOD NUMBLY IN THE STREET until someone honked at her. She walked blindly for several blocks, not even bothering to look for a bus stop. She didn’t know anything about the Indianapolis bus system. Angela had been driving her around for months. How would she get home? She didn’t even know if she was going in the right direction.

If she hadn’t walked right into a pay phone outside a Wendy’s, she might have gone on like that for hours, in the cold. As it was, she stared stupidly at the phone for a full minute before an idea occurred to her. A phone. She could call her mother. She put her money in and dialed. A computerized voice told her, “The number you have reached cannot be connected as dialed,” three times before she realized the problem: She’d been dialing her mother’s Bryden work number. Without an area code it was useless. She didn’t know her mother’s number in Indianapolis.

Dorry stared at the phone a while longer before it occurred to her to go into the Wendy’s and ask for a phone book. She scanned the list of
nursing homes—was it Pleasant View? Pleasant Years? Happy Years? I will never be happy again, she thought. I’ve given up God.

She went back to the phone. “Mommy,” she wailed into the receiver, “come get me.”

When her mother picked her up forty-five minutes later, still huddled outside the Wendy’s, she was praying, “Oh, God, what have I done? What do I do now?” But what right did she have to talk to God?

Her mother was jubilant. “Dorry, I’m so glad you’re leaving that church,” she said. “Your father and I were trying to think of ways—oh, never mind. You’ve done the right thing now. We can get back to normal. I talked my supervisor into letting me count this as an extra-long dinner break. Let’s go somewhere and celebrate. What do you want? Perkins? Bob Evans? Shoney’s?”

Dorry’s stomach growled. She was starving. But the thought of a restaurant dinner—burgers surrounded by French fries, platters overflowing with spaghetti—made her want to throw up. Food was still evil for her. But how could it be, if she’d given up God?

Dorry turned her face to the window. “I don’t feel like celebrating. Just take me home.”

“Okay,” her mother said.

Dorry and her mother drove the rest of the
way home in silence. The phone was ringing as they opened the door.

“Have you repented?” Angela’s voice rushed at Dorry over the phone. “Are you ready to atone? We’ll need an extra-long discipling session for this. I didn’t see it, but you were making those kids into a false god. What a grave sin. You must pray for forgiveness immediately What if you’d been killed in a wreck on the way home?”

For a minute, Dorry could almost picture it. A truck smashing into their car, broken glass and blood everywhere, Dorry dead on the street. And then God as a mysterious voice in the darkness, proclaiming, “Here’s another Fisher, not one of the greatest, but still—oh, no . . . You just quit? Too bad. You know where you go.”

Dorry bit her tongue so hard she tasted blood. She summoned up the image of Jasmine and Zoe, wailing, because of her. “I don’t want any more discipling sessions,” Dorry said through gritted teeth. “Ever. I meant what I said about quitting.” And then she hung up.

There were more calls after that, starting five minutes after Dorry’s mother finished her dinner break and went back to work. For the next week, the Fishers had an uncanny way of knowing when her parents weren’t around. Dimly, Dorry realized someone was spying on her—after all, it
had happened before. She’d done it herself. Just as dimly, she knew she could take the phone off the hook, or tell her parents, or even call the police. But maybe she deserved the calls.

“God is watching you. He knows your sin,” the voices said sometimes. Or “The Devil has you now. There is rejoicing in hell.” Or, “You are evil.”

“Yes,” Dorry whispered after that call. She felt evil. But no, it was the Fishers and God who were evil. Wasn’t it?

She still prayed. Prayed for strength when the calls were nice, “But Dorry, you’re like a sister to me. How can I let my sister go to hell?” Angela asked on Monday. Sobbing, Dorry hung up without answering.

“Oh, Dorry, we had such hopes for you,” Pastor Jim all but purred into the phone on Wednesday. “You were such a promising member . . . Return and all will be forgiven—”

“No,” Dorry said.

Her greatest temptation came the next night. “Dorry, old pal, what’s this I hear about you losing your mind?” said the voice on the phone.

It was Brad.

Dorry felt the familiar rush of longing. Of lust. Automatically, she thought, “I’ll have to confess this to Angela.” But she wouldn’t—she never had to confess anything to Angela ever again.

“I won’t be judging you or anything, but what do you say I come over and we talk about this. We could go out for pizza maybe.” Brad’s voice was slow and relaxed, practically a drawl. It was warm, too—Dorry could melt in that voice.

“Just you and me? Like—like a date?”

The instant she’d said them, Dorry wanted to draw her words back. Her face burned. She was glad Brad couldn’t see her.

“A date? I thought you’d never ask.” The teasing Brad was back. “But you know, I only date Fishers. Second Corinthians 6:14.”

Dorry didn’t have to reach for a Bible. The verse came into her mind unbidden: “Do not be mismated with unbelievers. For what partnership have righteousness and iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” She knew what she was. Iniquity and darkness.

“But, hey,” Brad continued. “You reconsider your insanity, sure, we can call it a date.” He chuckled.

It was the chuckle that did it. Dorry watched her knuckles turn white as she gripped the edge of the kitchen counter. “I—don’t—want—to—see—you,” she said. “Good-bye.”

That night Dorry dreamed that she threw herself at Brad and they started making out and just as she was certain he really loved her, he had
never been pretending, she looked at him again and it wasn’t Brad at all, but the Devil, with horns and a fiery face and eyes like burning coals. “You’re a fool,” he bellowed. “Nobody would want you but me. And I’m just trying to fill up hell.”

Then she dreamed she was in hell, screaming in pain, and Angela looked down from heaven and said, “I told you so.”

The next morning, when Dorry had shakily gotten herself off to school, she saw Angela in the hall. Dorry began bracing herself to speak—she would say, “Hi,” but nothing else, she decided—when Angela breezed past her, looking right through her. It was like Angela’s eyes no longer registered Dorry’s image.

It was the same way with Brad later in the day, when Dorry was coming out of study hall. She was right in front of him—he couldn’t
not
see her—but somehow he didn’t.

At lunch she sat two chairs down from her usual Bible Study group, so close she could read the small print in some of their Bibles. No one glanced her way. And then she knew: For the Fishers, she no longer existed.

“I’m a ghost,” she whispered in bed that night, in the dark. “Am I a ghost to you, too?”

She wasn’t really sure who she was talking to.

Chapter

Twenty-seven

DORRY WAS EATING ALONE. AGAIN.

It didn’t matter now. She didn’t care who saw her. The school cafeteria buzzed around her, with kids laughing, joking, yelling. She was on another planet. She chewed her food doggedly, not even tasting the special treat her mother had taken to slipping into her bag, declaring, “You’re losing weight too fast, honey. You’re starting to look peaked. This’ll perk you up.” Today it was a generous slice of brownie fudge pie. Dorry put it down after one bite and forgot to pick it up again.

It’d been two weeks since she’d left Fishers. Her parents wanted to send her back to Bryden. “You’ve got to get over this church thing,” her mother fretted. “If you just go home—”

Dorry pictured herself walking down the hall with her old friends back at Bryden High School.

“Dorry, you’re so thin now,” Marissa would rave. “Let’s do your hair a little differently, and you’ll have all the guys asking you out.”

Would Dorry dare answer truthfully? I don’t care about hair. I don’t care about guys. I’m in hell. I have condemned myself to hell.

“No,” Dorry told her parents. “I want to stay here.”

She’d overheard her parents talking about counseling, her father muttering, “Those psychiatrist types are all a bunch of fools!” and her mother protesting, “But just look at her—” Seeing her watching them, her mother twittered, “Dorry, is there anyone at school who can help you? Someone you’d trust—”

“No,” Dorry said. “No one.”

She wanted to go back to Fishers, she ached to go back, she wanted to have all of them and God love her again. But every time she reached for the phone or saw Angela in the hail, the vision of Zoe’s and Jasmine’s tortured faces swam up before her eyes.

Now she stared vacantly at the milk leaking from her carton where the seams didn’t meet evenly.

“Know what happens to fish who get caught?” a male voice said suddenly in her ear. “They die.”

Dorry looked up. She blinked at the boy who sat down beside her. His name came to her out of memories that seemed buried a hundred years back. Zachary. He’d been at the retreat with her. He’d been at the E-Team meeting. The first one. Had she seen him after that?

“I’m not a Fisher anymore,” she said dully. “You’re not allowed to talk to me.”

“Sure I am,” Zachary countered. “You don’t think I’m still in that crooked outfit, do you? That’s why I asked you that riddle. Think about it. We were called Fishers because Jesus said that thing about his followers being fishers of men. But it’s a lousy metaphor, because in nature, if you’re a fish, it’s really a bummer to be caught. It’s death.”