My Story (22 page)

In the middle of the night, we stopped in Las Vegas to change buses. A lot more people got off the bus than got on. For the rest of the ride to California, I had a row to myself. I know it wasn’t much, but I was grateful for the space. Mitchell, always a very light sleeper, seemed to jerk and wake up every time I even moved. No way he was going to let me slip off the bus in the middle of the night.

We finally made it to San Diego. It was still dark, but the eastern sky was turning a shade of gray. We stepped off the bus into a thick mist. I looked down the street. The roads were shrouded in heavy fog. Every streetlight formed a perfect circle in the yellow light, each one a little smaller the farther they were from me. I began to shiver. It was so clammy. So unfriendly and depressing.

Mitchell studied the metro map on the wall outside the bus stop, then pulled out the map he had stolen from the library, his eyes moving back and forth. Finally, he turned to us and said, “Lakeside is where we will go.”

We boarded the metro and rode all the way to El Cajon, which was the last stop on the line. Watching the people, I realized I could expect the same kind of treatment in California as I had experienced in Salt Lake. The people stared at us, giving us plenty of space, pulling their children away. To them, I was just another stranger on the metro. Yes, I might have been a whole lot stranger than some of the others, but I was nothing they would remember. At the end of the day, they’d go home. They’d go on with their lives. But not me. I was trapped. I was never going home.

It took about two hours to get to the end of the line. It seemed like it took all day. After the all-night bus trip from Salt Lake City, we were all exhausted and mostly rode in silence. But it was obvious that Mitchell was in a good mood. The burden of the prophet was much lighter now that he had put some distance between himself and the law.

I couldn’t help but see the symbolism in riding to the end of the metro line. That was exactly how I felt. I was at the end of the line. So far from home. So alone and isolated. Already I was so homesick that I wanted to cry.

I hadn’t realized how much comfort I had taken from the fact that, even if I was nothing but a prisoner, back in Salt Lake I was within a few miles of my home. I always had the hope that someone might stumble upon our camp and save me, that there were still some people looking for me, that somewhere I might be recognized and rescued. At one point—according to Mitchell, at least—there had been a huge effort to find me. Maybe there was a little bit of that still going on. Maybe I would still get lucky. But I knew that was infinitely less likely now that I was in California. No one knew me here. No one would recognize my face. I might as well have been riding the train to another planet.

After stumbling off the metro at the last station, Mitchell studied a map that showed the bus routes and got us on the right bus out to Lakeside. We bounced along for a while. Only a few passengers were on the bus. All of us were quiet.

Climbing off the bus, I took a look around.

Lakeside, California. My new home.

I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to enter a new phase of my capture. Mitchell had never really cared if I was fed or cold or hungry, but he was about to set a new standard in neglect and abuse.

Lean days were coming. I was about to find out what real hunger was.

*

I stood on the road where the bus had dropped us off and took in my new surroundings as best as I could through my stupid veil.

I had expected to see a beautiful mountain lake surrounded by pine trees and white aspen. That was hardly the case. What I saw was a small man-made pond with a stubby boardwalk wrapped around it. A few ducks. A single black swan. A couple of people out for a walk. And we were hardly in the forest. Across the lake there was an old convenience store. Wrigley’s was its name. Next to Wrigley’s was a liquor store. Great. That was going to make Mitchell really happy.

Later on, I would find that the small town had a tiny library and an old grocery store that was run by a Muslim man who was always very friendly. I don’t think he ever let Mitchell plunder like the guy back in Salt Lake did, but he was always kind to me, and he let us scavenge in the garbage for food. And he sold handmade tortillas. When Mitchell was flush with cash—meaning we had a couple dollars that he hadn’t spent on booze—we’d go into the grocery store and buy some of his warm tortillas. I’d spread a little butter across the top and sprinkle on some sugar. I thought it was one of the best things I had ever tasted.

Lakeside had a couple fast-food places and, a little farther down the street, a much larger grocery store named Vons. And there was a small Protestant church. What a godsend! The people who ran the church were simply angels. Once they gave me some frozen tortillas. I was so hungry, I gulped them down like some kind of flatbread Popsicle. More important, behind their building, they had placed a worn-out plastic crate in which they left old bread they had gathered up from the local grocery stores so that people like me could have something to eat.

That first day, we walked over to the pond, our green sacks over our backs. We placed our belongings on the ground, then Mitchell turned to us and said, “I need to go and find a place for us to live. Hephzibah, you stay and keep an eye on Esther.”

I remember watching him head off. How long is this going to take? I wondered. An hour? Ten hours? A couple of days? How does one show up in a new city, homeless and without any food or money, and find a place to live?

I settled onto the dry mud near the pond to wait, figuring it would be a while. It was a sunny day, warm and pleasant, and I was content to sit on the ground and watch the people go by.

I didn’t have to wait very long. Maybe twenty minutes later, Mitchell came back. Seeing him walking toward us, I expected him to announce that this wasn’t the place and that God had commanded him to move on. But as he got closer, I could see he was excited. “I have found the perfect place!” he announced.

We gathered up the green bags and started trudging after him. As always, I was walking in the middle, with Mitchell ahead of me, Barzee just a few feet behind. We headed up a hill and crossed the highway. We walked past the El Capitan High School, past the school’s sports fields, and then a BMX bike park. There we came to an old sand levee with a spillway. Everything was covered with so much dust it almost made it hard to breathe. Mitchell ducked into some wispy willow trees that covered the steep embankment. The trees were so old, I couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead. Cracked with age, their dry branches hanging down like bony fingers, they appeared to be completely leafless. Instead, they were covered with little hanging brown things that looked like worms. I reached out to touch one and it crumpled at my touch. It seemed that half of the wormy things fell off the trees as we walked underneath them, filling my hair with brown chalk.

I felt like I had entered the fire swamp from
The Princess Bride.

This might be the only place on Earth that has never seen any water! I thought, already feeling homesick for our camp back in the mountains.

Mitchell led the way across the levee, then pushed us up the other side of the embankment where the ground was flat. More dead trees. More of the fire swamp.

“Here,” Mitchell said.

It was incredibly discouraging to see the place that he had picked. There were so many branches, old logs, and twigs that I didn’t know how he could possibly expect us to find a place to set up camp. But Mitchell was acting like a schoolboy at recess, smiling and so excited about our new hideout. He went to work, clearing an area of old branches and a million twigs, cutting away what he needed to in order to set up our tent. As he cut away the logs and branches, he piled them on the side of the campground that was nearest to the road, creating even more of a barrier to hide us. The road was only twenty or thirty yards away but, between the old trees and Mitchell’s barricade, by the time he was finished we were completely hidden. After clearing away the debris, Mitchell got out his trowel and started digging, chopping at the ground to level it. Then he laid out two tarps, placing them so that they were slightly overlapping. He wandered off into the brush, looking for some branches that were not so brittle that they would snap in his hands. Dragging them back into the clearing, he started tying the branches together to make an arch. Then he made another. Once he had completed half a dozen arches, he drove them deeply into the ground, then took our largest tarp and draped it over the arches, creating a large tent that looked like a gray tunnel. He staked the tent into place. Even though the camp was bone-dry, Mitchell knew the rains would come, so he rolled up the edges of the tarps and jammed small sticks underneath them to form a lip just inside of the overhanging tarp. Then he dug a narrow trench around the outside of the tent to funnel the water away. Finally, he cut our last tarp in half and hung a piece at both ends of the tunnel.

Straightening up, he studied his work. Our new home was complete.

After clearing another space, he began to set up his own tent. When he was finished, he stood back and proclaimed his new temple. “This will be the Altar of Immanuel,” he said.

The Altar of Immanuel. Wow! What was I supposed to think? It sounded like something out of a comic book. It was creepy and sacrilegious. It was arrogant and misogynistic and it made my skin crawl.

I noticed him steal a quick look at Barzee. She glared at him and nodded.

“Now that we have a new home, it’s time to make some other changes,” he announced. “From now on, we’re going to stick to a schedule.”

Apparently Barzee was angry (again) that he was constantly coming after me and ignoring her. Feeling forgotten and resentful, she had demanded that something change. No one asked me, or I would have desperately insisted that he should focus
all
of his attentions on Barzee. Cut me off completely. I’d have been the happiest person in the world. But no one asked me. And that wasn’t Mitchell’s intention.

Knowing he had to do something to pacify Barzee’s wrath, he had come up with a plan.

“You’re going to start taking turns sleeping with me in the Altar of Immanuel,” he said.

I only have to sleep with you half of the time now! I thought. It was the greatest thing I had heard since the night I had been taken.

And that’s what we did. For about two days. Then, to my utter disgust and disappointment, our schedule quickly migrated to where Barzee was “his” in the daytime, and I was “his” at night. But Mitchell was gone most of the day. Then, after a long day of plundering, ministering, and drinking in San Diego, he’d come home just in time to lead me to his altar, leaving Barzee simmering outside.

After a few weeks of this, Barzee demanded another change in the schedule. Mitchell promised to do better. But nothing ever changed. One way or the other, I was always in the altar, and Barzee was always left outside.

A day or two after arriving in Lakeside, we went to the local Walmart. Barzee and I were wrapped up in our robes and covered with our veils. Mitchell bought a few things and stole a few others: bedding, cheap pale green comforters and flannel sheets that were decorated with the image of a moose.

Across the highway from our new home was a small park where people would come to fly their model airplanes. Between the park and our hideout was an open patch of dirt with tons of cacti. One day Mitchell came back from his wanderings with a few prickly pears he had picked in the open field. Vicious little things, with tiny sliver needles that would stick painfully in your skin, they ranged in color from deep purple to yellowy-orange. None of us had ever eaten one before, so it took a little bit of careful prodding before we figured out how to cut them open and extract the fruit. The meat was slimy and filled with tiny seeds. I watched as Mitchell took the first bite, hoping it was poison. He chewed and swallowed without falling over. Bummer. But at least we had something to eat. He cut a piece for me and I ate it. It wasn’t really good, but it wasn’t terrible. For a long time, I tried to extract all of the tiny seeds and spit them out, but there were so many of them I eventually gave up and just ate them.

I turned to look at the field. It was full of prickly pears. But we didn’t know how long the season would last, so Mitchell went out and picked as many as he could. Once I became accustomed to the slimy fruit and got over my objection to eating the seeds, I actually came to like them. We ate them a plateful at a time and, over the next few months, they turned out to be the main staple of our diet. The only problem was, no matter how careful I was not to touch the outer skin, it seemed like I spent half the day picking tiny slivers out of my hands.

Once we got set up in our new home, Mitchell really hunkered down. It became obvious that even though we were a long way from my home, and it appeared that no one was looking for me in California, the episode at the library had changed him. He was cautious to the point of being paranoid. Because of this, Barzee and I were only allowed out of our hideaway once a week. One day a week to leave my hot and dusty prison. One day a week to get away from the smell of blue plastic and warm water. One day a week to see someone besides my prison guards. My routine was very simple. Boredom. Hunger. Rape.

Sometimes Mitchell would bring us food, but it was sporadic and unpredictable. Soon, I was living with the pangs of hunger all the time.

*

I loved going out, not because I had any hope of being rescued but because I was desperately bored. Day after day, I sat and dreamed of getting out of the blue tent. I dreamed of getting out of the fire swamp, of seeing anyone besides Mitchell and Barzee. I desperately needed to be reminded that there was a real world out there. And even if I couldn’t be a part of it, even if I couldn’t do anything more than pass through it like a white-robed ghost that no one was willing to acknowledge, anything was better than sitting underneath the blue tarp day after day.