My Story (27 page)

Then the words came very clearly into my mind:
I will not leave you comfortless. I will come to you
.

I closed my eyes to thank Him and then climbed out of the tent.

It was a fierce storm, rife with water, the rain coming down in enormous, drenching drops. Barzee jumped up and we worked together. We grabbed the spare tarp and tied it up to catch the rain. Then we put out every bucket, can, and container that we could find to catch the rain. As the rain pooled on the tarp, I poured it into one of the containers. Once I had a mouthful, I lifted it to my mouth and gulped it down. I let it fill once more and gulped again. I poured and gulped and poured and gulped until I started feeling sick. I was drinking so much water; I knew I had to quit.

Glancing over, I looked at Barzee. She was on her hands and knees, sucking water off the tarp.

Once we had quenched our thirst and filled every container that we had, Barzee told me to get the soap. “We’re going to shower in the rain,” she said. We scrubbed ourselves, then wearily went to bed.

The next morning came but Mitchell didn’t. We lay on our beds all day.

“Is he ever coming back?” I asked Barzee.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Has he ever done this before? Has he ever left you for so long?”

She slowly shook her head.

“Do you think—”

“I don’t know!” she snapped at me.

Day five. No food. Hot and hazy. I hardly had the strength to move. Barzee and I sat around and talked, but only just a little. I felt too tired. Too weak. I lay in the tent and dreamed all day of food.

Day six. I felt so weak and dizzy it was almost impossible to walk to the bucket to get some water. I lay on my bed and stared up at the gray tarp. I felt like all my hope was slipping away. My life was nothing but sand through my fingers, water through my palms. I knew I had to eat or I would die, but I didn’t know what to do.

On day seven, Barzee seemed to lose her mind. Struggling to stand, she walked over and pulled out the recipe book that she had painstakingly put together over so many years. She looked at it with dry eyes, then started to tear out the pages and shred them on the ground. I watched her curiously. She ripped and scratched until she had torn out every page. I looked at the scattered pieces, the perfect cakes and salads, the delicious pastas and desserts. I wanted to chew on every piece of paper. I wanted to stuff them in my mouth. But a sudden breeze came up and blew them all away. In final desperation, I crawled to the trash pile in the back of our tent and sorted through it one more time, looking for anything that I could eat. Every last shred of food was gone. I struggled back to my bed and collapsed.

I lay there, waiting. What I was waiting for, I didn’t know.

Thinking of my situation, I almost laughed at the irony. After everything that I had lived through, the kidnapping, the knife at my neck, the daily rapes, the different moves, the months of abuse from my two captors, it seemed almost laughable that I was going to die of starvation in my tent.

For the thousandth time I wondered where Mitchell was. Was he ever coming back?

As I lay there, I started to wonder if this really was the end. Then I started to think about my family. No, that’s not right, I thought about my family all the time. But as I lay there, I thought back on all the good things in my life, deciding that I had been very lucky. Almost all of my fifteen years of living had been about as perfect as one could hope for. Sure, the last eight months had been pretty terrible, but everything before had been near perfect. I thought about my beautiful mom and imagined how she would take care of me if she were with me then. I thought about my dad, who was strong and capable of fixing any problem I might have. When it came to a great family, I felt like I had won the lottery, and that included my brothers and sister, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles … I couldn’t have asked for a more caring, loving family.

So I began to thank God for my life, my family, and the blessings that I had received in my short life. Then, not knowing if I could make it another day, I tried to think of things that I had done wrong and to ask God for forgiveness.

When I had finished my prayer, I lay still and waited to die.

It was in that moment that, far off in the distance, I heard singing. Had heavenly angels come to get me? No, this was something else. It was loud and off-key, and the melodies were completely mixed-up. It took me a second to realize that it was Mitchell. I was almost disappointed. He was about as far from a heavenly host as you can get!

Mitchell came panting and stomping into camp. Neither Barzee nor I had the energy to greet him. We waited until he stuck his head inside the tent. “Food?” we started begging.

He looked at us a moment. It must have been an incredible sight, the two of us lying on our sleeping bags, too weak to even move. But he didn’t say anything. In fact, he didn’t react at all. He didn’t rush to Barzee’s side, or jump around to get us something to eat. He didn’t offer to bring us any water. He didn’t even ask us how we were. Instead, he kind of smiled proudly. “I was walking through Lakeside when I passed the local KFC. They were throwing out their leftovers for the day. I asked if I could have them for my starving wife and daughter.” He pulled out macaroni and cheese, chicken, a couple of biscuits, coleslaw, and potato wedges. I rolled onto my knees and reached out for the food, guiding a couple pieces to my mouth with shaking hands. I had thought that I could eat the entire bag, but after a few bites I started feeling stuffed. Another bite and I started feeling sick. Realizing it was going to take a while for my body to adjust, I quit trying to eat and lay back on my mat.

“Where have you been?” Barzee asked in anger. Her voice was dry and accusing.

Mitchell smiled as if he didn’t have a care in the world and started to tell his tale.

*

The first thing he did upon getting to Lakeside was go into the convenience store to steal some beer. After gulping a couple of Budweisers in the aisle, he walked out of the store and saw a woman pushing a shopping cart while popping a few pills. “Ah,” he thought, “the next step I must take in my quest to descend below all things.” He went up to the woman and asked her for some of her pills. She refused, of course, so he grabbed her cart and started running. After getting away from her, he opened her purse and grabbed the prescription medication. Popping some into his mouth, he abandoned the stolen loot then turned and ran, the lady in hot pursuit. He jumped over a fence and kept on running. The drugs and beer, a really bad combination, started to kick in and he was getting wobbly. Soon after, he came to a church, the perfect place to spend the night. But all of the doors were locked. That wasn’t right! He was the prophet of the Lord! And the church was nothing but an abomination, with evil people who went inside. Who were they to deny him access to his Father’s house? So he found a brick and broke the window, then crawled inside and fell unconscious on the floor.

And that’s where the police had found him.

He didn’t remember a lot about being booked into jail other than the fact that he was able to flash a female officer from underneath his robe. He was really proud of that.

Seven days later, having given the police a fake name, and having told the judge that he had been clean for twenty years and how sorry he was that he had fallen off the wagon, and that, of course, he was willing to pay for the damages and do loads of community service, but that all he wanted now was to get back to his family, the judge had let him go.

He hung around the city for the rest of the day, then made his way back to camp.

“For seven days, you left us!” Barzee hissed like a snake. “Seven days without so much as a single scrap to eat.”

“I thought you’d go down to Lakeside and get something,” Mitchell answered without regret.

“For seven days, you were in jail. You got three square meals a day. We had nothing! You had a real bed with a pillow and soft blankets. We had this!” She lifted a finger to the gray tarps and the dirty bedding around us. “You had hot showers and a television and books and anything else you could desire.
We had nothing! We had nothing! You left us here to die!
”

Mitchell shook his head. “It was the Lord who called me to prison. I had seven days of preaching to the inmates, seven days of crying repentance to the sinful. All I did was serve the Lord.”

Barzee lay back on her sleeping bag and closed her eyes.

I was about to point out that no one in the jail had been converted but decided there was no point in stirring things up.

A few moments passed. It appeared that Barzee was already asleep. Mitchell and I were alone together and I stared into his eyes. He looked at me and held my stare, refusing to look away. My unspoken words were very clear.

You tried to kill me. But you didn’t. For all of your talk of being a mighty prophet, I am stronger than you are. One day, you’re going to know that. One day, you’re going to see.

The battle between us lasted only a few seconds. Then, for the first time since he had slipped into my bedroom, Mitchell was the first one to look away.

Mitchell was always driven by events. There was never a simple coincidence, nor did things ever happen just by chance. Everything that happed had to be a sign from God.

One afternoon near the end of February, a couple of weeks after Mitchell had abandoned us to our hunger, we were sitting outside our tents. Mitchell had decided he wasn’t going to go and minister that day. Too much work. Much too hot. The Lord wanted him to stay in the camp. So he spent the day sitting around talking about his favorite subject, which was, of course, himself. Barzee was lapping up every word. I was hardly even listening. After eight months of listening to him every minute of every day, there wasn’t a whole lot about him that I hadn’t heard before. But I always tried at least to act like I was paying attention. There was a steep price to pay if he felt like I didn’t give him the respect he thought he deserved. But I wasn’t listening, I was daydreaming; about my family, about my friends, wondering if I would ever be able to go back to school. It was a sunny day, and the skies were clear. It was already getting hot and I wondered what the summers would be like in California. Was I going to spend the rest of my life here? Was I going to spend the rest of my life on the top of this mountain, miles from anyone and anything, surrounded by boulders and scrub oaks? Would we ever go back to Utah? I really didn’t know.

Sitting there, I started to hear the low roar of helicopter rotors. The sound grew louder and Mitchell immediately stood up. The roar of engines and beating blades began to fill the air. Mitchell shoved me into the tent, then grabbed Barzee and pulled her in as well. Standing near the entrance, he jerked down the flap that we used for a door. The sound of the helicopter grew louder. It was coming right toward us. He motioned for Barzee and me to scoot to the back of the tent. I slid backward, keeping my face toward the door. The helicopter came to a hover right over our camp. There was a deafening roar of engines and the wind stirred up a terrible swirl of dust. The tarp tunnel was shaking so badly I thought it was going to be blown away. For a moment, I flashed back to the afternoon in the mountains over Salt Lake City, three days after I had been taken. But unlike that afternoon, this time I wasn’t anxious or excited. Whoever was in the helicopter, and for whatever reason they had to check out our camp, I was pretty certain they weren’t looking for me. I knew soldiers weren’t going to rappel from the helicopter to save me. Still, I kept my eyes toward the sound. After all, you never know.…

The helicopter hovered a few minutes, then moved on. Mitchell made us stay inside the tent until he was certain it was safe. When he finally allowed us to come out, he was a changed man once again. Less confident. Not as cocky. Full of doubts and fear.

He looked at Barzee and said, “That is a sign from God. It’s time that we move again.”

I knew it wasn’t a sign of anything. Mitchell was just scared the helicopter would come back or that the pilots would send police to investigate our strange camp.

Barzee looked at him but didn’t answer for a second. I knew she hated this place. I knew she hated being stuck in the camp twenty-four hours a day. I knew she hated never being allowed to go into the city to party or to scavenge food or to see something besides the trees that were around us. I knew that, like me, she was desperate to talk to someone new. I didn’t know what she expected out of a new place, but I suppose she thought it couldn’t be worse than the situation she was in. So she hesitated only for a moment before she agreed, “Yes, God wants us to move on.”

They started talking of all the places they could go, both of them getting excited about the possibilities. When you don’t own anything, or have any family ties or friends, and when you don’t really care where you end up as long as there’s a place to beg for food, the whole world opens up. They talked about New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. They talked about a lot of other places too.

My heart sank. I felt a tinge of panic and despair. All of the places they were talking about were even farther from my home! I always assumed we would eventually make our way back toward Utah. It was my only hope of getting rescued. No one had found me in California, but no one was looking for me here. But if we could make it back to Utah, I might be recognized. Someone might see me and realize who I was. They might call the police and save me without me having to do anything that Mitchell could blame me for.

All of the places they were talking about were on the East Coast. No one would recognize me there. And I had seen how much effort it had taken to get to California. Months of planning. Months of ministering to get the money. It would be so much harder to come back once we had made it all the way out to Boston or New York. Once we were there, there was no way we’d ever come back west.

As I thought, Mitchell started talking about his quest to obtain the remaining six young wives that God had told him to get. In fact, he said, it had been revealed to him that he was supposed to take seven times seventy wives. But for the time being, he was willing to focus on just obtaining the initial seven. As I sat there listening to his drivel, an idea started forming in my head. I thought of all the ways Mitchell had justified what he did by using religion. I thought of all the times that he had gotten away with things by lying and manipulating people and their emotions. Down in the city, he used faith and scripture to manipulate people a dozen times a day. It was what he did to get everything he wanted. It was what he did to get away with everything.