Sins of the Mother Read online

  Rather than continuing the bat mitzvah debate, she went back to the package. “Aunt Rebekah?”

  “No,” he started. “It would be—”

  “Pink. Right.”

  There weren’t a lot of other adults in Caitlin’s life at that point. Jane Bergman, her dad’s ex-wife, had died in a car accident when Caitlin was seven. Jane had been the woman in her life until just after Caitlin’s sixth birthday, when the up-and-coming defense attorney and LAPD officer Matt Bergman got divorced, but she’d never been Caitlin’s mommy. Her dad had gone through several girlfriends since, but a single cop with a back-talking daughter living in a two-bedroom Hollywood flat didn’t seem to interest the wannabe starlets hopping off buses every day.

  “Why don’t you open it, Slugger?”

  Caitlin let the mystery go, slid her finger inside the loose flap, and unwrapped the paperback.

  A boy and a girl walked through the woods under the title She Taught Me to Fly by Carol Rusnak.

  “This doesn’t look like a mystery.”

  Her dad rubbed his ear again. “Nope.”

  She flipped open the cover, surprised not to find any handwriting. Her father had written a personal message inside of every book she’d ever owned. “So who sent it?”

  He cleared his throat. “Technically, you’re a woman today, Caitie.”

  “Yeah, Dad, I’ve had my period for over a year.”

  He held up a hand. “And as a woman, I’m going to ask you to think about this as an adult.” He took a final drag of his cigarette, blew out the smoke, and crushed the butt in an ashtray. “This book came from Maya.”

  Caitlin’s cheeks flushed and her throat tightened. “As in Mama Maya?”

  Her dad nodded.

  She hard-swallowed. “So she’s alive.”

  Of course, they’d discussed her birth mother over the years. She’d been told that a young woman, Mama Maya, not equipped with the necessary mothering skills, had given Caitlin’s dad the ultimate gift and let him adopt her. The subject wasn’t taboo, but it hadn’t come up often. Nothing was known about her birth father, as that part of her birth certificate had been left blank.

  Her dad cleared his throat again. “We’ve got a few hours until we meet your girlfriends at Star Lanes. Do you want to talk about anything?”

  Caitlin brought the book closer to her chest. “I’m gonna read for a bit.”

  She took the paperback to her room and shut the door.

  Two hours later, her dad came in.

  Caitlin looked up, tears in her eyes. “Why would she send this? It’s about a jerk who gets his best friend killed.”

  “I read it, Caitie. I don’t think that’s what it’s about.”

  She climbed out of her beanbag chair. “No note, no letter, only two sentences underlined in the whole damned book.”

  She found the dog-eared page with the sentence highlighted in yellow and read. “ ‘Sitting by her side, he felt no stronger than Jenny’s crystalline bird. The slightest bump from any direction, and he’d collapse in front of her, broken into a thousand pieces.’ ”

  She shut the book and showed it to her dad.

  “This book was written in 1978, three years after she left me with you. So it’s not like it was even her book when she was young.”

  He nodded, looking over the cover. “Not everyone’s as good with words as you are. Maybe Maya was trying to explain why she wasn’t ready to be your mother.”

  Caitlin’s fingers formed fists. “She’s not my mother. I’ve never even met her.”

  Her dad looked down, took a breath, then looked back up. “If you could, would you like to?”

  He knew where Maya was. Obviously. The package hadn’t been mailed, so she’d handed it to him. They might even have spoken.

  Had he known the whole thirteen years?

  Had Mama Maya been out there, living some happy life without thinking of Caitlin for a single second? She felt another round of tears coming but made a fist and hit the top of her leg. She wasn’t going to cry for a woman who couldn’t even write a note in a book. She wasn’t going to cry at all. Her dad had said it himself: she was a woman now.

  “The truth,” her dad started, “isn’t one thing. It can be scary, no matter what side you’re on.”

  She hit her leg again, harder. “I’m not scared.”

  The pain felt good, better than the emptiness in her chest, better than the acid in her stomach. Pain she could handle. And wasn’t that everything she knew about the world? Even at thirteen, Caitlin knew that to be a woman was to suffer.

  Her dad reached for her hand, stopping her before she could punch her other leg. “That’s not what I’m trying to say, Caitie. Sometimes it’s better to face the truth. It’ll come out anyway. Better to get it over with.”

  “She didn’t want to meet me,” Caitlin said, pulling her fist out of her father’s hands, the emptiness transforming into rage once again. Instead of hitting herself, she reached for a pen and scribbled on the book’s cover, changing She Taught Me to Fly to Bitch Book. “As far as I’m concerned, she can die alone.”

  * * *

  Swirling the last bits of ice in her second drink, Caitlin watched the light refract through the melting cubes. Ten minutes earlier, the glass had been full. Time, chemistry, and her own actions had taken their toll.

  She reached into her bag once again. Roughly thirty years later, only thin strands of the once-firm binding of that original copy of She Taught Me to Fly remained intact. She grabbed a pen and flipped past page after page of text covered by handwriting in multiple colors of pen, finally finding an untouched section of original printed text near the back to write on.

  Guess I was right about that whole die-alone thing.

  She finished her cocktail, paid her bill, and retreated to her hotel room.

  CHAPTER

  10

  STAN LAWTON REPLIED overnight, approving both the story and three days’ worth of reasonable expenses. Caitlin had no problem finding people who wanted to go on record about the State of Jefferson, even on a Saturday morning. By nine AM, she’d eaten a continental breakfast and scheduled two interviews. The first, a phoner with a librarian in Salem, took half an hour and yielded a trove of historical info, both during the call and minutes later via emailed documents. The second, also by phone, saved her a five-hour drive south to Redding, California. Oddly enough, the radio DJ who hosted a weekly show on the subject of merging Southern Oregon with Northern California, opposed the Californian three-state initiative.

  “They want to include the Bay Area in Northern California, like we have anything in common with those freaks.”

  “I’m assuming it’s more about the Silicon Valley tax base,” Caitlin offered.

  “Don’t need it. Jefferson can stand on its own—if we get both the northern California counties and Southern Oregon. We care more about freedom than taxation.”

  The DJ took Caitlin’s info, promising to put her in touch with other Jeffersonians. Caitlin thanked him but wasn’t sure she needed another source. What she needed was lunch.

  She threw together an outfit of yesterday’s jeans and a white button-down shirt, rolled up her sleeves, and grabbed her laptop bag.

  Cloudless sunshine made the eighty-two degrees feel more like ninety, so Caitlin walked the streets slowly, peeking into storefront windows of antique shops and insurance agencies and then stumbling onto a local microbrewery, which offered far from the standard pub fare she’d expected. She ordered a bowl of roasted root vegetables on a base of pearled barley and two four-ounce samples of beer: a lager and a blond ale.

  Back out in the heat, Caitlin regretted her choice of jeans. Rather than heading back to the main drag, she took a side road lined with shade-bearing trees that would get her back to the hotel’s air conditioning, passing a sub shop, a tire place, and a barbershop with an old-fashioned red-and-white spinning pole.

  Caitlin laughed, got out her phone, snapped a photo, and texted the image to Mary,
her college roommate, now dean of a Big Ten journalism school. They’d only recently rekindled their friendship, and the previous talk with Scott had reminded Caitlin that friendship included actually sharing parts of her life on a somewhat regular basis. After spending the last month on the streets with the homeless, she’d certainly been slacking in her own communications department.

  She followed the image up with a text.

  Not sure if I’m in Oregon or time traveling.

  Mary’s reply came in seconds.

  Either way, looks like you’re back on the pole again.

  The woman always made her smile.

  Caitlin started to move on, but a handwritten sign taped to the glass door made her laugh out loud.

  Closed. Too hot to work. You should go home too.

  Oregon was growing on her. She snapped two pictures, shielded her phone screen from the sun, then checked which was better. The focus of the first looked soft, so she swiped to the second.

  “No way.” She put her phone down and turned one hundred and eighty degrees to the shop across the street she’d seen reflected in the glass door of the second photo.

  The words Daya’s Gifts—Handmade Articles for the Home and the Spirit had been hand painted onto the large picture window of an understated single-story storefront.

  Her phone beeped with another text from Mary:

  Where have you been anyway?

  Faced with an opportunity to learn about the Dayans, Caitlin no longer felt the requirements of friendship to be as pressing. She typed a quick reply:

  Going into an interview. More soon.

  She crossed the street and tried the shop’s door. A cluster of bells announced her entrance. Reclaimed pieces of furniture displayed various trinkets. A shabby-chic vanity held beaded necklaces and earrings. A nonmatching bookshelf showcased geodes and pink salt crystals. Two tables in the center of the room had been covered with coarse-looking sweaters and scarves. The distant smell of old wood competed with the scent of diffused lavender and lemon oil wafting from a lit oil burner on the long counter in the back of the room, where a cash register sat, unmanned.

  No blast of air conditioning cooled the room, but a small desk fan oscillated in a steady and partly effective arc.

  Caitlin let the door close behind her. A woman dressed in a simple flat-red housedress emerged from a curtain behind the back counter.

  “Welcome, sister. Come in out of the heat.”

  Cursed with unfortunate forward-jutting front teeth and flat brown hair, the woman gave Caitlin the distinct impression of a cartoon mouse.

  “Thanks.” Caitlin crossed her arms. “No AC, huh?”

  The Mouse smiled. “We prefer not to unduly tax the earth.”

  Caitlin smiled back. “You don’t sell T-shirts, do you?”

  “No, but we do have dresses and shorts. As you can see, we create our own clothing, plus we make a line of healing oils and creams.”

  “We?” Caitlin said, as naïvely as possible. “As in your family?”

  The woman folded her hands on the counter. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  Caitlin laughed. “Los Angeles. You’d think I’d be okay with the heat.”

  The woman nodded but didn’t say anything else.

  Caitlin pushed on. “So there’s actually a Daya behind Daya’s Gifts?”

  “Of course.”

  If the Dayans were supposed to proselytize, this woman wasn’t doing her job. Caitlin made an effort to look interested in a stack of sweaters, despite how implausible purchasing wool in this heat wave might seem. She held up a heavy-knit gray pullover. “How much for this one?”

  “How much would you like to pay?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “If you’d like the sweater, simply tell me the amount you’d like to pay.”

  “Wow,” Caitlin said. “Hard to believe you can stay in business like that.”

  “We thrive by the power of charity.”

  Caitlin returned the sweater to the pile and moved on to the only thing she might actually wear: shorts. “Cool, so you sell my credit card info or something, like a social media platform?”

  The woman looked offended. “We don’t accept credit cards.”

  “I was joking.” Caitlin grabbed a pair of red shorts from the stack. “How about ten dollars?”

  The woman smiled. “If that is what you consider those to be worth.”

  Caitlin checked her wallet, saw another five. “We can make it fifteen.”

  The woman reached under the counter and pulled a plastic shopping bag from a larger wad of bags, none of which referenced Daya’s Gifts.

  “They’re reused,” the Mouse said, “so we’re not—”

  “Taxing the earth, sure.” Caitlin handed her the shorts and the cash. “Do you have any documentation or paperwork? I’d like to learn more about your organization. Plus, my accountant is always on me about my charitable deductions, if you can write me a receipt.”

  “I’m sorry,” the Mouse said, looking to the side as she placed the shorts in the bag. “We ran out last week.”

  Caitlin thanked her, stepped outside, then walked back to her hotel.

  Her phone rang halfway through changing into the new shorts next to her room’s hard-working AC unit. She tugged the shorts the rest of the way, fastened the button, and answered the unknown number with a 541 area code. “Caitlin Bergman.”

  Sheriff Martin was calling from his private number. “Miss Bergman, sorry to bother you.”

  “What’s up, Boz? Did something happen?”

  “No, sorry to give you that impression. This is purely a friendly call. You seemed interested in Jefferson.”

  The cool air of the AC hit Caitlin’s sweaty back, and chills ran up her skin. “I am, actually. Did someone tell you that?”

  Martin stuttered briefly. “What? No, you asked about the flag in the office. Oddly enough, I had lunch with one of my reelection campaign donors today. When he heard a big-city reporter was curious about his favorite cause, he practically bribed me to put you two together. That is, if you have the time.”

  Caitlin reached for a pad of paper. “Sure, I’ll give the man a call. What’s that number?”

  Martin laughed. “Oh, you’ll want to meet Anders Larsen in person.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  “GUIDED BY THE Spirit, I have communed with Lily Kramer.”

  Standing over the Chair of Knowledge, Desmond Pratten rested his hands on the girl’s shoulders and smiled at the women seated cross-legged on the white marble tile, the Daughters of God.

  “After a complete yielding, she accepted the knowledge and moves forward willingly, casting away her birth name, as must be done.”

  Dressed in their ceremonial red tunics, the fifty women present for the ceremony raised their hands above their shoulders and spoke in unison. “We say good-bye to Lily Kramer.”

  At nineteen, Lily was the youngest of the Daughters by far, and the only new recruit since the ascension of the Five. She glanced back at Desmond, nervous but full of joy.

  He nodded in encouragement.

  She straightened her white gown, cleared her throat, and spoke.

  “My sisters, my mothers, my family.”

  The confident woman’s voice filled the Gallery of Light, absent the terrible stutter from which she’d once suffered.

  “I came to you broken and lost,” she continued, “unable to stand on my own. You welcomed and soothed me, anointed me with your love and the Light.”

  The Daughters raised their hands once more. “You are unique, powerful, and necessary.”

  “Indeed,” Desmond said, taking focus on the dais. “She is unique, powerful, and necessary, and her name shall be called on the last day.”

  He reached out his hand. “Stand now and speak the name to which you will answer when the Spirit calls.”

  Backlit by the golden glow of sunshine streaming through the gallery’s twenty-foot wall of glass, Lily t
ook Desmond’s hand. Despite her year of labor around the compound as an initiate, he felt the unspoiled softness of the four-decade difference between their skin. Something to look forward to later.

  “I say good-bye to Lily Kramer,” she said. “From now, until the last day, my name is Eve.”

  “Eve,” the Daughters repeated, rising to embrace her.

  Eve broke out in laughter, which led to tears of joy. Desmond let go of her hand, and she walked into the sea of women to be loved.

  It was good to see the Daughters happy. Not just happy, but hopeful, especially after the last two weeks. He wished he could share their optimism, but his thoughts kept coming back to Daya. Until she returned, he wouldn’t be able to relax fully. The double doors at the end of the gallery opened, and Gwendolyn Sunrise entered, dressed in her outer-world business suit.

  “Have I missed it?” she said, rushing to hug the newly named Eve.

  Eve threw her arms around Gwendolyn’s sizable frame. “Thank you, Sunrise. You’re just in time for the Climb.”

  Desmond moved into the center. “That’s right, my loves. Eve must prepare. Who will help this Daughter make the Climb?”

  All of the women, including Gwendolyn Sunrise, answered the refrain.

  “We climb God’s Hill together, now and at the end of days.”

  Desmond kissed Eve’s forehead, then raised his open hand toward the double doors. “I pray for your ascension.”

  Beaming, the young woman untied her dress and let the gown drop to the floor, leaving her in only white slippers.

  She bowed once, then walked out the doors, the throng of Daughters following to escort her on the Climb.

  Gwendolyn lingered. “The suite has been readied, including the—”

  Rather than letting her finish the sentence, Desmond kissed her forehead as well. “Thank you, my love.” Gwendolyn lived in his circle of trust, but he still didn’t like hearing the words erectile dysfunction medicine out loud.

  “There’s something else. A woman visited Daya’s Gifts.”

  Desmond smiled again, finally infected by the day’s hope. “Another voyager?”