When she finishes, she gathers her things and retreats to the door. She looks back once more at Birdie, who gazes out the window. Vanessa hates the girl. She’s hated all of the girls from the very first one years and years ago. But she didn’t have the strength to leave before. She didn’t have the strength to pull herself out of the hole that Tom had placed her in.
Things were changing. Something was moving on the ranch. There was an energy in place. An unstoppable force that Vanessa knew could be held back no more than the tide.
And she was ready for it.
IONE
I wake to a pulse that throbs in my temples. One, two, three, four—the beats of my heart pound a rhythm that makes me painfully aware of the fact that someday it will stop. It seems like it’s pounding too hard. Like it will over-exert itself and have to stop. Sometimes the thought of my own annihilation overwhelms me. A black cloud gathering energy, it hovers on the edge of my consciousness. It’s in moments like this—the quiet dawn—that I’m most aware of it. These moments when I’m alone and at my weakest seem to be its favorite to prey upon.
Before the anxiety can blossom into panic, I roll over on the couch and my cell phone falls with a thud on the carpeted floor. My neck aches, constricted to a cramped position for most of the night. I realize that I’m alone and I’m grateful. Philip left sometime after midnight, I think. I grab my phone and press the home button. No new messages. I guess he was underwhelmed.
I can’t imagine that I’d be good company at the moment. I’m barely good company to myself. A hangover settles in for the day as I stretch my back. It goes pop pop pop, angry at me for not spending the night on the fancy mattress I invested in last year. My head pounds and reminds me that I’m not in my twenties anymore.
I stop mid-stretch and my eyes widen. I remember the events of the night before. I remember seeing Tom’s photo on the news—the shooting—and hearing that Birdie had been wounded. It seems surreal and for a moment I wonder if I hallucinated the entire thing. I grab my phone once more and open the browser to my last viewed tab.
An article that I had trouble making complete sense of last night waits for me there.
SELF-HELP GURU AT THE CENTER OF MURDER INVESTIGATION
So, I didn’t imagine it.
I comb through the article, gleaning the most important details: there was increasing tension between Tom’s outfit and the ranch that meets his property line. Shots were fired and two people were hit. One of them—a ranch hand—died. The other is Birdie.
And the most important detail of the entire thing is that Tom has refused to come out of the compound to face the authorities. According to another article that I find, this has resulted in the FBI launching an investigation. The word siege comes to mind but feels surreal and intangible. All of the articles omit this word. This is such a far stretch from where I left Tom all those years ago. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the whole thing.
I delve deeper into the rabbit hole of news stories.
One after another they fill my screen. Images of Tom at self-help events, arm draped over followers of his book, The Way. He beams, so proud of himself. Vanessa, his long-suffering wife, smiles absently in one of them. In another, I see Birdie in the background. The consensus among most of the reports is that Tom is a deluded messianic figure, having retreated deeper and deeper into paranoia the further he got into this charade.
Upon publication, Tom attended every event related to the book. The further along things went—the more fame he garnered—the more suspicious he got and the more probing the articles about his teachings became. It had become a cycle that Tom had fed with his lack of willingness to be transparent the more famous he became.
I begin to wonder how this happened. I heard about the publication of the book. I’d laughed. Self-help seemed below Tom—or at least Tom seemed to think he was above it. And also, what credentials did he have for it? A predatory composition professor with a penchant for girls barely out of their teens? Who could he help?
I start searching for information about the book. The first page I land on is the Amazon listing.
Have you ever wondered how some people transcend the pain of life and are able to function in high stress situations in a way that puts the rest of us to shame? Have you ever experienced a loss so debilitating that it derailed your entire life? Do you want to live a life free from pain, particularly the pain associated with loss? The Way is the answer.
We spend so much of our lives worried about the world around us. Plugged in to artificial connection, we lose ourselves. In The Way, you’ll find out how to disconnect from the things in your life that are bringing you pain or that are sources of potential pain and suffering.
Dr. Tom Wolsieffer, a former creative writing professor and current life coach, preacher, and self-help expert, outlines his ten tenets for self-improvement that culminate in the reader becoming self-sufficient enough to escape life’s worst pain: grief.
I’d been so intent on avoiding any sort of exposure to Tom in the past few years that I’d managed to see the book in an airport and avoided picking it up, afraid that by touching the book, I’d have rubbed a bottle and released a genie that was eager to stretch its limbs.
The cover gives the appearance of a tome bound in leather with small gold-leaf lettering on its weathered black cover. The publisher wants thirty dollars for it. Unwilling to shill out a penny that will find its way into
