Lying with the book on her stomach, she strains her ears and listens. The silence of the room around her and the tunnel made by the vent create the perfect echo chamber for their voices.
“…the hell is that?” Annoyed, and most likely interrupted from staring uselessly at the blinking cursor of his word processor, Tom’s tone of voice expresses his irritation. He’s been working on a follow up to his wildly successful self-help volume, The Way, which had prompted more than five hundred people to seek enlightenment at Revelation Ranch. Birdie had been there from the beginning. Long before there was a Way to be spoken of.
“We found it by the creek, close to Bower’s property line,” Jeff informs him. Silence descends and Jeff’s words echo in the vent chamber. The two men are looking at something, Birdie decides. Tom seems to be considering it. Then he speaks.
“Take it down.” His statement is a demand, not to be questioned. Birdie imagines Jeff nodding assent and hears his footsteps lighten as their tread moves away from the center of Tom’s study. She sits up and the book falls from her stomach off the side of the bed to the floor with a thump loud enough to be a rabbit’s powerful foot hitting the carpet.
Birdie throws back the covers and slips on her flip flops. Still wearing the sweats that she had on at dinner, she goes to the door and opens it a crack. The light from Tom and Vanessa’s bedroom stretches into the dark hallway like a long, illuminated claw, their door only open a few inches. Not wanting to explain herself to Vanessa she creeps quietly to the staircase and cringes as the fifth step down moans her exit from the upstairs guest bedroom.
The baby isn’t going to let her sleep and it’s been weeks since she’s gotten to do anything worth remembering. The pregnancy has shortened Tom’s leash on Birdie, something that was normally left with a lot of slack. He keeps an eye on her constantly, reminding her slightly of a parole officer, though she hasn’t done anything wrong. A little like Big Brother, Tom’s eyes are everywhere. He exchanges privileges for information with the people living on the ranch. And Birdie’s comings and goings are of particular interest to him these days.
Still, she wants to know what’s going on. She imagines some sign constructed by Wade Bower, the rancher to the south. Perhaps NO TRESPASSING even though Tom’s followers adhere to strict rules when it comes to the laws of the land they reside on. Even on their best behavior, though, they haven’t been welcomed by the locals of Kenton, Oklahoma, with open arms.
Their arrival, a year prior, garnered suspicion from the locals. People accustomed to living off the land, far away from government intervention, didn’t have much interest in making their new neighbors—over five hundred people—feel particularly wanted.
Birdie glides past Tom’s office doorway like a wraith, moving more delicately than she has all day. He stirs and she hears him pause in the shuffling of papers on his desk. She holds her breath, back pressed against the hallway wall. After a moment, he resumes what he was doing. Birdie slips down the hallway and out the back door, sure that she turns the knob until the bolt slides silently into the doorframe as she closes it.
Air still warm from the heat of the day coats the landscape like a scarf wrapped around her mouth. As Birdie steps out of the air-conditioned house, it feels like she’s opened the dryer and stuffed her head inside. The nights will still be hot when the baby comes. Relief won’t arrive until November. The thought makes her stiffen as she walks. The heat is enough of an annoyance. Caring for a child is not something she ever wanted to do, and the cons of the equation are rapidly stacking up. It’s too late now, though.
She walks, unable to look down and see her feet. They find their footing in the dim evening light, though. She puts a football field between herself and the main house as she walks toward the property line, and finally she begins to feel like she’s out from under Tom’s ever-present eyes.
In the distance, she makes out the forms of three men. Jeff is among them. The other two, Ollie and Sid, play equally as vital roles in the hierarchy of the ranch. Sid not as much as Ollie, but still to a certain degree. Tom exchanges privileges—a cell phone, for one—with Ollie for the information that only he can glean. People trust him out here. Ollie is slightly younger than Birdie while Sid could be her father. On a mission, the three men march towards the creek.
Birdie keeps just enough distance so as not to alert them to her presence. It feels like an adventure, getting out of the house to investigate what’s up at the border of the two properties. She knows Tom won’t approve, which makes it delightful.
It’s true that familiarity breeds contempt. She’s grown too familiar with Tom, she thinks. Too much time spent together over the last seven years has made their relationship lose the shiny varnish that it was once coated in. She feels a lot of things for Tom, but she’s not sure that love is still one of them.
The men walk through the field that butts up to the back of the main house, and they begin following the creek on the edge of the Wolsieffer property. They stop about fifty yards in front of Birdie. The three
