By the time Lauren told Quentin and Saskia, the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and the long bones of her legs. Maybe she told them when she told them because the pain was soon to become too strong to hide. Or maybe she told them when she told them because it was too late for effective treatment, and she could glide burning down the Nile on her golden barge without having to listen to inconvenient arguments from other people. She was dying, and the one thing Saskia could do, should do, was comfort her, but Saskia was carried back to her awful childhood when Lauren, burying her head in clouds of incense, didn’t see her, let alone love her, and so instead of comforting her dying mother, Saskia berated her, because she was a selfish bitch who maybe didn’t deserve to be loved after all.
Saskia told Austin and Shannon, who came to the house a number of times over the next two months to help out, as Lauren weakened and spent more of each day in bed, at first refusing pain medication, opting for acupuncture instead, then accepting it when the full carpet-bombing power of the disease began to make itself felt. Melanie flew home for a week at the end of July and everything Saskia wanted to find out about her marriage was hidden behind a screen of Christian goodwifery, braced with two-by-fours of happy anticipation of the fourth (fifth?) blessed event in the offing, and subsumed anyway by Lauren’s more pressing needs. For about five minutes Saskia considered trying to find out how to reach Thomas, then decided without a tremor of remorse that he didn’t deserve to know.
Of course, shortly afterward, Lauren brought him up. She had clambered that morning out of bed and come downstairs, then immediately had lain on the living room couch. It was a hot day, but she pulled around herself the blanket that Saskia kept there for her, and accepted an offer of tea. When Saskia brought it, she gestured to have it placed on the coffee table by her hand, then didn’t touch it, which was unusual. Her face was very pale.
“Are you in pain?” Saskia asked.
Lauren ignored this. “You’ve never forgiven your father,” she said. Over the last few weeks her voice had lowered in pitch, become friable.
“That’s right,” Saskia said.
“I wish you would.”
“Is that a dying wish?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
Saskia sat on the floor next to the couch and looked at her mother. What a beautiful woman she had always been. How tough it was, probably, to be such a beautiful woman. To have to deal continually with men who believed they had a claim on her merely because they desired her. Men like her father, who wanted to control women, mold them, encage them.
“It would be easy to lie to you, I guess,” Saskia said. “And I probably would, if this weren’t a dying wish. But Thomas doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”
“It’s not for him, it’s for you.”
“Yeah, that’s what people always say. I don’t buy it. Forgiving him feels like abandoning any standards of decency. Those standards comfort me.”
“But he—”
“He fucked Jane when she was thirteen, right? Remember? I knew about it when he did it in a tent in Norway, and you knew about it when he kept doing it here in the loft in the barn. And we did nothing. Yeah, yeah, we were all under his spell. We were three weak women, two of us still munchkins, one of us getting fucked by the Wizard of Oz. Well, no, I’m pretty sure he was fucking you, too, right? Jane in the afternoon, you at night, right? Though I’ve never directly asked you about it. Here’s my chance, do I get a dying wish, too?”
Lauren closed her eyes. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”
“I’m always like this.”
“Yes . . . well . . .”
“If I weren’t his daughter he would have fucked me, too. And I’d have let him do it. What is that called, the hat trick, the triple crown?”
Forgiving Thomas would mean forgiving Lauren and herself, and yes, wasn’t it a grotesque irony that one of Thomas’s legacies was that she couldn’t do that. But cult leaders were possible only because of their followers, and to absolve the latter of their gullibility was to invite the phenomenon to occur again and again. One has a moral responsibility to be a grownup. Lauren actually was a grownup at the time, so her culpability was greater. But Saskia restrained herself from saying this out loud. She was mean, but she wasn’t that mean.
The next morning, when Lauren was still in bed, Saskia apologized. Sort of.
“I’m sorry for some of what I said. Any other wish you want to express, I’ll do it, I promise. But not Thomas. I can’t.”
Lauren stared into space for a number of seconds. Then she said, “I understand.”
Saskia burst into tears.
After that, Lauren’s cancer progressed quickly, maybe aided (even the Western doctor said) by her acceptance of it, and in late August Bill and Saskia set up a bed in the living room and brought in a hospice nurse to teach them how to administer palliative care. During the last two weeks a friend of Lauren’s named Amethyst showed up several times, usually bringing along three other women, and the coven would burn little bowls of greenery and chant, holding hands in a circle. They praised Lauren for the beautiful death she was having and cried what looked to Saskia like tears of joy. Meanwhile, Mette wouldn’t get with the program. The different routine in the house upset
