Yesteryear

Chapter 1

Natalie wakes in the dark to a cold she has never truly known, colder than any story her mother used to tell on Christmas Eve about ancestors crossing the West by horse and buggy. Her first thought is a curse, immediately followed by an apology to the Lord. She tries to center herself in spiritual gratitude, thanking God for Caleb, for the Inheritance, for Clementine, Samuel, and Stetson, but when she reaches for the comforter, her fingers find a stiff, thin, hand-stitched quilt instead of her flannel-linen duvet. A snake of fear moves through her.

She whispers for Caleb. Nothing. Her body clock says it is nearly six in the morning, but her alarm has not gone off. She lunges for the bedside table and slaps empty air instead of smooth walnut. She falls out of bed onto hardwood, knees cracking painfully, and claps a hand over her mouth in sudden terror of making noise. Her mind races through abduction and kidnapping, slick with panic. Then she hears it: a ripple of children's laughter, multiple voices, an older whisper shushing them. A voice she places at four or five years old. A child calls out, "Mama, we're having breakfast!"

She stands, ignoring the frantic signals from her bare feet about the lumpy, frigid floor, and moves through the dark house, trailing her fingers along the wall until she finds a doorknob. She tells herself this is her house, her doorknob, her quilt; the storm knocked out the power; fear makes everything feel strange. She knows this house like she knows herself, and each correctly placed step makes her more relieved. She even imagines making a video about the strange experience later.

She turns the corner into the warm light of the kitchen and stops.

This is her home. This is not her home. The size and layout are nearly identical, but the floorboards are wider and uneven, there are no overhead lights, and the fireplace, which in her house is decorative, pops and crackles with flames, the only light in the room. Sitting by the fire are four children who look like her children and are none of them: a dark-eyed teenage girl with pinned, plaited hair; a small freckled girl with one half of her head braided and the other half loose; two boys who resemble her Samuel and Stetson. All wear raggedy pioneer clothes. The oldest girl braids the little one's hair with unyielding focus.

A floorboard creaks. The oldest girl's eyes snap up and meet hers. Natalie asks who they are. The little girl calls her Mama. The older boy says, "It's us, of course." The oldest girl commands, "Barn." Natalie stumbles toward the front door, and there she freezes. Carved into the threshold are dozens of notches and names, a vertical record of height measurements: MAEVE, 1852; MAEVE, 1853; MAEVE, 1854; NOAH, 1853; ABEL, 1854. And at exactly the level of her eyesight, a freshly notched entry: MAMA, 1855.

She rips open the door and stumbles out onto the porch and into the darkness. The scene is intimately familiar and horribly wrong: the big red barn, the chicken coop, the sloping road, all bathed in shadow beneath a still-black sky. No driveway lights, no barn lights. The barn roof has a deep bow. The chicken coop is not her thirty-thousand-dollar technological marvel with its automatic door, but a small shed with a thatched overhang. Even the chickens look thinner, less friendly.

A figure stands by the barn and begins to walk toward her. The moonlight reveals his face: Caleb, her husband, with the soft face and the plaid shirt. But his eyes are black and cold and dead. The longer she looks, the less she recognizes him, until he is a stranger, an older man, staring at her in the dead of night. She realizes she is wearing a strange floral cotton nightgown she has never seen before. He calls her by name. She asks what is happening, where she is. He rolls his eyes, throws his hat to the ground, and says she is home, that he is her goddamn husband, Caleb.

She offers him money, anything, asks if he took her for ransom. He tells her not to shout. Something snaps in her, and she runs. She sprints down the road, gravel shredding the soles of her bare feet, muscles straining. She trips and pitches forward, skidding and rolling along the ground. She tries to get up, but the black sky looks like dirt and the dirt looks like outer space, and she cannot find her center of gravity. Footsteps approach on the gravel, then stop. Silence.

She rolls onto her side and screams, unsure if any actual words come out. The man drops to one knee and tries to gather her into his arms. She thrashes wildly. He pins her wrists in one grip. Without conscious thought, she spits into his face. He stares at her, cheek glistening in the moonlight, and she snarls the first "Fuck you" she has ever said aloud in her life. He wipes his face, then says a good wife doesn't speak to her husband that way. He rears back and slaps her so hard the whole world turns black.

Chapter 2

Seventeen years old, and Nattie Heller leaves her family for the first time. She is going to college in Boston, to Harvard University, on a full ride. The offer that arrives in the mail leaves her mother with no possible objection beyond a stunned "Oh my," because the Heller household cannot afford worldly luxuries like tuition. But the mother finds plenty to object to spiritually: the coastal cities are lost, the nuclear family is endangered, children run barefoot in the streets, and humanity is self-immolating. The white race is going extinct. These are the prayers her mother sends to the Lord each night while Nattie packs down the hall: Keep her safe, Lord. Lead her from temptation. Deliver her from evil.

Nattie's competence was never in question. By twelve, she practically runs her weekly Sunday school lessons while the actual teacher, a neighborhood dad who reeks of booze and hits on the older girls, sleeps off his hangover in the back. Her father used to call her sharp as a tack and warn, Be careful, or you might get pricked. Then he would laugh and laugh and laugh. That is all she remembers of him. He died when she was ten, or so her mother tells Nattie and her sister Abigail to say when the family moves to a new town in the southwestern corner of Idaho, four hours away from home. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand that keeps everyone honest: she never lies, she never commits a sin, because he is, technically, no longer with them. He has fled the state with a woman from his local bowling league. The teachers draw their own conclusions, and the conclusion is never that Eliza Heller's husband ran off. Her mother's logic checks out even to young Nattie. Daddy's dead. So sad! May he rest in peace, amen.

Nattie does not miss her father. He was the kind of man who called a woman smart only when it worked as a beer-soaked punchline. But she does what her mother says, because this is the world she is born into: a world where good Christian women moonlight as crisis managers for their good Christian men. The rules come down at church and Sunday school and over the dinner table: a woman's job is threefold, to be a mother, to be a wife, and to keep the household clean. Oh, and don't forget to smile.

She comes of age in a small mountain town with no relatives nearby. Her mother refuses every attempt by church women to set her up on dates, since she is technically already married. By day she is a secretary at a local law firm; by night she crochets baby sweaters, socks, and hats for the neighborhood women, whose families run five to nine children on average, so business is always booming. The bills are always paid. Her mother's carpal tunnel flares up monthly, but the pain, she says, is worth it for such a good American childhood.

At the airport, Nattie's mother and sister hug her goodbye. Abigail, two years older, with a heart-shaped face, wide Bambi eyes, and a crumb of a diamond ring on her finger, is engaged to her high school sweetheart, a pimple-faced corn dog of a young man with a bad temper named Bryce. Abigail has no intention of leaving their hometown or reading any book written by anyone not named Paul, David, or John. She tells Nattie, fearfully, "Don't do cocaine."

Her mother's goodbye is a command wrapped in piety: "Remember, Nattie, just remember to be kind." Her expression is bright with piousness, almost oily. She keeps glancing around at the other Idaho families in the ticketing area, nearly all dressed like them in long prairie dresses with braided hair, nearly all larger than them by a factor of two or three. When a woman leads a line of eight children to the baggage drop with a fat stack of passports, her mother watches with a face almost naked with regret. In their community, a family with only two children is suspiciously small. The opposite of blessed. But what can you do? Her husband is no longer with us.

"Everyone believes in something," her mother says, still watching the family. "You can reach anyone if you show them kindness."

"I know, Mother."

Her attention snaps back. "I'm serious, Nattie. Be nice."

Nattie swallows a hiss. It is a low blow to end the goodbye on this, the greatest shame of both their lives: she is not, and has never been, a very social girl. Polite, yes. Well-mannered, reliable, hardworking, and clever. Concerningly so, her mother tells the women at church when she thinks Nattie cannot hear. But extroverted? Not so much. Friends? Technically none to speak of.

"It's not going to be a problem," Nattie says, and she means it, though not in the way her mother will take it. This is secretly why she is going to Boston. She is going to a school and a city where intellect matters much more than being likable. Bostonians, from what she has read on the family's desktop computer, are famously smart and famously uninterested in pleasantries. That kind of world is undoubtedly where she belongs.

She hugs her mother and sister one more time, gathers her bags, and marches forward to the security line. As she inches along, she feels an urge to turn around and wave one more time. But then she thinks of Gomorrah, and what happens to women who look over their shoulders at the world they leave behind. The Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed the entire plain. But Lot's wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. Don't look back, don't look back.

But what about the women in the Bible who looked forward? She cannot remember any of them, and something about that notion feels instinctively wrong, sniffing of greed and worrying close to witchcraft. Do not turn to mediums or necromancers. Best not to take the risk.

So she finds a seat at her departure gate and stares pointedly at the carpet, determined not to look forward or backward until the flight attendants call her group number and the rest of her life begins.

Chapter 3

Chapter: "Chapter 3"

After Natalie and Caleb buy the farm, they meet with several architects and contractors to discuss a renovation. Most of them scratch their heads at the couple's demands. The house is from the late 1800s but was fully renovated just a few years ago, with new windows, appliances, roof, light fixtures, and floors. Now they want to renovate it again. The first architect says it will cost half a million dollars. The first contractor warns the resale value will be cut in half. The second, third, and fourth architects ask if they are both completely insane. Natalie keeps repeating that she wants it to feel like stepping into a time machine, that she wants it to feel authentic. One architect asks, "Authentic to what?" Then she adds the five most important words in any business meeting: "Money is not a concern."

The sixth man they speak with is the one they decide to work with. He does not try to talk them out of their plans, and he does not raise an eyebrow when Natalie lists her requests. She wants the dishwasher, microwave, and all modern kitchen appliances hidden from view. She wants a claw-foot tub absolutely dripping in natural light. She wants wide-plank floors that feel like they were ripped straight out of the Mayflower herself. She wants all the aesthetics of olden times and all the amenities of modernity, reconciled through impeccable design. The older contractor, who has worked in the area for decades, takes notes prodigiously. At each request, he nods and says in a quiet monotone, "We can certainly do that, ma'am." Right before the meeting ends, he looks at her with a totally straight face and asks if she will be wanting indoor toilets or would prefer an outhouse. Natalie laughs stiffly and says indoor toilets are fine. He shuts his notebook and says, "Great. Let's build you two a time machine."

Welcome to the time machine

Natalie lies beneath the covers of a god-awful quilt, curled in the fetal position, with no idea what time it is. She has woken from something that feels less like a nap and more like anesthetized surgery. Her left eye socket pulses in a steady throb. The skin on her palms, forearms, and legs stings horribly. Her feet feel unnervingly warm and swollen with blood. Her brain rings and spins in a way that makes her wonder if she has a concussion. Fragmentary voices surface in her mind: "Wake up, Natalie. Mama, we're having breakfast. Go to the barn. A good wife doesn't speak to her husband that way. Uh-oh. It's us, of course. I'm your goddamn husband. MAMA, 71855."

Thinking is a muscular effort. Every word feels like a rock she must find and pull from the mud. She realizes it must have been that man who carried her back to bed after knocking her unconscious. Caleb, allegedly. An older version of her Caleb. Old Caleb. As she lies on her side, she imagines him carrying her, touching her skin, tucking her into bed, doing God knows whatever else while she was passed out, and it makes her want to vomit. But her stomach only growls and whines.

She rolls onto her side, wincing as her body lights up in ten different locations. It is not just the injuries; her body generally feels old and worn out. She looks at the backs of her hands and forearms, but they are streaked with grime and dirt. There are no mirrors in this room, no way to see her own reflection, no way to reassure herself that she is, in fact, her actual self. She has never once paused to think about the miracle of a mirror, and now she is desperate to see herself and lacks the necessary tools. She closes her eyes and tries to calm her overheating brain, telling herself to regroup and think, but her brain only oozes little darts of panic.

A voice says, "Mama?" She twitches, lifts her head off the pillow, and a headache pierces the back of her skull like a surgical needle. The little girl stands by the doorway, the same one who called for her earlier, wearing one of those strange pilgrim outfits with her hair fully braided. Natalie's heart squeezes with a heartsick revulsion, the kind she felt in the early days of postpartum with Clementine. It is an innate instinct to love a child, especially one who looks like you, coupled with the overwhelming desire to kill the needful thing. The girl moves inside the room, her little hand trailing the wall, and says shyly, "It's Maeve, Mama. It's me." Natalie echoes the name groggily. Maeve has always been on the list for their daughters, with each girl they considered it but never found a soul who seemed to fully fit. This little girl, though, is a perfect Maeve, soft and watchful and sweet.

Natalie closes her eyes and mumbles, "Where am I, again?" Maeve immediately says, "Home." She is staring at the floor, looking upset or disappointed, like she is playing a game she does not want to play. A prickle of dread runs through Natalie, a paranoid thought rising: she was trained to answer these questions. Natalie asks what day it is. Maeve creeps along the wall toward her in an incremental shuffle, magnetized by her, like she loves her, like Natalie is her mother. She kicks softly at the nightstand, flicks her gaze toward Natalie and away when their eyes meet, and says, "Wednesday." Natalie latches onto the word with quick and immediate relief, a word she knows, a day of the week from home, until she realizes she cannot remember what her last day back home was. Memory offers fragments: her mother and her sister, marrying Caleb, giving birth, the email from Shannon, and the hopeful look on her husband's face when he said, "It's time to run—"

Maeve says, "Your eye, Mama." She is by the bed now, hesitating, then steps closer and brings a hand to Natalie's swollen face. Natalie flinches and closes her eyes, preparing for a shudder of pain, but nothing happens. She opens her eyes and sees Maeve's finger hovering above her skin. She knows what a bruise is. She does not want to hurt her. "Hungry, Mama?" Natalie's stomach rumbles in response. She admits she is very hungry. Maeve says, "Come to the kitchen. Come have a biscuit." Natalie hesitates and asks where "that man" is. Maeve says he is out working, with Abel and Noah. Names as biblical as they come. The girl looks like a six- or seven-year-old but speaks like someone three or four. For a shameful moment, Natalie wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her little body until the truth comes sputtering out of her like vomit. When was she taken from her home? How long has it been? What happened to her? Are her children and husband looking for her right now? Are the toddlers having meltdowns? Is the baby screaming for her?

Her hand flies to her stomach. Her little sea creature. The baby is gone. She is not six months pregnant anymore. Her mouth gapes open in a silent scream. She remembers watching girls in college proudly emancipate themselves from every institution that shaped them, snipping every tether to the mortal universe. It was unfathomable to her, the idea of floating forward through the world held up by nothing. What kept you from plummeting? As Maeve guides her down the hallway and back toward the kitchen, her little hand tightly gripping Natalie's, Natalie reminds herself she is not alone. "Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me." She reminds herself, with more than a little unease, that nothing is accidental, that nothing happens outside His plan. Visions of martyrs dance in her mind: women burning alive, children losing their heads, so some man's faith might be restored. Her hand drifts back to her stomach, and another wave of lightheadedness passes through her. "I'm not some sacrifice, am I, Lord?"

A lesson in soap

The kitchen is quieter now. The two boys and the man are nowhere to be seen. The older girl is bent over the kitchen table with her back to them, stirring something that looks like cake batter. She picks up the bowl and pours it carefully across a wooden grid, filling a dozen or so rectangle molds. Soap. The girl is making soap. Natalie recognizes it; she has done this before. It was one of the first tutorials she shared online after her account went viral. That video was sloppy and boring, recorded in one long take with a painfully trite caption, "cleanliness is close to Godliness!" Her new followers shredded it: "Why is this chick even famous This video is so out of focus lol Did someone accidentally lobotomize Martha Stewart???" In the year following that, she made a dozen more soap-related videos, each one cleaner and more well executed than the last. Before long, praise outweighed anger, and the anger shifted from criticisms of execution to criticisms of concept, like "who has time to make soap?" When that happened, she knew she had won.

Now Maeve drops Natalie's hand and runs to the table, climbing into the chair next to her sister. "Mama wants a biscuit," she

Chapter 4

On the first night of college, Nattie's new roommate, Reena Magliotti, shoves a plastic cup into her hands and commands her to drink. Reena stands before her in branded jeans, headband, sneakers, and T-shirt, a walking advertisement for a luxury mall. The room is packed with girls for a pregame, rap music blasting from Reena's desk speakers. Nattie asks if there is alcohol in the cup. Reena waves it off: "You won't taste a thing." Nattie sniffs strawberry jam and blushes as the girls on Reena's bed laugh. They look identical to the poster collage of models above the bed, modern, manicured, and a little surly. One of them says it's basically juice. No one steps onto Nattie's half of the room, with its hand-stitched quilt, its framed family picture, its scholarship desktop computer. Her mother's voice echoes in her head: Be nice! She takes a sip. It's sweet, syrupy, like the fake wine offered at church. She drinks more, ignoring the laughter as the juice dribbles down her chin onto the lace collar of her dress, leaving blood-drip stains that will never come out.

Then the room begins to disorient her. The music is so loud. The girls talk over, around, and past her, all of them already connected through summer camp, boarding school, family ties. Reena stands in a semicircle of women who look like misshapen clay versions of her, all covered in corporate cursive, a huddle of branded cows. The shifting sneakers underfoot turn into snakes. Nattie catches herself: not snakes. She wonders if this is what drunk feels like. The room has the atmosphere of a jungle, gusts of rank warm air drifting past, like standing inside a horrible monster's mouth. Scripture surfaces: the wicked are estranged from the womb, their poison like the poison of a serpent. Panic lurches through her. A tear rolls down her cheek.

One of the girls catches her eye and compliments her hair, says it's so long. The torrential conversation stops; all the girls look at her. They have teeth so straight and white they barely look like teeth. Another girl chimes in. A third imitates scissors and asks if she's ever cut it. Nattie realizes what's happening: they think she's dumb, all because of her hair, her prairie dress, the juice-stained blouse. She wipes a tearstained cheek and says shortly, "No, I've never cut it." They reply as one: "Woooow." A desperate, childlike loneliness falls over her. She longs for her mother's skirt, her mother's kind, authoritative expression. Ready to go home, Nattie? Yes, Mother. I'm ready to go home.

She announces, "I'd like to leave, now," even though this is her own bedroom. One girl tells her she can totally do that. As she walks away, she hears them speculating about her: Amish? Orthodox Jewish? Mormon? Evangelical?

For an hour Nattie sits in a floral upholstered chair in the recreation room, listening to the pregames up and down the hall. When the last thread of laughter disappears behind the dorm's entrance doors, she returns to her room and begins cleaning up the mess. This is Hell, she thinks calmly as she scrubs sticky red stains off her brand-new computer keyboard.

Later that night

Four hours later, Nattie wakes to Reena stumbling into the room with a boy. Reena talks loudly in a way that suggests she thinks she's whispering, telling the boy he's hot and that her roommate is sleeping. The mattress creaks as it sags under two bodies. The boy doesn't speak, but Nattie feels him there, hears him breathe. "Come here," Reena whispers, and he does. What follows is a series of sounds Nattie finds intellectually incomprehensible and instinctually horrible: laughter and grunting, rustling sheets, the sticking of skin against skin, a thick wet slipping, a mechanical suction, a long choking guttural sound, a rushing gasp. Reena mumbles that she didn't like that. The boy's first words: "No worries." He asks if she wants him to go. Nattie prays so loudly in her head she thinks they might hear: Please send him home please send him home please send him home. But Reena says, "No. All good," and they move forward. A minute later he is pushing inside her, slower, and it feels to Nattie like he is pushing inside her too. The pain is unbearable. She wants to scream, to tell them to stop, that she doesn't want it, but the pain and fear and humiliation snatch the sound from her mouth. She lies beneath the covers, heart still, blood frozen, mouth stretched open in a breathless corpse gasp, and lets them have their way with her. The Revelation verse about the beast and the whore runs through her mind. An entire lifetime later, the boy leaves. Reena dresses in the darkness and slips out, her footsteps carrying down the hall toward the bathroom. Nattie listens, then leans over the side of her bed and vomits strawberry jam.