Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [152]
Dad and Audrey showed me into the bedroom that they had set up for me, and after kissing them good night, I shut the door.
When I knew I was alone, I poked around the room looking for some paper on which to compose a letter to my father. I found a yellow legal pad in a corner of the closet and sat down to write. As tempted as I was to stay there, Dad and Audrey were still fighting to remain in the church. They were too intricately connected to the world I needed to leave behind. In the letter, I told Dad that Mom, Ally, and Sherrie were the only reasons I had remained here all this time. If I couldn’t be with them, then I didn’t want to stay—although a part of me wanted to live with him. Trying to set his mind at ease, I asked him not to worry; I’d be safe. I’d call when I could; all he’d have to do was pick up the phone. Leaving the letter on the bed, I tiptoed out of the room and down the hall, where I slipped out the front door and into the car.
I drove with the headlights off until I reached the end of the street, and when I knew I was safe, I called Lamont. “Please come get me. I’m in town.” I told him.
“I’m on my way,” he promised.
A few minutes later we met in the parking lot of the post office. I wasn’t about to take Allen’s car, so I left it and got into Lamont’s. Sliding into the passenger seat, I kissed Lamont and placed a hand on my belly. Inside a baby was growing, a baby my mother would never know. The thought of raising a child without my mother’s beautiful singing voice and her loving gaze was almost too much, and again I broke down crying. I was making this choice to leave, not just for me and not just for Lamont, but for our child. I was making this choice so that our child, be it a girl or a boy, could grow up in a world without the walls and boundaries of the priesthood, a world where God and faith are instruments of hope, not tools of manipulation. I was making the choice that my mother had been unable to make for me and my siblings. I was choosing to give my child the power of choice.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
NEW BEGINNINGS
Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just the first step.
—REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
I’d felt as though I’d leapt across the Grand Canyon as I lay down beside Lamont that first night. I think both of us had naïvely hoped that this giant step would be our final hurdle and from this point forward we would live a fairy-tale life. I’d always known that leaving would be hard. There was no way I could live in a closed community for eighteen years and suddenly emerge ready to live in the world beyond it. But nothing could have prepared me for the initial difficulty of life on the outside.
When I awoke that first morning after leaving my father’s house, I was paralyzed by fear and regret. “What if they’re right?” I worried. “What if I’ve made a mistake and I really am going to hell?”
For the first few days I was devastated, and while Lamont did his best to comfort me, I just couldn’t seem to stop crying. It took three days for me to calm down enough to tell him what had happened in my final meeting with Warren, Allen, and William Timpson, and even then the information had to trickle out in pieces. Leaving the FLDS had drained me of strength and left me emotional, washed up, and exhausted. It was as if all of the pain, loss, and uncertainty that I’d tried to “put on a shelf” over the past eight years suddenly fell on top of me.
I finally mustered the strength to venture out of our house, but it was unsettling to feel so out of touch with my surroundings. In all of my thinking about leaving the FLDS, I had focused so exclusively on my mom and sisters that I hadn’t considered many of the other things that would make the transition hard. Everything about our new life was strange and unfamiliar. From the moment we woke up to the moment we fell asleep we were both plagued by an entirely new set of insecurities that had come with our new lives. The tiny house