Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [21]
I was just a couple of months into school’s fall session when Dad made a fateful pronouncement: Craig was to be out of the house by November 1, 1996. Since he was over eighteen, it was considered too late to send him away to reform, as was customarily done in cases such as this. Instead, Dad just wanted him to leave.
I will never forget the day that Craig asked Mom if she could drive him to the highway, where he would hitchhike out of the area. Some of us younger kids piled into Mom’s little brown Buick sedan to join her for the ride and say good-bye to our older brother. The hour-long drive was mostly quiet, and our silence said everything about the sadness and fear we all felt. My sister Teressa was taking it the hardest. She had become very close to Craig, and now he was one more person leaving our lives. With little money in his pocket and raw emotional wounds, Craig set off to find his own answers to his many questions.
I could barely watch him get out of our car and walk away. The final image I had of my brother Craig is with a backpack strapped to him and a sign reading DENVER in his hand. Years later, my mother would tell me that leaving Craig by the side of the road that day was one of the most painful things she ever had to do. At the time, though, she was as silent as any perfect FLDS wife should be. Casting out her son was her duty. She could not object, and even if she did, her opinion would not matter. She had to follow the orders of her husband; that was the command of the church, and she obeyed it no matter how much pain it caused her.
Even so, it took her several minutes to find the strength to shift the car into drive. As we wound down the gray asphalt of the highway heading home, I watched tears trace the soft skin of my mother’s face. She was still beautiful, but in that moment she became a shadow of her former self. She had lost her eldest son, her protector. It was a wound that would never completely heal. I saw Teressa beside her, hands folded stiffly in her lap and her pained eyes staring into space. She had just watched her dear friend and brother walk away and did not know if she would ever see him again. I wanted so badly to reach up from the backseat and hug both of them, to offer the only form of consolation that I as a ten year old child could provide, but I knew better. The best and only option was to keep my mouth closed.
It was not until many years later that any of us heard from Craig. He purposely avoided reaching out to our family for fear of further affecting his younger brothers and sisters. Over time I came to understand his choice to put distance between himself and our family, but back then I thought of him frequently, which would always make me feel a bit sad and discouraged. I didn’t really understand the concept of questioning, but I felt sympathy for the way things had turned out between Craig and my dad. I was not alone in my concern for him, but I kept my pain to myself; it was not something to be spoken of. At home, I noticed a marked change in my mother. She seldom sang or hummed around the house anymore, and she began to look drained, somehow older. A general sadness permeated the household and made me miss Michelle all the more. I wished so dearly that I could hold on to my mother as I had once done with Michelle. Without my nurturing older sister around, I had no one to make me feel