Stolen Innocence (46 page)
Authors: Elissa Wall
Just as he’d done all along, Warren ignored me and continued condemning me for my wickedness. What he could no longer do was condemn me to a life with Allen. “You held up your end of the bargain,” he told the man who had used my salvation to hold me prisoner. “You are relieved of her as your wife.”
Warren next addressed the bishop, instructing William Timpson to bring me to my father’s house in Colorado City until he could decide what to do about me. Dad had finally been given a vacant home that he and Audrey had renovated. There was a certain irony to his pronouncement, that now after all these years, I was going back to my real father. For the past eight years, all I’d ever wanted was to be my father’s daughter and to have my family returned to me. Leaving him that day in 1999 had triggered a chain of events that was only ending this day in the office of William Timpson. I had finally come full circle. Before releasing me back to my father, Warren reminded me that I had failed in my mission to God, but I stopped listening to his words. I didn’t want to know the God of Warren Jeffs. I didn’t want to know a God who would willingly break apart families. I didn’t want to know a God who forced girls to get married. The God I knew, who I believed in and who I still believe in to this day, was real, but he had nothing to do with Warren Jeffs.
Warren adjourned the meeting with the words “The Lord’s will be done.”
I
left the room with tears streaming down my cheeks. The men were still inside talking, so I waited in the hallway quietly. When Allen was finished, he came out and walked straight past me like I was air, to his truck.
William Timpson then came into the hall to follow me in his car to my dad’s. Taking a long look at my tear-stained face and bloodshot eyes, he said, “Trust in God, Elissa.”
“What God do you want me to trust in?” I asked, my voice wavering. “The one who put me here and is telling me that I’m a wicked person?”
William didn’t try to respond in any way; we just walked quietly outside. I could feel a quiet ambivalence on his part toward his weighty new position as bishop. Unlike the older men of the church, he had not yet developed a stern and controlling style. He never would have admitted it, but I could almost feel sympathy coming from him.
On the way over to my dad’s house, I felt both betrayal and relief. No matter how it had occurred, I was forever free of Allen. There had been countless times that I’d wondered if any of this would have happened if we hadn’t been taken away from Dad, but I also recognized that it was too late for him to do anything. I wasn’t a little girl anymore, and I had a lot of healing to do. Four years ago he might have been able to help, but now the die had already been cast.
We arrived at Dad and Audrey’s house and William walked me to the door. When my dad answered it, his expression was soft but questioning.
“This is your daughter and you need to take care of her,” William asserted.
“She will always have a place in my home,” Dad said, looking at me with a nod. I walked through the threshold and into my father’s arms. Mother Audrey, too, was kind and welcoming. They didn’t ask me any questions as they cleared out a bedroom for me to stay in and busied themselves getting the house in order. Dad looked me in the eye and said, “I am so grateful you’re away from Allen.” Protective tears welled up in his eyes, but his voice remained steady and soft. “I want you to know I love you, and no matter what, this will all be okay.”
“You know what, Dad?” I said, trying to be as strong as he was. “It
will
be okay.” And I actually started to believe the words as I said them.
Warren may have been the prophet, but I was the one who could see my future. He could no longer tell me how to live my life. I would decide, and I was choosing happiness with Lamont Barlow.
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.
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 that Lamont rented for us in Hurricane was on a quiet street inhabited by “normal” families, who shot us confused glances because of how we dressed.
I tried to conquer this awkwardness by dressing differently, but it wasn’t that simple. Each new day brought with it the anxiety of not being able to “look the part.” My attempts to blend in only made me stand out more as I wore unusual combinations, such as T-shirts with my long skirts and thick FLDS tights, thinking that it made me look normal. I’d always wanted to wear normal clothes and had done so on occasion as part of my attempt to test my individuality, but with nothing familiar to cling to, I sought refuge in my old FLDS wardrobe.
My hair, too, was a huge source of worry for me. Because FLDS women were all raised to keep their hair long, I’d never had a haircut aside from a few wispy bangs, and now my thick, blond locks fell down past my waist. I had mastered my hair as a member of the FLDS and I knew how to sweep it up and back, pin it properly, and construct the tight braids that were all the rage in our society. But now I found it impossible to get in step with the styles of this new world I was in, leaving me no other option than a French braid that looked ridiculously out of place in the streets of Hurricane and St. George. It was too long and I felt completely uncomfortable with it loose. Seeing strangers with their hair in shoulder-length blunt cuts or easy, free curls made me long to look like them, but I just didn’t know how.
Part of what made our transition so difficult was that we barely had the financial resources to cover our bills, let alone acquire new clothes. In Colorado City there is no such thing as a mortgage or rent payment. A church-run trust called the United Effort Plan or UEP owns the land on which the people reside, and lots are awarded to worthy members of the priesthood to build on with the expectation of a monthly donation to the church of 10 percent of a man’s income. Of course, members are encouraged to donate as much as they can, and many contribute significantly more. A portion of the monthly tithing is used to fund the communal storehouse where we purchased some of our food, paper goods, and other necessities at a very low cost. We had lived our lives in big families and the shopping was done for us and usually in bulk at stores like Costco.
As a result, we’d never had to think about everyday money issues. Lamont and I were now confronting the jaw-dropping prices at the local grocery stores. To make matters worse, Lamont had taken an unpaid leave of absence from his job as a field operations manager for a local construction company that first week to help me make the initial adjustment, but my uncontrollable crying scared and confused him. He was worried that I regretted my choice to be with him. While his support during those days was invaluable, the loss of income left us unable to make our rent that month, creating a hole that we then had to dig ourselves out of.
The financial pressures would have been hard for anyone, but we knew absolutely nothing about money management. Financial planning was not part of any curriculum either of us had been taught, and because we’d been raised to think that the end of the world was imminent, we had always learned that personal credit was of no value to us. With little credit history to speak of, we both struggled with employers and banks that demanded such information.
During this time I was also undergoing the hormonal struggles that most pregnant women endure, which made me unpredictably emotional and particularly weepy. I had secretly seen a midwife before my departure from Short Creek, and because of my complicated history with pregnancies she advised me to see an ob-gyn. I was already in my twenty-fourth week, and the doctor recommended that because of my Rh-negative blood, I should have injections of Rh immunoglobulin (RhIg) to suppress my body’s ability to react to Rh-positive red cells. While he couldn’t say for sure, he believed that this could have been a part of the problem with my earlier pregnancies.
It was reassuring to know that a precaution could be taken to prevent losing another baby. The idea that there was an explanation for my miscarriages and that God had not been punishing me after all gave me comfort. I took good care of myself, but Lamont and I still worried a great deal. Though he knew about my miscarriages, I’d never told him about the stillbirth. Originally it had been too emotionally painful to describe or even bring up, but now I didn’t want to make him more concerned than he already was. Not sharing this with him didn’t make it go away, and often I worried that I would end up in another pregnancy nightmare.
While these problems of fitting in, money, and my pregnancy brought my anxiety to new heights in the first weeks, what weighed heaviest on me was the fact that I might never see my mother and little sisters again. I longed for Ally’s infectious smile and the sound of Sherri on the piano. Mom had secretly called me in those first days to make sure I was okay. It was healing for me to confront the issues that I had with her because of my marriage to Allen. Tearfully, she told me how sorry she was and that if she could turn back time, she’d change the outcome. Still, she held out hope that I would come back and repent, so that we could remain a family.
Like so many things about the FLDS, her words were one big contradiction. While she was genuinely sorry about how my life had turned out, it seemed she couldn’t see that there was any way other than that of the church. She’d lived her entire life in the FLDS, and she didn’t have the mental capacity to question beyond its walls. This conversation was one of the rare times I’d ever heard her express doubts. Her willingness to actually raise questions made me cautiously optimistic that she would continue on this road, but only time would tell if she would actually be able to change her beliefs. At fifty-four, this would be a monumental feat, to reverse a lifetime of conditioning. I knew that Mom loved me, and in the only way she knew how, she was trying to communicate that to me. It was with this understanding that I was able to begin the process of letting go.
Though Lamont and I remained in love and hopeful that we would adjust, those first weeks offered a frustrating overall picture of our new reality. Gone was our vision of escaping and simply starting anew. It would be an arduous road, but it was one that we needed to travel. It seemed like everyone we came into contact with during that time had left the FLDS with dreams of starting a new life only to end up penniless and drug- or alcohol-dependent with no place to turn. I thought back to all the times when I’d seen my older brothers go through the same struggles that I was now experiencing. I wish I could have known the mental battle that had to be waged.