These were the photos we mailed home to Grandma. Most are posed. Those awkward smiles that stay the same though your face ages—this is my picture smile, the smile I’ll hate every time I see it. But point a camera at me and my brain no longer controls my face. “Say cheese.” I remember having to brush my hair for the pictures. Mom fixing it after my failed attempts to make it look nice for the camera. “This is for Grandma. Wear those earrings she sent you for Christmas, Lauren. Stand up straight, Ann. Valerie, don’t make that face. Mikey, you’re perfect.” The backgrounds change. Cherry blossoms in Osaka. A glacier on the Gotthard Pass. A castle in Munich.

We don’t have our old art projects, those bowls you made in third grade. We don’t have yearbooks or scrapbooks. We don’t have a box of mixtapes and ribbons, no trophies, no spelling bee certificates. And up until that moment, I didn’t know we had many photos.

We kept passing those old pictures around, checking the backs for dates, telling those half stories each one of us remembers differently, or not at all, staring at those images of us like one of those optical illusions in the mall—relax your eyes and you’ll see a tiger, or figure out what the fuck happened to your family.

But we didn’t talk about the pictures that weren’t in the album, the pictures we’d never have sent back to Grandma—pictures from inside the homes, in our rooms with those fucking triple-decker bunk beds in the background or pictures of a prayer meeting or pictures of us on kitchen duty or selling posters. Those pictures don’t exist. If they did, we probably would have burned them. Still, if there were any time to discuss it at all, the four of us together, it was that night. But we didn’t. The Family had become a secret we kept, even from one another.

* * *

—

   When Ricky died, Ann showed me a website, a message board. I’m pretty sure social media at the time was still just classmates.com. But finally, I had a way to talk to others who’d grown up in the cult.

For weeks, I spent every spare moment on that website. Racing home after work. Still in my cable company work uniform, insulation stuck to my shirt. The ashtray by the keyboard overflowing onto my desk. Every night, I’d watch the same scene play out. One of us, a cult baby, logging in to ask the same question: “Do you remember me?” The details varied. “My parents were Happy and Mercy. I have an older brother, 5 younger sisters. I was in Osaka. I was in a home in Poland by a lake. I was in Brazil, the big home on a hill.” But the question was always the same: “Do you remember me? Does anyone remember me?”

I’d asked the same question when I first logged in. I got an answer almost immediately, an older girl who remembered me from Osaka. Holy shit. I was a real girl. She pointed out others who’d been in the same school. Then a girl from Switzerland, Jen, who knew another, a whole cluster of cult babies in Berlin. Another from a different home in Japan. We shot questions back and forth faster than we could answer them all. Those first few moments of finding a witness to your life. The fucking rush of it. Questions about the homes, about siblings, about shepherds, about parents. “Wasn’t there a park down the street? Yeah, with the bamboo forest. Where’s your little brother now? Oh, my parents are never leaving. Your mom was nice, though. Do you remember that nasty-ass homemade yogurt? Hey, what ever happened to that asshole who they put in charge of us for like ten minutes before the Elgg home got raided?”

   We had our own inside jokes. I’d tell you some, but, I mean, you’re not going to get them. We wrote down lyrics of Family songs just to put the bug in someone else’s ear. We complained about our jobs and debated why so many of us joined the military and shrugged at how all of us can cook and do basic carpentry. And honestly, we spent a lot of time making fun of you crybabies. How you can’t even change a diaper while holding another baby. How you can’t fix anything. How you could never have choked down boiled liver. How you think your mom gaslit you because she returned shoes she couldn’t afford to buy you. How you suck at camping and we don’t even want to go with you anymore. How you’re actually proud you can’t cook an egg. How the worst thing that happened to you was something you saw happen to someone else on the news.

And then the rush was gone, as soon as it came. We were real. Our lives were real. Cool. The fuck were we supposed to do with any of it. We weren’t much help to each other in the how-to-function-out-here department. Might as well have asked our parents for career advice. But what I wanted—someone to remember me—wasn’t what I needed. It rarely is. What I found, I didn’t recognize right away. I should have, considering. But I’m a slow thinker, and a slower learner.

We were telling our stories on that board. And I started realizing just how much the cult had shaped me—from the way the words “can I talk to you” would send ice down my spine, to the way I hate hearing music or television when I’m trying to sleep, to my obsession with socks. (We lived off donations. And no one ever donates socks.) We all had a story about sharing a contraband pink razor with twenty other girls. We compared what we’d bought with the money we pilfered from selling posters. I blew mine on candy and books that my mom let me hide in her closet. My friends who’d stayed in longer spent theirs on birth control pills and escape plans. But what I wanted to know, how to heal, how to be normal, no one could answer.