For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

responsible for what I’ve become: changed, Renata. What you’re doing to my daughter, my sweet Sandie…’ He forced his quivering lips to settle. ‘…it’s turned me around. Maybe I’m ill. Maybe I need help. But what I put you through, what I did to you…your mother…I see now how twisted it was. I think I’ve found my humanity because of you, and I thank you for that. There has to be some left in you, too. Please, Renata,’ he clasped his hands together as if in prayer, ‘end this.’

End this.

She smeared her sodden hair out of her face. The throbbing in her hands was intensifying – and reminding her of something. A punishment? Yes, her father’s Bible. It reminded her of being made to hold that weighty thing for so long, so very long.

‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God…’ The girl looks up to her father’s glare locked upon her. She returns to the pages. ‘…moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light. And, uh, there was light.’

 

What was it she’d done? Failed to clean her room, maybe misquoted a Bible verse at Sunday school. It didn’t matter. All punishments were roughly the same. Noah was not yet born, and so her punishments were frequent. The unusual thing about this punishment was her mother’s presence.

There the woman had sat on the sofa, the clicking of her knitting needles trying to keep up with the eternal ticking of the grandfather clock. But the scarf-in-progress draped over her pregnant belly wasn’t growing very fast. She was distracted. The girl would risk a glance at her mother every so often from her hard, rigid seat by the window, only to find she wasn’t even looking at the knitting. She was staring at the floor in front of her, that wooden smile slipping from her grasp as the hours rolled on, as her daughter was forced to act out her punishment: to sit and read aloud the entire tome.

‘And…and it came to pass that in the morning, behold, it was Leah: and he said to Laban, What is this thou hast—’

Her mouth has long since dried up. Grit has formed in her throat.

‘Fulfil her week, and we will give thee this also for the service which thou—’

She isn’t even through Genesis. She prays for Exodus after every page turn, but knows fine well she has some way to go before that. Even then, she still has Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy…

‘And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week, and he gave him—’

…Joshua, Judges, Ruth…

‘And he went in also unto Rachel, and he loved also Rachel more than Leah, and served with him yet seven other—’

…the Samuels, the Kings, the Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job…

‘And when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.’

…Psalms, Proverbs. So much still to go. He can’t expect her to read the entire thing right here, could he? Is that even possible?

‘And she conceived again, and…and bore a…son.’

A son.

The girl’s eyes rise.

Then her mother’s.

Then her father’s.

All eyes return as the reading resumes.

 

Renata rubbed her moonlit hands in the pouring rain, still throbbing from her long writing sessions. She thought of that bulky Bible and the burning sensation shooting through the ligaments of her nine-year-old hands. She’d finally made it out of Genesis, but by that time her voice was nothing but a rasp. She didn’t get very far through the opening pages of Exodus before her mother broke into tears. The woman clambered from the couch over to Thomas’s armchair, falling to her knees before him, begging for the girl’s punishment to end.

‘I know you don’t agree, but she doesn’t deserve this, Thomas.’ The woman places a hand on her bulbous, pregnant belly. ‘It’s a boy, I swear it. I can feel him inside of me. You’ll have your son. He’ll be here soon and everything will be better. I beg of you, my little girl doesn’t deserve this. Please, Thomas,’ she clasps her hands together as if in prayer, ‘end this.’

 

Thomas had slowly lowered his newspaper, then stared blankly at the woman as if she’d spoken a foreign language, one of his fingers casually tapping against the crinkled paper in his hands. She’d eventually scrambled to her feet and ran weeping from the living room, her hurried footfall ascending the staircase in the hall.

The girl had stopped reading to watch in a mixture of terror and rage. After her mother’s wails had disappeared upstairs, her eyes met with her father’s. Her instincts told her to bow her head and continue reading, to avert her gaze immediately like she’d been told to do if she ever looked at the sun.

But she didn’t.

She did not resume her reading, instead keeping her gaze fixed on her father’s, a raging sun blazing in each of his eyes, scorching and searing her skin.

Her stinging hands had gripped the Bible in her lap, tighter, tighter with every passing second until she’d thought her fingers were going to break. Suddenly, he’d set down his paper and approached the girl warily, hesitantly – is he frightened?! – reaching down to carefully close the Bible in her lap. He’d then left the room and joined Sylvia upstairs. In more ways than one for Renata Wakefield, the Bible closed for the final time that night.

She still remembered the battle between hate and fear raging in her father’s eyes during that stare down. And now, in this rain-pummelled garden, she saw that same old hate and fear warring it out again in Rye’s eyes.

He was lying. He had found no humanity. As he appealed to whatever trace of compassion may