Apricot.

Indigo.

Magenta.

Plum.

Sienna.

Violet.

Rainbow hid under her bed whenever she could. She wrapped her arms around herself and whimpered and shook in the corner.

Rainbow was dirty, her hair a wreck. She had refused to shower because she thought she would be dragged out of the shower and put in isolation again, only this time she would be “naked and white and in a beige cell alone with steel gray guards staring at me, touching me with yucky pink fingers.”

Betsy tried to comfort Rainbow as best she could, their tears blending together.

The abject loneliness and the hopelessness was a gaping wound within Betsy. She could hardly eat, hardly sleep, her mind crumbling from losing Baby Rose and Johnny. She worried about Tilly, too, sweet Tilly, Johnny’s little sister, who was now in foster care according to her attorney. There was no one to take care of her.

Betsy thought of her own mother, of her own father. They had never come to see her, and they never would, she knew that. She was gone to them, a humiliation, a curse from the devil. They had undoubtedly wrapped their arms around themselves in their fundamentalism and moved on. She wrapped her arms around herself, cold and alone.

* * *

When Betsy was younger, she got into trouble many times. Her father, Hansen, was a religious, hypocritical fundamentalist and her mother was weak, cowed and went along with everything he said. Now and then he would rage at her mother, insist that she obey, submit, behave. “Woman, do not break God’s law! I am the head of the household. You are my helpmate. You are one of my ribs. You are steeped in the sins of Eve. Do not question me.”

Her mother rarely questioned her father, but when he was in a bad mood, and he found her not obedient “enough,” he would sometimes slap her, Mary’s black hair flying out of her bun. “I am doing this for your own good! May Jesus forgive you for your insolence!”

Mary would tilt her head down in defeat and submission, her golden eyes closed.

When Betsy told them, when she was five, of her first premonitions, of someone getting hurt or drowning or, twice, ministers being arrested, and when those premonitions came true, her father had many consequences for her after he overcame his shocked anger. First, he called her a liar. Then, when the premonitions came through, he hit her with a Bible, he made her memorize long passages, he performed a séance on her, and he taped her mouth shut “so the devil inside of you will die.”

He then told people at their small church, a church that did not like outsiders, to pray for his daughter, as she was “possessed” by demons and they had to “pull the demons out.”

She was then, as a little girl, ostracized by the parents and the children of that church because no one wanted their children near a demonic little girl.