The Scream (20 page)

Toilet paper. Scott towels
. It was time to wrap the list, get going. For some reason, the rug rat's screams were perfect sound track music for the task.
Mr. Clean. Uncle Ben's
. She penned it, assessed it, vowed she'd fill in the blanks when she got to the store.

"Okay." She folded the envelope and jammed it in the back pocket of her jeans. She stooped and ensnared her ululating offspring, kissed one moist pink cheek, and strode into the living room. "TED! CHRIS! IT'S TIME TO GO!" she bellowed up the stairs against the heavy metal thunder.

No response. No enormous surprise. Even if they heard, there was no rush to respond. God knows they
lived
for the opportunity to hit the grocery store with Mom.

"C'MON, GUYS! LET'S ROLL! IF I HAVE TO COME UP AFTER YOU, I'M GOING TO BE UNPLEASANT!"

She moved to the foot of the stairs, paused, and counted the tappings of her foot. She had gotten to twelve when the bedroom door opened and Ted shuffle-footed to the stairway's head.

"Can we just finish listening to the album?"

"It's time to go."

"There's only one more song. It's three minutes and twenty-one seconds long."

"That'll give you time to change your shirt and maybe brush your hair. It's been two days since you changed clothes, hasn't it?"

Ted made an ugly face. Shades of Natalie, still a-whimper in her arms. The more things change, and blah-dee-blah.

"Come on," she said. "Get Chris, if he's coming."

Ted turned away, mumbling something. She was tempted to demand to know what it was, then thought better of it.
Yeah
, she thought.
It's a universal law. Nobody wants to do what they don't want to do
.

But the fact of the matter was that she needed him to go. It was too crazy out there. She couldn't take Natalie out alone. Her brother Cody had too much work to do, Pete's gramma was eighty-six years old, and everybody else was either in or nearing Philly. There were fifty brainwashed teenagers at the gate and God only knew how many more beyond. Ol' Friend in Jesus might be anywhere; maddening as it was to think about at all, it was madness to ignore.

"And so it goes," she said to Natalie. "Try to remember this, if you can. We didn't make the rules. God did. We just have to live by them."

Natalie sniffled and stared, listening to the sound if not the words.

"We just try to live up to the chores God sets up for us and do the best we can with what we're given. If it gets difficult sometimes, that's just the way it is. If it gets scary sometimes, that's just the way it is.

"That's why we're going to the store. Not because we want to. Because we have to. Okay?"

The thin flesh over Natalie's face did nothing to conceal the concentration that the muscles beneath denoted. No poker face, she: every ripple of thought played open as the sun addressing the morn. Sodium pentothal should have it so good. She was
listening
. That much was clear.

How much she actually understood remained to be seen.

Somehow, it didn't stop the tiny tears from welling in her own.

On the other side of the gate, Mary Hatch was suddenly equally unable to keep the slightly larger tears from welling in her eyes.

It had been, to use the vernacular of the Dead, a long, strange trip. And in the last two months it had taken more turns than the rest of her young life combined. She had seen, albeit dimly, the leering essence of Evil.

Now she was being treated, albeit grimly, to the lobotomized leer of Good.

And as she stood on the far side of the Jacob Hamer barricade, with her JESUS IS LORD placard held tightly in her hand, her mind had no choice but to roll back over the madness that had led her to this time and this place . . .

The first two weeks were spent reeling. No chance to make sense of the horror or the revelation: just an endless succession of flashing cameras and jutting mikes, loaded questions in no way prepared for the only answers she had.

Did she know who the killers were? No, she did not. Was there any possible motive for the slayings: drug wars, gang rivalries, a chance encounter at the concert with some homicidal fringe group? No, she insisted. She didn't know.

Did she know how she had managed to survive? they asked, and she had only one thing to say.

Jesus saved me.

After that, they had tons of questions, but the tone of them changed entirely. No longer were they concerned with receiving hard evidence; now they just wanted to know about the little wacko chick. Had she had previous religious experiences? Did she have a history of active church-going or was this something new? Exactly how many hits of acid was she on, anyway?

The quality of journalists changed, also, as time dragged on. She stopped getting visits from the
L.A. Times
and started seeing much more of the
Weekly World News
. Mary often had the feeling that her poor parents, God love them, were going to lose their minds.

They were already quite sure that she had.

Because the Hatch family had no real religious background whatsoever. Dad had been a Catholic till the age of six, at which point his father stopped going to church and the papist patriarchy of home caved in for good. Mom's blond-haired Jewish upbringing was orthodox as a chocolate-covered pork sandwich, which is to say that Jehovah rarely came up in conversation. Between them, they had steered the developing Mary clear of divine dogma in any way/shape/form.

And so it was still.
Thank God
, Mom would say,
that it's summer. Can you imagine what going to school would do to her?
And Dad would pace around the living room, muttering,
Jesus Christ, when will those assholes leave her alone?
But that was pretty much the extent of the supernatural credence they lent to the situation.

Bottom line: the girl was on acid. She went to a goddamned party, and she witnessed something horrible, and the totality of the experience had fried her out. This was not the first time someone had flipped out and seen God in California. The sixties had been full of that shit, and God knew that neither one of her parents had stood on the sidelines through that infamous Summer of Love.

But there was more, with no way around it. There was the fact that she had grieved them sorely, and that the resulting emotions were confused at best. They were pissed at her, in a terrible but incontrovertible way that was very hard to deal with. She had been found-drugged and naked and covered with blood-at the scene of the worst urban California massacre since Chucklin' Charlie Manson and his pals descended on Tate and the LaBiancas. She had turned their lives into a three-ring circus, full of predator-geeks with no handle whatsoever on how deeply this whole thing had savaged their lives. She had found Jesus, fercrissakes!-a belief that ran absolutely counter to their worldview.

And it made them furious. And they couldn't help it. And the emotion ran so counter to all they held dear that, yes, it really might just make them crazy.

Because . . . at the deepest, most bottom line . . . they loved her more than anything in the world.

Because she was their daughter. Because, out of their three incipient impregnations, hers was the one that they'd decided to bring to term.

Because they had brought her, through the juncture of egg and sperm and the screaming agony of passage, into this world.

Because it didn't matter how independent she got, how fully her life became her own, how strong or weak or wise or stupid or cool or lame she turned out to be.

It didn't matter.

She would always be their baby.

And there was baby Mary: sole survivor of the Diamond Bar Holocaust, sole survivor of her parents' own personal life-or-death decisions. There was baby Mary, at the center of the cyclone, while Dr. Wyler and his wife searched panic-strickenly for their own baby girl, and the parents of the deceased went rightfully berserk over the loss of their own precious children. The pressure at home had become insurmountable.

There was only one thing to do.

Mary's dad had a sister in Pennsylvania who lived a life of quiet seclusion and was an absolute sweetheart besides. So at the end of those crazed two weeks, Mary was surreptitiously sent off to stay with Aunt Elaine. It was a good decision: far from the crowds and the scene of the crime, in a peaceful place where she could begin to heal, if not make sense of what had happened.

And then, while watching the tube one day, she happened across Pastor Furniss's program, and there was something going on there that reached out to her. His association of rock and demonic forces, Jesus and salvation, set a buzzer off within her. It was clear that, if she was to understand her own very tangible salvation, she would need to learn more about Jesus. She would need to study Him in an atmosphere completely devoted to His name.

Within the hour, she had phoned her parents.

Within the week, she had been enrolled in the summer session at Liberty Christian Village.

Mary would never forget the last conversation she had with Aunt Elaine, on the eve of her departure. They were in the kitchen, brewing up some Celestial Seasonings Wild Forest Blackberry tea-Elaine was an herb tea fanatic, with at least a dozen varieties on hand at any given time-and they were both feeling things pretty profoundly. But that just made the encounter that much sweeter.

"Honey," Aunt Elaine began, "you're a very smart girl. Your folks have a lot of faith in you. That's why they're letting you do this, you know."

Mary nodded, not looking up. She was watching the hot water deepen in color, watching the tea bags steep.

"But they don't believe in Jesus, and they definitely don't believe in the people you're going to see. In all honesty, I can't say that I do, either.

"But I will say this: I believe in your experience. I believe that a higher being came to you that night, and I believe that it saved you. It must have had a reason; and I admire you for trying to find out what it is."

Mary stood over the teapot, watching its contents darken, watching the teardrop plummet from her cheek to stir the steaming surface.

"Just remember," Aunt Elaine continued, "that these people only have part of the truth, no matter how hard they try to convince you otherwise. Their view of God is extremely limited, and they can only tell you so much.

"But they have the Bible, and you can study that. Listen to how they interpret it; then make up your own mind as to whether you agree. Remember: you had a personal experience, not them; and nobody can tell you more about it than you can.

"Once you get their message, it's time to leave.

"And move on to the next step."

Mary wanted to look up then. She couldn't. Not quite yet. Elaine was moving closer to her, enfolding her with her arms, holding her tight, and she could do nothing. Couldn't hug back. Couldn't anything.

But let the tears roll.

"Oh, honey," her aunt continued, the voice and the hug so warm. "You'll be fine. I swear you will." She gave an extra squeeze for emphasis, then continued, "Now I want you to sit down and drink your tea.

"I want to give you something."

Elaine let go, and Mary moved obediently to the kitchen table and sat. A cup was set in front of her. She brought it to her lips, blew gingerly, waited.

A book was set in front of her.

Mary looked at the cover.
The Gnostic Gospels
by Elaine Pagels. Meanwhile, her Aunt Elaine sat across from her, blew at her own tea. Mary looked up for the first time, startled, found the power of speech at last.

"Did you write this?"

"Oh, no," her aunt responded, almost laughing. "I wish I had, but no such luck. It's just a book that I admire, and that I want you to think about.

"You see, it's been nearly two thousand years since Jesus was crucified, and that's a long time; but in certain ways nothing has changed. We're still fighting over what's right and what's wrong. We always have. We always will.

"Back then, even the apostles were fighting over who understood Jesus the best. It was a fight that lasted over two hundred years. That's how long it took to put together the Bible
.

"In the end the orthodox Christians won; and that's the Bible that you'll get to read when you go to the Village. But there was a whole 'nother group-the Gnostic Christians-who had a whole 'nother view of it."

"And that's what's in this book?"

"Well, they talk about it. And they've got quotes from it. Mostly, they just talk about the difference between the groups and the politics that went down. But this is the important thing, the thing I want you to remember.

"The Gnostics dealt with personal experience. They said that the kingdom of heaven was within you, and that God spoke personally to you. That means that if God comes to you in a vision, you listen, even if it contradicts everything you know or believe in. Even if it contradicts the church.

"I'm going to make you a bet now. I'm going to bet that they take this book away from you. They won't want you to read it. They won't want you to know what it has to say.

"If they do that, then remember what I've said.

"And when you've learned all you can from them, you have a place to stay. You know that.

"I love you."

Mary agreed that, yes, she knew that, then cried a little more.

The next day she arrived at Liberty Christian Village. The first thing they did, after assigning her her room and uniform, was to confiscate her copy of
The Gnostic Gospels. . . .

There was a hand on her shoulder, a hand that, in a short time, she had come to equate with all the hate and jealousy that seemed to have so successfully subverted the word of Christ. She tensed at its touch, sent out a silent prayer.