The Scream (42 page)

Now both of them laughed, and that was nice too. It had a very short half-life, however. All too soon, the all-too-uncomfortable silence returned.

"So," Rachel began at last, "where does that leave you?"

Jesse said nothing; but from Rachel's view, the psychic retreat was more than eloquent. This was the
really
difficult part. This was the landscape at the heart of the pain.

"We can stop now, if you want to," Rachel persisted gently. "But I've got a feeling, since we've come this far, that you might want to go all the way."

Jesse stalled for a minute, snubbing out her cigarette, reaching for another, refraining at the last moment. Her eyes, which had seemed on the verge of drying, began to fill again. Her breath hitched as she prepared to speak.

"I guess," she managed at last, "I'll have to find another place to get it done. I mean . . ." And then she lost it again.

Rachel reached out her hand, took Jesse's free one in her own: a gesture of solidarity. Jesse flinched for a moment and stared at the clutch; then her eyes overflowed, and she stared off into the never-never land to the right of her knees. Rachel watched her, gauging the pain, deciding whether she had the requisite empathy. Sometimes, after all, good will wasn't all it was cracked up to be. She needed to know if she was going to make things better or muck things up.

Only one way to find out
, she told herself, and then went with the flow.

"Listen to me, kiddo. You have a couple of choices. Not all of them are pretty, but that's beside the point. You'll want to think about them all-"

"No. You listen to
me
." Jesse yanked her hand away. Anger underlied the sudden power in her voice, the straightness of her spine, the intensity of her gaze. "If there's one thing I don't wanna fuckin' hear, it's anybody tryin' to talk me out of it! Okay? I mean, this is hard enough as it is!"

"I know what you mean-"

"
Do
you now!" Jesse could feel her defenses slamming home now within her, like the huge steel doors thundering shut behind Don Adams in the
Get Smart!
opening credits. "Rachel, no offense or anything, but you decided to
have
your kids. There's a big difference between a baby you want and a baby you had forced on you-"

"Jesse, let me put it to you this way." She gracefully withdrew her hand from where it had been abandoned, used it to push back her long red tresses, used the seconds to subdue her own anger. "When I got pregnant with Ted, it was in the days just preceding
Roe
versus
Wade
, which means that there
weren't
any listings in the yellow pages. It was illegal, you understand? The only legitimate way to get an abortion was with a doctor's excuse, which means that you either had to be at death's door or be a fucking psychotic. You know, either it was a certifiable health risk, or you had to threaten suicide.

"Of course you could always do it through the underground; but somehow, the thought of getting scraped in a back alley by some guy named Paco was more terrifying than the pregnancy itself.

"You follow what I'm saying?"

Jesse nodded. The anger had fizzled, at least for the moment. She listened, tense but most certainly attentive.

"At the time I was involved with this guy named Sam; and let's just say that Sam was an underachiever. He had a great voice, and he played a mean guitar, and he wrote me some beautiful songs . . ." She trailed off, wistful for a moment. ". . . but, bottom line, he was a deadbeat. Liked to sit around stoned all day, playing the guitar and bitching about how
commercial
FM radio was getting. Not what you'd call a good provider."

She smiled. Jesse did not. Her concentration at that moment was enormous.

"I would
very much
have liked an abortion just then. I'm pretty sure that I felt a lot like you do now. I was right about your age, in fact. You're twenty-three?"

Jesse nodded.

"Okay. I was twenty-one-anna-half. Big difference." She smiled and swigged her coffee again. "I have to admit I wasn't nearly as focused as you are, or nearly as talented; but I still had dreams, and they didn't involve carrying an infant around to job interviews, and they didn't involve going home to Mother or collecting welfare, and they
also
didn't involve spending my life with good ol' Sam. Unfortunately, I was up against a brick wall, and my dreams didn't seem to carry a whole lot of weight.

"So I went ahead and had Ted by myself. I really didn't
have
any choice. Fortunately, southern California was Midwife City around that time, so at least I had some support. Sam hit the road by the fifth month, which saved me the trouble of giving him the boot.

"And then I just struggled like crazy for the next eight years: me and Ted, against the world."

"But, my God," Jesse muttered. "What did you
do
?"

"My God!" Rachel laughed. "What
didn't
I do?" She shook her head, less wistful than rueful this time. "Well, lots of little counterculture jobs, for the most part; they were really good about babies, but they didn't pay for shit.

"Remember, these were the days when 'pregnancy leave' in straight America was an impossible dream, as opposed to the highly improbable one it is now. I mean, if you think
this
is a man's world, you shoulda been here
then
. There was no slack. There was no leeway.

"So I worked my way around the fringes. I'm talking food co-ops, stained glass, some political canvassing and stuff. Probably the straightest thing I did was spend a couple months working for George McGovern."

"Anyway, that was the straight stuff. Then, of course, I picked up a lot of Gerber's Strained Beets and Oscar Meyer Weiners on the ol' five-linger discount plan. I did some dancing and hustling for tips. I had a couple old men along the way, sort of low-grade sugar daddies." She paused, as if weighing the next batch of words. "I even turned a couple tricks at one point."

"Ohmigod."

"Hey." Rachel's face was ultrasober as she said it. "When it comes down to survival, you do what you have to do. At that point, I just considered myself lucky I was cute enough to pull it off. I
had
no backup: just the love of my son, the love of my friends, and the love that I felt God had for me."

"Yeah, that's some kind of love, all right," Jesse sneered. "Direct from that big bearded guy in the sky. Man, I've heard enough of
that
to last me the rest of my-"

"You been around long enough, you realize how unreasonable the whole
world
is. It's like there's this vast matrix of illogic that permeates everything; and once you realize that we don't make the kind of sense we presume to make, then you start to wonder about the image of God that presupposes that order.

"I went through that real heavy, the whole Christian thing. I had incredible faith, and I had incredible doubt. The beauty of Christ, on the one hand, was undeniable. What thinking, feeling person can deny the power of forgiveness, of unconditional love, of standing bravely and selflessly up against the forces of injustice and intolerance and hate?

"But on the other hand, there was the Church. Too much. All its little cliques and subcults of organized belief. And the more I saw of them, the more I realized that they had
less
forgiveness,
less
unconditional love,
less
tolerance or sense of justice than a lot of the undogmatic unbelievers I met.

"So I retained my love, and I retained my faith, but I gave up on being a Christian. It seemed evident to me that Christ had, to a large extent,
failed
when he died. He left His Word wide open to mutilation by the very people He'd made mincemeat of when he lived: all the power hungry high priests and multimedia rip-off artists of the world."

Jesse just stared at her now, saying nothing.

"And once the faith you had gets stripped down to that, you start to embrace a larger order. One that draws on a larger number of sources. One that doesn't draw the same kind of lines. Do you know what I'm saying?"

"I'm not sure . . ."

"Yes, you do. Just listen real hard. The fact is,
nothing makes any kind of real sense at all
until you embrace the irrational. And beyond that, the wildest extremes: the things more beautiful or monstrous than you ever dared imagine. Try to make sense of your emotions without that sensibility; try to make sense of your deepest feelings.

"Try to make sense of your
music
, for God's sake! You've already explained your music to me, what your Symphony of Life is supposed to represent. You already understand all this stuff. You're just so damned pragmatic about it, you seem to forget what it means."

"Okay." Jesse's hands were trembling slightly as she clasped them together before her. "So what does it mean?"

"It means that whatever it is that's Out There will love you, whatever you choose to do. It also means that it will mess with you, whatever you choose to do.

"
Mostly
, though, it means that any choice you make is between you and it, and nobody else has a right to say one goddamn word about it."

Yes, definitely trembling now, as Jesse brought her arms down to hug her belly. Very quietly, she spoke.

"So what do
you
think I should do?"

"I don't know what to tell you, Jess. I really don't. On the one hand, you'd have a much easier time bringing up a kid than I had with Ted. You can still write and record and play; you aren't scheduled for another tour until next year; you could afford an au pair girl to cover you while you work. I'd even help out, as much as I could.

"But just because you could handle it, that doesn't mean you should have to. Like I said before, I would have
loved
an abortion way back when. I wouldn't blame you a bit if you had one now. It's just a matter of what you can live with."

Jesse said nothing. Rachel followed suit, waiting.

A weighted oasis of silence followed.

Jesse broke it at last with the skritch of a match. Her face was seriously pale as she spoke.

"I'm scared."

"Okay." Rachel left it there.

"I mean, I'm really scared," Jesse persisted. Her eyes were almost luminous red as she began to cry again.

"So go on. Tell me."

"I'm scared to have the baby. I'm scared
not
to have the baby. I'm scared"-pausing to choke back the sobbing-"that this thing inside me might be all that's left of Pete in the world."

And then the sobbing came, full force. Rachel waited it out, suppressing the urge to go over and hold the girl. This moment of pain and catharsis was Jesse's and Jesse's alone. When it was done, they could go on.

Or they could leave it, for now.

"And you know what keeps coming back to me?" Jesse moaned through her tears. "That stupid woman and the thing she said: '
It has a right to live!
'"

"No, it doesn't," Rachel said. "Not at all.

"It merely has a chance."

Sunday afternoon's big
Call to Glory
telethon was just getting revved up when Mary Hatch tipped over. As always, it had been made direly clear to everyone in the preshow power prayer debriefing that this was
the
most critically elemental segment of LCV's weekly Faith Outreach programming lineup.

It was more important, they stressed, than the chatty downhomesiness of
Triumph Tonight!
, more important than
Rock of Ages
(their admittedly marginal Friday-night competition against the glut of late-night Murder Music venues), which featured primly dressed and smartly suited youngsters singing Pastor Furniss's favorites from the ol' time gospel hit parade. Yessir, it was more important than just about anything, because on a good night
Call to Glory
could really rake it in for the Lord, hallelujah, amen.

Especially
in the wake of yesterday's stunning defeat for the Enemy.

Yessir, Satan had really done it this time, and Pastor Furniss was fully expecting the joint to be jumping, with all those lights on all those phones
blazing
. Everyone smiled a lot and assured Mary that it was quite the honor to be chosen as one of the smiling Faith Outreach volunteers for such an important event. It meant that they were really on the way to accepting her into the fold; it meant that she could be personally trusted to spread the Good News to those who called in their darkest time of need, praise God, that she could be personally trusted to speak for the Lord, giving comfort and getting at least one major credit card number.

It meant that they were hoping to high heaven that she'd be all right.

Mary's knees were still stiff as she made her way through the cinder block basement facility that comprised the realms of Studio B, the heart of Liberty Christian Village's multimedia complex. There was, in fact, no Studio A, nor any complex to speak of; and in fact, there never had been. But it was coming; oh, yes. Soon, soon. Just as soon as they could amass enough faith to beat the Devil back and get their financial heads above water, they were gonna be a
beacon
: shining into the morass of sex and drugs and murder music to CALL the teenagers of North America back home to GLORY!

AMEN! THANK YOU, JEEZUS!

Mary stood before her preordained space, a red plastic bucket-style chair at the end of a long bank of red plastic bucket-style chairs, each facing its own pair of bright red telephones. It was the same fragile fiberoptic lifeline that she herself had been on the other side of not so very long ago. With any luck at all, dozens of lost and floundering souls would be reaching out tonight, praise God, and would find Him through her.

Mary sat down. The chair was maybe an inch or two shy of comfortable height for the table, and the enormous Faith Outreach button she'd been given clanked against the table rim like a giant metal cookie. It was a bright yellow 3-D disk that shifted as you looked at it, with a big frowny/smiley face and the legend
GET SMART! GET SAVED!
alternating in boldface along the bottom. They must have figured that the trauma of yesterday would fade a little faster if she were given a little piece of the Lord's work to do. So it was given to her, along with the pledge forms and the training manual that she was supposed to have stayed up with, memorizing. It was hers to keep, an honor conferred on a chosen few. It was almost as big as her left breast.