Pretty (13 page)

Everyone was crying by then. The hairs on my arms were standing up and I felt a little sick and something started humming in me.

“So, folks, you can say no and no and no to Jesus and Jesus will still love you. Jesus will love you always because Jesus is love and he will wait, he will wait until you see, like I did, that Jesus is everything he said he was. He is the way. He is the truth. He is the life.

“Now, is there anyone here today who doesn't know Jesus yet? Who is ready today, right here, right now, to let Jesus into your heart, to accept Jesus as your Lord and savior?”

I did want to be saved. I did want to be forgiven. Who doesn't? And why not. Why not there. Why not then. Saved from every sad thing I had known and reborn as someone else.

I stood. I was the only one that day. I stood and Margaret put her arms around me, her face glossy with tears. People sang and touched me and I stood in front of Pastor Dan and he laid his palm on my head and prayed over me and the whole world got brighter, like it was overexposed. And then it was over and I was born again. I had a new life, a new family, a new father in Jesus who wouldn't drink himself to death.

Two weeks later I was baptized. It was a windy Sunday in late fall. The congregation filed out to the parking lot and into a caravan of cars. Margaret's friend Ruth rode shotgun and Hunter rode in the backseat of the Chrysler with me, holding my hand between both of his and smiling warmly. I tingled with the exquisite and unfamiliar feeling of actually getting something I wanted.

There was a turnoff near a picnic spot in Water City, on the banks of the Maumee River. We arrived last. Everyone already stood by the side of the road waiting for us. I stepped out of the car and it was only a short, gravel-crunchy walk to the river's edge, which was muddy and strewn with fallen leaves. We could hear the cars rushing by on the highway behind us.

Margaret helped me on with my white robe and it felt nice to have my hands over my head and her pulling the robe down around me. She smoothed my hair out of my eyes and smiled like she was proud.

Pastor Dan and me and Stacy-Ann, the kid from the band's girlfriend, slipped together down the small incline to the river's edge. And all I could think of was the cold, cold, cold water. Like a bath I took once when I had the measles. My mother sat beside me and sponged my forehead and the water felt like needles and I wanted to get out but I was so tired and I guess I almost died that night, is what my mother tells me. And when I look back on it I can see that right there, right in that thought, was the thread that would catch on a nail and unravel my whole cloak of faith before too long. Because I thought, just randomly, I'll be in heaven with Jesus but where will my mother be, who sat by me, who doesn't know Jesus, who probably never will because she's had plenty of opportunity by now? In hell? And my pop? What kind of a God am I giving myself to? But the thought didn't fully gel until later.

Pastor Dan beckoned to us with his arms theatrically wide, calling us his children. Behind him the river was alive with sparkles of afternoon sunlight. He turned and waded in, smiling and undaunted, until he was waist high. Stacy-Ann went first. The temperature of the water stopped her in her tracks when she was ankle deep; then she set her face and propelled herself on by sheer will. She stumbled to the reverend's side. He spoke a few words to her I couldn't hear. Then she pinched her nose shut and fell backward and he cradled her in his arms until she was fully submerged. Stacy-Ann stood up, raised her arms to the sky, and ran for the shore into the elated cheers and warm blankets of her new brothers and sisters in Christ.

I went next. I left my shoes and ran in without being called, my stocking feet partly numbed against the sharp stones of the riverbed, the cold water going straight to my bones. When I reached him, Pastor Dan put his arm around my back like how I imagined you would for a dip in a slow dance. He looked me in the eye and I felt like I was in the arms of John Travolta or something.

“Because you believed with your heart and confessed with your mouth that Father God raised Jesus Christ from the dead and that Jesus Christ is now Lord of your life I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

It was that fast. And back we went.

I held on to him and looked up into his eyes, blue as the glass marble blue of the sky behind him, the kind of blue that means heaven, right before the water splashed in around my face. And what I thought was, Here we go. My old life, my old fears, all my doubts and sins are being washed clean and I'll emerge not perfect because only Christ is perfect and only a crazy person thinks they're Christ, so not perfect but new. New.

When I emerged, the drops of water on my eyelashes caught the sun and made swimmy starry spots in front of my eyes and Pastor Dan released me. But when I got to shore all I felt was blue cold. Not new.

Fuck, I thought. There it still is, that square of wormy scared dark in my heart.

Violet gets all fascinated by my born-again past and she asks me, what did it feel like? And I tell her, it didn't feel like I thought it would. I didn't feel new. Not at all. But I tried not to be disappointed. Because there was something I very definitely did feel. I felt love. I knew my church family loved me. I believed Jesus loved me. I didn't stop believing that until later.

Me and Jake
walk out the door and navigate the sea of socializing bodies and the fog of cigarette smoke. The meeting quieted Jake. He reaches for my hand as we stroll through the clear night back to the Ghetto Racer.

It makes me want to laugh sometimes. I thought I cut the cord with God the day we pulled the cord on Aaron. I was sure I was done with God forever. And here I am in church. I traveled two thousand miles from Zion to sit in another church.

I guess some people have to be born again and again.

“W
here do you want to go now?
We still have a couple of hours before curfew.”

Jake doesn't answer but raises his eyebrows enigmatically as he pulls out and turns south down Vermont. We slide past gas stations and fast-food joints and Korean strip malls with their mysterious ciphers advertising boba coffee shops and karaoke clubs. I settle back, contented. I like driving at night, moving through shifting puddles of light, in between here and there.

Jake hits Wilshire and makes a right. When they built all these beautiful old hotels and apartment buildings on Wilshire, they thought it was going to be the heart of the city. They didn't know it would wind up just another long, long street in a town that can't be said to have a heart.

Wind rattles the bushy-topped trees growing out of their holes in the sidewalk. An impossibly huge and beautiful moon hangs dead center in front of us, lighting up the sky midnight blue, and it's a right-place-at-the-right-time-on-the-right-side-of-the-earth's-face kind of heartbeat. And I don't wonder where we're going; I don't even care.

Ahead of us, the ruin of the Ambassador Hotel peeks out from behind twelve-story glass boxes stuffed with staffing services and catering companies and temp agencies and bartending schools. In L.A. there are two kinds of people—servants and the people they serve. Somewhere on one of these blocks is the dreaded edifice where, in thirty-seven days, I will meet my fate at the State Board exam.

Jake turns left on a street that flanks the fenced-off Ambassador grounds, then turns again onto a dead end. A low, crumbling brick wall stands between us and the hotel property and in front of each wall is a row of grand palm trees standing their ground. Things like tall palm trees, haughty old things with knife blade fronds that catch the sunlight like camera flashes, can almost make me like L.A. Can almost make me feel a pang of nostalgia for some glamorous hazy past that never existed anyway. Everything looks better in black-and-white, and the Ambassador, with its history of celebrity scandal and splashy tragedy, is definitely black-and-white. Jake parks, grabs a Maglite from under his seat, comes around my side, opens my door, and pulls me out of the car.

Spirals of razor wire crown most of the tall fencing around the grounds, but Jake leads me straight to a gate that has a clean shot over the top. I hook my fingers through the metal diamonds of fencing, wedge my Chucks on a crossbar, and pull myself up. I swing my leg over, reposition, and in three graceful moves clear it and land with a quiet crunch on the grass. My head rings with adrenaline. I wonder if there are cameras, if there are guards, but I guess the only way you really know is if one catches you. I wouldn't normally mind the risk, but I am one week from graduation and this kind of trouble could be Susan Schmidt's ideal ammunition. Jake scales the fence so fast I barely see him climb it. The tricky thing about Jake is that he can seem like an incompetent lunatic, but really he has all these crazy skills.

What I hear is a billion crickets and a late-roaming icecream truck with a warped soundtrack and some people screaming with drunken laughter up the block. Jake takes my hand again and we are off like
Mission: Impossible
superstealth spies across wide-open ground until, lungs aching, we reach the grand, ruined behemoth that looms over us at least ten stories high. Heading toward a service entrance, we pass under an overhang that looks ready to collapse. Behind us lies a massive, empty pool with weeds pushing up through cracks in the concrete.

Jake opens the door without so much as a jimmy of the lock and pulls the flashlight out of his waistband.

“I fixed it yesterday.” He explains the ease of our breaking and entering. “It gets better.”

I feel like we're in a movie except the genre keeps changing. When it opened, we were getting ready to enter the Cocoanut Grove, where Ginger Rogers would be waltzing with Fred Astaire. Then we had to break in and we were in a spy movie. But now, as we follow the dancing flashlight beam through a maze of corridors until I completely lose my sense of direction, it's like the scariest horror movie you ever saw. I make Jake walk in front of me because he has the flashlight, but then I change my mind and make him walk behind me because the darkness is thick and creeping up my neck and I would run screaming if I was alone.

Switch genres again and we're in a sci-fi time travel movie because we turn a corner and find ourselves in a wide, red-carpeted hallway lined by shops that look as if they were abandoned yesterday, except yesterday was in 1952. The shop names are painted on the windows in gold lettering. There is a flower shop, a barbershop, a travel agency with intact Art Deco posters advertising other cities: a dainty Chinese girl in front of the Golden Gate Bridge to advertise San Francisco, an old man with a white beard on a boat in front of the Statue of Liberty. Jake shines the light around slowly, illuminating one circle at a time of the lost world.

“It's still so perfect.”

“We're then and we're now. We're in two parallel dimensions at once. You can slip through the wormhole if you want. If you choose it. Would you go or would you stay?”

“Huh?”

“Stay or go. Quick. Would you rather be in this hallway then or now?”

“Then. Anything but now.”

“Too slow.”

“What?”

“You hesitated. Hesitate and the universe closes the window. You're stuck with now. But you're stuck in now with me so allow me to make your now a mystical thing.”

We continue down the hall until we reach what was once the lobby and it looks like something from
The Shining.
The ceiling opens up huge and high, and dark wood and wide red carpet stretch in all directions. A white fountain with a tall spire stands in the center of the room. Behind it a grand stairway unfolds to the upstairs. Chandelier after chandelier, each made of a thousand glittering crystal teardrops, hang from the ceiling.

“Oh, my God,” I say, in a normal tone of voice that fades to a whisper because my voice sounds like a reckless violation, as if we are going to disturb some cranky, sleeping spirit.

“Can you hear them?”

I can't. And normally I'd worry about him hearing voices. But I can feel them this time. There's something here that wants to be heard. Maybe that something counts on people like Jake, with a fragile brain chemical cocktail. Maybe when he gets somewhere so clearly heavy with stories the weight of it tips his scales just a hair, just enough.

But no. We're subject to suggestion. Our brains play tricks on us. I'm in a perfect horror movie set so of course I imagine I feel ghosts. And my boyfriend hears voices when his brain isn't metabolizing adrenaline or something, so he isn't exactly the best fact-checker.

“Don't be scared,” he says. “Go on up the stairs and then come down again.”

“Why?”