by Abby Bardi
“Yes, ma'am.” After just talking to Mama for a few minutes, I had already gone back to behaving how I knew she was going to want me to behave.
“Diane says it's up to you. You can stay here with us—and of course, Mary Fred, we'd like that more than anything in the world—or you can go back with your mother.”
I told her I had made a decision and that I was going back with Mama. She looked really sad then, and I hated to be the one that made her look like that, but she said she understood completely but that she wanted me to know that I always had a home with them, that as far as she was concerned I was part of her family and always would be. I said I knew that, and thatI felt the same way, but I had to go. She gave me a hug, then went into the kitchen, and I think she was trying not to let me see her cry because when she came back out her eyes were all red but she was smiling and talking about what we were going to have for dinner. She had gone to the store and bought all the stuff I liked.
I was just taking a big bite of red snapper when the doorbell rang. Alice went over to the front door and opened it, and when I looked up, Mama was standing in the living room, her head moving from side to side like she was scanning the horizon. Her face was all screwed up and she looked like she smelled something bad. I knew what she was thinking because I remembered how weird the house had looked to me when I first saw it, with no brown and no Book and nothing but a bunch of fiddle-dee-dee—this was what Mama was thinking, and I knew it. Her hair had gone grayer, and she had cut it, or maybe they had made her cut it in jail. She was wearing it loose around her shoulders, and it made her face look older and more tired.
Alice introduced her to Dr. Greenberg, and I was afraid Mama wasn't going to shake hands with him, since he was a doctor and all, but she did, though she looked like she was going to go scrub her hand afterwards. I was standing up next to my chair, and when she got finished meeting everyone, I went over to her and put my arms around her waist, like I had done a million times. I had forgotten how she smelled, sort of like gingerbread and soap and lemon. She patted my head, like everything was okay now, and she was going to stand by me and protect me from all of these Lackers. She looked at me and shook her head, like I had turned into some kind of hootchie-kootchie woman while her back was turned.
Alice asked her to join us at the table, but she said she had eaten on the road—which seemed odd since Mama wouldnever eat fast food or anything like that—and that we needed to get going because we still had a long drive in front of us. I was still in the middle of my fish, and it had been tasting mighty good, but suddenly I wasn't hungry anymore. Mama told me to go pack up my belongings, so I went upstairs, moving kind of slow, since it still hurt sometimes when I walked, especially climbing stairs. I went into my room and took my suitcase out from under the bed where it had lain since last June. I started putting things in it like my Beanie Babies and my pink stuffed dog, but just as quickly I realized that Mama was not going to like that, so I took them out again and propped them all back up on the bookcase. I opened up the closet and saw a bunch of the pink shirts and dresses Alice and Heather had bought me. I knew I didn't need them either, so I just took out everything that was black or brown and folded it up real neat. I took The Book of Fred from the shelf where I had set it, and I really wanted to take Ozma of Oz with me too, but I knew better. I left my bowling ball in the corner in its carrying case, since I didn't figure I'd be bowling where we were going.
I went into the bathroom and started gathering up my toiletries. I had all kinds of little bottles of stuff that Heather and I had gotten as free samples at Bloomingdale's one time, and I knew Mama wouldn't approve, so I was going to leave them behind but then I thought well, maybe she won't know if I just take one small one, so I took a little tube of Princess Borghese moisturizer. I grabbed my toothbrush and my hairbrush. I wanted to take the deodorant but I knew Mama wouldn't like that either. I stood there looking at everything on the shelves and in the medicine cabinet, and there was really nothing else I could take that she wouldn't mind somehow.
As I started to grab my pills out of the medicine cabinet, Ihad a terrible feeling, almost like the way it must feel to be standing on the earth somewhere when a comet falls out of the sky and lands right on your head. I realized that all these weeks I had been taking all kinds of medicine, antibiotics and painkillers and whatever else they'd been giving me, and I hadn't even stopped to think about what that meant. The nurses had been sticking needles in me and thrusting pills down my throat for days before I was even really awake, and it occurred to me that this was exactly what Mama and Papa had gone to jail about. That was how important it was to them. But by the time this thought even began to flicker in the back of my mind, I was in the hospital, I'd had surgery, and it seemed I might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.
Now here I was in the bathroom with this comet-feeling crashing down on my head. I suddenly saw myself and my new life through my old eyes—my body had been invaded by doctors, I had been poisoned with pills, I had not trusted enough in the One but had been a coward and let Evil triumph within me. But then I thought, wait, I was unconscious when Dr. Greenberg did my surgery, I was in a coma, I did not have a say in any of it. For a second I felt outraged about this. But then I had an even more horrible realization: I was glad. I was so glad. I was so, so glad. I looked around me and suddenly the bathroom looked like a vision from Beyond—the little white octagonal floor tiles glistened at my feet, and my face in the mirror sparkled, the bottles of shampoo on the edge of the bathtub were all different colors. This strange feeling, like of all the blood in my veins popping like popcorn, came over me and a voice in my head was saying, “I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive.” I felt like I was falling, and I grabbed on to the edge of the sink. I looked in the mirror. There I was, and I knew that if it hadn't been for Dr. Greenberg, I wouldn't be. Yes, I wouldbe in the World Beyond with my brothers, but the truth was, I wanted to be here on earth.
I reached into the medicine cabinet and took out the bottle of pills Dr. Greenberg had given me. I held the bottle for a minute or two and just looked at it. Then I stuck it under my shirt and went back into my room and closed the door. I found a Swiss army knife in a desk drawer and with it, I made a little hole in the inside lining of the suitcase and dropped the bottle in there. Then I finished putting my clothes in, packing them tight so the bottle wouldn't rattle around, closed up the suitcase, and carried it downstairs. Mama was standing there in the sitting room, still looking around her like she was seeing Evil coming at her from every which way. I put the suitcase down and told her I was ready to go.
It felt so strange and so bad to drive away from Alice's house and know that I would probably never see it again, and I had to steel my mind and just not think about it. It had been hard to say good-bye to Alice and Heather, and I had done it quickly, though I'd had to kind of peel Heather off me as she was clinging to my arm and crying. I told her I'd be seeing her again soon, but the truth was, I was just saying that to make her feel better. I didn't think Mama would like it if we kept in touch, and even though I had only been with her for half an hour or so, I was already switching back to the way I was before and was ready to do whatever Mama wanted, because of course that was how she brought me up to be.
I looked out the window and watched as the little streets that had become so familiar to me turned back into the strange streets they had been when I first saw them. We drove onto the Beltway and I expected Mama to head north toward Frederick, and the Outpost, but she went the other way. She hadn't saidmuch so far, and I could tell she was concentrating on the road, since I knew she hated to drive and hadn't done it much in the past, since Papa was always the one behind the wheel if we went anywhere, or else we went on a big bus, but I couldn't help asking her where we were heading. She said we were going to the new place. I asked her where that was and she said North Carolina, and didn't even tell me that I shouldn't be asking questions of a grown-up. I asked weren't we going to the Outpost and she said no,
that everyone had left there. I thought I ought to tell her that Alice had taken me to the Compound and that no one had been there either, but for some reason the words just wouldn't come out. It wasn't like I was lying to Mama if I didn't tell her something, was it? I just didn't think she would like that I had showed Alice and Roy and Heather where the Compound was and that I had tried to go there with a bunch of Lackers, and on such a holy day— though then when I remembered how the Big Cat had turned out, it didn't seem like a holy day anyway, and my mind started getting all confused so I just let it go.
I tried talking to Mama for a while, since I wanted to hear about what she had been doing, but she didn't seem to want to say anything about it, and soon she told me to go to sleep and when I woke up we would be there, so I did. It was still dark out when we stopped driving, just after two, according to the clock on the dashboard, though it was such an old, beat-up car that for all I knew the time was wrong. We got out and I started to lug my suitcase, but when Mama saw me struggling with it, trying to ignore the pain in my insides, she took it and carried it, and said I shouldn't lift anything heavy until the One had healed me up.
In the darkness, I could see that we were walking past a group of log cabins, and all their lights were out. Mamaopened the front door to the fourth cabin we came to. She didn't use a key, and that seemed strange for a minute, but then I remembered that of course we never used keys at the Compound either. She brought my suitcase into a little room and set it on the floor. There was nothing in the room but a bed with a brown bedspread, a small brown dresser, and a straight-backed chair. On the wall was a mirror, which seemed odd to me, since I knew Mama didn't approve of mirrors. She told me to go to sleep, that I could unpack in the morning, and she gave me a kiss on the top of my head like she always used to, and said a prayer over me, though not a long one. When she was gone, I opened up my suitcase and took out my pajamas. Alice had bought them for me and they were flannel with cows on them. I liked them because they reminded me of the cows that Diane and all them had sent to that foreign country, and since the cows were brown I figured Mama might not mind them. I reached into the lining of my suitcase and pulled out my pill bottle, being careful not to shake it because Mama had incredibly powerful hearing, and I worked up a bunch of spit in my mouth, took a pill out, and swallowed it.
When I climbed into bed, I was tired and sore from riding for so long, but I couldn't fall sleep, maybe because I had slept in the car. The sheets felt cold and strange, and outside I could hear weird, spooky noises. I wished I could have brought Pinky, my stuffed dog, with me. I could have put my arms around him and fallen right to sleep instead of just lying awake, trying not to think about anything, trying so hard that all the things I didn't want to think about got to be a loud noise in my brain, and when I woke up in the morning, I still had my hands over my ears, as if that was going to help.
Mama came in while I still was lying there and told me to get up, that we had to go to breakfast, since there was nokitchen in the cabin. She pursed her lips a little when she saw my pajamas, but she didn't say anything about them, just helped me to take them off and to put on my old brown dress. She didn't look too happy about my underwear, either, since it was a little bit fancy, with some lace on it, but at least I had left all the pink panties and bras behind, much as it had pained me to do so. “You've grown,” she said, and she shook her head like she didn't approve. She brushed my hair back hard and put it in a ponytail that was so tight it hurt my face. I went into the bathroom and washed up, then returned to my room for a minute and while Mama wasn't looking, I took another one of my pills. Then we put on our coats and walked out the door. Now that it was light out, I could see we were surrounded by mountains like at the Compound, though they were taller and darker green, and there were a bunch of cabins just like ours, not in rows but sprinkled around like someone had just dropped them there from the sky. It was a sunny day, though chilly. “I guess spring is on its way, huh, Mama,” I said, making conversation as we walked. I hadn't remembered that she was this quiet, although I had never really been alone with her before, come to think of it, there was always the whole bunch of us, and Papa.
“Did you have any boyfriends while you were up there?” she asked, as if I hadn't said anything about spring.
“Oh, no, Mama.”
“Why not? You're a pretty young woman now.” She glanced over at me, then went back to looking down at the path as we walked.
“Just didn't have any, I guess. I had some friends who were boys, but we just went bowling.”
“You never let any of them touch you, did you?”
“Oh, no, ma'am. Of course not.”
She looked at me again, to see if I was lying. I remembered this look from my whole life, how Mama had a way of knowing everything you were thinking, so you had to keep your mind pure and clear. Then she made a little noise in her throat, and we turned onto a dirt road that led us up to a square one-story building. It was gray concrete with almost no windows, like an office complex or a police station, with a high wall all around it. There was a man at the front gate holding a long-barreled gun. Mama introduced me to him, telling him that I didn't have my ID card yet, and he let us pass. We walked through some glass doors and down a long hallway to the back of the building, where we came into a huge kitchen full of people in white jackets and little white paper hats. “This is where we'll be working during the week,” she said. “We've got today off though. You hungry?”
I told her I was starving, though the truth was, I wasn't hungry at all. Maybe it was from taking a big pill on an empty stomach, but I felt a little queasy. She led me out of the kitchen and into a long cafeteria line, where she loaded up two plates for us with eggs and grits and pancakes and potatoes and sausages. There was no fish to be seen, and that seemed odd, since Mama generally made fish for breakfast, and she never did like sausage, said it was too heavy and would slow us down. I didn't think I was going to be able to eat anything, but we sat down at a long table and I did my best. The whole time we were sitting there, folks kept coming up to us and saying hello. Sometimes their faces were familiar from the Outpost or the Compound, though mostly I didn't know them. “Where did all these people come from, Mama?” I asked her. “There's so many of them here.”
“We joined up with some other like-minded fellowships,” she said. “They have chosen to share in our gospel.”
“Oh,” I said, and added, “that's nice.”
I did the best I could with all the food, and then Mama let me give up, though normally she'd have made me eat every bite. We stood up and took our trays over to a conveyor belt. As we were heading to the front door, I saw the Reverend Thigpen coming in, and I have to admit that my heart sank. I was surprised at myself for this, but that was how I felt. I guess maybe in part of my mind I blamed him for the Big Cat not taking place. But the truth was, I had had to admit to myself that I was glad it hadn't happened, and I felt all mixed up and angry about that, like I didn't know what to think about anything anymore. And it was the Reverend Thigpen who had stood up there at the pulpit and yelled all those things about the terrible fates of the Lackers, how they were going to stand in the flames of justice, and their bodies would catch fire and their skin would burn right off until they were screaming all the names of the One but it would be too late for them, they would never be able to stop the eternal lake of fire that would consume them forever and a day. When I imagined those things happening to the people I knew, instead of making me feel all safe and happy like it had all my life because I wasn't going to have to burn up like that, it made me feel sick and angry and mean.
“So this is our young sheep,” he said, stroking the side of his long face, “back to the fold.”
“And not a moment too soon,” Mama said darkly, looking at me like I had just returned from a visit to the Evil One himself.
“Living among those who lack,” he said in his Sunday morning voice. “Oh, what a trial that must have been.”
“And
there was a doctor,” Mama whispered. “A Greenberg.”
“Do tell,” he said, his hand on his heart. He turned to me and said, “I understand you were also in a hospital.”
“Yes sir,” I said, hoping that was all anyone would ask me to give in the way of commentary.
He shook his head and sighed, then turned back to Mama. “And the others?”
“Still with Lackers. But we're working on getting them back.”
The Reverend Thigpen offered Mama his condolences. He picked up my hand and held it for a minute, and I was glad when he let it go because his hand was fat and damp. I looked up at his huge square bald head, into his beady eyes that peered over his square wire-rimmed glasses, and it occurred to me that the truth was, I had just never liked the Reverend Thigpen. When we had been at the Compound, the Reverend Smith had been our main preacher and he used to talk about nice things, how golden it would be in the World Beyond, and how we would spend eternity without a care, instead of all the horrible, grisly things Reverend Thigpen mentioned like people's skin burning off and stuff like that.
“Where is the Reverend Smith?” I asked them, just to make conversation.
Neither of them answered at first, then Mama said, “The Lackers got him.”
“I'm afraid he's in the penitentiary,” the Reverend Thigpen said in a kind of snooty voice, it seemed to me. “There were some irregularities with his finances.”
“Well, then I guess we'll hear you preach on Sunday,” I said to the Reverend Thigpen as we started walking away. He didn't answer, and the smiling parts of his long cheeks seemed to droop.
“He's not our preacher anymore,” Mama said, chiding me as we got out of earshot. “We've got a new one. He's the head of this whole operation.” Mama led me over to a little wooden bench and sat me down, though it was kind of chilly out to belollygagging around outside. Though the sunlight was bright and clear, there was a mean little wind in the air. Mama turned to me and looked into my eyes, her face all serious. “I need to talk to you about this, and there's no time like the present. Things aren't the same here, Mary Fred, and you need to understand the new ways. I'm sure you've already noticed some differences.”
