now we understand that we know all things and there’s no need to question you. From this we can believe that you came from God. And then Jesus goes, do you now believe? He’s asking, do you believe I’m God? That’s the question every Christian has to answer, Danny. He’s asking you. Do you believe Jesus is God? Do you accept him as your Lord and Savior so he can be with you always?”
Daniel wiped tears and snot on his shirtsleeve, and when he looked back at the sky the script had faded, and everything was light.
“Yes!” he shouted. “Yes!”
Ronnie had jumped up, hauled Daniel into the freezing ocean, and baptized him.
••••
“Remember that moment,” he told Gwen. “That Jesus boat wasn’t just something to grab onto because you left me.”
She relented. “I’m sorry I was disrespectful, Daniel. In my family Jesus was the strap they used to keep me in line whenever I did anything my mom didn’t think was ladylike.” She sipped her coffee. “That’s what Jesus meant to me when you told me you were saved. I should have asked what it meant to you.”
He remembered the glittering ocean, the pang of salt in the air, the cries of the gulls in the dizziness of blue above him, and how he had felt filled with light.
“It meant,” he said, “for a moment, I was blinded by love and when that passed, nothing looked the same again.”
••••
But at the time, when she had come to see him at the Living Room, his conversion was still too fresh for him to have words for it. She looked around the room, read the scripture on the wall, listened to his story about how he’d been struck by the glory of the Lord, and said dismissively, “The Lord? You mean that old white man in the sky who told women to bow down to the men?”
“Paul said in God there is no male and female and all are one in Jesus Christ.”
“Tell that to the girls washing dishes in the kitchen while you guys sit around out here smoking and drinking coffee and rapping.” She got up. “This trip isn’t for me and maybe, when the acid high wears off, it won’t be for you, either.”
He grabbed her hand. “Gwennie, don’t go. I love you.”
She pulled her hand away, looked at him and said, “I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry, Danny, I’m going to take care of it.”
“What do you mean, take care of it?” he asked in horror. “You don’t mean an abortion.”
“That’s for me to decide,” she said flatly.
“It’s my child, too,” Daniel protested. “You can’t just kill it.”
“You don’t tell me what to do with my body.”
“Marry me,” he exclaimed.
Her eyes which had been angry, filled with sadness. “You don’t mean that.”
He drew in a breath. “I’m serious. Marry me. I’ll do whatever you want me to do, even if it means leaving my friends here. Leaving the city, getting a straight job, starting over somewhere else.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want you to change your life for me anymore than I want to change my life for you. I won’t marry you, Danny. Our thing is over. You go your way, and I’ll go mine.” And with that she had left.
••••
Now, he said, “I went to the commune where you were living. A redheaded girl told me you’d gone hone and slammed the door in my face.”
Gwen chuckled softly. “That would have been Alice.”
He continued, “I realized I didn’t even know where your family lived. I had no way to reach you.” He shook his head. “I stood there and cried until another girl came up the steps and saw me and told me I should leave.” He shrugged. “At least she was nice about it.”
The quiet of the hospital room was broken by the splash of rain against the window. They both looked over as water began to streak the glass. He remembered how he had wiped his eyes and nose on the sleeve of his dirty cowhide jacket and gone heavily down the stairs.
••••
Six years later the Living Room had been shuttered, its people scattered, but Daniel’s conversion stuck. He returned to school, a small Christian college in Orange County. There, the free-wheeling faith he had learned on the streets of San Francisco was tempered by the corollary tenets of man’s inherent sinfulness and the requirement of repentance. Daniel, having watched with dismay as what was left of the idealism of the sixties soured into consumption, materialism and licentiousness, accepted those teachings. If other principles, like the inerrancy of the Bible and the exclusivity of Christianity, gave him pause, he hammered out his doubts with his teachers until he arrived at a place of, if not blind, then working acceptance. As the years passed, the distinction evaporated.
He was ordained, became the youth pastor at a big, unaffiliated evangelical church in Los Angeles called Ekklesia. He thrived in the role, bringing dozens of young families into an aging congregation. He also discovered a gift for raising money that, more than his ministerial skills, brought him to the attention of Max Taggert, Ekklesia’s founding pastor. Taggert’s only child was a daughter, Jessica, who could not, of course, inherit his position, as women were barred from ordination. Taggert, eyeing a successor, began to call Daniel “son.”
••••
A church in San Francisco had invited him to help design its youth ministry. After six years, the city was at once familiar and unrecognizable. The streets were the same, but the feet that trod them belonged to strangers. One afternoon he strolled through the Haight, where no trace of the sixties remained except in fading graffiti and a couple of old hippie businesses. Moved by nostalgia, he stepped into a phone booth, opened the phone book, and looked up Gwen. He didn’t really expect to find her since, as far as he knew, she’d never returned to the city. But there she was: Gwen Baker. Or, a Gwen Baker. Living in the Mission on Fair Oaks Street. Impulsively he called her. She knew him by his voice, even before he said his name, and invited him to dinner.
Daniel had stood at the front door of Gwen’s flat— one half of a tall Victorian on a street of tall Victorians— and peered through the window at a steep flight of stairs. He rang the bell. A moment later the small figure of a boy came hurtling down the stairs and opened the door, breathless. He was seven, Daniel later learned. He had Gwen’s frizzy hair, complexion, and elegant features but his eyes— blue and awash with curiosity— were Daniel’s.
“Hello,” Daniel said. “Is your mother home?”
“She’s cooking,” he said. “She said to let you in. I’m Wyatt.”
“I’m Daniel.”
••••
Their conversation was limited by Wyatt’s presence. Bright, inquisitive and bold, he had interrupted them when they attempted to speak in grown-up code and demanded to know what they were talking about. Eventually, they gave up and restricted themselves to pleasantries as they sipped coffee in Gwen’s comfortable living room while Wyatt sprawled on his belly on the floor with crayons and paper, coloring with one hand and shooing away a plump gray cat with the other.
“What are you drawing?” Daniel asked.
“It’s a stego— stego . . .”
“Saurus,” Gwen said.
“Mom! I was going to say that.”
“I’m sorry, Wyatt.”
“My school went to the natural history museum, and we saw the dinosaur bones. When I grow up, I want to be a paleo— a paleo . . .” Now he glanced at Gwen for help.
“Paleontologist.”