Ice was brought and wrapped in the gory towel. After a minute, Ana decided the ground was too hard and her injuries too light to continue sitting where she was, so she allowed a couple of the men to help her to her feet. Her knee functioned, her left hand was scraped and already swelling but all the fingers seemed whole, and the bleeding from the cut lip was slowing down. She no doubt looked a sight, but what did that matter?
"I'm fine," she said indistinctly to the people fluttering around her. "I'm fine. It was an accident, and the only thing damaged is my bridge, and that can be replaced," She lisped and enunciation was difficult, but calm communication was reducing the anxiety level. Time to move on. "Would somebody go and buy me a T-shirt in the shop so I don't go around looking like an escapee from the emergency room? I'll pay you back. And did somebody tell the museum people they don't need to call in the riot squad?"
A babble of voices started up, and she squelched them. "No, I do not need to see a doctor. There's no point in even seeing a dentist until the swelling goes down. Finish your lunch, I'm going to go wash my face,"
She pushed through the would-be Samaritans until she could see Jason. Both he and Bryan were unscathed other than a small, already dried cut on Jason's knuckle where it had connected with her mouth. His face was taut and pale, and not, she thought, because of the infuriated woodworking teacher looming over him. The sight of her blood-smeared face emerging from the crowd brought a look of mingled relief and horror to his features, and he took in a great gulp of air. He looked ill.
"I'm okay, Jason," she said as clearly as she could. "It looks worse than it is. And it wasn't entirely your fault."
She came out of the rest room still looking as if she'd fallen in front of a truck, but cleaned up, wearing a shiny new T-shirt with Anasazi pot designs printed on it and beginning to see the humor in the situation.
And the benefits: This would mean at least two trips into Sedona to see a dentist, great opportunities to contact Glen. Silver linings, she told herself, and would have chuckled if it hadn't hurt so much.
The first group had already been taken away by their highly reluctant decent. The second group, her own, was assembling near the door, but she saw that neither Bryan nor Jason had joined them. Without hesitation she marched up to Jason, took his arm, and moved him over to her group. There was one tentative objection, inevitably from Dov.
"Look, Ana, we were specifically told—"
"I'll talk to Steven when we get back," she interrupted him, wishing it didn't have to come out Thteven. "I want you with me Jason." Jathon.
The authority of her shed blood shut them up, and the tour resumed. Ana felt distinctly unwell, and would have opted out but for the strong need to maintain her poise before, and because of, Jason. She absorbed not a word of the lecture and demonstration by a Hopi carver on fetishes, and when the bus doors opened before her, she staggered for the opening as if for a lifeboat. The only thing she had accomplished was keeping Jason safe, and with her. It was enough.
Jason had not appreciated her protection. He was firmly back in his shell, refusing to meet her eyes, sitting at the window hunched away from her. She might have been an arresting officer. Ana slumped back in her aisle seat, her mouth, hand, and knee radiating sharp pain and the rest of her just sore, hoping that a degree of energy and wits would seep back before Jason had shut himself away for good. Ah, Jason my lad, she said silently, I've opened harder clams than you.
It was afternoon, and the traffic out of the sprawl that was Phoenix seemed endless. Ana had been to the city half a dozen times before, but she always forgot how big it was and how long it took to cross it. The occupants of the bus had fallen silent by the time the driver finally shook the suburbs off, exhausted by the trudging and the thinking and the emotional surge over lunch. A few people talked, several fell asleep on each other's shoulders, but most simply sat, rocking with the motion of the bus. She still felt ill and old, but if she was to reach the boy, it had to be now.
"What was it Bryan said to you?" she asked Jason quietly. He sat up straighter and seemed intent on melting holes in the window with his gaze. "It was something about Dulcie, wasn't it? Something about her being retarded."
The side of the young jaw was clamped down hard, working against her words. Ana had dredged Bryan's shouted sentences out of the back of her mind, and she thought that what he had actually said was a criticism of Jason, and indirectly of Dulcie: "He's a retard like his sister."
Ana did not for a moment believe that Jason had resented the derision against him, but a threat, or even a mere insult, aimed at his sister would easily have the power to pry the lid off his self-control.
"Well, do you think she is retarded?" she asked.
Had she been any other person on the bus, he might well have hit her. She knew what his reaction would be, though, and she braced herself against his surge of emotion, instantly repressed. The moment his face was closed again, she leaned toward him and said urgently, "Think, Jason, think. Would I call Dulcie retarded? Me?"
She watched his hackles go down and she drew a relieved breath. "You know I wouldn't, because she's no more retarded than you or I. Of course, Bryan's vocabulary is about as extensive as his moral sense, so he may have meant not that Dulcie is mentally deficient, but that she is unbalanced. Ill. What Bryan would think of as crazy. In which case, Jason, do you think Dulcie is crazy?"
Fury mixed with fear instantly welled up in his eyes, fear for Dulcie and fear that Ana might so readily see it, fear that her saying it must make it true and fury that he could not change his own fear. She smiled at him.
"Jason, your sister is fine. Whatever it is you and your sister have been through, Dulcie is working it out. You being there, you being strong and stable and loving, makes it more certain. She's not sick, not nuts, not disturbed. She is a true individual, and I for one cherish her for that.
"Personally," she added, "I think she's a hoot. Did you hear about Dulcie and my bridge, the day I met her?" Jason shook his head, so Ana settled down and told him the whole story, drawn out and decorated with extraneous details.
And he laughed. Jason Delgado, tough guy and basketball star, first snorted and then gave forth a brief guffaw of laughter. It startled half the bus and was instantly stifled, but it was there between them, and it remained in his eyes, that picture of his silent little sister almost peeing herself giggling at the lady who took out her own front teeth.
That short, unguarded laugh was to sustain Ana through some hard days ahead. That laugh bound her to Change far more closely than she had intended or anticipated. She knew she would sell her soul for that laugh, if it came to that.
In the deep, still dark of the desert night the bus came into the compound. The weary travelers climbed stiffly down (Ana more stiffly than most). The adults staggered off to the dining hall behind the revitalized teenagers, and respectively sat in silence or in excitement over the meal that had been kept warm for them.
Ana managed a few mouthfuls of soup and a glass of goat's milk, and looked up to find Teresa standing next to her.
"I'll take your classes tomorrow," she said. Ana protested feebly, then allowed herself to be talked into spending a day doing paperwork. She thanked Teresa, helped herself to a tureen of ice cubes, and went to her room, where she arranged one ice-filled washcloth on her mouth, another one on her left hand, and lay with her right arm thrown over her eyes, aching and thinking.
What was she doing? What the hell was she doing? She had no business becoming involved in the lives and affections of two orphaned or abandoned kids. Let's make another joke about menopause, Ana, with the hormones running wild and the old brain melting in a hot flash. She acted as if she were falling in love with a boy of fourteen, a tough, swaggering child who shaved once a week whether he needed to or not. Hell, who was there to kid here? She was falling in love with him. Oh, it was not a physical thing, she was not out to seduce him, not even tempted to fantasize about him, but God, this felt like a high school cr
ush, looking for The One across a crowded room, studying him from a distance, casually meeting and flirting and making him—yes—making him laugh.
That laugh.
She really should get out of here before someone got hurt. Glen would insist, if he figured out what was happening.
But she knew she wouldn't go.
Chapter Seventeen
Let's say one day you discovered that your next door neighbors were in the habit of slitting open live chickens and watching them run around the back yard. What would your reaction be? If this family was of your everyday middle-class Anglo-Saxon background, if the people doing it were young boys, and if everyone there seemed to be drinking beer and having a fun old time, you'd be more than justified in locking the doors, shutting up the cat, and ringing every emergency number you could find from the police to the SPCA, because the chances of that being pathological behavior would be very high.
But what if you found out that the offending family was freshly arrived from, say, Haiti, and if the people doing the slaughtering were grown adults with not a breath of hilarity in the air? What if you knew that the sacrifice and reading of auguries was a deeply ingrained part of the family's society and religious heritage? You might still check on the whereabouts of the family pet, you would no doubt still be disgusted, and you would still have a problem on your hands, but the phone calls you made would probably have less panic in them and more concern for long-term socialization efforts.
Cultural relativity is the acknowledgement that what your Caribbean neighbors were doing was in their eyes a valid religious expression. After all, a hundred years ago it was absolutely acceptable that my great-great grandmother married at the age of thirteen, and for a large part of the Muslim world today, circumcision is a thing for eight to twelve year-old boys.
Are these seekers of auguries wrong? Was my female ancestor old enough to become a wife and, ten months later, a mother? Are these boys mature enough to make the decision to submit to the knife? Or are my grandmother's marriage and the circumcision of fourteen year-old boys both examples of child abuse, and the inhumane slaughtering of chickens strictly a legal matter?
Excerpt from the transcription of a lecture by Dr. Anne Waverly to the Northern California Sheriffs' Association, January 16, 1992
Ana slept fitfully and woke early, imagining she had heard a scratching at her door. She lay for a minute, waiting for the sound to be repeated, and then dismissed it. She had not yet regained the immunity from external noises one needs in communal living, and she tended to hear every closed door, every toilet flush and cough.
She eased her legs over the side of the bed and groaned herself upright. Her face ached but her hand was on fire, and she reached over and turned on the bedside lamp to examine the damage.
It looked surprisingly normal, though it was scraped from the bits of gravel embedded in the shoe that had come down on it and the fingers were as fat and immobile as sausages. Tomorrow the whole hand would be black, but today it was only darkly suffused with blood. She forced herself to bend each fingertip and wiggle each sausage; they all worked, but maybe she would go see the nurse about it after all.
Now for the mirror. She gained her feet, and the scratching noise came again from the door.
She tottered over and pulled it open: Dulcie sat shivering on the floor outside, her arms wrapped around the canvas bag full of bright yarn rope.
"Dulcie?" Ana exclaimed. "What on earth—? Come in, child, let's warm you up." She bent down, but with only one usable hand she could not lift the girl. "Dulcie," she said in a clear voice, "you'll have to help me. I hurt my hand yesterday and I can't pick you up. Come on, sweetheart, stand up and come inside, where we can get you warm. That's a girl. Good, good. Now let me get a blanket—you'll have to let go of my hand for a second, Dulcie. Okay, let's just sit over here and warm each other up."
Ana whipped the blankets from her bed and sat down in the room's soft chair, pulling Dulcie onto her lap and wrapping the still-warm blankets around them both. The child's shivering seemed more like shock than mere cold, but in either case warmth seemed the best treatment. Dulcie put her thumb in her mouth and nestled down between Ana's breasts; in two minutes she was asleep.
Memory was a terrible and intensely physical thing. Unlike guilt, it lost none of its power over time, and if it hit less often than it had in the early years, it still hit hard and unexpectedly: The sight of a furry infant skull would trigger the warm, round sensation of cradling Abby's head in her cupped palm, all of her daughter's humanity and future in her hand; a blend of fragrances on a street would jerk her back to a particular mad evening with Aaron in New York before they came west; a certain kind of tree-lined street in the fall would evoke the heady beginnings of graduate school.
Now it was her breasts that betrayed her, heavy and warm, tingling with the gush of nonexistent milk down to her nipples for Abby's greedy mouth. Dulcie slept on, unaware of the turmoil within the woman she knew as Ana, aware only of the rare and dimly remembered bliss of being held in comforting arms, aware that Ana must be trustworthy, since Jason had told Dulcie to go to her if she needed anything while he was away "helping Steven". She was aware only that she felt safe.
Dulcie's thumb dropped from her slack mouth and half woke her, so that she turned against Ana's chest, nuzzling like an infant until sleep pulled her down again.
It was agony, it was sheer delight; eighteen years after the fact, Ana had been given back her daughter. Dulcie was not Abby and Dulcie would never be Ana's daughter, but Ana's arms craved the child and the bone-deep love of a mother tugged at her, and she knew she had only two choices: she could put Dulcie on the floor and walk away from her, or she could permit the indulgence of her body's yearnings. It was no choice. She wrapped herself around the sleeping child and rocked her in the ageless rhythm of mothering, and when Dulcie woke fully an hour later, Ana more than half expected to find the front of her T-shirt drenched with leaking milk.
Her shirt was dry, but Dulcie was frowning at her face.
"I had a little accident yesterday, Dulcie. It really doesn't hurt very much, but those teeth of mine that come out got broken right in two, so I'll have to have them fixed. Looks funny, doesn't it? Thounds funny, too. Remind me not to smile, okay?"
Dulcie's only response was to turn and look at Ana's hands. Ana held the left one up. This one does hurt. I don't think anything's broken, but it'll be sore and ugly for a few days.
"Now tell me, Dulcie: Where's your brother?"
She was unprepared for the extremity of Dulcie's response. The child wailed and flung herself against Ana, curling up to make herself small, burying her face in Ana's T-shirt.
Ana's immediate urge was to burst out of the door and find what had happened to Jason, but she forced herself to sit and calm Dulcie with drivel first.
"Okay, we'll talk about that later. Dulcie sweetie, let me tell you about the time we had in Phoenix yesterday. There was a display in the museum that showed all these beautiful clothes the Indian women used to wear, all covered with beads and stuff, and the house they used to live in made of logs and mud, with a fire built right in the middle of it. You ever seen one of those? Maybe you can go on a trip with the school next time. It's a long drive but it's fun. You know, I'm feeling a bit hungry. I think I'll get dressed and go have some breakfast. Do you mind coming with me down to the dining hall? I think I'll have a bowl of porridge with lots of brown sugar on top, that'll be nice and soft to chew on." She waited until Dulcie had given her a small nod, and then worked herself out from under the child. She went to the closet and chose clothing with loose cuffs, pulled on her boots and pushed her untied laces into their tops, and eased on her jacket.
Dulcie was more of a problem: She was dressed, but she had no shoes on. Ana had her climb onto the arm of the chair and propped her awkwardly on her right hip. Fortunately, it was not far to the dining hall.
Once inside the building, Ana could loose her precarious hold and let the child
slide to the floor. They walked hand in hand toward the breakfast noises. The instant they came in the door, Teresa leapt to her feet and scurried over to intercept them.
"Dulcie! Where on earth have you been? We've been looking all over, we were so worried about you. Come along and let's get properly dressed."
She reached for Dulcie's hand, and the child twisted around behind Ana to avoid her. Despite Ana's protests, Teresa pulled the child's hand away, and Dulcie naturally reached up for Ana's other hand and grabbed it hard.
The pain was literally blinding. Ana sank to her knees with a breathless squeal, and with infinite tenderness tried to peel the little fingers from hers, all the while chanting "No, no no no no no, Dulcie, oh please, no no no." The grip suddenly dropped away as the horrified child realized what she had done. She stepped back, looking ready to bolt, but Ana scooped her around the shoulders with her right hand and pulled her back, murmuring all the maternal phrases of condolence while the agony in her left hand subsided and her right hand stroked the back of Dulcie's hair. The child threw her arms around Ana's neck and began to weep. The pain retreated and became bearable; when Teresa saw the change, she started to fuss again. Ana took a deep calming breath, and let it out.
"Dulcie, it's over," she said firmly. "It's uncomfortable here on the floor, I feel stupid with everyone staring at us, and I want my breakfast. What say we eat?"
Teresa started to say, "Yes, Dulcie, let's let Ana—" when Ana gave her a glare that instantly silenced her.
"Dulcie is going to eat breakfast with me. We'll talk to you later."
Teresa opened her mouth, closed it, turned on her heel, and left. Ana persuaded her limpet to let her free enough to rise, and the two of them continued their interrupted journey to the breakfast line.
With Dulcie holding firmly on to her jacket, Ana carried their tray over to an unoccupied table. Dulcie seemed uninterested in food, so in the end Ana spooned oatmeal into the child's passive mouth. It was like feeding a baby, down to the close-lipped shake of the head to let Ana know she'd had enough. Ana finished the bowl, drank her herb tea and the remainder of Dulcie's juice, and piled their dishes on the tray. No doubt about it; the brain functioned better with food.
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