She took Dulcie's hand and bent down until she was looking into the young face. "Dulcie, would you please tell me now where Jason is?"
Dulcie was feeling the stabilizing effects of breakfast as weigher lip quivered and her eyes filled, but she did not wail and fling herself at Ana. Neither did she answer her.
"Dulcie, I want to help you find Jason. Did he tell you where he was going?" Dulcie gave her a tiny nod, dislodging the tears from one eye so that they spilled down her face. "Can you tell me? Please?"
"He went to help Steven," she said in a tiny voice. "Two men took him."
At first Ana refused to hear the meaning of Dulcie's words. Even when the horror of what it might imply was roaring through her, she tried hard to remain objective, sensible. Eventually, rationality won out. Had there ever been any indications, in the weeks she had lived here, that Steven was a sexual predator? Any record indicating that he might be a pederast, straight or gay? Any sign of ongoing sexuality among even the abused outsiders in the school? No, no, and no. It was possible, yes, but it was also possible that something else was going on—some kind of initiation, perhaps, or a punishment for yesterday's fight, or a hundred other things. She needed to find out, but she also needed to keep her head. As she'd said to Jason: Think!
Her first responsibility was to Dulcie, temporarily bereft of her brother and clinging mightily to the only other support she could find. There was no possibility of abandoning her.
"First step," she said to Dulcie. "We get your shoes and your coat, brush your hair and your teeth.
"Second step," she said, in answer to the unvoiced objection of the small person, "we find out where your brother is. Okay?"
Dulcie nodded, content that Ana was not proving herself yet another untrustworthy adult. This time Ana carried Dulcie piggyback to the room in the next building where she and Jason slept. Teresa went with them, but she did not try to interfere, she just tied Dulcie's shoes and put her hair into braids after Ana had demonstrated her inability to do either of those things. She even tied Ana's flopping boots for her, to Ana's embarrassment and gratitude.
When Dulcie was dressed and scrubbed, Ana asked her to sit down and work on her rug for a few minutes while she talked with Teresa. She reassured Dulcie that she was not going to leave her, just step out in the hall and talk privately for a minute, and led Teresa out, shutting the door.
"I need to talk to Steven," she said.
"You can't."
"Is he here? In the compound?"
"Yes, but he's busy."
"Teresa, be sensible. I don't know what that child's background is, but it's obvious that it was pretty hellish. Jason is all she has. She's accepted me, heaven knows why, as a substitute, but I have to know what Steven is doing with Jason in order to help Dulcie. She's too fragile to be kept in the dark."
"I know, but there's nothing anyone else can do. Jason will be back when he's… when he's ready."
"You know where he is."
Teresa would not meet her eyes.
"Is it a punishment for yesterday? It wasn't his fault."
"A consequence is not a punishment."
"That sounds like Steven."
She didn't answer, but Ana could see it was true.
"Where is Steven now?"
"Meditating. You can't—"
"I sure as hell can," Ana said, and pushed her aside to yank the door open. "Come on, Dulcie. Let's go ask some questions."
She did find Steven, and she did ask questions, but he did not answer them. He did not even respond, but merely sat in the full lotus position, unseeing and unhearing on his high seat in the very center of the meditation hall, the golden sparkles from the mobile directly over his head moving slowly across the wall.
Thomas Mallory, inevitably, was there. She entered the meditation hall and saw Steven, and addressed him in a loud voice. Steven did not react. Telling Dulcie to stay where she was, Ana started for the rising platforms on the side of the room, intending to clamber over to the platform and seize Steven by the shoulders, shaking him from his trance, but Mallory stopped her, his scowling eyebrows nearly meeting over his nose. She knew better than to resist physically, not when Dulcie was looking on. She also suspected that Steven's assistant would have picked her up bodily and put her outside the meditation hall had it not been for Dulcie's presence.
"Steven!" she shouted. The hall had excellent acoustics, but Steven did not move. She retreated from the platforms and angrily hammered her fist against the great black pipe that rose out of the floor to support the fireplace and Steven's platform. It was metal, and oddly warm, but it gave out only an unsatisfactory dull thud instead of the clanging echoes she had hoped for, and then Thomas Mallory came up behind her and grabbed her shoulders, whirling her about effortlessly and propelling her toward the exit. She retreated, but at the door she turned to plead with the man.
"Look, Dulcie is worried about her brother. She just wants to know where he is and when he'll be back. Surely you can tell us that."
Mattory studied her, and then the child, and his petulant mouth softened a fraction.
"Her brother is in meditation with Steven," he said. "He'll be back in a day or two."
That was all he would give them. Strangely enough, it seemed to reassure Dulcie, whose level of anxiety went down a great deal, although she refused to venture from Ana's side. All that day, wherever she went, Dulcie was her shadow, a silent and determined presence working eternally on the cumbersome bulk of her yarn rope.
Ana's own concern for Jason, her unresolved anger against Steven, and Dulcie's presence, silence, and absolute trust all began to prey on Ana, and the bright, aggressive cheeriness of Dulcie's rope began to rub on her nerves.
Three times in the course of an hour Ana got up and left the desk where she was doing paperwork; three times Dulcie put her spool into the bulging canvas bag and followed her: into the supply room, into the computer room, and to the bathroom, where she stood outside the door, waiting for Ana to come out.
Patience was a good thing, Ana decided, but at times did not go far enough. Dulcie was beginning to look like a miniature Madame Defarge, knitting as the heads rolled.
"Dulcie, don't you think it's time you started to make your rug out of that? I'm sure you have enough there for a nice big rug."
The child nodded, and went back to looping the bile-green yarn over the nails on the spool, one stitch at a time, around and around.
"You could set it out here on the floor and get it started," Ana suggested. "I'll be here for another hour or so."
Dulcie dropped her hands into her lap. "I don't know how," she said, sounding sad to the point of despair.
Ana turned and looked at her. "You've never done this before, have you?" she slowly.
Dulcie shook her head.
"Did Carla get you started?" Dulcie nodded. "But she hasn't shown you how to make the actual rug?"
Dulcie looked up at Ana, her eyes not far from tears with her anguish. "I don't know how to stop," she cried.
The pathos in the child's manner made Ana's lips quiver for a moment. "You poor thing," she said. "Did you think you were going to knit away on this thing forever? That one day we'd go to look for you and all we'd find would be a pair of feet sticking out from under a gigantic pile of brightly colored rope?"
Dulcie's own lips quivered, but not from amusement. "It's very bright," she agreed sadly.
"You mean—Didn't you choose those colors?"
Dulcie's head went back and forth, slowly and emphatically. The two of them sat looking at the dirty canvas bag with the pink loops and the orange coils and the green tail emerging to dip along the floor and disappear into the wooden spool in Dulcie's fist, and Ana began to laugh at the tragedy and the absurdity of the whole situation. She gathered Dulcie into her arms and the two of them howled and howled.
When that was over, she found some tissues and she and Dulcie sat up and dried their eyes, and she helped the child blow her nose. Then, with great ce
remony, she took a large pair of scissors from the drawer of the desk and laid them in the center of the desktop.
"Bring me the spool," she ordered Dulcie.
"If you cut it, the whole thing will fall apart," Dulcie said quickly. "Carla told me."
"Not if you tie the end off first," Ana replied grimly, hoping it was true. Perhaps she should tie two knots, just to be sure.
Dulcie hopped down from Ana's lap and fetched the spool, the instrument that had produced all those yards and yards of rope. Ana did not know if it had functioned as a meditation device or as a form of penance, but be it rosary or hair shirt, she was declaring it finished.
She snipped the yarn that led from skein to spool, tucked the end in, and set the unused yarn to one side. Working slowly because of the awkwardness of her left hand, she looped the rope below the spool into a knot, and had Dulcie pull on the rope to help her tighten the knot. They then repeated it to make a second knot beside the first, and she picked up the scissors and offered them to Dulcie. They were too big for the child's hand, but Dulcie took them with two hands and chewed with them at the rope until it parted, and Ana was touched by a brief vision of Aaron with a pair of obstetrical scissors in his hands, his face showing mingled revulsion at the effort of cutting through the tough flesh of Abby's umbilical cord and dawning wonder at the separate new person lying in red, angry splendor on his wife's breasts.
Dulcie's face showed mostly relief, and wonder at her daring, and trepidation lest the sundered end should suddenly burst into life like some live thing or cartoon entity, spitting furiously and peeling back countless loops of yarn until her weeks of effort were reduced to a room-sized heap of kinked-up yarn.
It did nothing, just sat there with the two snug lumps at its end. Dulcie noticed the spool and picked it up. She worked the stub of yarn rope from its nails and thoughtfully pulled at the loose end. Around and around the yarn unraveled, each loop pulling free. When she held only a length of kinked chartreuse yarn in her hand, Dulcie dropped it into the wastebasket, put the spool and hook out of sight in her pocket, and bundled the now-severed rope into the bag.
"You know," Ana suggested, "when you're finished with the rug, if you decide you don't like it, you could always give it to Carla."
Chapter Eighteen
The word "cult" has become meaningless as a description of human behavior, so laden is it now with negative emotional baggage. Any small and vaguely eccentric group of religious seekers-after-truth is apt to find itself slapped with the label and instantly converted in the minds of outsiders into a potential People's Temple or Branch Davidian. This is a heavy burden to carry, and serves primarily to increase the level of paranoia in even the most level-headed group.
Of course, short words with hefty emotional impact are the stock in trade of the media. When a newspaper reporter describes a group as a "cult," it has nothing to do with the actual technical definition of that word. The media are not interested in matter-of-fact; that sells no papers. It speaks in polemic, describing not what is, but what has been in the past and, more to the point, how we as readers have to feel about it: outraged, righteous, and moved to demand action.
Cults—or as they should usually be termed, sects—can be vicious, stupid, paranoid, murderous, suicidal, incomprehensible, and hysterical; as indeed may any group of human beings involved in a quest and immersed in passion. They can also be gentle, contemplative sources of creativity and peace, but we do not hear much about those. We must keep firmly in mind, however, that most of the picture we see of cultic activity has been drawn for us by ex-members, and if in some cases their withdrawal from the community may be seen as a return to sanity, in other cases the ex-member's dissatisfaction may have its roots in political, personal, or even financial reasons. To expect a calm and balanced Image of their former life would be to hope for rational words from a jilted lover about the ex. Grains of salt must be applied with a generous hand—an exercise the news media has never shown much interest in. [laughter]
Excerpt from the transcription of a lecture by Dr. Anne Waverly to the FBI Cult Response Team. April 27, 1994
During the afternoon, Ana found a dentist in Sedona who would see to her teeth, and made an appointment with him for the following day. Teresa agreed to take her classes again.
Teresa also agreed that unless Jason had reappeared, it looked as if Ana would have to take Dulcie along, since the child showed no sign of relinquishing her hold on Ana. They ate dinner together, and then Ana borrowed an armful of bedding from the stores closet and made up a bed for the child in the corner of her room. She showed Dulcie where the bathroom was, supervised a bath and the brushing of teeth, and settled the child into her makeshift bed.
"I have some reading to do," she told her. "I'll turn out the lights in a little while."
"Ana?"
"Yes, Dulcie?"
"Jason always lets me read for ten minutes when I go to bed. We used to watch TV," she confided, "but then one of my mom's boyfriends broke it and so Jason said I could read instead,"
"Oh. Well, books are better anyway. Except that I don't know if I have anything you'd like,"
Dulcie promptly sprang up and trotted over to the bag of things they had fetched from her room, and came back to the heap of tumbled sheets and blankets with two well-thumbed paperback picture books. Ana laboriously remade the bed with her one hand, tucked Dulcie in again, and returned to the papers her students had written. For ten minutes all was quiet but for the turning of pages; then Ana told Dulcie it was time to put her books away and go to sleep.
"I have to go to the bathroom, Ana."
"You go ahead, then. Just try not to mess up your bed when you get up."
Five minutes later: "What are you reading, Ana?"
"I'm reading papers I had my students write about what they expected to see on their trip to Phoenix. Next week they'll hand in papers on what they did see."
"Did any of your students say they were going to see you hurt in a fight?" Dulcie knew all about what had happened to Ana; everyone on the premises knew.
"No, none of them so far has mentioned that."
"What does Jason's paper say?"
"Jason isn't my student, Dulcie. I don't know what he wrote for his teacher."
"Jason hit you, didn't he?" said a small voice.
Ana let the paper she was reading drop onto the table. "Jason's hand hit my mouth, somebody else's elbow hit my back, and I think Dov Levinski the math teacher stepped on my hand. No one was aiming for me, Dulcie. There were a lot of people moving quickly, and I just happened to be in the way."
"So you're not mad at Jason?"
"Of course not. I'm sorry that he lost his temper, and I'm sure he's sorry he did, too. But I'm not at all angry at him. I like your brother."
"I love Jason."
"And Jason loves you. Now go to sleep."
"Ana?"
"Yes, Dulcie."
"Is Jason okay?"
"Jason will be fine, Dulcie. There are just some things he needs to do, and then he'll be back."
A few minutes later: "Would you say my good night prayer with me, Ana?"
"Why don't you say it and I'll listen?"
"Now I lay me down to sleep," Dulcie began to chant. Ana winced. She had always considered it a sadistic idea to make a child's final words for the day "If I should die before I wake"; after Abby's death the thought had become truly appalling. She steeled herself, but when the second half of the poem came, it was, instead, Thy love guide me through the night, and wake me with the morning light." A much better version.
"Amen," Ana said.
"Ana, is the Lord like Don Quixote?"
"What?"
"The Lord. You said that Don Quixote's name meant 'lord'."
"Well, no. 'Lord' is the way we speak to noblemen, to knights and kings and very important people, and when we talk to God, we use the same word, because it's one of the most important words we have. God is much bigger than any king; it's just that langua
ge doesn't go far enough to describe how we feel about things as big as God. You could say that God is bigger than language."
"Is Steven God?"
"No! For heaven's sake Did somebody say he was?"
"I don't think so. But Amelia said that Steven sees everything and knows everything."
"Steven is a human being, so he can't be God. You could say—" Ana paused to choose her words. "You could say that Steven tries to act for God, that he knows something of what God wants and helps others know it, too. Steven may be a man of God, but he can't be God. No person can be God."
"Wasn't Jesus God?"
Ana had to smile. "That, my dear, is a question that better minds than yours or mine have dedicated their lives to thinking about. Now: sleep."
Five minutes later, in a tiny voice: "Ana?"
"What, Dulcie?"
"If you're not here when I wake up in the morning, you'll be back as soon as you've finished your walk?"
"That's what I told you. I promise I'll be back."
"Like Jason. He goes running in the morning sometimes."
"Yes, I know. I've seen him."
"Ana?"
"What?"
"I love you, Ana."
Dulcie was asleep before Ana could formulate an honest response to that last statement. She sat with her papers, listening to the child's even breathing, the occasional hitches and pauses in the rhythm, an indistinct mutter and chewing noise when Dulcie entered a dream.
I love you, Mommy. All the various meanings that simple phrase had once held. It could mean, Thank you, Mommy, for the great birthday party, or it could be a spontaneous and inarticulate recognition of the joy of human companionship. It had even, once or twice, been a preemptive strike, an attempt at disarming Ana's probable anger when she found out that something had been broken, spilled, or otherwise spoiled. I love you, Mommy.
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