A Darker Place (51 page)

“It looks like dinner’s going to be late,” she told them. “Why don’t you guys go in the side door and get some school work done.”

Jason had no objection to being spared the turmoil that lay inside, but Ana watched them start around the house with a fervent wish that she could join them. Instead, she walked back into the kitchen, where she found near the door a distraught-looking Vicky, the woman who had met them at the airport.

“What on earth has happened?” she asked. Vicky stared at her as if she’d just inquired what was going on at Pearl Harbor.

“They’re taking our kids!”

“What,
all
of them?”

“No, of course not,” she said sharply. “Though they’re going to try, you watch.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Social Services,” Vicky spat out, and it all began to make an awful sense.

Back in Arizona, Ana had heard of a custody battle between one of the Change members and her ex-husband who was trying to remove their son from the community. Now, it seemed, another battle was brewing, over nearly identical circumstances, only this time there were four children involved, the eldest of whom was actually a stepson, but adopted by the man when he married the boy’s mother seven years before. Now he wanted them all out of Change, and that afternoon, while Ana was sitting in the sunshine admiring the abbey ruins, a social worker had arrived clutching Emergency Assessment Orders for all four children, with a brace of large
constables to enforce them. The kids were removed for the compulsory seventy-two-hour observation period, the mother packed a bag and followed them, and Change was in an uproar.

Ana studied all the faces in the room, one at a time, looking for the too-familiar signs of desperation and outright panic such an event could set off. She saw a lot of anger, a universal sense of frustration, some misery and fear, but the only face she saw that was white and pinched with distress was that of a young woman whom she knew to be under such a threat herself, a single mother barely out of her teens whose parents were trying to pry their grandchild loose from Change. Ana began to breathe again, for what seemed to be the first time since entering the room. What had happened was bad but not catastrophic. Nothing was going to happen to Change tonight because of it.

The same thought seemed to occur to the others as well. One by one they turned away from their collective outrage to resume their life. One woman shot a glance at the clock and turned, tight-lipped, to drag a clattering armful of pans from a cupboard, while two others simultaneously opened refrigerator and onion bin. Two men set off into the house, still hashing it over at the tops of their voices, while another yanked open a corner drawer and snatched up a long white plastic apron and a wickedly sharp knife. Ana eyed him nervously as he started for the door, but Cali, the woman at the stove, called out, “Peter, you don’t have to do that now. Leave it for the morning.”

“Got to eat,” he grumbled, and marched off. Ana, reassured that he was not about to turn the blade on himself or others, quickly washed her hands and began chopping vegetables for an improvised raw salad to go with the rice and the beans that had been started before
the Social Services invasion had thrown the kitchen into a state of confusion.

Twenty terse minutes later the rice was cooked, the salad assembled, and Ana was starting through the kitchen with a full tureen of red beans and sausage in her hands when the air was split by the bloodcurdling shriek of a soul in mortal terror. Deirdre dropped a glass into the sink and Cali jerked and sliced open her finger, but on Ana the effect was disastrous. A gallon of half-liquid beans hit the floor and erupted in a spicy shower over every surface. Beans spattered the ceiling, scalded exposed flesh, dripped down the walls, and covered the floor; in the midst of the carnage stood Ana, hands out, gaze far away, her body gone rigid as stone.

“She’s having a fit,” said a voice.

“Don’t let her swallow her tongue,” someone else contributed, but Ana did not hear them. She was not there. She was eight years distant and ten thousand miles away, standing in
another kitchen with gingham checks on the windows and the hot Utah sun beating down outside, with the squeal ringing in her ears of a terrified blond teenager named Claudia being dragged through the dust by an enraged spiritual leader, knowing that she was about to be locked into the stifling padded closet he used for the purpose of enforcing discipline. It was this sound that crystallized Anita Wells’s decision to get out, now; this sound that led to her key in Rocinante’s ignition, her foot on the accelerator, her quick glance in the side mirror to see Calvin the cook through the billowing dust, raising his automatic pistol at her; this same shocking, high human shriek of protest and pain that set into motion the events that ended in Calvin’s gun and the incomprehensible violation of her own pain, and two miles down the road the slow, inevitable collision with the jumble of boulders that rose up before her, all set off by the
loud series of furious animal squeals that were coming from the Change barnyard.

Ana looked down at her feet, where the pieces of the crockery tureen were still rocking, and she began to shake. Deirdre, pretty young Deirdre with the golden hair like young Claudia’s, began to gather up the pieces. Someone else—Vicky?—was speaking in an urgent and worried voice right in Ana’s ear. Ana pushed the voice away and bolted for the small washroom just inside the back door, where Vicky found her retching violently into the toilet.

When nothing was left for her body to get rid of, Ana sat back on her heels, gasping and shivering.

“Are you okay?” Vicky asked for the tenth time. This time Ana responded.

“I’ll be fine. What the hell was that noise?”

“Terrible, wasn’t it? Peter’s usually pretty good at sneaking up on the animals so they don’t know what’s happening, but I guess the pig saw him coming. Pigs aren’t stupid.”

“A pig. Christ.”

“It doesn’t happen very often, honestly it doesn’t,” Vicky told her earnestly. “Almost never.”

“I could see why you wouldn’t want that every day. The kids must be freaking out.” At least the room shared by Dulcie and Jason was on the far side of the house. They might even have missed it entirely. She gave a last shudder and got to her feet, which reassured her attendant into stepping back and leaving her alone.

She splashed her face, rinsed her mouth out, and stood with her head bowed over the small hand basin for a minute, waiting for equilibrium to set in. She took a few slow breaths and raised her face to the mirror, and then she did lose control, well and truly.

Her face was the only clean thing in the mirror. Her hair was a red-brown cap plastered against her head.
Her once-yellow T-shirt was mostly the same brown color, dotted with individual kidney beans, bits of green pepper, and one slice of sausage lodged in a fold. Her legs were brown, her feet indistinguishable from her sandals, and her skin felt as if she had a sunburn beneath a drying mud pack. She was a sight.

The women in the kitchen looked up at her entrance, alarmed at the snorting noises she was emitting. Ana checked for a moment at the appearance of the room, but then she caught sight of three beans nestling on the top of Deirdre’s head, and she doubled over in uncontrollable hilarity.

The giggles spread, until the kitchen and a rapidly growing audience were deep in half-hysterical laughter, gales of it that were renewed at each new discovery of the scope of the disaster. Ana finally had to leave, staggering brown and sticky upstairs toward the bath. She did not know if she wanted to share her colorful state with Dulcie and Jason or to hide it from them, but the choice did not come up, and she was soon safely locked in the bathroom with the water running.

After dinner, she joined the group meditation for the first time. She found it strangely disappointing, a colorless round of chanting and silence followed by a flat sermonette by Marc Bennett. The brittle edginess of the community was neither increased nor dispersed by the hour spent in the hall, but it lay under their actions and was resumed at the door when they left.

Ana spotted Sara coming out and went over to talk to her. After asking about the condition of the baby cabbages and confirming what Sara had heard about the disaster in the kitchen earlier, she tipped her head back toward the meditation hall and commented, “I’d have thought that Jonas would lead the meditations.”

“He used to a lot, but not in the last few months. Which is fine,” Sara admitted, lowering her voice, “because his meditations were getting a little… confusing. He’s too lifted up for my little brain to follow. How are things going with you?”

“Fine,” Ana told her. “Just fine.”

She made her way upstairs and found Dulcie still awake, so she settled down with her and they read the remainder of the church mice story, as well as one of Ana’s personal favorites, a book she had bought Dulcie in Sedona and which was already looking worn, the story of Ferdinand, the least-testosterone-burdened bull in all of Spain. Ana then went back down to the kitchen to spend an hour scrubbing the cabinet fronts with a toothbrush and to drink a cup of tea, and then she exchanged good-nights with the others and went back upstairs.

It was not until she was brushing her teeth that she remembered her midnight visit from Jonas.
I’ll come for you
, he had said;
be ready
.

The last thing on earth she wanted was another session with the Bear, but there was not much she could do to avoid it. She sat in her room and tried to read the Jung book through drooping eyelids, until lights-out came and she decided that either Jonas had forgotten her in the heat of his calculations or he had been distracted and would send his summons when he damn well pleased. She might as well go to bed.

Still, she dressed for bed in clothes that could as easily serve as actual daywear, in case he crashed through her door again at two in the morning. She pulled on her better, light gray sweatpants in place of the dark blue ones with the hole in the knee, and a white T-shirt with the banana-slug logo of U.C. Santa Cruz on the place where the breast pocket would have been, and got
into bed. After a while, she got up again and removed the folded diary pages from her slippers, putting them instead under the inner sole of her running shoes. Then she climbed under the covers and slid away into sleep.

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield);
reproduction of the
coniunctio
stage of the alchemical process
from the
Rosarium Philosophorum
, Frankfurt, 1550

Jonas did not come crashing through her

Instead, she dreamed.

What came to her that night was not one

of her usual innocuous dreams with emotional overtones, but a true nightmare, rare and vivid, and causing the flesh to creep. It was as if her mind were reminding her that the flashback she had experienced had not been healed by the laughter, only hidden.

She dreamed she was driving in a car with Abby, going home, and she decided to take a different route from the one they usually took. After all, what good was it to have a Land Rover if you couldn’t take a muddy dirt road occasionally?

So they turned off the main road onto the mud track deeply surrounded by trees, and drove with the branches pressing close on the windows. Then they were walking, with that seamlessness of dream logic, still going home, heading down a stone passageway with a backpack resting between her shoulder blades and hiking boots on her feet, with Abby in front of her and other people behind, all of them everyday commuters like herself, going home. The walls of the passageway grew closer, the ceiling lower and lower, until the tunnel was nothing more than a low horizontal gap in the stone.

Ana knew it was passable—not only for Abby, who had already vanished through the crack and gone before her, but everyone behind her seemed so matter-of-fact, she knew this must be a normal occurrence for them, just another part of the commute.

So she lay down onto her back, the pack cushioning the rock, and scooted along, feetfirst, into the gap. There
was a distinct slope that made forward progress not only possible, but unavoidable, so she lay in the position of a luge racer, except with her arms stretched up over her head because of the low roof, and let herself slide down after Abby.