A Darker Place (16 page)

Reluctantly, she came back to earth and looked around to see what had happened to Carla. The woman was standing at the passenger door of her pickup truck, laden down with parcels and a bulging grocery bag, exhorting Dulcie to get down and come on. Ana closed Rocinante’s door, thought about locking it and decided not to, and buttoned up her jacket while she walked over to see if she could help.

The child had been sleeping, she saw, and was still more than half asleep, fisting her eyes against the thin brightness of the pickup’s cabin light and whining the inarticulate protest of the very young.

“Can I carry something?” Ana asked. To her dismay, Carla stepped back from the truck and nodded at Dulcie.

“Why don’t you just carry her in?” she said with thinly concealed annoyance. “Otherwise we’re all going to freeze to death out here.” Carla turned and walked away.

Ana swallowed and stood where she was. Dulcie’s arms came up in the natural, trusting gesture of a child waiting to be lifted up, her normally guarded expression rendered soft and vulnerable by sleep; it was all Ana
could do to keep herself from bolting for the safety of Rocinante.

“Is something wrong?” Carla called.

Ana shuddered and felt the sweat break out under her hat and along her back, but she bent down and put her hands under the child’s arms. “Come on, Dulcie,” she said thickly. “I’ll give you a ride.”

This was not by any means the first time she had held a child since her daughter had died. All the other contacts, though, had been casual, daytime hugs, pats, or rough-and-tumble play, and none of the children had resembled Abby. Not for eighteen years had a trusting young child reached up to slide her arms around Ana’s neck, hitched herself up to perch on a maternal hip, and then dropped an utterly relaxed head against Ana’s shoulder. The fierce and immediate response of her own body to the sensation of holding Dulcie took Ana by storm, and she could only stand stiffly, fighting for control.

Dulcie was too drowsy to be aware of Ana’s reaction, but behind them Carla, impatient at the delay, had turned back to see what the problem was. Ana heard the crunch of her feet and stepped back quickly, kicked shut the door of the pickup, and hurried to join her, infinitely grateful for the poor lighting along the path.

The nearly unbearable luxury of the warm, limp body clinging to her made it impossible to concentrate on anything more complicated than placing her feet without stumbling, but she was peripherally aware of buildings around them, of spiny desert plants and low shrubs behind the light-colored rocks that lined the borders of the path, of a few lights behind windows. Then Carla was struggling to open a door, and they were inside.

Rough plaster walls, uneven red paver tiles underfoot, and exposed timbers over their heads placed them solidly in the Southwest idiom of architecture, even
without the bright rug on one wall and a collection of Indian pottery arranged on a shaky-looking table, little more than lashed-together branches topped by unsanded planks. The scale of the hall and the rooms they passed was large, as if designed for the gathered community, but at the moment they were echoing and empty.

As if reading Ana’s thoughts, Carla spoke over her shoulder as she led Ana down the hallway toward the back of the building and the sounds of clattering dishes.

“There’s normally a lot more people around, especially right after dinner. But just at the moment we have a busload of kids and adults down in Tucson for a basketball game and to visit Biosphere, and some of us are off at the sister house in England. Steven’s there, but he’ll be back in a couple of days. I hope you’ll stay—we’ve got plenty of room, and I know you’d love to meet him.”

“Who’s Steven?” Ana asked ingenuously.

“His name is Steven Change, but we just call him Steven. He’s our spiritual counselor. He founded the community.”

“Oh. Like your guru?”

“I don’t know about that,” Carla said disapprovingly. “He’s just a very wise man. He sees things, and helps others see them. I hope you’ll stay to meet him.”

“I hope so, too.”

One last door took them into the sudden brightness of the communal kitchen, a room Ana had seen dozens of times in her past: huge, battered stainless steel pans (never aluminum, no matter how cheap it was—the health risks were unacceptable) heaped precariously on open shelves from which hung ladles and spatulas and industrial-sized spoons; stacks of ill-assorted mixing bowls nested on other shelves, dented stainless steel resting inside peeling plastic inside hand-thrown pottery objects so heavy most people could not wrestle them from
the shelf. The cupboards would be filled with cheap, chipped partial sets of department-store stoneware plates, graying, scratched Melmac cereal bowls, and all the handmade coffee mugs too lopsided or ugly to sell at the crafts store in Sedona. The drawers would hold vast numbers of flat spoons, twisted forks, ill-suited knives, and all the odds and ends that collect in a kitchen, the balls of twine and meat thermometers, the toothpicks and
egg
separators and paraphernalia bought or brought by one cook or another, abandoned under the pressures of quantity food production or when the cook tired and transferred over to work in the vegetable garden or weaving shed. One of the drawers would be jammed solid with plastic bags from the grocery store.

It was familiar, as comforting and dreary as a homecoming, and Ana found she was smiling even before Carla started introducing her to the three women cleaning up the evening meal.

The names made less of an impact on her than did the warmth on her face (rubbery with the cold of the long drive in Rocinante’s still-unheated interior), the smells of cooking on her stomach, and the weight of Dulcie on her arms. She nodded in acknowledgment to Suellen (a small woman with a pale blond bun on the back of her head), Laurel (tall, bony, glasses, and thick brown plait), and Amelia (round, glasses, a bad burn scar on the upper part of her forearm, and older than the others, perhaps a year or two older than Ana), and while Carla was easing her various bundles down to the counter and into the hands of the three women, Ana looked around for a chair, found a bench against the wall, and went over to it. She shifted Dulcie’s legs to one side and sat down cautiously, but the bench seemed more sturdy than decorative, and she relaxed. Dulcie burrowed into Ana’s jacket and gave a little grunt of contentment,
a sound that reached straight out of Ana’s past and gave her heart a hard twist.

“That sure smells good,” she said loudly. “One of the drawbacks of living in a bus is that you find yourself eating the same one-pot meals all the time. And you never have really fresh bread.”

The meaningless little speech not only succeeded in attracting the attention of the other women, but also woke Dulcie, who sat up, blinking crossly at the light. Amelia put down the red cabbage she had taken from a bag and came over to where Ana sat, bending to smile into Dulcie’s face. She smelled of mint and perspiration and she had a small mole with a pair of dark hairs growing out of it on the side of her jaw. As she bent forward, Ana caught sight of a heavy silver chain under the edge of her blouse.

“Dulcie my sweet, did you have a big day helping Carla in the shop?” Amelia, a born grandmother, had an accent from somewhere in the south of England. “How about a bite to eat before you slip into bed? No? Well, just a glass of milk and a biscuit, then, how about that?”

Dulcie slipped out of Ana’s lap without a backward glance to follow Amelia over to the big refrigerator, leaving Ana both relieved and longing to reach for her and pull her back. Instead, she stood up briskly and stripped off her gloves and jacket, dropping them on the end of the bench. She pulled off her hat, added it to the pile. When she turned back, running her fingers through the impossibly short hair on her head, she noticed that Amelia and Suellen were looking at her oddly, and then both of them quickly moved away to resume what they had been doing.

Both women seemed to have been taken aback by Ana’s appearance, and she ran her fingers through her hair once more, to calm its apparent disorder. Funny, she reflected, I didn’t think it was
that
bad.

Carla showed her where to scrub Rocinante’s grease from her fingers, then gave her a bowl of thick vegetable soup and several slices of heavy bread. There was water to drink, tasting strongly of minerals, and the offer of dessert in the form of fruit crumble made with canned peaches or the healthy-looking cookies Dulcie had taken away with her, both of which Ana declined. When they had eaten, when the last of the pans were washed and the surfaces wiped clean, Carla began to dress again for the outside.

“I’ll show you your room. Breakfast is next door to the kitchen from six to eight in the morning. I work the shop again tomorrow, but I’ll be around until nine. I eat breakfast about seven-thirty, or Amelia and Laurel will be in the kitchen. Got your gloves? It’s sure cold tonight—I’ll be glad when winter’s over. The spring up here is really beautiful.”

They went out the same way they had entered, down the gravel pathways that seemed even more dimly lit than before. Ana stumbled once, but Carla did not notice, chattering inconsequentially as she led her charge past the vaguely seen buildings and back to Rocinante, where Ana retrieved her toothbrush, some clothes, and the big metal flashlight.

“Do I need to lock it?” she asked Carla.

“Well, you can,” said the woman disapprovingly.

Ana left the keys in her jeans pocket. “I just didn’t know if you had problems with intruders, kids in the neighborhood, that kind of thing.”

“There isn’t a neighborhood,” Carla said, “and our own kids wouldn’t steal anything, not once they come here.”

Ana wondered at the confidence of this statement. The kids fostered out to the care of the Change community had often been through the rounds of juvenile hall and a series of temporary homes, and many of them had
police records; she couldn’t believe there wasn’t a certain amount of misbehavior when they came here. Change it might be, but a leopard’s spots didn’t fade overnight.

Still, she didn’t imagine there was too much to worry about. The road out was gated and the only valuables inside Rocinante were hidden beyond the reach of the average delinquent. She did debate with herself whether she needed to pursue Carla’s provocative statement “not once they come here,” but she decided that she was too tired, and that Carla was insensitive enough not to notice her guest’s lack of curiosity.

Besides which, they had reached their destination, and Carla was holding open a door, turning on a light, and leading her into a building considerably less imaginative and carefully built than the communal hall had been. The walls were simple painted Sheetrock, the decorations desultory and mass-produced. Her bedroom, the third and last one to the right, was cold and sparsely furnished. It could have used Dulcie’s brilliant rug on the floor, Ana thought. She was pleased, though, that when Carla went over to a motel-style heater under the window and turned a dial, warm air billowed out. Carla drew the curtains against the night, checked that the two narrow beds had sheets and that there were extra blankets in the closet, pointed out the towel hanging openly on the wall, and showed Ana the shared bathroom across the hallway.

“There’s no one else here tonight, though,” she said. “It’s kind of early for casual visitors, and with Steven away, there aren’t any retreats scheduled. Anyway, I hope you’re comfortable, and I’ll see you in the morning. Oh yes, let’s see. We don’t have a lot of rules, except basic things like no loud music and no drugs, but we appreciate it if you don’t wander into the buildings, since most of them have people living in them, and I should warn you that the outside lights go out at midnight, so take a
flashlight if you’re going to be out after that. And there is a community rule that we don’t wear any jewelry except wedding rings, and no extreme dress, and only small amounts of makeup, which doesn’t look like it’s going to be a problem for you. Okay? Good night, then.”

Ana listened to Carla’s retreat, easily followed through the flimsy walls, and fingered the hammered surface of her new necklace thoughtfully. In a moment she was alone, left in sole possession of the two-story building reserved, she thought, for unimportant guests and people outside the Change community—quite literally outside, in truth, perhaps half a mile down the road from the central compound.

The fan blew out its warm air; there was no other sound in the guest house. After a while she put her jacket back on and went to explore, but she found nothing unexpected, nothing of interest, just sixteen bedrooms, most of them with two beds, one desk, two chairs, a shared bedside table, and a rug or two on the floor. There were also six communal bathrooms, one tiny kitchen with stove and empty refrigerator, and two storage closets for bedding and cleaning materials. Only two other rooms were made up, ready for occupancy; the others had bare mattresses with folded blankets and pillows neatly stacked at their feet.

She found a heater in the bathroom nearest her room and turned it on to thaw out the chilly space, then went back to her room and sat for half an hour or so with her light out and the curtains drawn back, vague thoughts chasing themselves around her brain while her hands massaged her knee and her eyes watched the young moon. When she judged the bathroom warm enough, she took her towel and the sweatshirt and sweatpants she used as nightwear and crossed over the cold, empty hall to take the first shower she’d had since leaving Oregon.

She used a lot of lovely hot water.

•     •     •

She was wakened in the morning by the brisk crunch, crunch, crunch of a single person walking past her window on a gravel path. Although she lay waiting for something else, there came no other noise, and no one entered her building.

A look at the clock told her that breakfast would soon be starting in the main hall; she wondered if the members of Change drank coffee, and decided she should resign herself to something herbal or, at best, black tea. The things we do for our country, she thought, and then abruptly recalled the last time she had heard that phrase. She felt her face go red and then laughed quietly to herself, and threw back her blankets to face the new day.