A Darker Place (27 page)

Accordingly, halfway along the tour and deep in a lecture on Navajo building techniques, she sidled up to Dov and told him, “You guys’ll have to watch the kids by yourselves for a couple of minutes. I have to go use the rest room.”

Dov looked annoyed. “Can’t you wait for twenty minutes?”

“I don’t need to pee,” she whispered cheerfully. “It’s this menopause business; a person has really hard flows at the weirdest times.”

He turned scarlet and pulled away from her as if it might be contagious, and Ana strode off toward the ladies’ room.

To her irritation, there were two women already in the rest room and another followed her in the door. Even worse, there was no seat cover dispenser in the stall she entered, and the toilet paper holder was too small for her diary. The women left, Ana flushed (her period was quite regular, and not due for a week), and went out to see if she could jimmy the towel holder, and there stood the woman who had followed her in, waiting for her.

“Agent Steinberg, FBI,” the woman said, and flashed a badge in front of Ana’s startled eyes before making it vanish into a pocket. “Glen McCarthy told me to follow you around the museum, to see if you had anything for him.”

For a moment, Ana could only stand and gape at this evidence of the FBI man’s all-seeing and omnipotent presence, but then her brain kicked in. Of course—with all the activity involving the school board to set up this trip, the news had leaked to Glen’s ears somehow. She yanked her diary out of her bag and thrust it at Agent Steinberg.

“Photocopy all the pages after the marker and give
them to Glen. Tell him I need information on alchemy. Got that? In two days—not tomorrow morning but the next day—I’ll walk down the road at dawn. I need this diary back, along with any material he can get together; have him put them underneath the big rock with the white chip out of it exactly half a mile outside the gates, on the east side of the road. Now go.”

“Alchemy,” the woman said. The diary was already hidden.

“Go.” Ana turned to wash her hands, and Agent Steinberg was gone before she could reach for the towels.

The half-closed door was pulled open and Teresa walked in.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Just fine,” Ana answered, and left to find the others.

The trouble erupted over lunch.

Jason and Bryan were in the group behind Ana’s, the last to finish. When the assorted students and teachers spilled into the small courtyard behind the bookstore where the others were already settled with sandwiches and drinks in hand, Teresa and the other woman chaper-one were looking extremely apprehensive, and two men, whom Ana knew only as Dean and Peter, were trying to position themselves between the two boys, with limited success. Bryan’s sneers and feint pokes were kerosene to Jason’s smoldering anger. Watching them, she could see the meaning of the slang term “mad-dogging.” The two boys glared at each other, daring the other to be the first to move, encouraged by the low remarks and glances of the other students.

Steven be damned, Ana cursed to herself; those two have to be separated.

She grabbed Teresa by the arm and hissed in her ear, “Do you want a fistfight right here in the museum?
Wouldn’t that make Change look really good? I know Steven said to keep those two together, but Steven isn’t here. Split them up, and we can settle it with him later.”

Teresa looked over at the two boys and decided to agree with Ana. She went over to speak urgently into the ear of David Carteret, who then moved his six-feet-six-inch bulk over to the table where the sandwiches had been set out.

“C’mon, man,” he said to Bryan. “Time to cool down.”

Ana went to stand next to Jason, who was positively vibrating with repressed fury. She spoke his name, picked up a wrapped sandwich, and thrust it into his hand, trying to distract him, make him focus on her and return him to himself. He glanced at her distractedly, but then from behind her came Bryan’s voice saying something she barely heard but which sent Jason’s control through the roof. He dropped the sandwich, whirled, and reached out for Bryan, roaring his fury straight into Ana’s face. She was caught up in a swift whirl of movement. Her shoulder slammed against some hard object, men were shouting, a woman shrieked—she shrieked—pain shot up from her knee, and then a shocking impact spun her face around and she was buried beneath two furious and very strong young men. She cried out again when a shoe ground down hard across her fingers, and then just as suddenly as it had begun it was over, leaving her crouching on hands and knees, waiting for her body to report its injuries. Her head spun, her hand throbbed, her mouth hurt, and she watched the drops of bright red blood across her bruised knuckles splash regularly down onto the courtyard tiles.

Hands tentatively touched her back, heads were bent to hers, shocked voices came from nearby, and at a distance a man, full of rage and disgust, harangued.

Jason, she thought suddenly. Where—?

She raised her head, grimacing at the taste of blood in her mouth, and tried to see him through the legs.

“Ice,” a voice said. “Get a wet cloth,” said another, and “Who’s got the first aid kit?”

A dripping towel appeared; Ana took it with her right hand and put it gingerly to her mouth, which seemed to be alarmingly full of sharp pieces of tooth. No—not teeth.

She sat down on the pavement and pulled out the remains of her two front teeth, which caused a quick frisson of horror to run through the crowd of onlookers until they saw the broken plate of the bridge and the wire bits that were attached, and the tight laughter of relieved stress replaced the horror. Several of the girls began to giggle uncontrollably, and Ana was reminded of Dulcie. Great icebreakers, missing front teeth, she thought. Well worth all the trouble of getting shot up and crashing your face into a steering wheel.

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 docent. 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.

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 two 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 crush, looking for The One across a crowded room, studying him from a distance, casually meeting and flirting and making him—yes—making him laugh.