Authors: Laurie R. King
A Darker Place (28 page)
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.
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 out 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 see 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 oatmeal 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.
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 well; her 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.”