A Darker Place (37 page)

The plane was scheduled for a three-forty-five takeoff. At four Ana took out the hardback illustrated
Hunting of the Snark
she had bought in Sedona and presented it to Dulcie. At four-ten the copilot came on the intercom and admitted that they were still on the ground, although the moment the deicer had been unclogged they would be away. By five-fifteen Ana had read Dulcie and Benjamin the
Snark
four times and most of the other books twice. At five-thirty the passengers heard a series of bangs and thuds from below, and those on the starboard windows were gratified to see the repair truck fill with men and drive away. In another three minutes the big jet lurched and began to creep backward, and Dulcie said she really, really had to use the toilet.

Ana had the child back in her seat and buckled in with twenty seconds to spare. They taxied and accelerated, rattling and roaring until the tons of metal and flesh gave their little hop and they were airborne. Dulcie did not notice, she and Benjamin being busy loudly discussing life in England across Ana’s lap, but Jason’s eyes shifted constantly, particularly upward to where the overhead baggage compartments were vibrating madly.
If one of them drops open, Ana thought, he’s going to land five rows back, taking his seat with him.

“Have you flown much, Jason?” she asked to distract him.

“Uh, no.”

“Planes always look like they’re about to shake themselves to pieces, but as I understand it, they build the flexibility and movement in. If everything was completely rigid and nailed down, it would be too brittle. Even the wings bend a surprising amount. Much safer that way.”

“Oh yeah?” he said, looking dubiously up at the rattling bins.

“Actually, I don’t have the faintest idea if that’s true or not. It’s just what I tell myself when I fly because it’s better than believing the plane is about to fall apart.”

That did distract him, to the point of making him meet her eyes and smile. He leaned back, looking less nervous.

The plane leveled off, drinks and peanuts were handed out, and then there was such a delay before the meal was served that Dulcie and Benjamin both fell asleep. They woke when the food trolley bumped down the aisle, picked at the strange food, eating the cake and some noodles, but Benjamin found the milk strange after a lifetime of goat’s milk and Dulcie spilled half of hers. They then wanted to play together with the packet of games and colors the flight attendant had given each of them.

Ana got tired of the elbows digging into her thighs and the constant chatter of excited voices directly under her chin, so she changed places with Benjamin and allowed the two small kids to have the middle of the row, bracketed by her and Jason at the ends. The children colored and played with the headphones, Jason watched
the movie, and Ana tried to read the Jung book she had bought in Sedona and tried not to think of Glen.

The movie ended, reading lights were dimmed, toilets were visited, and the two children attempted to get comfortable. A thousand squirms later Ana got out of her seat and arranged pillows and blankets for Benjamin over both seats. Dulcie put her head into Jason’s lap, and Ana took her book back a couple of rows, where there were a few empty seats. To her surprise, after a while Jason joined her with his own book,
The Old Man and the Sea
. He smiled shyly and read six or eight pages before closing it with an audible sigh.

“Are you reading that for school?” she asked. She took off her reading glasses and rubbed her tired eyes, leaning her head back on the headrest.

“Yeah. It’s really boring. Nothing happens.”

“I remember. The old man talks to himself a lot and the scavengers eat his giant fish.” There was no response. After a minute she opened one eye to see whether he had gone back to his reading, but he was looking at her with an odd expression on his face.

“What? Isn’t that what happens?”

“Don’t you like Hemingway?”

“Oh yes, Hemingway was an immensely creative and influential writer, but that’s the problem. So many writers have tried to copy his style that the original has begun to seem like a cheap imitation. Unfair, but I find it hard to get past the sense of caricature.”

This may have been the first time the boy had heard that there might be differing opinions about the great literary works he had been required to appreciate for the last few years of his life.

“Anyway,” she said, closing her eyes again, “I’d have thought the family Dumas more to your taste, or Dashiell Hammett. Someone with more flair and sense of
romance than Hemingway. Romance in the sense of adventure”—she added in an aside—“not as in love story.”

He said nothing, and she allowed herself to be lulled by the noise and the vibration, drifting into a light doze.

She woke and slept and woke, each time checking on her surroundings, on Jason, and on the forward row where she could see the top of Benjamin’s head. Jason had abandoned Hemingway and was looking at Jung, reading at her marker. She slipped away a third time, and woke greatly refreshed. She stretched and looked around for an attendant, but the plane was still dim and quiet. Jason was awake, still working away at the alchemy essay. She glanced at the page, and saw that he was staring at the drawing of a fifteenth-century alembic.

“Jason,” she said. He jerked and quickly turned the page.

“Jason, look—”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“I know it’s part of the Work that Steven gave you, but—”

“I can’t talk about it,” he repeated brusquely, and started to lift himself out of his seat.

She laid her hand on his arm to stop him. “Okay, Jason, I understand. But can I say something? As a friend?”

He gradually subsided, and she took that as a yes. She thought for a minute, trying to find words that might open a door rather than shut him off.

“Steven is a good man,” she said, “and he cares for you. There aren’t a lot of people like that in the world, and when we meet someone like him, someone who really reaches us, our automatic response is to accept him fully, every part of him. Add to this the fact that no one your age believes that they have a lot of choices in life, and it is natural to think that you either have to accept all parts of Steven’s belief system and teaching style, or
reject him completely. You don’t want to talk about what went on between you and him during those two days, and I respect that. I just want to say that if you have any doubts or even questions, if anything someone wants you to do doesn’t seem quite right or fair, you can come to me and I’ll try my hardest to keep an open mind. Okay?”

Jason gave his trademark shrug-and-a-nod, and she had to be satisfied with that. She reached down and unlatched her seat belt.

“I’m going to get a cup of coffee,” she told him. “Can I bring you anything?”

He looked up at her, his face clearing with the relief of having gotten off so easy. “Can I have a Coke?”

“You can have anything you want except alcohol.”

“I haven’t had a Coke in three months.”

“I haven’t had a decent cup of coffee in five weeks. And four days, but who’s counting?”

She found the attendants talking quietly in the galley. They exchanged a few words about the “cute kids” she was shepherding (Dulcie and Benjamin) and Ana went back to Jason with a can of Coke, a cup of ice, and two cups of stale instant coffee for herself.

“What else do you miss at Change?” she asked him when they were both settled in again with their drinks. “Your friends?”

“Nah. Most of the people I knew were jerks. I guess at first I missed all the normal stuff—you know, McDonald’s and TV and music and everything. Ice cream—me and Dulcie both miss that. I kind of got used to the place, though.”

“It’s a different life. But, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have ice cream at the English house. I remember when I was in London in the dead of winter once, I was amazed at how many people I saw eating ice cream.”

“I don’t know, I hear it’s a weird place. Not the whole country, just where we’re going.”

“What, the Change community? Weird how?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “There was a kid in my house who just came back from there. He said they never went anywhere and it was like living in a jungle.”

Ana had to smile at the thought of a jungle set down in the civilized English countryside. “He’s probably exaggerating.”

“Maybe. Anyway, he’s kind of weird himself.”

Ana Wakefield and Jason Delgado sat elbow to elbow with seven miles of air between their feet and the ice-studded surface of the northern Atlantic Ocean, drinking their respective beverages. Jason poured the second half of his Coke into the plastic cup and glanced at the book she had stuck into the seat back ahead of her.

“Do you read a lot of stuff like that?” Jason asked with a gesture at the worn black cover. She was mildly surprised that he would raise an obviously forbidden topic, even obliquely, but she thought the best thing to do was just treat it as an innocent question. She had, after all, told him that it was up to him to talk about his experience in the alembic.

“When I’m living in the bus, I tend to read more demanding things such as that,” she said. “There just isn’t room to collect masses of books. But when I settle down for a while, I usually go a little nuts at the local libraries and bookstores, catching up on all the novels I’ve missed.”

“God, that must be so great, living in a bus. You can go wherever you want, eat when you want, pull over and sleep when you feel like it.”

The wistful tone in his voice did him great credit: Most boys of fourteen, faced with the prospect of twelve years of responsibility for a minor sister, would feel more than mild regret.

“I have to tell you, Jason, how impressive your attitude toward your sister is. Dulcie is a sweetheart, but she’s also a major burden. It can’t be easy.”

Praise on the basketball court was easy to ignore; from a person sitting at your side it was more difficult. Jason fiddled with the contents of the seat pocket in front of his knees for a moment, and then stood up to go check on Dulcie. He came back and continued on to the toilets in the far rear of the plane, where he spent a long time.

When he returned he paused by the seat, then walked forward again to look at the sleeping children. When he was finally in his seat he looked straight ahead at the rumpled white hair of the old man in the next row and began to talk.

“Dulcie and me, we’re not orphans, you know. Our parents are still alive. At least, I know my dad is—he’s in jail, and last I heard Dulcie’s father was around. He lives in Vegas, I think. Our mom is a crackhead—or, she used to be, until about a year ago she started shooting up, and things got a little crazy. She’d bring these really creepy guys home, real narfs, you know? and they’d… Well, anyway, I finally got pissed off and told her she couldn’t do that, not with Dulcie there, and I… I kinda beat one of them up, so she started just not coming home. I had a job, just part-time at a building site, but I had to give it up because I couldn’t leave Dulcie home by herself. I mean, I know people do, but she’d get scared, and when I got home she’d just be lying in her bed shaking and she wouldn’t eat her dinner. I used to wish Mom would get arrested so the city would step in and take care of things, but I couldn’t go asking for food stamps or child care or anything because then I’d have to tell them why Mom wasn’t the one doing the asking, and then she really would get arrested.

“I got… I don’t know. I guess I got kind of fed up after a while, trying to do the school thing with
Dulcie and no money. I thought I deserved a break. Some time for myself, you know? I mean, all the other guys I knew used to spend hours just hanging out, not dragging their little sisters to all the games and wondering where their damn mothers were half the time. I know most of them don’t have fathers and a lot of them have moms who work or spend time in jail, but there’s always grandmothers or the welfare or something. Dulcie and I just had us.”

He turned and gave her a hard look. “I’m not complaining, you know? I’m just telling you. Okay?”

“I understand.”

He looked as if he doubted that, but he continued.

“Anyway, I started to go out sometimes at night after Dulcie was asleep. I never went anywhere, not far, because I kept thinking, ‘What if she woke up and went looking for me?’ or ‘What if there was a fire?’ I’d just sort of hang out with the guys who lived around us, listening to music and stuff.

“And then one night… God, I still can’t believe I could be so stupid. We hadn’t seen Mom for about a week, and there was almost no food in the house, and school wasn’t going too good, and—I don’t know, a lot of stuff. So after Dulcie went to bed I went out with some of the guys. And one of them stole a car. And I went for a ride with him, and the stupid bas—he crashed the car.

“We were miles and miles from home, and it was about two in the morning, and all I could think of was Dulcie waking up, and I just kind of lost it and started beating on him. And”—he shook his head—“somebody called the cops. Probably a good thing or I would’ve killed him, but instead of letting us go they arrested me, ’cause I was the one with blood all over my hands, and they took the kid who’d stolen the car off to the hospital.

“As soon as they closed me in the back of that cop car
I knew I’d really done it. I had to tell about Mom, or else Dulcie would wake up in the morning and find an empty house and go nuts. She did go kind of nuts, I guess, with this strange woman showing up at the door with another cop and no brother in sight, because after a while they brought her to me to settle her down. Some psychologist came along and told them it’d be a bad idea to put her in a foster home by herself, so we got to stay together. We were in and out of half a dozen places, but for some reason nobody wanted a little girl who didn’t talk and her brother who liked to beat people up, so we ended up at Change.”

“Did you like to beat people up?”

“No! It’s just, sometimes you don’t have a choice, you know? I used to think that, anyway, but Steven’s been helping me see that I really do have a choice, that I hit people because it’s easier than not hitting them. Steven told me that sometimes what looks like being strong is really being weak, and what looks like weakness takes greater strength. There’s some stuff in the Bible about it.”