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 and your sister 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
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.
Chapter Seventeen
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,
