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.'
'I know, but there's nothing anyone else can do. Jason will be back when he's… when he's ready.'
'You know where he is.'
Teresa would not meet her eyes.
'Is it a punishment for yesterday? It wasn't his fault.'
'A consequence is not a punishment.'
'That sounds like Steven.'
She didn't answer, but Ana could see it was true.
'Where is Steven now?'
'Meditating. You can't—'
'I sure as hell can,' Ana said, and pushed her aside to yank the door open. 'Come on, Dulcie. Let's go ask some questions.'
She did find Steven, and she did ask questions, but he did not answer them. He did not even respond, but merely sat in the full lotus position, unseeing and unhearing on his high seat in the very center of the meditation hall, the golden sparkles from the mobile directly over his head moving slowly across the wall.
Thomas Mallory, inevitably, was there. She entered the meditation hall and saw Steven, and addressed him in a loud voice. Steven did not react. Telling Dulcie to stay where she was, Ana started for the rising platforms on the side of the room, intending to clamber over to the platform and seize Steven by the shoulders, shaking him from his trance, but Mallory stopped her, his scowling eyebrows nearly meeting over his nose. She knew better than to resist physically, not when Dulcie was looking on. She also suspected that Steven's assistant would have picked her up bodily and put her outside the meditation hall had it not been for Dulcie's presence.
'Steven!' she shouted. The hall had excellent acoustics, but Steven did not move. She retreated from the platforms and angrily hammered her fist against the great black pipe that rose out of the floor to support the fireplace and Steven's platform. It was metal, and oddly warm, but it gave out only an unsatisfactory dull thud instead of the clanging echoes she had hoped for, and then Thomas Mallory came up behind her and grabbed her shoulders, whirling her about effortlessly and propelling her toward the exit. She retreated, but at the door she turned to plead with the man.
'Look, Dulcie is worried about her brother. She just wants to know where he is and when he'll be back. Surely you can tell us that.'
Mattory studied her, and then the child, and his petulant mouth softened a fraction.
'Her brother is in meditation with Steven,' he said. 'He'll be back in a day or two.'
That was all he would give them. Strangely enough, it seemed to reassure Dulcie, whose level of anxiety went down a great deal, although she refused to venture from Ana's side. All that day, wherever she went, Dulcie was her shadow, a silent and determined presence working eternally on the cumbersome bulk of her yarn rope.
Ana's own concern for Jason, her unresolved anger against Steven, and Dulcie's presence, silence, and absolute trust all began to prey on Ana, and the bright, aggressive cheeriness of Dulcie's rope began to rub on her nerves.
Three times in the course of an hour Ana got up and left the desk where she was doing paperwork; three times Dulcie put her spool into the bulging canvas bag and followed her: into the supply room, into the computer room, and to the bathroom, where she stood outside the door, waiting for Ana to come out.
Patience was a good thing, Ana decided, but at times did not go far enough. Dulcie was beginning to look like a miniature Madame Defarge, knitting as the heads rolled.
'Dulcie, don't you think it's time you started to make your rug out of that? I'm sure you have enough there for a nice big rug.'
The child nodded, and went back to looping the bile-green yarn over the nails on the spool, one stitch at a time, around and around.
'You could set it out here on the floor and get it started,' Ana suggested. 'I'll be here for another hour or so.'
Dulcie dropped her hands into her lap. 'I don't know how,' she said, sounding sad to the point of despair.
Ana turned and looked at her. 'You've never done this before, have you?' she slowly.
Dulcie shook her head.
'Did Carla get you started?' Dulcie nodded. 'But she hasn't shown you how to make the actual rug?'
Dulcie looked up at Ana, her eyes not far from tears with her anguish. 'I don't know how to stop,' she cried.
The pathos in the child's manner made Ana's lips quiver for a moment. 'You poor thing,' she said. 'Did you think you were going to knit away on this thing forever? That one day we'd go to look for you and all we'd find would be a pair of feet sticking out from under a gigantic pile of brightly colored rope?'
Dulcie's own lips quivered, but not from amusement. 'It's very bright,' she agreed sadly.
'You mean—Didn't you choose those colors?'
Dulcie's head went back and forth, slowly and emphatically. The two of them sat looking at the dirty canvas bag with the pink loops and the orange coils and the green tail emerging to dip along the floor and disappear into the wooden spool in Dulcie's fist, and Ana began to laugh at the tragedy and the absurdity of the whole situation. She gathered Dulcie into her arms and the two of them howled and howled.
When that was over, she found some tissues and she and Dulcie sat up and dried their eyes, and she helped the child blow her nose. Then, with great ceremony, she took a large pair of scissors from the drawer of the desk and laid them in the center of the desktop.
'Bring me the spool,' she ordered Dulcie.
'If you cut it, the whole thing will fall apart,' Dulcie said quickly. 'Carla told me.'
'Not if you tie the end off first,' Ana replied grimly, hoping it was true. Perhaps she should tie two knots, just to be sure.
Dulcie hopped down from Ana's lap and fetched the spool, the instrument that had produced all those yards and yards of rope. Ana did not know if it had functioned as a meditation device or as a form of penance, but be it rosary or hair shirt, she was declaring it finished.
She snipped the yarn that led from skein to spool, tucked the end in, and set the unused yarn to one side. Working slowly because of the awkwardness of her left hand, she looped the rope below the spool into a knot, and had Dulcie pull on the rope to help her tighten the knot. They then repeated it to make a second knot beside the first, and she picked up the scissors and offered them to Dulcie. They were too big for the child's hand, but Dulcie took them with two hands and chewed with them at the rope until it parted, and Ana was touched by a brief vision of Aaron with a pair of obstetrical scissors in his hands, his face showing mingled revulsion at the effort of cutting through the tough flesh of Abby's umbilical cord and dawning wonder at the separate new person lying in red, angry splendor on his wife's breasts.
Dulcie's face showed mostly relief, and wonder at her daring, and trepidation lest the sundered end should suddenly burst into life like some live thing or cartoon entity, spitting furiously and peeling back countless loops of yarn until her weeks of effort were reduced to a room-sized heap of kinked-up yarn.
It did nothing, just sat there with the two snug lumps at its end. Dulcie noticed the spool and picked it up. She worked the stub of yarn rope from its nails and thoughtfully pulled at the loose end. Around and around the yarn unraveled, each loop pulling free. When she held only a length of kinked chartreuse yarn in her hand, Dulcie dropped it into the wastebasket, put the spool and hook out of sight in her pocket, and bundled the now-severed rope into the bag.
'You know,' Ana suggested, 'when you're finished with the rug, if you decide you don't like it, you could
