The smell of food in the dining hall filled Ana with nausea, but she craved something hot to drink. She took a mug and filled it from the big urn, added sugar, and took it to her corner, where she cupped her hands around it as if the tiny heat it gave off would drive away the coldness of her bones. Three mugs later her thirst was slaked but she was still shivering in the warmth of the dining hall.
Then she looked up and saw Dulcie, and one glance at the child's expression cut her shivering off. Dulcie needed her; there was no time for weakness.
'Hello, Dulcinea,' she said gently. 'How's my squire this evening?'
The child shrugged, a motion so like her brother that Ana wanted to reach out and pull Dulcie to her, burying that sad, remote little face in her embrace. Instead, she put her mug down on the table and stood up, casually holding out her hand to the girl.
'Why don't you show me your room, Dulcie? Then I'll show you where mine is. Sorry my hand's so rough and covered with Band-Aids—I spent the afternoon digging and I got a bunch of blisters. I shouldn't call them Band- Aids, though, should I? Here they're sticking plasters. I wonder why they call them plasters? Plaster is that white stuff they cover walls with, that turns really hard and you can paint it. You remember that gray mud that Tom and Danny were using back in Arizona, that would get big blobs in their hair and when they came to meals they'd look really funny? Oh my little sweetheart, what's the matter?'
Dulcie had drifted to a halt halfway up the stairs and was now just standing, one hand limp in Ana's, her shoulders drooping and her head down. She was crying. Ana sat down on the upper step and pulled Dulcie to her. The child was pliable but unresponsive, weeping as if she were too tired and dispirited to do anything else. Ana crooned wordlessly and rocked her, oblivious to the people coming and going on the stairway, aware only of the small, warm head of hair tucked under her chin, and the slack hopelessness of this young body, and eventually the shuddering intake of breath as the tears tapered off. When the tears ended, some of Ana's own hopelessness seemed to have worked itself out as well.
'Where is your room, Dulcie?' she asked. The child stood without speaking, and they continued up the stairs and down the hallway, Ana's hand resting on the back of Dulcie's neck. Dulcie chose a door and Ana followed her in. She picked up the child and sat her down on the bed with the teddy bear from the pillow, and then sat next to her. Dulcie leaned into Ana's arm.
'What's wrong?' she asked the child again.
'I want to go home.'
'Home to Arizona? To where Steven is? Or home—?' Where was the child's home, anyway?
'To Steven.'
'Why are you unhappy here? Jason's here.'
'No.'
'He isn't?' Ana looked quickly around the room: shoes in the corner, a familiar plaid shirt over a chair, books and papers on the desk—all reassuring signs that a teenager lived there.
'He's always doing things. Talking to Her, or That Man.'
'Jonas, you mean? And who's 'Her'?'
' The girl.' Dulcie's voice vibrated with disgust.
Ah. 'Do you mean Dierdre?' Dulcie nodded. 'Dulcie, listen to me. Jason loves you. He's just excited to be in a new place, and it's hard for him to keep his mind on things. I'll have a talk with him, okay? Ask him to settle down a little?'
Dulcie nodded, then said, 'But I still want to go home.'
Ana thought for a minute and decided it was best not to bring That Man into it at all, but, rather, to dwell on the positive side. 'There are some nice things here. Have you seen the barn with the horses? And there's lots of kids.'
'I can't understand them.'
'Their accents, you mean?'
'They talk funny. Like on TV.'
'You know, I'll bet they think you talk funny like TV, too. There's a lot of American shows on English television.' Not that the Change kids saw much TV, come to think of it, but never mind. 'Come on, let's go see the horses go to bed.'
Ana spent the next hour coaxing and amusing the child out of her feeling of abandonment. Dulcie found the horses beautiful, the lambs amusing, the cats still at the kitchen door, and the voices around her not quite as unintelligible as she had thought. At the end of their tour they went to see Ana's room. Ana let her look around, bounce on her bed, and paw through her meager belongings, and then told the child that she could come to visit anytime she wanted.
They talked for a while about church mice and other important matters, and then Ana took Dulcie down a set of stairs and along the long corridor and around a corner to the room the child shared with her brother. Jason leapt out of his chair at their entrance, looking worried and angry, but before he could berate Dulcie for disappearing, Ana broke in.
'Oh, Jason, there you are. Sorry I didn't leave you a note to tell you I'd taken Dulcie down to see the animals in the barn, I should have realized you'd wonder where she was. Dulcie, maybe you should pop in and have a bath after petting all those horses and playing with the cats. Need a hand?'
After the child was dispatched to the bathroom down the hall, Ana lingered to talk with Jason about school and work and how he had spent his day. His dark eyes were alive with enthusiasm and she enjoyed the rare—the formerly rare—sight of Jason Delgado smiling, twice. His animation and willingness to talk to her at length about ordinary things were disorienting but steadying, and as enormously comforting as the physical contact with his sister had been earlier.
'You know,' she told him gently when he paused to draw breath, 'Dulcie seemed kind of lonely and a little upset tonight. You've been busy, and she was feeling left out. Though I'm glad you're enjoying it here.'
'It's all right,' he said, adding, 'I like some of the people.'
'You're going to miss the basketball,' she said.
'Season's over anyway.'
'Tomorrow after lunch, let's get together and look at what you and the others need to do to finish the school year. Dov and I brought the final exams with us' (a thousand years ago, it seemed) 'so maybe you could take them early and have the summer ahead of you.'
'You don't think we'll be going home before school's out, then?'
'Doesn't sound like it to me. Why, did Steven say you were?'
'Nobody said anything,' he said with a wry grimace. 'Just 'get on the plane.' I didn't even know we had passports.'
She did not tell him that it was standard procedure at Change for new members to apply for passports, or whenever possible for minors to have the application made for them. International experiences (carefully monitored, of course) were used as a selling point by the school.
'Well, I hope you get to see something of the country while you're here.' Dulcie was making final splashing noises down the hall. 'Tomorrow is our half day, you know that?' Once a week, in addition to Sundays, the Change residents had an afternoon free. Thursday was theirs. 'After the school meeting, assuming I'm free, I'd like to take you two for a walk. I have a little surprise for you. You personally, I mean.'
Jason nodded, concealing his interest well, and went to supervise the nightgowning of his sister. Ana waited to give Dulcie a good night kiss, and then she returned to her room. She had intended to join the evening meditation, now that Jonas had acknowledged her existence, but she felt weary and distant, and when she had to make an effort to exchange a few simple words with her next-door neighbor, she knew she could not bear the entire gathered community. She closed her door, jammed the chair under the knob, tugged the curtains as closed as they would go, and sat on the hard bed, her skin crawling with tiredness and a cold that did not come from the soft night. Too tired even for sleep, her body twitching with the day's tensions, she took out her diary and got to work.
She sat on her narrow bed with the covers pulled up to her chest, and she wrote. It began as a straightforward report like any of those she had submitted to Glen in the past, detailed and analytical, complete with maps and diagrams, but within a page or two it began to get away from her. Speculations began to intrude: her personal reactions became a necessary part of the explanations. There was, in truth, very little about this case
