that she had bought at the airport in Phoenix. She gave them each a packet of broken pieces, keeping for herself the one that had been completely pulverized.
They ate their open-air meal, and after they had finished she lay back on her elbows, watching surreptitiously as the two children explored the crumbling walls and ran their fingers over the time-softened carvings. It was a new sensation for Jason to be valued, she decided, first by Steven and now by Jonas. The approval of the two male authority figures and the complete change in setting had continued to work their magic on him. He looked younger and more nearly content than she had seen him, and it was like a knife in her heart to know that if she had anything to say in the matter, it would not last. Jonas would be revealed as a dangerous lunatic, Dierdre would go back home with her parents, Steven's school would be smashed, and these two children who in a few short weeks had taken control of her thoughts and her affections, would be farmed out again to the chance protection of foster homes.
And all that only if she was very lucky.
The sun grew low in the sky, and eventually she stirred and began to gather up the papers and bread crusts. 'Thank you,' she told them. 'I can't remember when I had a nicer afternoon.'
'Thanks for the basketball,' Jason said. 'That was cool.'
'Even though I broke the hoop,' said Dulcie.
'It can be fixed,' Ana said.
On the way back to the house Dulcie alternately lagged behind and raced ahead. On one of these surges Ana drew a breath and let it out slowly.
'Jason,' she said,'there's a couple of things I need you to know and then forget unless you need them. And I have to ask you not to say anything about either of them to anyone, not for, oh, maybe two or three months. It is extremely important to me that you particularly not tell Jonas what I'm about to say. I realize this isn't fair to you, keeping a secret from someone like that, but if he or Steven found out, I could be in big trouble. I'm asking you to trust me. Will you?'
After a while he said, 'Okay.'
'Promise?'
'I said I would,' he said testily.
'Thank you. Two things. If anything happens here, if there's a raid or someone appears with a gun or we have an earthquake—no, come to think of it, they don't have earthquakes in England. Anything major and confusing anyway, I want you to promise me you'll grab Dulcie and get her away from the house. Take her to the abbey, or the woods. Don't try to find me or Jonas or your friend Dierdre or anyone, just grab Dulcie and run.'
'What's the other thing?'
She took a deep breath and let it out. 'I have a friend, an old friend, who works for the FBI. Yes I know, it seems unlikely, doesn't it? Anyway, his name is Glen McCarthy. If you're ever in real need of a friend yourself—years from now, even—get in touch with Glen. He owes me big. Mention my name and he'll help you.'
Jason studied the trees for a minute. 'I thought you were a friend.'
'I am, of course I am. But things happen, and I'm sometimes hard to find. With Glen, every small town in the United States has an FBI branch office, practically, and a lot of other places as well, like London in this country. And who knows,' she added under her breath, 'you might even like him.'
'Glen McCarthy and take Dulcie into the woods. And I'll forget them both unless the roof falls in.'
'Thank you, Jason.' She stopped and turned to study his young-old face, the hawk nose and dark eyes and shorn hair. She noticed suddenly to her surprise that his was not actually a handsome face, just compelling. She reached up impulsively and rested her palm for a moment on his check. 'I wish—' She stopped, and looked down past the crook of her elbow to see Dulcie gazing up at her.
'What are you wishing, Ana?'
Ana removed her hand and bent down to look Dulcie in the face. 'I was wishing that I could take you both right this minute to an ice cream parlor I know in Portland, Oregon, where they make their own ice cream and serve it in giant bowls with paper umbrellas on top, and we'd order pizza ice cream for dinner and green pea sherbet for our vegetables and chocolate pistachio cream pie ice cream for dessert.'
Dulcie giggled. '
'Where's your sense of adventure?' Ana chided. 'Sancho Panza would eat pizza ice cream. Even Don Quixote might.'
As they walked back to the house through the shimmering afternoon, Ana allowed herself to open up to the pleasure of their companionship and to treasure the small, glittering gift of their affection. We do not deserve to come to this thy table, Lord, she thought. The tender mercy of communion with these two may have been undeserved, fragile, and based entirely on her own deception, but it was nonetheless real, and none the less warming.
The sensation of comfort did not survive three steps beyond the kitchen door. The entire household appeared to be gathered there, all of them shouting at one another. Ana stopped abruptly and escorted her two countrymen back outside.
'It looks like dinner's going to be late,' she told them. 'Why don't you guys go in the side door and get some schoolwork done.'
Jason had no objection to being spared the turmoil that lay inside, but Ana watched them start around that house with a fervent wish that she could join them. Instead, she walked back into the kitchen, where she found near the door a distraught-looking Vicky, the woman who had met them at the airport.
'What on earth has happened?' she asked. Vicky stared at her as if she'd just enquired what was going on at Pearl Harbor.
'They're taking our kids!'
'What,
'No, of course not,' she said sharply. 'Though they're going to try, you watch.'
'Who's 'they'?'
'Social Services,' Vicky spat out, and it all began to make an awful sense.
Back in Arizona, Ana had heard of a custody battle between one of the Change members and her ex-husband who was trying to remove their son from the community. Now, it seemed, another battle was brewing, over nearly identical circumstances, only this time there were four children involved, the eldest of whom was actually a stepson, but adopted by the man when he married the boy's mother seven years before. Now he wanted them all out of Change, and that afternoon, while Ana was sitting in the sunshine admiring the abbey ruins, a social worker had arrived clutching four Emergency Assessment Orders, with a brace of large constables to enforce them. The kids were removed for the compulsory seventy-two-hour observation period, the mother packed a bag and followed them, and Change was in an uproar.
Ana studied all the faces in the room, one at a time, looking for the too-familiar signs of desperation and outright panic such an event could set off. She saw a lot of anger, a universal sense of frustration, some misery and fear, but the only face she saw that was white and pinched with distress was that of a young woman whom she knew to be under such a threat herself, a single mother barely out of her teens whose parents were trying to pry their grandchild loose from Change. Ana began to breathe again, for what seemed to be the first time since entering the room. What had happened was bad but not catastrophic. Nothing was going to happen to Change tonight because of it.
The same thought seemed to occur to the others as well. One by one they turned away from their collective outrage to resume their life. One woman shot a glance at the clock and turned, tight-lipped, to drag a clattering armful of pans from a cupboard, while two others simultaneously opened refrigerator and onion bin. Two men set off into the house, still hashing it over at the tops of their voices, while another yanked open a corner drawer and snatched up a long white plastic apron and a wickedly sharp knife. Ana eyed him nervously as he started for the door, but Cali, the woman at the stove, called out, 'Peter, you don't have to do that now. Leave it for the morning,'
'Got to eat,' he grumbled, and marched off. Ana, reassured that he was not about to turn the blade on himself or others, quickly washed her hands and began chopping vegetables for an improvised raw salad to go with the rice and the beans that had been started before the Social Services invasion had thrown the kitchen into a state of confusion.
