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 that was straightforward, and the attempt to reduce it to analysis and point out the logical progress of her thoughts only served to make the lack of logic more obvious and her own position more tenuous, even desperate. As she wrote, she was aware of how personal she was becoming, how she was revealing not her competence as a trained investigator, but her feelings—claustrophobia and grinding anxiety, the upwelling of fears and memories, the sensation of impotence. (What is the female equivalent of impotence, Glen? she found herself writing. Hysteria? Well, I am both impotent and hysterical.) What she wrote was like nothing she had ever given Glen before, presenting details of her self and her life that she had never given anyone, not since Aaron had died, but here she was, her hand shaping letters that described just what Abby's face had looked like in death and how that vision kept intruding itself on her current choices and decisions. Even while she wrote, she was appalled at the intimacy of the document, fully aware that Glen would have no choice but to set it before countless others, but unable to stop herself from writing. The sensation of open communication was a lifeline to sanity, the words a catharsis that reached down to her bones. She told herself that she would destroy it when she finished, that she could write a second, expurgated version for Glen, but she knew she would not.
Lights-out came and an officious passerby tapped at her door, so she turned out her lamp and opened the curtains to write by the light of the compound floodlights. She wrote until she had it all down, up to the point of what she planned to do next, and as she was thinking about that she fell asleep.
She woke some hours later, her diary jabbing her cheek and the floodlight shining in her eyes. Her bladder was also protesting at the number of cups of tea she had drunk, so she removed the chair from under the doorknob and went down the hall to use the toilet and brush her teeth. When she got back to her room, she saw the diary lying openly on the pillow, and she closed the door and cautiously tore out the incriminating pages. The only place she could think to hide them was inside the sole of her Chinese slippers; she folded the pages over and over and pushed the long rectangle in between the cloth lining and the sole. Not ideal, but as a temporary hiding place, as good as she could do.
She put her head back onto the pillow, and was asleep.
Ana's day began two hours later, long before the birds had begun their dawn chorus, when her bedroom door was flung open and a man's voice began talking at her. She went from deep sleep to heart-pounding panic in a split second, whirling around in the tangling covers and bruising her elbow on the wall before she was upright and blinking at the door. It was Jonas.
"What?" she croaked.
"What is wrong with you? I said I'm not going to need you during the day, I'm working on some calculations, but I may want you tonight. Be available. Listen for my call. You know how to get there?"
She sat up more fully, scratched her scalp to encourage brain activity, and said, her sarcasm half swallowed up by a yawn, "I think I can find it again, Jonas."
He stepped back and was gone. After a minute she climbed out of bed and closed the door. The sarcasm that she had let slip was not a good sign, but she was, after all, fast asleep, and it was annoying to be credited with barely enough brains to walk downstairs to the Bear's den.
Her eyes went to the diary on the bedside table. After a moment, she took it up and turned to a clean page.
Glen—I fully intend to watch my step, take care, and all the rest. For the first time in many long years I can honestly say that I do not want to die. Realistically, though, things happen. You and I both know that. We"ve known it since the day you planted your finger on the doorbell of my apartment fifteen years ago.