"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. "Pizza ice cream? Yuck."
"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, all of them?"
"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.
Twenty terse minutes later the rice was cooked, the salad assembled, and Ana was starting through the kitchen with a full tureen of red beans and sausage in her hands when the air was split by the bloodcurdling shriek of a soul in mortal terror. Dierdre dropped a glass into the sink and Cali jerked and sliced open her finger, but on Ana the effect was disastrous. A gallon of half-liquid beans hit the floor and erupted in a spicy shower over every surface. Beans spattered the ceiling, scalded exposed flesh, dripped down the walls, and covered the floor; in the midst of the carnage stood Ana, hands out, gaze far away, her body gone rigid as stone.
"She's having a fit," said a voice.
"Don't let her swallow her tongue," someone else contributed, but Ana did not hear them. She was not there. She was eight years distant and ten thousand miles away, standing in another kitchen with gingham checks on the windows and the hot Utah sun beating down outside, with the squeal ringing in her ears of a terrified blonde teenager named Claudia being dragged through the dust by an enraged spiritual leader, knowing that she was about to be locked into the stifling padded closet he used for the purpose of enforcing discipline. It was this sound that crystallized Anita Well's decision to get out, now; this sound that led to her key in Rocinante's ignition, her foot on the accelerator, her quick glance in the side mirror to see Calvin the cook through the billowing dust, raising his automatic pistol at her; this same shocking, high human shriek of protest and pain that set into motion the events that ended in Calvin's gun and the incomprehensible violation of her own pain, and two miles down the road the slow, inevitable collision with the jumble of boulders that rose up before her, all set off by the loud series of furious animal squeals that were coming from the Change barnyard.
Ana looked down at her feet, where the pieces of the crockery tureen were still rocking, and she began to shake. Dierdre, pretty young Dierdre with the golden hair like young Claudia's, began to gather up the pieces. Someone else—Vicky?—was speaking in an urgent and worried voice right in Ana's ear. Ana pushed the voice away and bolted for the small washroom just inside the back door, where Vicky found her retching violently into the toilet.
When nothing was left for her body to get rid of, Ana sat back on her heels, gasping and shivering.
"Are you okay?" Vicky asked for the tenth time. This time Ana responded.
"I'll be fine. What the hell was that noise?"
"Terrible, wasn't it? Peter's usually pretty good at sneaking up on the animals so they don't know what's happening, but I guess the pig saw him coming. Pigs aren't stupid."