First off, she had to forget the details. She had never heard of Steven Change, never seen an aerial photograph of the Arizona compound or a photocopy of its building application, never reviewed the community's Web site or studied its tax returns. These were all thing she should not know; that would only trip her up and get in the way of her innocence.
Instead of facts, she had to concentrate on how she felt about Change, to open herself up and make her mind receptive to its nuances. She already had the impression of Change as a growing, energetic, interesting group of people with a strong leader filled with original ideas. Yes, she knew that Glen had reservations, and yes, an ex-member had complained at great length about the secrecy and limitations he had encountered, but that did not explain the almost excessive openness the community displayed when it came to the school or to visitors to its frequent retreat sessions, nor did it account for the presence of a number of educated, intelligent people—a professor of economics, a doctor, several schoolteachers, and a rabbi—who had dropped out of their former lives to join the community. Granted, even the most critical of minds could become gullible, open to the point of emptiness when confronted by the mumbo jumbo of another discipline. And she could not forget that boy's odd and disturbing nightmare drawing of the man in the giant pear surrounded by monsters. Still, Change promised to be sufficiently complex to be interesting.
Who knew? Ana might even learn something there.
Ana became aware that she was sitting in Rocinante staring out at the plowed drifts of snow, and had been for some time. She shook herself mentally and reached for wheel and gearshift, then hastily drew back her bare hands and patted her pockets until she found her gloves. Once they were on, she put Rocinante into first gear, drove out of the parking lot, and turned toward Jerome.
It began to snow along the narrow, mountainous road, but the fat flakes seemed to be blowing about rather than sticking, so she pressed on. The flurries dove toward her hypnotically, a moving tunnel she was driving into. Oncoming cars startled her with their nonchalant speed, but she was also encouraged by their presence—if they contained irritated drivers forced to return by a road closure ahead, one of them anyway would surely give her some sign as to the hopelessness of her progress.
Trees and sheer cliffs and the infinitely reassuring white lines of the road made up Ana's world, and she started singing to herself as a means of keeping alert, and talking aloud to Rocinante about the camber and slope of the surface, the unseen depths off to their right, the speed of the oncoming madmen, and the weather.
Coming around one sharp and completely blind turn, she was plunged into icy horror when her entire windshield was suddenly filled with a Winnebago out of Minnesota, its driver trying to avoid the overhanging cliffs by driving along the center line. She slapped her hand onto the horn and her foot gingerly on the brakes, bracing for the impact. The driver of the tin box seemed to think her panic unjustified; he clamped his hand onto his own horn in reply, drowning out Rocinante's thin wail, and pulled his vehicle just enough to the right that they passed each other with nothing more than a tap on the back of Rocinante's side mirror and a certain momentary insecurity of the right-hand tires.
Ana furiously rolled down the window and shook her fist at the behemoth, but he was already around a corner, gone from sight, and the only recipients of her indignation were the equally frustrated drivers of the mud-stained pickups and four-wheel-drive vehicles caught behind the man from Minnesota. Ana rolled up the window, shivering from the combination of cold and adrenaline, and deliberately forced her mind back to the road ahead.
With her eyes on the pavement, fighting to separate what she needed to see from the constant distraction of the swirling snowflakes, she noticed nothing else of interest the rest of the way down from the mountains aside from a handful of small waterfalls and one valiantly blooming shrub, its pink blossoms looking a bit stunned against the gray stone and white snow.
The small town of Jerome, perched on a steep hill above the mines that had given birth to it, was a welcome interruption as well as being a sign that the worst of the drive was over—and indeed, by the time she was actually in town, the snow had turned to a dull rain. Her target was Sedona, just a few miles away, but she decided to stop here and piece her nerves back together. She parked alongside the road, careful to turn the wheels into the curb, pulled her knit hat down across her ears, and got out.
The air was magnificent, clean and cold and damp and fragrant. She could smell smoke from well-seasoned firewood, and wet dog from the recesses of the porch behind her, and a faint waft of pipe tobacco. A symphony of odors, but standing out, clear as two instruments in a duet, came the fragrances of fresh coffee and hot chili peppers. She turned, smiling, and went into the café.
An hour later, when she came back out onto the street, she was warm inside and out, her nose still running from the spice in the chili. She tugged on her wool hat, got in behind the wheel, and launched Rocinante's nose downhill, out of the mountains toward the Mecca of the New Age, the town of Sedona.
Chapter Eight
From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)
Sedona had changed, dramatically. Drastically, even. When Anne and Aaron had spent the summer driving from the East Coast to grad school in Berkeley the year before they were married, they had spent a couple of days hiking the red rock cliffs and sleeping beside Oak Creek. She remembered that some of the New Age residents had talked about the recent "discovery" of metaphysical vortices, the earth's "power points", but for the most part the town was simply another quiet artists' community, supported by visitors from Flagstaff and Phoenix and a growing population of retirees attracted by the clear air, the cooler summers, and the stunning beauty of the area.
Now the only thing that made her certain it was the same place was the unchanging arrangement of red cliffs, dark with the rain, that looked down on the town. Ana had reckoned that differences would be apparent. The phenomenal growth of New Age ideas over the last twenty years had put Sedona on the map of must-sees for the crystal, aura, and alien-abduction sets. Somehow, though, she had visualized the changes along the lines of longhairs camped along the road selling each other moonstones and tie-dyed T-shirts; she was unprepared for the great clusters of expensive new homes with picture windows looking out on the vortex-bearing rock upthrusts, and for the sprawl of motels, drugstores, and—God!—car dealerships.
Not until the far end of town did Ana begin to recognize a few buildings, and by then she was so put off by this blatant defilement of Anne's past that she drove on through and out of town, heading up the precipitous Oak Creek road that proved blessedly free of the intrusions of civilization. After a few miles, she pulled over into a wide spot, cut the engine, and got out to look around her.
Yes, she thought; this is where we slept, back there above that boulder. We'd been driving for hours and hours in the heat, and we got in at night, and couldn't see a damn thing except by the headlights of Rocinante's predecessor. In the morning Aaron got up and made us coffee on the pump-up campstove, and brought me a cup, and we made love in the zip-together sleeping bags. Afterward, there was a blue jay sitting on that branch there, that very branch (although the tree was smaller then), and it flew away when we began to laugh. Aaron always said that morning was when Abby was conceived, and I never argued with him, even though I knew it was ten days later, on our first night in the apartment in Berkeley.
Cars went by on the road, pickups and delivery trucks from Flagstaff and RVs from Montana, but Ana heard only the wooded silence of that distant day and the familiar low, loving groan of the man who was going to be her husband; it was cold, but she felt only the cool air of an early summer's morning on her face and the faint imprint of a pair of rather poorly made elkskin boots beneath her feet, high elkskin moccasin boots worn by a young woman with long hair, a woman who had not only a full scholarship, but a man who adored her and a life opening up before her.
Ah, Annie, she said to the
young woman giggling in the sleeping bag with her man's rough black beard buried in her neck; Annie, it's God's true blessing that we cannot see our future, because we'd never be able to bear it if we had any warning.
The blare of an air horn brought her back to herself, and she looked up to find the red cliffs dim behind low, wet clouds.
She stood for a moment longer to look down at the spot where the tent had been. Good-bye, Annie, she said. Good-bye, Aaron. Enjoy each other. Cherish your daughter. Be grateful for the life you have left.
Despite the cold drizzle, Sedona was bustling with the incongruous life of commerce. On this side of the town, however, it seemed more familiar, a place of galleries and coffeehouses instead of supermarkets and garages, the vehicles at the curbs leaning more toward mud-spattered four-wheel-drives and less to shiny travel trailers. Ana slowed to allow a family in bright, worn anoraks to scuttle across the road in front of her, then pulled into a parking place between a muddy Willy's Jeep with a bumper sticker that declared FRANKLY MY DEAR I DON'T GIVE A DAM and a newish Mercedes with a window sticker showing three almond-eyed aliens. Rocinante's om mandala fit right in.
For the better part of two hours, she wandered up and down the street, in and out of shops, smiling at the locals and talking to the shopkeepers. She bought a delicate blue crystal on a deerskin thong, a pair of thick wool socks made in Ecuador, three slim books on Sedona, and a newspaper, which she took into a small cafe that seemed to cater mostly to scruffy vegetarians rather than the polished tourist classes. She ordered a latte and a slice of apple pie from the waitress, a girl with thick black braids, two gold studs in her nose, and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a Tibetan lotus blossom on it, and then she opened the paper to immerse herself in the printed word and the overheard conversations of the locals.
The coffee was very good, the whole-wheat crust on the pie less successful, and the news and conversation had more to do with small town politics and economics than with the otherworldly considerations Sedona was known for. True, the couple at the next table was earnestly discussing the miraculous reappearance of a medicine wheel a week after the local parks department had kicked the earlier one apart, scattering the rock design in all directions, but the six people gathered around the table in back of her were involved in a vigorous debate concerning the area south of town around the Chapel of the Holy Cross, and although the New Age books in the bag next to Ana's elbow had told her that the Chapel had been built (all unknowing) on the site of a powerful vortex, the four bearded men and two flannel-shirted women were more interested in the sewage problems involving the houses being constructed in that area and the need for a traffic light where the access road met the highway.
It was very comfortable, this snug little coffeehouse with its woodstove, dark walls, and the amateur paintings of red rock buttes done in a realistic style alternating with visionary depictions of those same rocks psychedelically glowing with the energy of a vortex. The air inside smelled of wet clothing and baked goods and was filled with low music, the clatter of pans in the kitchen, and the hum of voices discussing matters of no earthly interest to her. She felt at home here, just one more aging refugee from the sixties, with no lectures, no papers to read or to write, no Glen watching over her shoulder. All she lacked was a dog to lie across her feet, and she suspected that if she poked her head into the kitchen and asked, she'd even be provided with one of those.
Ana smiled into the dregs of foam in her glass, tipped it back to allow the coffee-stained island of foam to slide slowly down into her mouth, and put it down with a small sigh. She was of an age to know that a person had to take her pleasures when and how they came, and not to grasp after them as they faded. Sitting here had been very pleasant, but it did not, as her grandfather used to say, pay the bills.
The tip Ana left, nearly matching the size of the amount she owed for her latte and pie, was her offering of thanks to the resident deity responsible for this moment of calm. Restored, she buttoned her jacket, pulled her hat down over her brief hair, and went back out into the street.
The rain had let up, though low clouds still hid the taller of the surrounding hills. Rocinante was not far away, but she was not about to get back on her mount and ride away, attractive as the thought might be, for five doors down from the cafe lay the Changing Earth Crafts Gallery, the shop that had been her circuitous goal during the entire afternoon.
She started in the direction of the shop that Change ran, glancing in the windows of the intervening shops with no intention of entering any of them until all her attention was seized by a small display of silver jewelry arranged across a length of dark brown velveteen. Most of the pieces were conventional enough—arching dolphins and delicate fairies—but one piece caught her and would not let her go.
It was a crescent moon, but instead of being the usual small wisp of silver, this one was larger around than Ana's thumbnail and had a thickness and texture to it that invited the fingers. And if the new moon shape wasn't enough, calling out from her vision in the desert, above the moon the cord passed through a single red bead that could be the double of the one Ana had in the medicine pouch hanging from Rocinante's mirror, the remnant of Abby's favorite necklace.
Ana smiled at herself, started reluctantly to move on. Then she stopped. An omen was an omen, after all, and who was she to fight it?
The moon necklace cost little more than the weight of the raw silver, and it dropped around her neck as if she had worn it for years. She refused a box, rubbed the satisfying shape between thumb and forefinger, and zipped her jacket up over it against the cold.
A bell tinkled overhead when she entered the Change gallery, and the pretty young woman at the desk raised her head to give her the standard greeting, grateful and hopeful, of a shopkeeper on a slow day. Ana started to respond in the browser's usual way, a quick phrase and a duck of the head, when her eyes caught on the other person in the shop; the words in her mouth turned to dust, and shock froze her spine.
Next to the woman sat Abby, hunched up on a stool, weaving a yarn rope from a wooden spool with four small nails in it, one side of her mouth pursed up in concentration, her hair its usual wild mass of intractable black curls. Abby looked up from her work to the young woman at her side, and then glanced at Ana, and the rigid shock melted into a shudder of mixed relief and despair, because of course it was not Abby. Abby was dead. This was another child, a pleasant enough child, no doubt, who resembled Anne's daughter strongly in her hair and her eyes and the quirk of her lips, a child who was looking wary now at a powerful current of something she did not understand.
Ana tore her eyes from Abby's double and glanced at the woman, who she assumed was the child's mother and whose face was now looking positively apprehensive.
First meetings are dangerous moments. Ana pulled off her hat with one hand, ran the other over the brief bristle that covered her skull, and gave a shaky laugh.
"How weird," she said to the woman. "For a second there I could have sworn the child was someone I knew a long time ago. She's the spitting image of my sister's kid at that age. How old is she? Five? Six?"
"Almost six," the shopkeeper said, still cautious.
Ana shook her head and took a few steps forward, careful to stay closer to the mother than to the child. "My goodness," she said to the little girl. "That's quite a rope you've made."
It was, too. It looped around and around on the child's jean-covered lap and trailed off onto the floor, yards and yards of tubular weaving, uneven and full of gaps but gloriously bright, almost fluorescent in intense shades of alternating orange, fuchsia, lime green, and yellow. It was obviously a work of great dedication. "May I ask what you're going to do with all that?"
The child looked down at the spool in her hands, and after a moment of silence, the woman spoke up. "She's thinking of making a rug with it, to put on the floor next to her bed,"
Ana studied the immense pile of soft yarn rope, and raised her eyebrow in puzzlement at the mother, who let go
of the last traces of apprehension at being in an empty shop with a stranger who had reacted oddly to the sight of her daughter. She said, "Like a braided rug, you know? Show the lady how it's done, Dulcie."
Obediently, the child laid down her spool and crochet hook and slid down from the stool to dig around in the bright mass until she came up with the end, two feet of an almost neon orange dimmed only slightly by collected grime. This she laid on the counter, holding it in place with two fingers, and began deliberately to coil the rope around the center.
"Ah," said Ana. "I see. In fact, I have one like that on the floor of my bus. Only this one is brighter than most of the ones I've seen."
"A lot brighter," agreed the woman.
"It's going to be magnificent," Ana told the little girl.
This pronouncement brought the child's head up, so that for the first time she was looking straight at Ana. After a moment, she smiled, a shy and brilliant smile that acknowledged Ana as a true and kindred spirit, and Ana felt as if she'd been kicked in the stomach, because it was Abby, sharing a moment of complicity against Aaron and the world. In another moment she would be crying for the first time in years.
Abruptly, Ana moved away, reaching blindly for the first thing she came across, which turned out to be a crudely thrown pottery mug with a quail drawn into the side. The bird was nicely done, simple, brief lines bobbing with the essence of quailness, even if the glaze had slipped into it, and the shape of the cup was inviting in the hand. She held it for a moment, finding it oddly soothing, then took it over to the counter.
"I broke my favorite mug last week," she told the woman. "Funny how certain shapes seem just right, isn't it? And the bird is great."
"Isn't it? In fact—is this one of Jason's, Dulcie?" she asked the child. Dulcie looked up from her work, nodded, and dropped her head again. "I thought so. Jason is Dulcie's brother," she told Ana. "Not much of a potter, I'm afraid, but he can draw beautifully."
The Birth of a new moon Page 10