Ana whipped the blankets from her bed and sat down in the room’s soft chair, pulling Dulcie onto her lap and wrapping the still-warm blankets around them both. The child’s shivering seemed more like shock than mere cold, but in either case warmth seemed the best treatment. Dulcie put her thumb in her mouth and nestled down between Ana’s breasts; in two minutes she was asleep.
Memory was a terrible and intensely physical thing. Unlike guilt, it lost none of its power over time, and if it hit less often than it had in the early years, it still hit hard and unexpectedly: The sight of a furry infant skull would trigger the warm, round sensation of cradling Abby’s head in her cupped palm, all of her daughter’s humanity and future in her hand; a blend of fragrances on a street would jerk her back to a particular mad evening with Aaron in New York before they came west; a certain kind of tree-lined street in the fall would evoke the heady beginnings of graduate school.
Now it was her breasts that betrayed her, heavy and warm, tingling with the gush of nonexistent milk down to her nipples for Abby’s greedy mouth. Dulcie slept on, unaware of the turmoil within the woman she knew as Ana, aware only of the rare and dimly remembered bliss of being held in comforting arms, aware that Ana must be trustworthy, since Jason had told Dulcie to go to her if she needed anything while he was away “helping Steven.” She was aware only that she felt safe.
Dulcie’s thumb dropped from her slack mouth and half woke her, so that she turned against Ana’s chest, nuzzling like an infant until sleep pulled her down again.
It was agony, it was sheer delight; eighteen years after the fact, Ana had been given back her daughter. Dulcie was not Abby and Dulcie would never be Ana’s daughter, but Ana’s arms craved the child and the bone-deep love of a mother tugged at her, and she knew she had only two choices: She could put Dulcie on the floor and walk away from her, or she could permit the indulgence of her body’s yearnings. It was no choice. She wrapped herself around the sleeping child and rocked her in the ageless rhythm of mothering, and when Dulcie woke fully an hour later, Ana more than half expected to find the front of her T-shirt drenched with leaking milk.
Her shirt was dry, but Dulcie was frowning at her face.
“I had a little accident yesterday, Dulcie. It really doesn’t hurt very much, but those teeth of mine that come out got broken right in two, so I’ll have to have them fixed. Looks funny, doesn’t it? Thounds funny, too. Remind me not to smile, okay?”
Dulcie’s only response was to turn and look at Ana’s hands. Ana held the left one up. “This one does hurt. I don’t think, anything’s broken, but it’ll be sore and ugly for a few days.
“Now tell me, Dulcie: Where’s your brother?”
She was unprepared for the extremity of Dulcie’s response. The child wailed and flung herself against Ana, curling up to make herself small, burying her face in Ana’s T-shirt.
Ana’s immediate urge was to burst out of the door and find out what had happened to Jason, but she forced herself to sit and calm Dulcie with drivel first.
“Okay, we’ll talk about that later. Dulcie sweetie, let me tell you about the time we had in Phoenix yesterday. There was a display in the museum that showed all these beautiful clothes the Indian women used to wear, all covered with beads and stuff, and the house they used to live in made of logs and mud, with a fire built right in the middle of it. You ever see one of those? Maybe you can go on a trip with the school next time. It’s a long drive but it’s fun. You know, I’m feeling a bit hungry. I think I’ll get dressed and go have some breakfast. Do you mind coming with me down to the dining hall? I think I’ll have a bowl of oatmeal with lots of brown sugar on top, that’ll be nice and soft to chew on.” She waited until Dulcie had given her a small nod, and then worked herself out from under the child. She went to the closet and chose clothing with loose cuffs, pulled on her boots and pushed her untied laces into their tops, and eased on her jacket.
Dulcie was more of a problem: She was dressed, but she had no shoes on. Ana had her climb onto the arm of the chair and propped her awkwardly on her right hip. Fortunately, it was not far to the dining hall.
Once inside the building, Ana could loose her precarious hold and let the child slide to the floor. They walked hand in hand toward the breakfast noises. The instant they came in the door, Teresa leapt to her feet and scurried over to intercept them.
“Dulcie! Where on earth have you been? We’ve been looking all over, we were so worried about you. Come along and let’s get properly dressed.”
She reached for Dulcie’s hand, and the child twisted around behind Ana to avoid her. Despite Ana’s protests, Teresa pulled the child’s hand away, and Dulcie naturally reached up for Ana’s other hand and grabbed it hard.
The pain was literally blinding. Ana sank to her knees with a breathless squeal, and with infinite tenderness tried to peel the little fingers from hers, all the while chanting, “No, no no no no no, Dulcie, oh please, no no no.” The grip suddenly dropped away as the horrified child realized what she had done. She stepped back, looking ready to bolt, but Ana scooped her around the shoulders with her right hand and pulled her back, murmuring all the maternal phrases of condolence while the agony in her left hand subsided and her right hand stroked the back of Dulcie’s hair. The child threw her arms around Ana’s neck and began to weep. The pain retreated and became bearable; when Teresa saw the change, she started to fuss again. Ana took a deep calming breath, and let it out.
“Dulcie, it’s over,” she said firmly. “It’s uncomfortable here on the floor, I feel stupid with everyone staring at us, and I want my breakfast. What say we eat?”
Teresa started to say, “Yes, Dulcie, let’s let Ana—” when Ana gave her a glare that instantly silenced her.
“Dulcie is going to eat breakfast with me. We’ll talk to you later.”
Teresa opened her mouth, closed it, turned on her heel, and left. Ana persuaded her limpet to let her free enough to rise, and the two of them continued their interrupted journey to the breakfast line.
With Dulcie holding firmly on to her jacket, Ana carried their tray over to an unoccupied table. Dulcie seemed uninterested in food, so in the end Ana spooned oatmeal into the child’s passive mouth. It was like feeding a baby, down to the close-lipped shake of the head to let Ana know she’d had enough. Ana finished the bowl, drank her herb tea and the remainder of Dulcie’s juice, and piled their dishes on the tray. No doubt about it; the brain functioned better with food.
She took Dulcie’s hand and bent down until she was looking into the young face. “Dulcie, would you please tell me now where Jason is?”
Dulcie was feeling the stabilizing effects of breakfast as well; her lip quivered and her eyes filled, but she did not wail and fling herself at Ana. Neither did she answer her.
“Dulcie, I want to help you find Jason. Did he tell you where he was going?” Dulcie gave her a tiny nod, dislodging the tears from one eye so that they spilled down her face. “Can you tell me? Please?”
“He went to help Steven,” she said in a tiny voice. “Two men took him.”
At first Ana refused to hear the meaning of Dulcie’s words. Even when the horror of what it might imply was roaring through her, she tried hard to remain objective, sensible. Eventually, rationality won out. Had there ever been any indications, in the weeks she had lived here, that Steven was a sexual predator? Any record indicating that he might be a pederast, straight or gay? Any sign of ongoing sexuality among even the abused outsiders in the school? No, no, and no. It was possible, yes, but it was also possible that something else was going on—some kind of initiation, perhaps, or a punishment for yesterday’s fight, or a hundred other things. She needed to find out, but she also needed to keep her head. As she’d said to Jason: Think!
Her first responsibility was to Dulcie, temporarily bereft of her brother and clinging mightily to the only other support she could find. There was no possibility of abandoning her.
“First step,” she said to Dulcie. “W
e get your shoes and your coat, brush your hair and your teeth.
“Second step,” she said, in answer to the unvoiced objection of the small person, “we find out where your brother is. Okay?”
Dulcie nodded, content that Ana was not proving herself yet another untrustworthy adult. This time Ana carried Dulcie piggyback to the room in the next building where she and Jason slept. Teresa went with them, but she did not try to interfere, she just tied Dulcie’s shoes and put her hair into braids after Ana had demonstrated her inability to do either of those things. She even tied Ana’s flopping boots for her, to Ana’s embarrassment and gratitude.
When Dulcie was dressed and scrubbed, Ana asked her to sit down and work on her rug for a few minutes while she talked with Teresa. She reassured Dulcie that she was not going to leave her, just step out in the hall and talk privately for a minute, and led Teresa out, shutting the door.
“I need to talk to Steven,” she said.
“You can’t.”
“Is he here? In the compound?”
“Yes, but he’s busy.”
“Teresa, be sensible. I don’t know what that child’s background is, but it’s obvious that it was pretty hellish. Jason is all she has. She’s accepted me, heaven knows why, as a substitute, but I have to know what Steven is doing with Jason in order to help Dulcie. She’s too fragile to be kept in the dark.”
“I know, but there’s nothing anyone else can do. Jason will be back when he’s… when he’s ready.”
“You know where he is.”
Teresa would not meet her eyes.
“Is it a punishment for yesterday? It wasn’t his fault.”
“A consequence is not a punishment.”
“That sounds like Steven.”
She didn’t answer, but Ana could see it was true.
“Where is Steven now?”
“Meditating. You can’t—”
“I sure as hell can,” Ana said, and pushed her aside to yank the door open. “Come on, Dulcie. Let’s go ask some questions.”
She did find Steven, and she did ask questions, but he did not answer them. He did not even respond, but merely sat in the full lotus position, unseeing and unhearing on his high seat in the very center of the meditation hall, the golden sparkles from the mobile directly over his head moving slowly across the wall.
Thomas Mallory, inevitably, was there. She entered the meditation hall and saw Steven, and addressed him in a loud voice. Steven did not react. Telling Dulcie to stay where she was, Ana started for the rising platforms on the side of the room, intending to clamber over to the platform and seize Steven by the shoulders, shaking him from his trance, but Mallory stopped her, his scowling eyebrows nearly meeting over his nose. She knew better than to resist physically, not when Dulcie was looking on. She also suspected that Steven’s assistant would have picked her up bodily and put her outside the meditation hall had it not been for Dulcie’s presence.
“Steven!” she shouted. The hall had excellent acoustics, but Steven did not move. She retreated from the platforms and angrily hammered her fist against the great black pipe that rose out of the floor to support the fireplace and Steven’s platform. It was metal, and oddly warm, but it gave out only an unsatisfactory dull thud instead of the clanging echoes she had hoped for, and then Thomas Mallory came up behind her and grabbed her shoulders, whirling her about effortlessly and propelling her toward the exit. She retreated, but at the door she turned to plead with the man.
“Look, Dulcie is worried about her brother. She just wants to know where he is and when he’ll be back. Surely you can tell us that.”
Mallory studied her, and then the child, and his petulant mouth softened a fraction.
“Her brother is in meditation with Steven,” he said. “He’ll be back in a day or two.”
That was all he would give them. Strangely enough, it seemed to reassure Dulcie, whose level of anxiety went down a great deal, although she refused to venture from Ana’s side. All that day, wherever she went, Dulcie was her shadow, a silent and determined presence working eternally on the cumbersome bulk of her yarn rope.
Ana’s own concern for Jason, her unresolved anger against Steven, and Dulcie’s presence, silence, and absolute trust all began to prey on Ana, and the bright, aggressive cheeriness of Dulcie’s rope began to rub on her nerves.
Three times in the course of an hour Ana got up and left the desk where she was doing paperwork; three times Dulcie put her spool into the bulging canvas bag and followed her: into the supply room, into the computer room, and to the bathroom, where she stood outside the door, waiting for Ana to come out.
Patience was a good thing, Ana decided, but at times did not go far enough. Dulcie was beginning to look like a miniature Madame Defarge, knitting as the heads rolled.
“Dulcie, don’t you think it’s time you started to make your rug out of that? I’m sure you have enough there for a nice big rug.”
The child nodded, and went back to looping the bile-green yarn over the nails on the spool, one stitch at a time, around and around.
“You could set it out here on the floor and get it started,” Ana suggested. “I’ll be here for another hour or so.”
Dulcie dropped her hands into her lap. “I don’t know how,” she said, sounding sad to the point of despair.
Ana turned and looked at her. “You’ve never done this before, have you?” she asked slowly.
Dulcie shook her head.
“Did Carla get you started?” Dulcie nodded. “But she hasn’t shown you how to make the actual rug?”
Dulcie looked up at Ana, her eyes not far from tears with her anguish. “I don’t know how to stop,” she cried.
The pathos in the child’s manner made Ana’s lips quiver for a moment. “You poor thing,” she said. “Did you think you were going to knit away on this thing forever? That one day we’d go to look for you and all we’d find would be a pair of feet sticking out from under a gigantic pile of brightly colored rope?”
Dulcie’s own lips quivered, but not from amusement. “It’s very bright,” she agreed sadly.
“You mean—Didn’t you choose those colors?”
Dulcie’s head went back and forth, slowly and emphatically. The two of them sat looking at the dirty canvas bag with the pink loops and the orange coils and the green tail emerging to dip along the floor and disappear into the wooden spool in Dulcie’s fist, and Ana began to laugh at the tragedy and the absurdity of the whole situation. She gathered Dulcie into her arms and the two of them howled and howled.
When that was over, she found some tissues and she and Dulcie sat up and dried their eyes, and she helped the child blow her nose. Then, with great ceremony, she took a large pair of scissors from the drawer of the desk and laid them in the center of the desktop.
“Bring me the spool,” she ordered Dulcie.
“If you cut it, the whole thing will fall apart,” Dulcie said quickly. “Carla told me.”
“Not if you tie the end off first,” Ana replied grimly, hoping it was true. Perhaps she should tie two knots, just to be sure.
Dulcie hopped down from Ana’s lap and fetched the spool, the instrument that had produced all those yards and yards of rope. Ana did not know if it had functioned as a meditation device or as a form of penance, but be it rosary or hair shirt, she was declaring it finished.
She snipped the yarn that led from skein to spool, tucked the end in, and set the unused yarn to one side. Working slowly because of the awkwardness of her left hand, she looped the rope below the spool into a knot, and had Dulcie pull on the rope to help her tighten the knot. They then repeated it to make a second knot beside the first, and she picked up the scissors and offered them to Dulcie. They were too big for the child’s hand, but Dulcie took them with two hands and chewed with them at the rope until it parted, and Ana was touched by a brief vision of Aaron with a pair of obstetrical scissors in his hands, his face showing mingled revulsion at the effort of cutting through the tough flesh
of Abby’s umbilical cord and dawning wonder at the separate new person lying in red, angry splendor on his wife’s breasts.
Dulcie’s face showed mostly relief, and wonder at her daring, and trepidation lest the sundered end should suddenly burst into life like some live thing or cartoon entity, spitting furiously and peeling back countless loops of yarn until her weeks of effort were reduced to a room-sized heap of kinked-up wool.
It did nothing, just sat there with the two snug lumps at its end. Dulcie noticed the spool and picked it up. She worked the stub of yarn rope from its nails and thoughtfully pulled at the loose end. Around and around the yarn unraveled, each loop pulling free. When she held only a length of kinked chartreuse yarn in her hand, Dulcie dropped it into the wastebasket, put the spool and hook out of sight in her pocket, and bundled the now-severed rope into the bag.
“You know,” Ana suggested, “when you’re finished with the rug, if you decide you don’t like it, you could always give it to Carla.”
CHAPTER 18
The word “cult” has become meaningless as a description of human behavior, so laden is it now with negative emotional baggage. Any small and vaguely eccentric group of religious seekers-after-truth is apt to find itself slapped with the label and instantly converted in the minds of outsiders into a potential People’s Temple or Branch Davidian. This is a heavy burden to carry, and serves primarily to increase the level of paranoia in even the most level-headed group.
Of course, short words with hefty emotional impact are the stock in trade of the media. When a newspaper reporter describes a group as a “cult,” it has nothing to do with the actual technical definition of that word. The media are not interested in matter-of-fact; that sells no papers. It speaks in polemic, describing not what is, but what has been in the past and, more to the point, how we as readers have to feel about it: outraged, righteous, and moved to demand action.
Cults--or as they should usually be termed, sects--can be vicious, stupid, paranoid, murderous, suicidal, incomprehensible, and hysterical; as indeed may any group of human beings involved in a quest and immersed in passion. They can also be gentle, contemplative sources of creativity and peace, but we do not hear much about those. We must keep firmly in mind, however, that most of the picture we see of cultic activity has been drawn for us by ex-members, and if in some cases their withdrawal from the community may be seen as a return to sanity, in other cases the ex-member’s dissatisfaction may have its roots in political, personal, or even financial reasons. To expect a calm and balanced image of their former life would be to hope for rational words from a jilted lover about the ex. Grains of salt must be applied with a generous hand-an exercise the news media has never shown much interest in. [laughter]
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