“She's here!” Mitch said, choking.
Kaye saw Stella and stood up straight and tried to shove her way out of the circle. The youths crowded in to stop her.
Stella stopped outside the gyre, arms crossed, looking this way and that as if she had not found what she had come looking for, or did not want to see it.
Kaye beat at the young people to get free, using no words, just grunts and shrieks.
Stella suddenly dashed forward and grabbed at the members of the gyre.
The old man lifted his hands, the woman did the same, and the gyre dropped back, leaving Kaye and Mitch and Stella at the center of a loose and expanding crowd.
A breeze whispered through the trees and across the gravel turnaround and dispelled the scent. Stella hugged her mother, then reached around Kaye's shoulder and grabbed Mitch's arm and pulled him in, as well.
Other youths arrived, curious, waiting to join in and do whatever was necessary.
“See!” Morgan shouted triumphantly. “Would I shit you? Man, let them be! They're family!”
They said good-bye and thanks to Morgan, and Mitch shook his hand. Morgan was sternly told by the old Shevite man that he was not to return again, ever.
“Hey, it was worth it,” Morgan said defiantly. He waved farewell as Stella led Mitch and Kaye to a small meeting room at the back of the old bowling alley.
“They're unhappy that you're here,” she said, pulling out chairs around a battered wooden table. She motioned for them to sit. The window at the back of the room was dark; night had fallen. “They don't want us to be found.”
“Who are they?” Kaye asked, too sharply, but she could not help herself. “Cult leaders? What are their names, Bo and Peep?”
“I don't know what you mean,” Stella said.
“They wouldn't talk with me,” Kaye said, trying to control her agitation. “Do they hate us so much?”
Stella shook her head, unable to answer for the moment. She could not easily explain how complicated an answer to that question might be.
“I sympathize with all of you,” Kaye said. “We both do, Stella. They have a marvelous story, I'm sure of it, but we have been looking for solong, we were so afraid!” She pounded the table hard enough to make the floor vibrate and the window rattle.
Mitch placed his hands over hers. “We've both been searching.” He watched Stella with alternating expressions of relief and anger.
“I'm sorry,” Stella said. “Will and I came here after the bus accident. It was for the best.”
“Will?” Mitch asked. “Was he the boy?” John Hamilton had told them about putting Stella and Will in the car with Jobeth Hayden. Hayden had been arrested by state police in Nevada and turned over to the FBI, but she had never been charged with anything.
She had had no idea where the children might have gone. Piles of crumpled paperback pages had been found in her car.
“You saw him in Virginia, in the long building where you found me. Where the girl died,” Stella said.
“I don't remember much about him,” Mitch said.
“He was my friend,” Stella said. She turned to Mitch, examining his face with shy, flicking glances, her own face turning dark and her pupils dropping down to pinpricks. Mitch had never seen his daughter looking so down, so discouraged.
“Was?”
“He's dead.”
“How did he die?” Kaye asked.
Stella shook her head and looked away.
“Did he fit in, here?” Kaye asked cautiously.
Stella shook her head once more. “He lived with humans too long. They hurt him. They made him wild. He couldn't fit with any deme, not even mine.”
“You've lived with humans,” Kaye said softly.
“Not the same.”
“Stella, are you pregnant?” Mitch asked, and Kaye jerked as if kicked.
“Yes,” Stella said.
Kaye's jaw clenched. Mitch moved his hand to Stella's shoulder. “Will?”
“Yes,” Stella said.
Kaye moaned, then wrapped her hands around her mouth and jaw. Stella stared at the window, unwilling to witness her mother's anguish.
“He's the father,” Mitch said.
“I went to wasp so quickly,” Stella said. “It seemed so right, and he was sweet and gentle, with me, when he was away from the others.”
“Did they kill him?” Mitch asked.
Stella shook her head and her cheeks went a lovely shade of sienna, which, Mitch knew, signified a very unlovely emotion: grief. Her cheeks had taken a similar color when they had found Shamus huddled dead in the kudzu, years ago. Lifetimes away. “He stopped eating. Nobody could force him. Nobody would. I don't know why; we can do so much with some who are ill. I stayed with him. We played games. It was his decision. He said he did not fit. He was in such pain, he became so far away.”
Kaye laid her head on the table. Mitch saw glints of tears falling from her eyes, darkening the scarred wood.
“He couldn't be with us, and he couldn't be anything he wanted to be away from us. Something was broken inside of him. He knew he would never be right with us or anybody else. Yevgenia and Yuri—our hosts—they tried everything they knew.”
“There is so much to learn,” Kaye murmured, and turned her head toward her daughter.
“He did not want to live, at the end,” Stella said. “We buried him in the woods.” She shook her head vigorously. “No more talk about Will.”
Kaye got up and stood behind her daughter. “Can we stay for a while?” she asked Stella. “Be with you? Help around here, maybe?”
“I don't know,” Stella said.
“Do you want us to stay?” Mitch asked.
Stella stroked Kaye's fingers where they rested on her collarbone. “Yes,” she said.
“Are we the first . . . from the old kind of people, to come here, to visit?” Kaye asked.
“No,” Stella said. “There are four more. An old man and three old women. They lived at Oldstock when Yevgenia and Yuri bought the place, and they stayed. The man does maintenance and they all work in the cafeteria.”
“So it wouldn't be unprecedented. Maybe they can explain some things to us,” Kaye suggested.
“I'd like you to be here when the baby comes,” Stella said. “That would be good.”
Kaye lay her cheek on the crown of Stella's head. “I would be so proud,” she said. “Is there a doctor here?”
“Yevgenia and Yuri were doctors in Russia,” Stella said. “Mine will be the first baby born here.”
“Like mother, like daughter,” Mitch said with a hint of his old reluctance. “Pioneers.” His wife and Stella ventured smiles.
“You could sing to the baby, like you did to me,” Stella said. “You have a good voice, for babies.”
“She's right,” Kaye said. “What if it's a boy?”
“It is,” Stella said. “I can smell him. He smells like Will, inside me.”
6
SPENT RIVER, OREGON
Some said the turning point had come. Kaye was not so sure. After all the years of struggle she could hardly imagine a time of reconstruction, of engagement and change. As she sat with her husband and the three girls in the back of the long passenger van, jouncing along the rutted trails beneath the white glare of Mount Hood, what she felt inside was a kind of frozen patience.
She held her husband's arm and stared between the driver and the Secret Service agent sitting up front. Then she turned to look back at Stella and Celia and LaShawna, and John Hamilton behind them. The girls—young women now—were stiff as dolls, their eyes large. They had watched the landscape change from high arid brush to farms and pear orchards and then to thin forest; saying little, pushed close together on the bench seat. John was looking out the back window at where the long line of vans and cars had been.
He wants to be with Luella,Kaye thought. He's tired of this fight and he wants to be with his wife. For the next fight.