Three times I've gone into the belly of the whale for Glen McCarthy, she thought; three times for him, and once for myself. More than any one person owed her fellow human beings, and a greater slice of her life, her sanity, and certainly her health than she could readily afford to give. She was tired now, she felt thick and damaged and middle-aged, and she wanted nothing but to dedicate herself to simple things like work and friendships and growing things.
In the beginning, she thought, I worked for Glen because doing so was the only thing that might justify my continued existence, a payback for the lethal blend of arrogance and blindness that killed Abby. Suicide would have been a relief and a coward's way out, so I gave myself over to Glen and his crazy schemes.
And on the whole, her work for Glen had been worth it. There was no bringing Abby back, but she had at least saved other mothers' children. Maybe only a few; perhaps as many as sixty-eight, all the children salvaged from the four communities she had interfered with. No matter the numbers, she had begun to feel a semblance of equilibrium, that she had done her penance and might be allowed to move on.
How long, Abby? she whispered into the still air. How many more weeks of acting stupid and serene while my bowels go loose with shitting out the terror? How many more times do I ritually pollute myself with that man, whom I don't know if I love or hate? How long until a great wave of tiredness overtakes me at some crucial moment, and I blurt out something that triggers a madman's paranoia? Oh God; how many more times can I do this?
Anne had not realized that she was taking Abby's photograph from its resting place in the drawer until she found herself sitting back in the chair studying her daughter's face. She kept the picture hidden for fear that it would become familiar and lose its ability to reach her. Time, however, and the first faint distortions of color on the paper had conspired to make the child a bit of a stranger.
Abby had not been beautiful; Anne had known that even when she was alive. She was an ordinarily lovely child with a wild mop of curly, almost kinky black hair—Aaron's impossible hair—dark brown eyes, and a dimple in her right cheek. Her teeth would have required braces had she lived long enough, but at the age the photograph was taken, just after her seventh birthday, their crookedness was merely charming.
Aaron had taken the picture, unusually enough, although Anne had still been there on the Farm. In the early years of gazing at the photo she had thought that the faint blur on the far right border was her own arm, because she remembered Abby grinning just that way, on the picnic lunch two days before Anne had left, and she wanted very badly to be in the picture with her daughter.
Print it how they might, though, the photo labs had been able only to raise a blur. It might possibly have been Anne's elbow; more probably it was the tail of one of the Farm dogs.
Two days before Anne had driven away in their Volkswagen camper van, the aperture of Aaron's camera had opened and allowed Abby's face and her living body to be imprinted onto the emulsion of the film. Two days after the picture was taken, Abby's mother had abandoned her, driving off to try and 'find herself' (a phrase that still had the power to set Anne shaking with an intensity of fury and detestation, on the rare occasions when a student or a friend chanced to use it in her hearing). She drove off to find herself, and eight days later drove home to find instead the remote dirt road clogged with the pulsing lights of a hundred strange vehicles, sheriff and newsmen, ambulance and coroner's vans, disturbed neighbors and frightened relatives, and at the core of it, when she had finally clawed her frantic way through to the cloying miasma of death that lay over the farmhouse and barn complex, a dozen or more invisible, unmarked, and distinctive late-model cars of American manufacture, driven by men like Glen McCarthy.
The film in Aaron's camera had been developed by one of the government agencies as an automatic part of the investigation, and returned to her many months later along with Abby's shoes and teddy bear and several cartons of Aaron's books. More than three years later, during the final stages of her Ph.D., she had been moving apartments and come across the few things of theirs that she had kept, and she made the mistake of taking the developed strips of negatives in to be printed. There had been only seven pictures on the roll, three blurry shots of a new foal that Abby had wanted to take, a couple of the hills around the farm, green with the spring rains, one odd and accidental picture of (she thought) Aaron's boots, and this one of Abby.
It had been a bad mistake, a nearly disastrous one. The life she had built up for herself, the competent persona she had constructed so painstakingly, had proven more fragile than she could have suspected. That one photograph had acted like the carefully set charges of a demolitions expert taking down a high-rise; and when she slid it from the photo lab wallet, sitting behind the wheel of her car outside the shop, she had felt the shudder immediately, and succeeded only in making it to the safety of her apartment before her mind fell in on itself.
Once home, she had collapsed into bed and spent a week there, alternately crying and lying in a sleep so deep it felt closer to a coma, before she was dragged out of it by her insistent doorbell with Glen McCarthy's finger on it. His request for assistance, from someone with not only professional training but personal experience as well in the mechanics of religious aberrations, had literally hauled her back to life. Whether or not this was for the best she had never decided, but it had at least provided a focal point for her life, some sort of purpose to the random motions of eating and thinking. For that, at any rate, she supposed she was grateful.
Now, though, she was surprised to realize that the momentum of daily life had become a purpose in itself. There was an interest and a savor to her interactions at the university, and she had lately been anticipating the rich smell of warm, freshly turned spring soil as her digging fork sank into the overgrown vegetable patch and the amusement and satisfaction of seeing six boxer puppies learn to run and leap. She had even thought vaguely of taking a trip somewhere, for no reason other than pleasure. How long, Abby?
Abby looked back at her from the glossy rectangle in her hand, a smiling young face with a faint worry line between her brows as if in foreknowledge of the death that awaited her in her mother's absence, and did not answer. After a while, Anne Waverly closed the photograph of her long-dead only child away in the drawer and reached again for the manila envelope. She carried it into the kitchen, made herself a pot of strong coffee, and sat down at the table to read.
It was not a terribly thick file, as McCarthy offerings went, and Anne had read it through twice before the coffeepot was empty. She felt somewhat better about this one; indeed, the symptoms were so mild she had to wonder if Glen wasn't getting a bit fixated. Still, some signs of impending loss of balance within this remote religious community were there, and it was certainly worth taking a closer look from the inside.
They called themselves Change, and the leader of the Arizona branch, born Steven Chance, was now named Steven Change.
Twelve years ago Steven and two friends had taken a trip to India and returned, as had countless others, transformed.
Steven Chance was an American, a young chemist who had been born into a conservative Christian family in the Midwest, put himself through university on a full scholarship, graduated with a degree in chemical engineering, and then gone to work for the English branch of a huge chemical conglomerate. Thomas Mallory was a friend from university with whom Chance had kept in touch, who dropped his job in his father's contracting business to join Steven on the trip. With them went a brilliant and independently wealthy research physicist with an interest in metallurgy whom Steven had met in England, a man seven years older than Steven named Jonas Fairweather.