He nodded and left, and behind him rose up a murmur of dismay and annoyance tempered by a surprising amount of philosophical acceptance. Another thing to remember, Ana thought: have someone point out the caches of flashlights.
After she had cleared her dishes she looked around for Jason and Dulcie, and found them sitting with three or four other teenagers. Jason was deep in conversation: Dulcie looked bored and truculent. Ana went over and sat down beside her.
"Hola, Dulcinea. Did you enjoy your apple crumble? I helped make it."
The child nodded, and Ana wondered if her former silence was returning, but then she elaborated grudgingly, "It would've been better with ice cream on top."
"I know. Oh well. Hey, I have to go help with the dishes, but afterward I wonder if you'd like me to read you a story?"
Dulcie nodded, animation seeping back into her face.
"Great," Ana said. "How about you come to the kitchen and save me from the dishwashing after you've had your bath and brushed your teeth? Is that okay, Jason?" she said, turning to face him. He looked up at her blankly, having obviously not heard a word she had said before his name.
"What?"
"Can you bring Dulcie down to the kitchen when she's ready for bed and I'll read her a couple of books?"
"Sure. No problem." He went back to his conversation and Ana studied him for a moment. The hardness was leaving his face, dropping years as it went. The tough, sexy street kid she had met was now visible only in the edges of his face and the angle of his head. He had put on a little weight, true, but that was not the only reason that the harsh lines of his face had softened. Unlikely as it might be, here, yanked from his native land and set down among strangers, he had already made friends. Here he was free to be a different person.
Ana looked away before he could catch her staring at him, and smiled a bit sadly at Dulcie.
"See you in a bit, okay, Sancho? Bring me a couple of good books."
Two books translated into four, and after Ana had suggested that Jason come back in twenty minutes or so, they settled down in a comfortable armchair that smelled of dogs in a small room off the kitchen, a space Ana thought might originally have been the butler's domain. Dulcie was warm from her bath and tired from the long day and the time change and the turmoil, and she fell asleep in Ana's arms halfway through a book she had found about a tribe of mice who lived in a church and earned their keep polishing the brasses. Ana finished reading the book silently, then settled back in the chair and was nearly asleep herself when Jason returned for his sister.
"Hey," she greeted him.
"She fell asleep, huh? Thought she might. Sorry,"
"Why be sorry? Sit down. So, what do you think of the place?"
"It's okay,"
Ana grinned at him, and, slowly, he returned it. "I mean, it really is okay. That Bennett guy's a—" He stopped and glanced around guiltily. "You know, he's not real friendly, but some of the kids are pretty cool, and Jonas is great,"
"You've met Jonas?"
"Oh, yeah. I spent most of the afternoon with him,"
"Doing what?" She hoped she didn't sound as startled as she felt.
"Oh, just talking,"
"Talking? About what?"
"Just stuff. My family, how I grew up, the neighborhoods I lived in, things like that,"
(Was that a twinge of jealousy she felt, that Jason should confide so freely to a stranger?)
"You know, it's true," the boy went on with a note of discovery in his voice. "It does help sometimes to talk to people about things. Problems and stuff. It makes things clearer, you know?"
"I know," she said, and bent her head to look at Dulcie and hide the twisted smile she could feel on her lips. (Yes, no doubt about it; it was jealousy.) "Have you noticed that our names are the same?" Jason asked suddenly. "Jason, Jonas—they're just turned around,"
"Did Jonas point that out?"
"Yeah. He has a funny way of looking at things. Original, like. He'll go all quiet for a while and then he'll say something really off the wall. Sometimes I could sort of understand what he meant, but most of the time I really couldn't. I mean, you know how you sort of laugh when someone tells a joke you don't get? Well, I did that a couple of times and I think it kind of pissed him off, because the second time he just stood up and kind of waved his hand like he was brushing me off, and then he walked away.
"I was kind of worried, you know, in case I'd done something wrong, but I asked a couple of people and they said it was no big thing, Jonas was like that. It's like his brain gets full and he has to go think about things for a while,"
"I see,"
Dulcie stirred then, and Jason took her limp body up in his arms and said good night. Ana responded automatically, but for once she was not thinking about them. She was too preoccupied with Jonas Seraph, the distant figure around whom this tense little community turned.
The dynamics of the community were not at all what she had been led to believe, although she had to admit that was because of her own assumptions and expectations, not due to any overt flaw in Glen's information. She had expected Jonas to be dynamic and involved; instead, he was playing the role of the distracted alchemist buried in his thoughts and in his laboratory, and it appeared that Change had been given much of its shape, not by Jonas or even by Steven Change, but by the now-departed Samantha Dooley. Samantha, vanished with her two friends into the women's community in Toronto, where no doubt her intense interest in growing things, in transforming the earth to cabbages and winter soups, was being given free rein. The information on Change had all been there from the beginning, but like an iceberg, the reality changed beneath the surface.
Jonas was beginning to take shape in Ana's mind, this shadowy person defined by the reactions of those around him. Jonas was wise, Jonas was aloof, Jonas occasionally struck those who were being, in his opinion, particularly slow in understanding, although his outbursts of violence were attributed not to any lack of control, but to the teaching methods of a superior being. Jonas did listen to Steven, and he had brought Jason and his sister and baby-sitter Ana all the way from Arizona just to look at the boy, but Jonas could not be bothered to explain his pronouncements to Jason, and had grown quickly impatient with the shy overtures of a fourteen-year-old boy. Ana speculated for a moment about Jason's reactions if Jonas had tried to backhand him into a state of satori, and decided that Jason would almost certainly not have struck back. He was already as much in awe of Jonas as everyone else.
Ana had met any number of people who were as wrapped up in themselves as Jonas seemed to be. Some of them had been profoundly retarded; others were off-the-scale geniuses. Sociopaths were this way, and the severely neurotic, and madmen of various flavors, for that matter—as well as think-tank employees, high-ranking business executives, high-flying academics, half the archbishops she had met, and even, it is true, one or two genuinely holy people. The utter self-absorption of these individuals would have seemed brutal if there had been any awareness in it; as it was, it often seemed only otherwordly. Into which category, she wondered, did Jonas Seraph fit?
The big Victorian house was quiet now, the smaller children abed and group meditation absorbing the adults. Perhaps she might find some hot water in the pipes to soak away the aches.
Ana pried herself up from the soft chair, laid the story about the church mice on the seat, and took herself to bed.