Francis was coming down the driveway now. He said, “I guess we’d better say goodbye,” and he and Lila got in the car and closed the doors, and her mother leaned in through the window and said goodbye again. Francis backed the car out of the driveway, and Lila waved to her mother, who lingered in the driveway. She knew her mother would go straight to her studio—and smother her loneliness with her work.
HOURS AND HOURS later, Lila barreled the dented yellow Chevy down Route 80 in Nevada, and Francis sat in the shotgun seat watching her out of the corner of his eye. Her two sturdy arms reached forward, her hands gripped the steering wheel, she stared straight down the road. She drove just like Marjorie Boyd, he thought: Everything gets out of the way. She was going someplace, this kid, blasting forward toward some passion that she would ride on for a lifetime. He thought of Siddy, his son, so different, wandering in Europe, tasting everything, circling, and lonely suddenly, he riffed on the fantasy that Lila’s mother had planted: that he and Peggy had adopted Lila too, Siddy’s younger sister by five years, and the two kids were telepathic, they didn’t need words to understand each other at the core.
He wondered if Lila remembered how much she had disapproved of herself when she arrived at the school three years ago—for her tallness, her thick legs, her braces. Now she liked her tallness, she thought her sturdy legs were just fine, and her braces were gone. In a coed school Lila would be one of the girls whom the boys didn’t want to date. At Miss Oliver’s she was president-elect of the student council; she would have more influence than many of the faculty.
“It’s weird how things happen,” Lila finally said without turning her head. Neither of them had said a word for miles. “If some little man, an archaeologist with a funny name, didn’t show up at school in February and give a speech, I’d still be in Denver now with my mom instead of here.”
“I didn’t think it was a funny name,” Francis said. “Livingstone Mendoza, what’s so funny about that?”
Lila smiled at his little joke. “I knew the minute he started to talk that I was going to sign up,” she said.
“Me too,” Francis murmured, remembering the little man, almost as small as Father Woodward, standing at the lip of the stage, promising that they would find the remains of the village that was there on the side of the mountain for thousands of years before the Europeans came. “So they could see what the Ohlones saw,” he had said, “maybe even dream their dreams.” Blue work shirt, dark tie, brown corduroy pants, and hiking boots. Mendoza’s intensity had made up for his small size, and his voice had filled the auditorium.
“How could I have spent three years at our school and passed up this chance?” Lila asked. “Three years thinking about, and then pass up this chance to be.”
“I guessed that you would sign up,” Francis said. “It didn’t surprise me. Though quite a few of the people on the faculty thought he was a phony. Or a lunatic,” he added, remembering Mendoza’s telling them that the Ohlones were not just outnumbered by the animals but by every species of animal, and claiming in a kind of chant that “if we put one of you and one of them side by side in their world, you would see emptiness and would despair. They would see the majesty of First Things, the nearness of God.”
For the first time, Lila took her eyes off the road, glanced at Francis. “But not you?” she asked. “You didn’t think he was a phony?”
“No, not me.”
“Why not? I mean, he was kind of intense. Sort of overboard.”
Francis hesitated. He’d concede Mendoza’s funny name, but he didn’t think he was overboard at all.
“Like, you’ll be three thousand miles away from home for two months, away from your wife and the school.”
“Yeah, it’s a long way.”
“So why’d you come if it’s so far away?”
“I’m only gone for the summer,” he said, thinking of his conversation with her mother. “You’re away from home from September to June.”
Lila frowned, took one hand off the wheel to push her blond hair away from her forehead. “Now you’re acting just like my mother,” she said. “Whenever she doesn’t want to tell me something I want to know, she changes the subject.”
“All right,” he said, giving in. “It’s like this: Once when I was a little kid, I was fishing with my dad.” He began to speak very fast now that he’d discovered he was going to tell her this amazing thing. “In a canoe. And a huge turtle swam up to the surface of the lake. Came right up beside me where I was in the bow of the canoe. He looked right at me, looked me right in the eyes.” He stopped talking suddenly, aware of how foolish he sounded.
“And you looked back at him,” Lila finished.
“Yes.”
“And then he went away?” Lila’s voice was very quiet.
“Yes. And then he went away.”
“You recognized each other,” she announced, and now he was surprised at how matter-of-fact her voice was. “He chose you,” she said. “He’s your totem. From out of the time when the earth was here and human beings were not.” All Francis could think about was how different this kid’s reaction was from Peggy’s when he tried to tell her what this moment meant to him.
“Thanks for telling me. I know you better now,” Lila said. “I’ve always wanted to know you. Now I do. Thanks.”
LATER, IN A campground near Winnemucca, Lila waited for sleep to come. She’d rather have been out under the stars, but Francis had insisted she put up her tent and sleep in it. Afraid some crazy rapist would come through. “Who knows who comes to public places like this?” he’d asked. Speaking like a dad! He was in his tent too, not far from hers. She imagined she could hear his breathing over the noise of the big trucks on Route 80 half a mile away. She shivered with her happiness and hugged herself, and then she fell asleep.
FIVE
In Fred Kindler’s office Peggy was saying, “I think I can help you,” and wondering if he could hear the shyness in her voice. She still felt she was usurping Francis’s place. “I think I’d be a good recruiter.”
Fred didn’t respond for several seconds that seemed like forever. Forget it, she wanted to say. It was just an idea.
In fact, he loved it. He was embarrassed that he had hesitated, caught assuming that Francis should be the one, not her. But he was sure she was right. “I should have thought of it myself,” he said. “You’ve been here longer and know the school better than anyone.”
“Except my husband,” Peggy murmured She needed to let Fred know he was forgiven.
“Yes. Well, he’s busy. He’d help if he could,” Fred said, and Peggy thought, Thanks. Thanks for saying that, wondering if her new friend would be this diplomatic if he weren’t the headmaster.
TWO DAYS LATER, the plane that Fred and Gail Kindler, Nan White, and Peggy took from Bradley Field to Hopkins Airport in Cleveland was two hours late; by the time they got across the airport and into their rented car for the drive to Shaker Heights, they knew the audience of potential students and their parents had already been gathered for half an hour in Steven and Sharon Maynard’s house. They arrived at the Maynard’s front porch at eight-thirty, feeling harried and rushed—an hour and fifteen minutes tardy, just as the summer sun was setting. Above them, draped from a second-story window, was a big American flag to celebrate the Fourth of July weekend, which would start in just two days.
Sharon Maynard greeted them in the spill of light from the front door of the big brick house, a tall, angular woman in her late forties, dressed in a white blouse and