She hadn’t been to Mission San Luis since elementary school, and what she mostly remembered was the long climb uphill to get there. Otis had dropped her off at the bottom of the hill and zoomed off to God knows where, refusing to wait, even when Ava promised she’d just be a few minutes. He was off on some Otis errand of mysterious importance. But actually she was glad that he’d gone, glad to be left alone and entirely free of her family.
It was late afternoon. On top of the hill the live oaks shaded the paths and buildings. She followed the path to the right, past the friary and the huge thatched-roof church, seeing no one until she noticed a few people gathered in front of a cottage across the field. She had no idea what sort of craft or trade Travis demonstrated—had no idea whether or not Travis was even working today. But she needed to talk to him. Talking to someone she didn’t know well on the phone made her nervous, and he wasn’t on MySpace, so she’d taken a chance and come here. She’d taken a chance! She didn’t usually take chances.
A gaggle of little boys in baseball caps raced past her, going the opposite way, red-faced and shouting. She approached the cottage. There were gardens around it and a small bonfire in a clearing. The smell of meat cooking wafted up from an iron kettle in the fire. A costumed woman was holding forth near the fire, while an earnest middle-aged couple in matching T-shirts and shorts, with big smiles plastered on their faces, looked on.
The talking lady, who wore an ivory linen mantilla and silver earrings and an ivory linen bustled dress, turned to include Ava as part of her audience, and Ava felt obliged to stand and listen.
“That’s my cook,” the talking lady said, pointing to a darker, younger woman sitting on a log nearby, sewing. “She’s fixing our stew for dinner. I have to keep an eye on her so she doesn’t burn it.”
The young woman, also in costume—a much simpler one—didn’t even look up.
“I’ve just been at the church, saying my rosary,” the talking lady went on, as if they’d asked. “My older brother is the friar here, and another brother is the merchant trader. He has three ships anchored down at St. Marks. He takes the things we make here in the village and trades them in Havana for things from Europe, like playing cards and tools and olive oil. There’s his stand.” She gestured at a little thatched-roof stand across the path, where animal skins hung on a line.
“Is there anyone working there now?” Ava jumped in.
“My brother has just set off down the Wakulla River with some Indians in canoes, headed for St. Marks, carrying more of our products to trade. I’ve been praying for their safe return.”
Ava guessed that this meant that Travis wasn’t acting as the merchant trader today. She stood there, swatting gnats away from her eyes, wishing she could swish her ponytail like a horse’s tail.
The talking lady gazed quizzically up at the sky. “Oh dear. Looks like rain.”
Actually, it didn’t. But it was cooler today than it usually was in August, or so everyone was saying. Only in the mid-eighties, with low humidity. It could be because Hurricane Grayson had gone back out into the Gulf. And then, who knew what it would do?
“Heavens, I need to bring in my children’s beds before it rains!” said the lady. “I set them out to air this morning. My husband and I and our ten children live in that cottage.”
A black rooster and some speckled hens darted past, weaving this way and that.
The man listening asked the talking lady if the hens were hers.
She couldn’t give a straight answer, it seemed. “I lost three hens to hawks last week.” She went on and on, in her phony antiquated English, when Spanish would’ve been more accurate. Ava listened as long as she could stand it. Finally she interrupted and asked her if Travis was working there today.
“He’s a soldier, down at the fort,” she told Ava. “Would you like to see inside my cottage?” she asked her group. The nice couple followed her and Ava turned and hurried off toward the fort.
She wanted to talk to Travis about everything that had been going on at home. Things had been bad, very bad. Travis might not be glad to see her at all, since Rev. Buff was his mother’s brother, and his uncle, but this was another chance she had to take. The red dust on the paved path got between her flip-flops and her feet, and she wished she’d worn sneakers. She didn’t have much tolerance for the physical irritations that most people could just ignore, but if she banged her head hard on something it didn’t seem to hurt her as much as it would most people. Most people. She got tired of most people. Travis wasn’t like most people, either.
A log stockade enclosed the white stucco fort. Inside, Travis was talking to the group of sweaty little boys. He wore the same white collarless shirt and breeches with the braided belt and felt hat that he’d been wearing at church, the same brown knee sock thingies and leather shoe boots. “Ava!” he said, and she could tell he was really glad to see her. He held up his finger, meaning, wait a minute. So she did.
A set of military spears with wooden handles and wicked-looking blades hung on the wall behind him, and he explained the differences among them to the boys. They were different kinds of pole arms, he said. One was for fighting on horseback, another type had different-shaped blades to demonstrate rank. The boys made sounds of approval.
Then he showed them the matchlock and flintlock muskets hanging on another wall and some swords lying on a shelf right at the boys’ eye level.
The boys crowded close to the swords, itching to pick them up. They weren’t even listening to Travis, she could tell. Each one wanted to snatch up a sword and stab something.
Finally Ava couldn’t stand it anymore. “You boys need to get out of here,” she said. “Time’s up. Move along.”
There were four of them, and they all looked at her with varying degrees of surprise and annoyance on their faces. Then one of the boys said, “Vamoose,” and they all took off together out of the fort like a school of little fishes.
“Is there anyone else in here?” Ava asked him, and Travis said no.
“When are you going to be on America’s Next Top Model?” He leaned back against the clay shelf that was built into the wall. “I’ve been watching it every week.”
Was that all he cared about? She leaned against the shelf next to him. She told him she wasn’t interested in being on that show anymore.
“Good,” he said. “It’s really lame.”
That made her feel better. “You didn’t come to support group yesterday.”
He shrugged, lifting his tricorne back off his forehead. There was a slight indentation in his forehead and Ava longed to touch it the way the boys had longed to touch the swords.
“I don’t need to go to that group,” he said. “I don’t have Asperger’s.”
“What do you have, then?”
“You mean like what disorder? I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m just going to live my life. Screw all that disorder and syndrome shit.”
“Tough talk,” Ava said. She knew she would think of herself as someone with Asperger’s syndrome for the rest of her life, and it felt like a huge, unfair burden. If she ever voiced this sentiment, someone would point out that everyone had burdens of one kind or another. That was the Christian way to look at it, but she wasn’t a Christian, so did she have to look at it that way? It sucked. Period. But at least she could read about Asperger’s and make sense of herself, and how many people could say that?
“Did you just come here to yell at me for not coming to group?” Travis said. “I didn’t think you’d care.”
“I’m not yelling. I care.”
“That’s good,” Travis said, and they both leaned in awkward silence. Ava kicked the toe of her flip-flop in the red clay floor. Outside there was the sound of birds, a rooster crowing, and the boys somewhere yelling and whooping.
“I wish I could just stay in the seventeenth century,” Travis said.
“Why?”
“My mom. She’s always in a bad mood. Either drunk or trying not to drink or has a hangover. Do you drink?”
Ava shook her head. “I mean, I have a couple of times.” That was a lie. She’d tasted wine once and hated it. In high school she’d never been invited to the parties where kids drank. Her few friends in high school had been the uncool supersmart girls, now gone off to good colleges across the country, who’d had slumber parties where they watched Gilmore Girls.
Travis straightened up, turned around, reached up and removed one of the rifles from the wall.
What was he going to do with a gun? “Is that real?” Ava asked him.
“Of course,” he said. “We’re not supposed to let visitors hold them, but do you want to?”
He took aim at something outside the front door. “We keep our gunpowder kegs in a room back there, if you want to see.”
“No, thank you,” Ava said, and then asked him if he knew about Buff and Suzi, and when he said no, she told him what had happened, and she told him how her mother had confronted Buff at church and that he’d denied doing anything, and how her father had beaten Buff to a pulp and how Buff had threatened to press charges, and how that didn’t sound good, even if she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, and how her parents had reported Buff’s abuse of Suzi to the police and he’d denied everything to them, too, and how Suzi had just been crying in her room and going to counseling appointments, and her mother had been crying, too, and her dad had either been angry and yelling or not speaking to anyone.
Travis had lowered the rifle and was frowning at her. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“Since he’s your uncle, I thought you’d want to know. Bob’s your uncle!” she couldn’t help adding.
“Buff’s my uncle. He’d never do anything like that. He’s a minister!”
Ava couldn’t believe that he was standing up for Buff. She’d thought he’d be on her side, on Suzi’s side. “You don’t believe Suzi? You think she’s lying? She’s not a liar.”
Travis lifted the long gun to his shoulder again, sighting an imaginary target across the room, and Ava felt like slugging him. It seemed very important, suddenly, to prove Suzi right and Buff wrong. But how to do it when she wasn’t there with them? Actually, she knew how to do it. She could reveal her secret to Travis, about Mr. Boy taking the naked pictures of her and Buff showing her that he’d seen them. But if she told Travis, she’d have no control over the information anymore. If Travis told anyone, more people would get in trouble, including her. But she really, really wanted Travis on her side, and Suzi’s side, and telling on herself was the one way she could think of to get him there.
“Hey,” Travis said, hanging the musket back up on the wall. “Would you like a tour of the mission? We close in forty-five minutes so they won’t care if I leave my post. I’m in training to give tours. What I want to do eventually is work on the archaeological dig. They’ve found some cool stuff—pottery, bowls, tools. I’m going to FSU next year and majoring in archaeology. I’m going to get my own apartment. Have you been watching the news about Hurricane Grayson? There’s a storm warning for the entire coastline of Florida. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. First time that’s ever happened.” He started walking out of the fort, and Ava had to catch up.
Okay, so he didn’t want to talk about the Buff thing, and Ava realized she was sick of hearing about it and talking about it and thinking about it, and glad not to have to tell Travis what she didn’t want to tell anyone.
He and Ava went into the friary and then into the gorgeous church with the high thatched roof, which let in tiny beams of light, wisps of straw floating down, and the dirt floors and glowing religious paintings, then they walked over to the Indian council house. She could see why Travis liked it here so much. Up on this hill there was a touch of a breeze every now and then. And the traffic on Pensacola Street was just a faint murmur.
As she was walking around with Travis, she had three realizations, none of them directly related to what she was looking at. The first realization was that looking at the pictures and the places and imagining what went on in Mission San Luis felt like a key into a new kingdom. Re-creations of the past. She wanted to re-create the past. She wanted to immerse herself in history. The history of something. She would major in history. History, she realized, was what she cared about most. She’d been skirting around this knowledge for some time. She’d been most interested in the story of Elvis, in his history, even more than his music. She’d loved reading books about how horse breeds came to be, about the origins of foxhunting and what sort of people had gone in for it. The subjects weren’t as important to her as the stories. What sort of history she might want to study, the time period, at what college, she didn’t know yet. But she knew. History! That’s where she wanted to be. She felt something in her settle and lift at the same time.
The second realization was that she really liked Travis. She felt happy around him. Relaxed. Even today, with all the stress at home. He was cute and smart and interesting, and she wanted to go out with him. Not out-out, like going steady, but she wanted to go on a date with him and see what happened. She hadn’t had any fun dates ever. But she felt ready to try again.
The third realization wasn’t so good. It struck her that she’d been remiss in keeping her secret from her family, especially now that Suzi was in such a bad way. It wasn’t Travis she needed to tell. She needed to tell her parents. Suzi, surprisingly, hadn’t ratted on her about the naked photos, but she needed to rat on herself.
If she told her parents about her experiences with Mr. Boy and Buff, her story would add more weight to Suzi’s case. It would also get Ava into trouble, but was that such a big deal now? No, Suzi was her little sister, and she needed her help. Ava rarely got to feel like the big sister with Super Suzi as a sibling, but this would give her the chance. It would upset her parents even more, though. She hated to be the cause of more pain and conflict, but she had to do it.
She and Travis were standing at a display of knee-high pottery jars in the Indian council house, a large circular structure that could accommodate three thousand people, and Travis had gone quiet and was watching her. “What are you thinking about?” he asked her. “Are you bored? I’m sorry, I talk too much.”
“I was wondering how I was going to get home,” Ava said. She wasn’t, but she should have been, since Otis had roared off before she could make arrangements with him to pick her up.
“I can take you,” Travis said. “We could get ice cream first, if you want.”
“I want,” Ava said, knowing she’d remember this afternoon for the rest of her life, walking around Mission San Luis with Travis, realizing that she liked him, realizing what she wanted to study in school, realizing that she had to help her sister, come what may. Two great things and one awful thing in one afternoon. And there was Hurricane Grayson, which might or might not cause a lot of trouble.
Why did the good and the bad have to come together? It seemed, often, that they did.