That the day of her escape didn’t come for more than two years, just a month shy of her seventeenth birthday, would seem comical to her only after she’d started work at the restaurant in Del Mar, and long after the day the vegetable truck pulled up outside the school’s cafeteria and the pudgy-faced young deliveryman met eyes with her from fifty yards away. She’d let him reach under her blouse as they sped northward a few miles from the school, only to run away from his shouting voice as he pumped gas along a speeding state highway half an hour later. Long after all that, she could finally laugh at herself for eyeing the gate every morning and afternoon and evening, could laugh at the girl she’d been in those days, could laugh at her fear of being found out by her mother and father and dragged all the way back to St. Anne’s—or worse now, back to San Diego.
Not that she’d gotten so far. But twenty miles proved a great distance indeed once she’d added a sympathetic old lady who didn’t mind waiting on her first week’s rent and a HELP WANTED sign at Phil’s Roadside Café and a haircut and dark eye shadow and a waitress’s white uniform. Far from Philippa, sure, far from the world of her parents, who to this day hadn’t shown up. Occasionally she worried about them, how she’d hurt them, but really they were strangers, people too busy to even know her, and so at other times she figured her disappearance must have come as a relief. Last year she’d gone to the horse races and there, scanning the crowd with rented binoculars, she thought while holding her breath she might see them.
But she’d never once, no, not once, been troubled by the fact that they hadn’t come around looking for her, that her name and their desperation to find her hadn’t filled the airwaves and headlines all over Southern California.
No, she told Eileen that night, when she told her all the rest. No, that didn’t trouble her at all.
They’d had dinner at a seafood restaurant on Camino Del Mar, and really Claudette just couldn’t hold back anything. She’d just kept talking. Talking through dinner so that Eileen was finished long before she was, talking as they walked back toward Ocean Avenue, talking as they took off their shoes and walked onto the beach in front of Eileen’s church just as the last orange glow of sunset faded into the blue night. Then, sitting together with the pads of their feet in the damp sand, feeling close to her and more open and honest than she’d ever been with anyone, she said, “You never talk about your church.”
Eileen tilted her head just so, and though Claudette didn’t turn to look, she knew that she’d nearly rested it on her shoulder. She could feel her fine hair, the loose and straggling outer halo, brush against her neck. They had touched. “My church?” she said. “I never thought to call it that.”
Claudette had expected her to talk about it, though she had never stopped to think how strange it was that Eileen hadn’t. Now as the waves murmured and fizzed in the dark before them, the subject seemed hush-hush, clandestine. The idea troubled her. “I didn’t want to ask,” she said quickly, defensively. “It’s a person’s private business.”
With her knees up in front of her under her long skirt, Eileen arched forward and hugged her shins. Her eyes appeared to focus on a little rift of wet sand between their feet. “Not at all,” she said. “We want everyone to understand the vision. It’s just—”
A single wave crashed, propelling a line of foam toward them, nearly reaching their bare feet.
“It’s just that you may not agree with our way of thinking. People often don’t.”
Claudette didn’t really have a way of thinking, at least not about religion. Her parents had taken her to church only sparsely as a child, and even then it seemed like a social function, a necessary part of being upright citizens whose name now and again showed up in the paper. At St. Anne’s she’d gone to mass as an obligation, finding it dreary, the pews uncomfortable, the priest’s messages lacking epiphany. The closest she’d come to religious ecstasy there was looking at prints of the famous Renaissance paintings in the library. Sometimes, though, now, the sounds she heard from inside Eileen’s church, or whatever it was, filled her chest with an expectant sort of lightness. Their songs and the exhortation of a man’s voice, maybe even Eileen’s brother’s, followed her home at night like whispers just behind her ears. It occurred to her she’d never even seen this brother. “Ever since you came to town I wanted to know,” she said. And then, recalling the older man in his beige robe with the children, said, “What’s the vision? I’ve heard that.”
The Vision, Eileen explained, spelled with a capital V, came to humankind at the foot of Mount Shasta, and not to her brother, but to their former leader, a woman by the name of Sophie Rhodes. “We were following Sophie before we came here,” she said. “Oliver met her years ago in Washington State, before I joined him, back when I was in New York and still married. She was very charming, very unconventional. She had the Vision, and we revered her for it, revered her so much that she could live like a hermit among us. From the beginning my brother spoke for her, because, you see, he’d had his own vision, his own ideas before meeting her, when he first headed west after the sighting—the original vision you might say—and last year when she led us back to Mount Shasta, back to the site of the Vision itself, promising that there we would be taken up, that a new dawn would come, well, when that didn’t happen, when we all stood in the rain hungry and in need of a bathroom for two days, when all the name-calling began, it was Oliver everyone chose to follow. Sophie Rhodes left us. But when she left, the Vision transferred to him. And now he is the One. He’s what we call the Tzadi Sophit.”
Clearly she was being told a flat joke, and so she laughed, kicking a little sand with her toes. “And what kind of name is that?”
Eileen’s eyes had been focused out to sea as if she could see a great distance in the dark, out past the moon-reflecting waves and the faint curve of the horizon. Stars were out now, glimmering, watchful, and Claudette was more confused than before. In fact, again, she felt a little scared. “The name isn’t important,” said Eileen. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” she said. And then, trying to turn a corner, “What about the Vision? What is it?”
“Do you think we’re alone in this solar system?”
“Us?”
“Humankind. All of humankind. Do you believe we’re actually alone?”
Claudette thought of the millions of people all over the planet and the millions more mammals and birds and insects, the worms and fungi and bacteria, the trees. “No,” she said. “Of course not.”
“What if I told you there were people like us from elsewhere? From other worlds?”
It seemed to Claudette that the evening was bending toward a tepid joke. “I’ve seen about that in magazines,” she said. “Martians and all. I don’t go in for it, personally.”
Now Eileen dropped her legs to one side and turned to face her, leaning back on one arm, her chin raised slightly, her wide eyes intense. “But it’s true,” she said. “I happen to know that it’s true. And they have a message for all of us. That’s the Vision, Claudette. Their message is the Vision. One day we’ll build a home for all of us, for everyone, and the Vision will be made real on Earth.”