“You’re missing your guitar?” Russ said in a choked voice.
“Uh, yeah.”
“They took mine, too,” another girl called from across the room. “It’s definitely not here. They freaking stole my Martin!”
Catching a note of hysteria, Russ removed himself from Frances and found his voice. “All right, ah—listen up. This is obviously not good, but we need to stay calm. Let’s get the lanterns on and do a careful inventory. If anything’s broken, anything’s missing, I want to hear about it.”
“My guitar is missing,” Darcie Mandell reported dryly.
“So, yes, we seem to be missing two guitars, but let’s see if there’s anything else. We’re in a place of underprivilege, and sometimes these things happen. The important thing is that we’re together as a group. We’re safe as long as we stay together.”
“I’m not feeling especially safe,” Darcie said, “despite our being together.”
“Let’s straighten up the room and see what we’ve got.”
Still unable to look at Frances, he lit two lanterns and checked his own belongings. He wasn’t angry; he was struggling not to cry. The sorrow pertained to everything—the hardness of reservation life, the fears and hurt feelings of forty good kids, the cultural and economic gulf between New Prospect and Kitsillie—but especially to his own vanity. He’d imagined himself a friend of the Navajos and a bridger of divides, imagined he knew better than the people who’d warned him not to come here. He hated to think what God thought of him.
It emerged that only the two guitars had been stolen. The greater damage was in the violation of their space, the chill that Clyde’s aggression had put on their fellowship. When the group gathered again around the candle, the contrast to the previous night couldn’t have been starker. Unhappiness or fear was in almost every face.
“So we’ve encountered our first adversity,” Russ said. “Adversity can strengthen us as a group, but it’s important that I hear from every one of you tonight. We’ll go around the circle and hear what each of us is feeling. Speaking for myself, I’m very sad—sad for us and sad for whoever broke in. It could be that we’ll decide not to stay here, but my own inclination is to stick it out and deal with the issue, not walk away from it. In practical terms, at least one adviser will now stay in the building at all times, and tomorrow morning I will deal with this. I will try to get Darcie and Katie’s guitars back.”
“How about just calling the police?” Ted Jernigan said unpleasantly.
“We can report this to the tribal police, but I’d like to understand better why it happened. Let’s see what we can achieve with listening before we bring the law in.”
It took more than an hour to go around the circle, and Russ wasn’t Ambrose. He didn’t have limitless patience with the self-drama of adolescents, the Crossroads-encouraged inflation of emotional scrapes into ambulance-worthy traumas. He himself was upset, but his fault gave him the right to be, and although he’d asked to hear from everyone, because this was the Crossroads way, it tried his patience to sit in a world of real social injustice, real suffering, and make such an opera of the theft of two guitars, easily replaceable by their owners’ parents. The outpouring of support for Darcie and Katie was comparable to what Alice Raymond had received when her mother died. Of all the feelings voiced at the long candle, the only one Russ respected was the group’s frustration with being quarantined from interaction with the Navajos. He shared that frustration.
In the end, they voted to stay at least one more day. All the advisers except Ted Jernigan favored staying. Afterward, while the group bedded down, its spirits subdued, Russ went outside to look at the sky. He hoped to reconnect with God, but the door behind him opened. Frances had followed him.
“I thought you handled that well,” she said.
“I feel bad for the kids, especially the sophomores. This is their first experience here.”
“They respect you—I could see it. I don’t know why you thought you shouldn’t be a youth minister.”
His eyes filled with gratitude. “Now I’m the one who needs a hug.”
She gave it to him. The blessing of her touch, the palpable reality of the woman in his arms, was making a believer of him. It was as if he’d yearned to know God without actually believing that He existed. Now he could feel that, far from overhoping, he might have underestimated his chances—that Frances’s decision to come to Arizona had been, in fact, a decision about him.