“Sorta.”
“I found the you-know-what in the woods today. The... dead man.”
“You weren’t supposed to,” Luisa said. “It’s a secret.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s in hell fire.”
“I don’t believe it,” Jessie said, shaken. “My mother says there’s no such place as hell fire.”
“She doesn’t know. She’s not a Catholic.”
“Why did he go to hell fire?”
“You’re too little to know. He did, that’s all. There are rules about it and he broke one.”
“Do you ever break any?”
“Lots,” Luisa said recklessly. “I’ll probably go to hell, too, only I don’t care. It can’t be much worse than being stuck out here with not even a human being to talk to.”
“You can talk to me.”
“Oh, you. I meant, real people. Boys and men mostly. I hate women.”
“Maybe you could get married.”
“I intend to, don’t worry. I already got a boyfriend.”
“I might get married myself,” Jessie said thoughtfully. “Maybe if Billy hadn’t of drowned I could marry him.”
“Billy?” Luisa let out a noise that sounded like a muffled giggle, and a moment later she slammed the window shut and pulled down the blind.
Moving softly across the room in her bare feet, Jessie turned on the lamp on the bureau. It was here she kept her most important treasures, a clown sachet that smelled of lilacs, odds and ends of shells and colored pebbles, and a family of tiny rubber dolls living in an abalone shell, each of them no bigger than Jessie’s little finger. Holding the place of honor in the center of the bureau was the baby starfish housed in one of Carmelita’s glass casseroles.
It was a most unusual starfish, everyone agreed, because most starfish had just five or six arms, but Jessie’s had eleven and a half. Jessie called it Cinderella and anticipated the day when it would recognize her and come over to the side of the bowl in response to its name. So far the starfish had done nothing but sit in the sand at the bottom of the bowl, ignoring its lavish banquet of bread crumbs and rice krispies and sowbugs and sea lettuce. But Jessie knew this was because it felt strange in front of a strange little girl, just as she had felt on the first day of school. She was fiercely convinced that it would soon get over its shyness and respond to her overwhelming love and tenderness.
“Cinderella,” Jessie whispered, tapping the side of the bowl very gently. “Here, Cinderella. Come on.”
She was almost certain that Cinderella moved an arm languidly in reply, but she couldn’t be sure; the water was so murky with disintegrated food that Cinderella looked like a delicate pink brooch accidentally dropped into the bowl.
It was possible that since it was after nine o’clock Cinderella might be sleeping. Jessie didn’t want to disturb it, but she did want it to move just a little to dispel the vague fear that was pressing against her heart.
“Cinderella, it’s me, it’s Jessie Banner.”
She tapped the glass again with her fingernails, and this time she was sure that there was no movement at all except a tiny ripple of water that danced to the other side of the bowl and back again.
She pulled out the second bottom drawer of the bureau, and using the edge of it as a stool to stand on, she peered anxiously down into the dingy water. The sea smell of the water mingled sickeningly with the lilac sachet and the sharp acrid odor of the abalone shell.
“Cinderella,” Jessie said. “Look where I am now, up here.”
Putting her hand into the water she touched one of Cinderella’s fragile beaded arms, and then slowly she drew the starfish out. It lay, soft and cold, in the palm of her hand. The tiny hairs along its arms didn’t wave and tickle her skin the way they had when she’d first picked it out of the tide pool.
After a moment she put it back into the water. It sank to the bottom and she realized, not only that it was dead, but that all her plans and hopes for it had been futile. It had never been just shy and sleepy; it had never heard her calling, or seen her, or known she was Jessie Banner; it had never eaten the bread crumbs and the sowbugs, or been aware of its snug little home in the casserole; it had never liked her.
With a cry she picked up the casserole and climbed down from the drawer. Some of the water spilled on her nightgown and the wet cloth stuck to her skin, quite cold at first but getting warmer and warmer until she hardly noticed the wetness. Without turning on the hall light she crept down the stairs holding the heavy bowl awkwardly in her arms. The smell of the water nauseated her, it had become the smell of death; and the starfish at the bottom was no longer Cinderella, cunningly and delicately made like a breathing flower. It was a dead thing that Jessie couldn’t bear to see or to touch. The real Cinderella lay close against Jessie’s heart, and she could keep it safe there only by getting rid of this impostor.
The voices from the living room were quite distinct now but she didn’t stop to eavesdrop. Slowly and silently she went through the dark hall and the dining room with her burden, not sure yet what she intended to do with it.
She pressed open the swinging door into the kitchen, squinting her eyes against the sudden dazzle of light.
Carmelita was finishing the dishes, humming to herself. In the platform rocker by the window Mr. Roma sat reading the newspaper. His glasses were perched in the middle of his nose as if they had alighted there by accident and meant to fly away at any minute.
He held the paper at arm’s length, frowning at it over the top of his glasses. These newspaper people were getting very careless lately about the printing. In spite of the spectacles Carmelita had given him for Christmas he found it difficult to make out the furry letters.
“Bless my buttons,” he said in surprise. “It’s Jessie.”
Jessie put the bowl on the floor and wiped her hands very carefully on her nightgown.
“This is a little visit, eh?” Mr. Roma said, taking off his glasses. “The starfish is hungry again?”
Jessie stared at him, mute and suffering.
“I told you, Jessie. I said to you, this little fellow cannot live in a bowl; no, he must have the whole sea, he cannot breathe unless the waves stir up the water.”
“I made waves. I stirred it up.”
“The whole sea,” Mr. Roma said again. “I am sorry.”
“It was only a fish anyway, just a plain old fish.”
But her voice trembled, and Mr. Roma understood that of the billions of fish in the sea this one alone had been raised from anonymity by Jessie’s love. In all the seven seas there was not another one quite like it and never would be.
“Carmelita,” Mr. Roma said, “is there a small piece of cake left from supper?”
“I don’t want any cake, thank you,” Jessie said.
“A very small piece?”
“No.” She couldn’t explain to him that eating a piece of cake would only make her feel worse because ordinarily she would have shared it with Cinderella, floating the crumbs very cautiously so as not to frighten it.
“Not hungry, eh?”
“No.”
“Come, stand on the rug. Your feet will get cold.”
“I could sit on your knee.”
“Yes, I guess you could.”
She sat on his knee but it turned out to be quite bony and uncomfortable, and after a moment she got off again and stood hesitantly on the braided cotton rug.
“I could bury it,” she said finally. “Like the man in the woods, with a stone to show where.”
“It’s too late to do it now.”
“No, it isn’t. I’m not tired, I’m not hungry or cold or sleepy or anything. People always think I am when I’m not. Anyway it won’t take long. It would just take a little hole, Cinderella is so little.”