She blinked away the sudden tears that stung her eyelids. Mr. Roma saw them anyway.
“It won’t take us a minute,” he said.
Carmelita muttered in Spanish that it was not good, such play-acting about death; it would bring more bad luck to a house already loaded down with it.
Mr. Roma rebuked her softly: “Houses don’t have luck. Only people have. And then, who can say, until the very end, what has been good luck and what has been bad luck?”
“The priest can. You talk like an infidel.”
“Ah, now.” He took the flashlight out of the cupboard and handed it to Jessie. Then he picked up the bowl from the floor, wrinkling his nose a little at the smell.
Jessie opened the screen door for him, holding the flashlight, and looking very solemn and pale, like an acolyte in her white nightgown. She looked so different that James didn’t recognize her. He turned and waddled away, squawking, into the shadows.
“Play-acting,” Carmelita repeated with scorn, but she followed them out on the porch, wiping her hands on her apron. To bury this soulless animal in the ground like a man was a sin, and never again would she use the glass casserole, never. She would hide it in the shed and pretend she had mislaid it. Or she would throw it over the steep cliff where the cormorants lived and the next high tide would carry away the pieces or grind them to dust on the rocks below the cliff.
Standing on the dark porch she crossed herself, her flabby face lifted toward the cold bright eyes of heaven.
“Here,” Jessie said. “Under my window.”
“That would be suitable.”
Mr. Roma dug the hole himself, using a little stick to pry loose the hard dry ground beside the oleander.
“Tomorrow,” he said, chipping at the earth, “tomorrow, maybe Mrs. Wakefield will find you a new starfish, a bigger prettier one.”
“No, thank you.”
“Mrs. Wakefield knows all about the things in the sea. She will fix the starfish for you so you can take it home with you and show to your friends. Of course it will not be alive,” he added apologetically, “but it will look so.”
“It won’t move, though.”
“No. But it will be pretty to put on your dresser and use as a pin cushion.”
“I don’t have any pins.”
“Even so,” he said briskly, “it will be pretty to look at and remind you of the sea.”
“How big will it be?”
“Big as your head.”
“Bless my buttons,” Jessie said. “I’d like one like that.”
“Tomorrow. The very first thing tomorrow. You’re a very sensible girl. Already you know something some people never learn — when you lose one thing you must accept a substitute and be cheerful about it.”
Jessie didn’t quite understand what he meant but she was warmed by his approval. She felt impervious to the cold slap of the wind.
Leaning back on his heels, Mr. Roma said, “There now, it is all ready. You bring the little starfish.”
Jessie tipped the water out of the bowl. It oozed out slowly, thick with the soggy bread crumbs and the slimy sea lettuce and the sowbugs that floated like little black boats down a sluggish river. She picked up the starfish, pretending it was only a flower she’d found unexpectedly on the ground.
She put it into the hole Mr. Roma had dug, and he covered it up very quickly and neatly. To mark the grave he pressed into the ground with his heel a white pebble with grey stripes; and beside the pebble he laid an oleander blossom, no longer fresh but still showing signs of pink under its sun seared edges.
“You feel better now,” Mr. Roma stated. “I know how it is. The starfish is buried and already it has become part of the past. Maybe you’re already planning how you will tell your friends about it, eh? ‘Once I had a little starfish,’ you will say. ‘He was a pretty little fellow but he died, and it was nobody’s fault.’ ”
“I’ll tell them he drowned.”
“Oh, no. Now that isn’t right. No, a starfish cannot drown. He died for lack of air.”
“It looked like he was drowned, like Billy.”
Mr. Roma glanced at her quickly. “Who said that Billy was drowned?”
“Mrs. Wakefield.”
“No, no, I’m quite sure you’re mistaken, Jessie. Maybe you didn’t understand her. Maybe she said, Billy is dead.”
“She told me herself that he had a bad accident, he was drowned.”
“Well.” He stood for a moment, scuffing the ground with the toe of his shoe like a hesitant child. Then he turned and picked up the empty bowl. “Come along now. It’s getting late.”
She took his free hand and walked along beside him with her nightgown flapping around her legs and pushing her along like a sail in the wind.
Carmelita was waiting for them at the kitchen door. She had taken the scarf off her head for the night and her hair bristled with bobby pins like a porcupine. Her voice bristled, too, with sharp staccato Spanish:
“Leave the casserole on the steps. I will not have it in the house.”
“Is she mad?” Jessie said anxiously to Mr. Roma.
“No, no. She wants me to leave the bowl outside.”
“Why?”
“It smells a little.” He put the bowl on the steps and opened the screen door.
The kitchen was warm and alive with lights. The lights splashed like acid into Jessie’s eyes and they watered feebly and wouldn’t stay open.
“The little one’s tired,” Carmelita said reprovingly. “All this play-acting, all this night air. What will her mother and father have to say about this?”
“We will be very quiet,” Mr. Roma said. “Eh, Jessie? Can we go upstairs very, very quiet?”
“I can go up by myself. You have squeaky shoes on.”
“You’re a sensible girl.”
“Good night, Mr. Roma.”
“Good night, Jessie.”
She slipped out through the swinging door, through the dining room and into the hall. As she ducked past the doorway of the living room she had a glimpse of Mrs. Wakefield sitting at the piano. Her right arm hung straight down at her side, as if it was broken, and with her left hand she was playing soft, low chords, humming the melody absentmindedly, her eyes half-closed. Her voice brushed softly against the air, like spider webs.
When she reached her room again Jessie closed the door tight. The wet patch on her nightgown had dried, and there was nothing to show that she’d been downstairs at all except the empty spot on the bureau where the casserole had been.
She tried to keep from looking at it as she switched off the lamp, but the gap was there even in the dark. She couldn’t escape from it any more than she could escape from the gap in her mouth when she lost a tooth. A new tooth always grew in its place, but the period of loss, of ugliness, was never quite forgotten.
Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow.
It was like a present under the tree at Christmas. It couldn’t be actually opened ahead of time, but it could be wondered about, shaken, smelled, touched on the outside, the ribbons loosened a little, the paper pierced with peepholes.
She went to bed hugging the box of tomorrow with its new starfish, not yet found, and the piece of chocolate cake waiting in the cake box, and the swim in the sea with Mrs. Wakefield. She had a transient feeling of contempt for the boy Billy who couldn’t even swim.
7
Mrs. Wakefield turned from the piano, rubbing her hands as if to restore their warmth and flexibility. “I’m badly out of practice. I haven’t touched a piano for over a year.”
“I don’t play at all,” Mark said. “It sounds wonderful to me.”
Mrs. Wakefield got up, making a funny little grimace of protest. “I could never play very well, just enough to be able to read notes if I looked at them long and hard enough. I didn’t start to learn, actually, until after my son was born and we came here to live. My son was very fond of music.”