The laughter was a cry for help, but no help came.
“If you keep this up you’ll go straight to your room,” Evelyn said. “And stay there. Do you hear?”
She heard. She ran out of the house leaving a trail of hiccups that hung in the air like bubbles.
Sitting in the sun on a packing case was the starfish, but she didn’t look at it. She kept her head turned away and walked past the starfish sideways like a crab.
Starfish, old men, stingerless bees and little boys who couldn’t swim. But not little girls.
Not little girls. The words were a stone fence behind which she would live forever, always young. But the moment had come when she was big enough to see over the fence, and what she saw was, yes, little girls, too.
She saw Jessie Banner in a rolling field of little girls. They lay like flowers dropped into the grass. Drowned, frozen, swatted like flies, slapped like mosquitoes, burned, smothered, broken, left to dry in the sun. She saw herself, Jessie, walking into the field of little girls to share death.
But the vision beyond the fence was too massive; it fell of its own weight into the bottom of her mind like a stone in a pond, and the only clues to its existence were the molecules it displaced, the bubbles of laughter, the hiccups, the swollen eyes.
“Hold your breath and swallow nine times,” Luisa said, dreaming on the swing in the pepper tree.
“What will I swallow?”
“Spit,” Luisa said. “Imagine, crying, at your age.”
“I wasn’t crying. I was laughing.”
It was very difficult to get enough spit for nine swallows but she did it by pretending she was sucking a lemon.
The hiccups went away and the world was suddenly and beautifully ordinary again. The rope of the swing scraped on bark, Luisa was patronizing and cross, the hummingbirds darted crazily in and out of the eucalyptus leaves and flung themselves at Jessie’s head. Spiders took a stroll in the sun and ants marched up and down the pepper tree.
Everything was alive, everything moved and felt and thought. Jessie’s pulse beat with love for this ordinary world. She loved even Luisa.
“I don’t think you’re a stinker,” Jessie said.
11
Back and forth Luisa swung and the topaz necklace swung, too, against her throat.
She couldn’t keep her hands off it; she fingered it like a rosary, and by its divine power she became a beautiful girl with yellow hair singing into a microphone. All the men crowded around her, and even the orchestra stopped playing to hear her better. The throbbing voice went on alone. Among the men was one in particular, the richest handsomest man in the world, swooning at her feet: Luisa, look at me, Luisa, just a glance, don’t be cold to me, Luisa! Slowly, contemptuously, she turned her head...
“You look funny,” Jessie said. “Why are you going like that for?”
“Stop interrupting me.”
“You weren’t doing anything much.”
“I was, I was!” She closed her eyes, but the rich handsome man couldn’t be resurrected. “I never have a minute’s peace.”
“Luisa...”
“Now what do you want?”
“I could trade you something for the necklace.”
“You haven’t got anything valuable enough.”
“I have so. It’s a secret. No one knows but me.”
“How much did it cost?”
“I don’t know, but it’s gold. It’s real gold. Probably cost a million dollars,” Jessie said recklessly.
“Then why don’t you sell it and buy a hundred necklaces?”
“Maybe not a million dollars.”
“Let me see it if it’s so valuable.”
Jessie hesitated. “Promise on your brother’s blood not to tell anybody?”
“Sure.”
“It’s in my room.”
“I wouldn’t trade the necklace for anything, but I’ll look at your whatever-it-is.” There was always the faintest, vaguest possibility that Jessie was telling the truth and that she had found something worth a million dollars. Not gold, but maybe radium.
Of course it was radium. What else? Jessie had been prying into things as usual and, by a miraculous accident, she’d found a piece of radium on the ground.
On the track of the radium Luisa became quite animated. She skipped along the path behind Jessie, a rich girl, an heiress, courted by dukes, riding to hounds, flying her own plane...
“Oh, my God,” Luisa said bleakly, and dropped onto Jessie’s bed as if she’d been struck from behind. “It’s only a watch.”
An ordinary man’s pocket watch with the crystal smashed and the gold chain clogged with dirt.
“But it’s gold,” Jessie said, “and it really works. It tells the time.”
She wound the watch, and sure enough it told the time quite loudly, tick-tick-tick. It was difficult to see the hands through the shattered crystal, but it was enough for Jessie to know that they were there. What time the hands told didn’t matter; it was time itself ticking away that was important. Jessie held in her palm the minutes and the years.
Luisa groaned and rolled her eyes. “A lousy old watch. Honestly. Where’d you get it?”
“Somewhere.”
“Maybe you stole it, for all I know.”
“I never did,” Jessie said. “I found it. Finders keepers.”
“Let me hold it a minute.”
“Why?”
“I want to look at it, is all. I wouldn’t trade for a billion dollars, but I can at least look at it, can’t I?”
“It’s my secretest treasure and your hands are dirty.” She was reluctant to let Luisa take the watch, not because of the dirty hands, but because the watch wasn’t entirely her own. She had found it, certainly, and finders were keepers, but her possession of it was, she knew, temporary; it hadn’t been ratified by any grown-ups. She had no real hold on the watch, it could be taken away from her at any time and for all sorts of reasons.
Luisa said, cunningly, “Imagine finding a watch on the road.”
“Not on the road.”
“Where then?”
“You’d tell.”
“On my brother’s blood I wouldn’t tell.”
They heard footsteps in the hall and Evelyn came into the room carrying a pile of Jessie’s freshly ironed clothes.
“Hi, baby,” Evelyn said. She smiled at Jessie and there was a coaxing and uncertain quality in the smile as if she wanted to make something up to her but wasn’t sure what it was. Jessie’s clothes over her arm were still warm from the iron. The clothes, without Jessie in them, were somehow very sweet; they conjured up a Jessie without faults, a sleeping child, innocent as heaven. It was a shock to come unexpectedly on the real Jessie, looking a little sullen, holding her hands behind her back, her eyes brooding with secrets.
“Open the second drawer, will you, Jess?” she said pleasantly.
Luisa rolled herself off the bed. “I got to be going.”
“Don’t let me interrupt your plans. I’ll just put the clothes away and vanish.”
“I got to be going anyway.”
With Luisa gone the minutes and the years were very loud in passing. They couldn’t be ignored.
“What’s the big secret, Jessie?”
“Nothing.”
“I hear a clock ticking.”
“It’s only a watch,” Jessie said.
“Daddy’s?”
“No one’s. Just mine.”
“Where would you get a watch?”
“Found it.”
“You’d better show it to me, don’t you think?”
The moment had come, as she knew it would. That was the terrible part about finding important things — someone else had to lose them first.
She handed the watch to her mother, suddenly feeling almost relieved to be rid of it because it was, in a misty way, connected with the dead man in the woods and the drowned boy.