She turned her gaze toward the sea. Through an open space between trees she could see, dimly, part of the island, a little barren mountain rising out of the sea, where no one lived but a flock of sheep starving in the drought, and the black vicious ravens grown fat on sheep’s entrails.
“I couldn’t stand it anymore. Everywhere I went people stared and whispered, and then turned away breaking into self-conscious chatter. They never looked at me as if I were a person. To them I was the mother of that half-wit, the woman with the queer little boy. I was ashamed, yes, I admit it. Who wouldn’t have been ashamed? Then when I came back here I met Mark and he looked at me as if I was a woman, a real woman. And I felt like one, too, for the first time in years. I’ve been cheated. Perhaps it’s made a monster of me, I don’t know. I feel that from now on I’m entitled to anything I can lay my hands on.”
“My Luisa has been cheated, too — to be born half-mulatto, half-Mexican — but if she talked like you I would be worried. I would wonder about her — her mind.”
“Don’t worry about my mind. It’s very clear. I’m not muddled anymore at all.”
“What will you do? He — I’m sure he will not leave his family. He belongs to them.”
“Only half,” she said, softly. “He’ll never really belong to them. And Jessie — Jessie is all mine.”
“It is bad to talk like that.”
“You must try to understand me, Mr. Roma. After all, we’ve known each other a long time, and you’ve always admired me, haven’t you? You’ve always said I was a fine woman. Those were your very words.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll have a pleasant goodbye, then?”
“Yes, Mrs. Wakefield.”
They shook hands, but at her touch he seemed suddenly to grow smaller, like the spider that had curled up into a ball from fright.
At the bend in the path he began to run. She watched him through the trees, controlling an impulse to follow him and try further to explain herself, starting right at the beginning: I was born on a farm in Nebraska. It was a scraggly little farm. I hated it. I was always terribly ambitious. I wanted to make something of myself...
Like that, very simple and logical. But Mr. Roma had run away from her, like John, and like Mark. There was no one left to explain things to, only the deaf trees and the blithe lizards, the selfish chattering birds and the rocks worn smooth by the storms of other years.
She wheeled suddenly and called out, “Jessie? Where are you, Jessie?”
“Here.”
“I can’t see you.”
“Right here.” The top of Jessie’s head, and then the rest of her, appeared at the edge of the barranca. There were leaves caught in her yellow hair, and little spikes of twitch grass had pricked the front of her jersey.
“There you are,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “There you are, of course. Let me brush you off, darling.”
“You sound funny. Like my mother after she cries. Shivery, kind of.”
“Does your mother cry?”
“Sometimes.” Jessie began to pluck the twitch grass out of her jersey. “I made the trail. I hope he finds it and comes home.”
“Surely he will.”
“Maybe he’s gone out to lay an egg some place, eh?”
“He can’t because he’s a gander, you know.”
“I know. I just forgot for a minute.”
“Perhaps he just got bored with us and went to find some other ganders and some geese to talk to.”
“He’ll come back, though?”
“Oh, yes. Someday.” One by one she untangled the leaves from Jessie’s hair, and they fluttered away in the wind like brown butterflies. “I’ll come back, too, someday.”
Jessie’s mouth gaped in surprise. “Are you going away?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I thought you were going to live with us for a long time.”
“No, Jessie.”
Hand in hand they began walking along the path. When they came to the swing in the pepper tree they found Jessie’s doll sitting on the wooden seat. The doll was nearly scalped from being carried around by the hair, but it was dressed sumptuously in a purple scarf belted with one of Mark’s ties.
Jessie took the doll and flung it in the dirt. She suddenly hated it, and she didn’t care if her father’s tie got dirty or not.
“I could come with you,” she said at last.
“No. No, Jessie, not this time.”
“I wouldn’t be any trouble.”
“I know that, but... You’d better pick up your doll and clean her off. What’s her name?”
“Marie. I just hate her.”
“I’ll send you a new doll,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “The very best and biggest one I can find.”
“I like the kind that wet and burp.”
“Then that’s the kind you’ll get. What will you name her?”
“I don’t know,” Jessie said slowly. “I guess I don’t really want a new doll anyway. I’d rather just go with you.”
“Why?”
Jessie shook her head. She couldn’t tell why. She only knew that with Mrs. Wakefield she felt quite independent and grown up. Mrs. Wakefield never told her to be quiet or to go and wash her hands or to stop biting her hangnail.
“If I came with you,” she said, “we could catch lots of starfish and I wouldn’t mind a bit about them being boiled.”
“But you’d miss your father and mother.”
“I could write to them.”
Mrs. Wakefield had turned quite pale. “Someday — someday you’ll come and visit me.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“That’s the same as never,” Jessie said harshly.
“No, dear. No, it isn’t.”
“It just means never.” Never was not a word, it was a tone, a look, a gesture. “You don’t want me to come visiting you.”
“I do, very much. More than I can tell you.” She sat down on the swing and put her arm around Jessie’s shoulders. “You must be patient and so must I. We both had disappointments today. We have to face them, though. There’ll be other disappointments for both of us, all kinds and shapes and sizes.”
“You told me different before! You read my hand...”
She twisted out of Mrs. Wakefield’s grasp. Giving the doll a final and decisive kick, she picked it up by the hair and dragged it along in the dirt and through the piles of sharp oak leaves.
Cramming it under a fuzzy green anise bush she felt a bitter satisfaction. It was inevitable that someday her father would question her about the tie, and that Evelyn would ask what happened to “that lovely doll your Aunt Susan gave you.” But she didn’t care. The doll was the symbol of the disappointment, the image of both of her parents who wouldn’t let her go, and of Mrs. Wakefield who wouldn’t take her. It was the physical form of never, the impossible dressed in a purple scarf and a wig. Once the doll was thoroughly beaten and out of sight, her spirits began to rise a little.
She broke off a twig of anise and put it in her mouth. Mr. Roma said that anise was the favorite food of the swallow-tailed butterfly when it was a cocoon, and there was the magic possibility that if she ate enough of it she, too, would suddenly sprout wings and be able to fly anywhere she liked. The possibility of magic was delightful, but alarming, too, because if there was good magic there would also be bad magic. Her father had told her so when he was reading aloud from Grimm’s fairy tales. The system of weights and balances wasn’t perfect, he said; the darker magic was heavier.