“This Wyndham Manor you called, how much does it cost?” Celia inquired of her daughter
sotto voce
.
“Look, whoever you are, you’d better go now,” Rosalie said, turning to Bento. “Do you hear me? Go back to St. Vincent’s or wherever she hired you from.”
He made no reply. She strode across the room to him. “Hey! Can you hear me?”
She grabbed him by the arm and then she screamed, and staggered back. Celia was beside her at once, catching her before she fell. Bento had not moved, had not even turned his head.
“Honey, sweetie, what is it?” Celia cried.
Rosalie was gulping for breath, her eyes wide with horror. She was holding her hand out stiffly. Her mother closed her own hand around it and recoiled; for Rosalie’s hand was as cold as though she’d been holding a block of ice, and as wet, and gritty with sand.
“Should I go get Father Halloway?” asked Margaret Mary.
“No,” said the women in unison.
“I don’t see why you’re all so mad, anyhow,” said Margaret Mary. “I think it’s neat. If we can really bring the dead back, so we won’t be lonely—well—wouldn’t that be great? You could still have Grandpa to talk to, Nana! How’d you do it, Tia Adela?”
Tia Adela said nothing, watching Bento. He was pacing back and forth before the window.
“She made a Soul Feast,” said Nana Amelia. “Didn’t you, Adela?”
“You mean she just cooked some food?” Margaret Mary cried. “Is that all it takes? Can anybody do that?”
“Not everybody,” said Tia Adela, curling her lip. “And food is not enough. There must be love that is stronger than death.”
“Oh,” said Margaret Mary.
“It’s
wrong
, child,” said Nana Amelia. “The dead don’t belong to us! And they want their rest. Look at him, Adela, does he look happy? You have to let him go.”
“How are you keeping him here?” asked Rosalie in a little voice, the first time she had spoken since she’d learned the truth. Celia, sitting with her arm around her, shook her head.
“Sweetie, don’t ask—”
“Borax,” said Tia Adela.
“What?”
“Borax,” Tia Adela repeated, with a certain satisfaction. “I poured a line of it all along the fence, and he can’t cross it.”
“Jesus Christ, Tia Adela, you put down borax powder for
ants
, not ghosts!” yelled Celia.
“It’s alkali, isn’t it?” said Tia Adela. “The opposite of salt. So it breaks the spell of the sea.”
“Urn… but alkali isn’t the opposite of salt, Tia Adela,” said Margaret Mary, wringing her hands. “It’s the opposite of acid. We learned that in Chemistry class.”
Tia Adela shrugged. “It still works, doesn’t it?”
A gust of wind hit the windows, whirling brown leaves. A gull swept in close, hung for a moment motionless at eye level before gliding away downwind. Rosalie shivered.
“No, I’m not letting him go,” Tia Adela went on, in a harder voice. “Fifty years I’ve sat up here, and I got old, yes, and she’s still beautiful. Is that fair?”
“There will be a price to pay,” said Nana Amelia.
Tia Adela did not reply. Bento sighed, making no sound, but far out and high up a gull mourned.
“Go away now,” said Tia Adela. “I’ve got his dinner to fix.”
Rain advanced like a white curtain. The leaden sea turned silver before it vanished in the squall. One by one the trawlers came in, fleeing for their lives, ramming the pier in their haste to moor. The crews scrambled ashore dripping, dodging the waves that were breaking over the pier. A police cruiser pulled up to the mole with its red light flashing, and cops in black slickers set sawhorses across the walkway.
Nobody was fool enough to go out there, though. The harbormaster sighed, looking at the moored sailboats; half of them would be on the beach, or matchwood, by morning.
The cars were pulling up now to the foot of the pier, and women and old men were getting out, squinting into the flying rain, leaning over as they walked into the wind. Soaked before they reached the harbormaster’s office, they came one after another and asked: Was there news of the
Medford
? Was there news of the
Virginia Marie
?
They came away with faces like stone, and went back to their cars and sat, steaming up the windows, except for a couple of the old men, who splashed away through puddles to the Mahogany Bar and could be glimpsed thereafter at the window, looking like fish in a lit aquarium, drinking steadily as they waited.
Night closed down. One by one the headlights came on, pointed out to sea. When the waves began to break over the edge of the parking lot, the cops came and made the cars move back; but they did not leave, and they did not turn out the headlights.
Then there was a confusion of shouting, of horns and red lights, and Margaret Mary started awake as the car doors were flung open. She had to wipe her steamed glasses clear before she could see her mother and father hurrying through the rain, splashing through the long beams of light, calling after Rosalie who was sprinting ahead as fast as she had ever gone in her life.
And beyond her—Margaret Mary took her glasses off, wiped them again and stared openmouthed. Impossibly huge, bizarrely out of context with her prow almost on the asphalt, the
Virginia Marie
lay beached and rolling. Men clung to her, shouting, staring at the solid world of automobiles and houses and warmth, just within reach and terrible yards away, as the black water, the white water kept breaking over them, and the rain glittered and ran.
Sirens howled; a big ambulance pulled up, and another police car. People were crowding too close for Margaret Mary to see much, until the ropes were rigged and the rescued began to arrive on shore, huddled at once in blankets.
The crowd parted. Mary Margaret saw a blanketed man with his wet hair plastered down, and he was talking earnestly to Rosalie. She put her hands to her face and screamed. She just kept screaming, until at last John lifted her in his arms and dragged her back to the car, with Celia running after, weeping. Margaret Mary wept too, withdrawing into her seat. Through her tears she mumbled the Our Father; though a cold, adult voice in her head told her it was a little late for that.
“Daddy, what happened?” she begged, as he thrust Rosalie into the back seat beside her and slammed the door. For all anybody noticed her or answered, she might have been a ghost. Celia reached into the back and gripped Rosalie’s hands, and held on to them all the way up the hill to the house.
It was an hour later before she heard the story from her father, as he sat in the kitchen in his bathrobe, over strong coffee with whiskey in it: how the
Virginia Marie’s
radio mast had gone by the board, how she had been making her way back, how they had come upon the
Medford
taking on water and listing, how they had managed to take her crew off; and how Jerry had just gotten the last man aboard and was pulling in the lifeline when he had fallen, and dropped between the two hulls like a stone.
There had been no sign of him, in the rain and the night, and he might have answered their calls—one crewman swore he had heard him answer, and thrown out a life preserver in that direction—but the wind was so loud they couldn’t be certain. Then suddenly the
Virginia Marie
had her own problems, and no man aboard had thought to come home again. Yet—
“Only Jerry was lost,” said her father, and had a gulp of his coffee. “Can you beat that?”
“But he might have made it,” Margaret Mary protested. “Maybe he caught the life preserver. Maybe they’ll find him tomorrow when it’s light!”
“Yeah,” said John wearily. “Sure, honey.”
Margaret Mary looked out between the curtains, up through the night at the warm light glowing in Tia Adela’s window.
She slept on the couch in her clothes, because they had put Rosalie to sleep in her bed. Just after seven she rose, put on her glasses and stood at the front window, blinking out at the day. The rain had stopped, the wind dropped, though it was still gusting cold fitfully. The
Virginia Marie
was breaking apart fast, and there was a big crack in the parking lot where her prow had acted like a wedge on the asphalt. More yellow sawhorses blocked it off. Sailboats were lying all along the tideline, and one actually had come to rest on the boardwalk.
Turning, slipping off her glasses to rub her gritty eyes, she heard sudden footsteps from the hall.
Rosalie was up and dressed, pulling on one of her father’s coats. Nana Amelia was right behind her, looking unstoppable. After them Celia came, hopping as she tried to put on her shoes while following.
“Sweetie, you need to stay here and rest—” she entreated, but Rosalie ignored her mother.
“Where are you going?” asked Margaret Mary.
“Where do you think?” said Rosalie, in a furious voice, flinging open the door and marching out, as Nana Amelia pulled on her shawl.
Margaret Mary stuck her feet in her saddle oxfords and clumped hurriedly along after them, running to catch up.
The rain had packed down the line of borax before Tia Adela’s gate, but had not washed it away. Tia Adela and her husband were out in the garden. She had filled another basket with windfall apples, and he was sawing loose a bough that had been broken by the storm. He did not look up as Rosalie threw the gate wide and shrieked:
“Let him go!”
Tia Adela lifted her head, gazed at them. She looked down at the harbor, where the
Virginia Marie
wallowed broken in the surf.
“This has come of your wickedness, you see?” Nana Amelia told her sternly. “And her child needs a father, Adela.”
“Please, Tia Adela! For the baby’s sake!” Celia implored.
Tia Adela looked hard at Rosalie, who was scuffing through the line of borax with all her might. She grimaced, looking for a long moment as though she’d tasted poison.
“That won’t do it,” she sighed. She went to the shed and got a broom. Casting a long regretful look over her shoulder at Bento, she walked to the front gate.
“Stand back,” she said. They shuffled out of her way and she swept the borax aside, in a white fan like a bird’s wing.
The sun broke through, a long beam brilliant and white, whiter still for the seabirds that rose in a circling cloud through it, crying and calling.
“Look at the rainbow!” cried Margaret Mary, and they all looked up at the great arch that spanned the harbor, in colors so intense they nearly hurt the eye.
When they looked down again, they saw the car pulling up.
It was black, and long, and so, so expensive. The dashboard was inlaid with patterns in mother-of-pearl, all shells and mermaids and scalloped waves; the upholstery was sea-green brocade. The chrome gleamed as though it were wet.
And she who sat at the wheel was exquisitely dressed, tapping with her ivory fingers on the wheel, just a little impatient. Though her face was that of a skull, her very bones were so beautiful, so elegant, as to inspire self-loathing in any woman with a face of flesh (too
fat
!).
She hit the horn. It sounded like a foghorn.
The mortal women heard the quick footsteps behind them, felt the ice-cold touch as Bento shoved through them in his haste to go. He was smiling wide as he got into the car, didn’t so much as look back once. He closed the door. The car glided away down the hill without making a sound. The women stood there, looking after it.
“Bitch,” they said in unison, and with feeling.
But before noon the Coast Guard had picked up Jerry from the swamped and drifting derelict
Medford
, which he had been able to scramble aboard somehow, and they brought him home to Rosalie’s waiting arms.
Seven years later, though, in another November, his luck ran out. The
Star of Lisbon
was lost with all hands. The Old Woman of the Sea is a poor loser, but she is a worse winner.
Rosalie wore black, and once or twice a week climbed the long street to Tia Adela’s house, carrying baby Maria and tugging little Jerry by the hand. Jerry sat in the middle of the faded rug with his toy tractors and trucks, running them to and fro while Maria napped, and Rosalie learned how to make the old dishes:
Caldo Verde
with bacon, linguica with sweet peppers, garlic pork roast. And she waited for the wind to change.
Shadow saw the fire from the Hollywood Freeway, and realized it must be near her apartment. Her heart beat faster all the way down the exit at Odin Street, and all along Highland Avenue, until she saw that it wasn’t her place after all. One of the apartment complex’s garages had caught, instead.
Leaping flames made the predawn gloom darker. The revolving lights of the fire engines strobed out across Highland and flashed on the windows of the apartments above. She had to park all the way up on Woodland Court, threading her way down the narrow winding steps between bamboo thickets to get to her door. She sniffed the air appreciatively: jungle perfumes of copa de oro and night-blooming jasmine mingled with smoke. It smelled like exotic danger.
Letting herself in, she checked the room with a glance. No intruders in her furnished studio sanctuary. A red light hit her like a splash of blood, flicked away. She went to the window and looked down.
She didn’t know whose garage was on fire, because she knew none of the other tenants. The firemen were mostly standing around watching it burn, playing water on the adjoining garages to keep them from catching too. These were all of clapboard, built in the 1920s and consequently accommodating nothing wider than a Model A. Fifty years on most of the tenants used them for storage, with the exception of one or two who drove Volkswagen Beetles.
Shadow lost interest. She went to her tiny refrigerator, crouched before it, and pulled out a half gallon of lowfat milk. Thirstily she drank from the carton, in long, sensual swallows. When she put it back, she was pleased that she didn’t feel hungrier. She was trying to avoid solid food. Shadow must always be lean.
Prior to reinventing herself as Shadow, her name had been Samantha, and she had lived with her accountant mother in a tiny, courtyard apartment over on Gramercy. Three years ago, when she’d turned eighteen, they had had a terrific fight over—well, everything, really—and parted company for keeps.