CHAPTER 9

THE BOX WAS EMPTY.

The girl put the empty box back on her mother’s dresser and went back to her room. She got down on her stomach and inched under the bed; her legs stuck out.

The girl thought about the pearl in the duct. She could see it in her mind, patient in the dark, a little world around which the hot wind blows. She could be as patient as the pearl; she was a pearl herself; her mother called her “my little pearl”; her name was Pearl. On her stomach, under the bed, blanket’s bright fringe dimming the light, the girl knew what it was the pearl felt like.

She knew that the metal grating led downward into the house; she could picture it. She could see the duct slope downward and expand, she saw the duct beneath the house was larger than the house, widening into the earth beneath the foundation, opening into the inner ocean, the ocean inside the world where the islands are still uncharted, where there was no map, where the stone faces stood sentry looking for ships, statues whose eyes were pearls; she could see the pearl in the sea, falling down in the water, swayed only slightly by the current as it blew. She saw it falling, saw on the ocean’s bed the oyster with unhinged mouth open, awaiting the pearl’s return. Pearl was in the ocean too: blanket’s blue fringe sealike swaying surrounding her. It was nice to drown; necessary. Then she could hear the voices. The voices in the water. One of the voices was her mother’s.

It came up through the ductwork, her mother’s voice in the kitchen. She was talking but no one was there with her. It was the old story, the story her mother told: The giant took out his heart and buried it. Her mother’s voice told her the story from the ocean’s bed where in the water all the stories tell themselves over and over again. Pearl fell with the pearl, lullaby of her mother’s voice. The box was empty, but it was empty in another world, a world in which the night sky was starless as was the inside of the box, night’s black velvet. That was a world in which everyone was asleep. That was the world everyone slept in, the world before the turbulent dreams began.

Mother’s voice stopped speaking before Pearl heard it stop. In her dream her mother’s voice was the ocean. The long current was the pull on her legs, it was the current, until the ocean stopped being the ocean, when the blue water became again the blue fringe, when she woke up. Her mother pulled her out from under the bed.

Pearl turned around and looked up. Her mother was holding in her hand the box, lid open.

The box was empty.