“It is entirely normal,” the stroke specialist had told Desmerelda, “for victims to respond to all kinds of emotional stimuli by crying. What we might call the brain’s emotion circuits will have been damaged. Confused. Tears do not necessarily indicate unhappiness. They might equally be a sign of pleasure, say, or gratitude.”
Felicia has long since lost her fear of the big white machines in the villa’s utility room. The washing machine delights her now; she likes the way it pauses in its slosh and tumble, ticking, as though making up its mind what to do next. Sometimes she opens the door of the tall freezer just to feel its cold and misty breath on her face and throat. And sometimes she goes to stand on the terrace beyond the pool and closes her eyes. She counts to ten, as slowly as she can bear it, and when she opens her eyes again it is all still there, still real. Not a trick.
Her feelings about La Señora remain complicated. Raúl’s mother, the Desmerelda Brabanta who now employs her, isn’t the Desmerelda Brabanta that Bianca enviously worshiped. She’s not the pretend whore-goddess whose pictures hung over Bianca’s head like a dream. She has, now, the gentleness that sad people have. But, all the same, it is her. Felicia finds herself thinking this, watching La Señora play with the child, watching her chatting to Bush. It is her. It is her. She is to blame. And she has saved us.
Erroll, the gardener, has taken to the boy, which he thought he would not do. The city kid with the crazy hair who knew the names of nothing, who’d never held a pruning knife, never even used a goddamn hose, in his life. But Bush — he has the name for the job, at least — is solemn and watchful and careful, which Erroll likes, being that way himself. And the boy does the heavy work, which Erroll is starting to feel a bit too old for.
Erroll is also teaching the boy to read, which is a slow and faltering process because the truth is that the gardener is only semiliterate himself. They use the book Bush has gotten from God knows where. Stole it, maybe, sometime in his previous life. Sure couldn’t have bought it, seeing as it cost more than a week’s wages. The Wonders Under the Sea. Together they clamber across the long words that jag like reefs through the text.
When Desmerelda is there and Felicia is busy with Raúl, Bush keeps Michael Cass company on his patrols. Cass has given Bush a pair of binoculars, and they sit together at the head of the path that leads down to the beach, under the tilted and rustling palms, studying the boats that still, after all this time, come too close. They see other things, too.
“Hey, what’re those? Dolphins, porpoises?”
“Porpoises,” Bush says.
Bush and Felicia live in the previously unused staff rooms above the big four-car garage. They occupy this miraculous space carefully, almost religiously. They are, as Desmerelda tells Faustino, as good as gold, as quiet as mice. Except that they have a vice, a secret sin. Bush worries about it, but it gives Felicia such pleasure, she has such a need for it, that he cannot bring himself to refuse her. So, just now and again, on nights when they are alone at the villa, they steal into the main house and lie together on Desmerelda’s white-sheeted bed, their limbs intertwined like the roots of adjacent trees.
Bush, despite himself, eventually falls asleep. Felicia, with her head on his shoulder, watches the ghosty shiftings of the curtains, grieves at the granting of her desires, and listens to the distant susurrations of the sea.
MAL PEET is the author of Keeper, winner of a Branford Boase Award and an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults; The Penalty, a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age; and Tamar, a Carnegie Medal winner. He lives in England.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Cast of Main Characters
Act One
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
Act Two
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8
2.9
Act Three
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
3.7
3.8
3.9
3.10
3.11
Act Four
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
4.7
4.8
4.09
4.10
Act Five
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6
5.7
5.8
5.9
5.10
Epilogue
About the Author
Mal Peet, Exposure
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