What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (24 page)

“Ah, man, this breaks my heart,” Ben said, looking around.

Mom kind of cocked her head at him, like she was thinking. Then she just said, “Come help me with the vestments. I want to see what we can save.” He followed her into the back room.

If I wasn’t depressed already, I would get depressed just looking at the church. The fire started in the basement, as much as anyone can tell, and all the junk down there burned, and then the fire melted a piece of plastic water pipe (which should
not
have been installed in plastic pipe, according to everybody, but nobody knows who did it), and that flooded the whole basement. So everything that isn’t burned is wet and rotting, and a lot of it is both.

But I don’t care if Father Weatherford is a goof who is always looking for a pony, because he did something that made me want to kiss him. Everybody—meaning the Parish Council and the Altar Society—was telling each other how they’d told him so, and “that man,” meaning Felix, “should never have been allowed to stay in the basement, and we said over and over that he was dangerous.” This right where Felix could hear them while he carried load after load of wet horrible stuff out of the basement, stuff
they
weren’t going to touch. And he wasn’t staying there the night of the fire, but they were going to blame him anyway.

And Father Weatherford called everybody together and said, “We don’t have the fire department’s report yet, but I am afraid that I’m responsible.”

“Now, Father, you always have such faith in people, you mustn’t blame yourself when it’s misplaced.” That was Mrs. Beale, the Altar Society nut with the flashlight who found me in the basement with Felix.

“No, Mrs. Beale, I mean that I am directly responsible for the fire.” Father Weatherford looked so tired and miserable, all covered with soot. “The fire department thinks it could have been a short in the wiring, and I fear that I caused it. The fuses in the basement have been blowing nearly every time we turn the lights on, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for it. I was getting very tired of stumbling down in the dark to change them and I remembered my grandfather telling me about a trick of putting a penny in the fuse. So I tried that.”

And that’s apparently a very bad idea. The way Ben explained it to me, the penny keeps the fuse from blowing and that lets the wire heat up so much it can make sparks shoot out of an outlet, so even if it’s inside an adobe wall, it can spit sparks out at the stack of hay bales you just happen to have left near the outlet.

“I’m afraid that the heater in the basement was still switched on,” Father said, “and I never thought to check it. I can’t blame anyone but myself for that. I should have seen that the fuses were a sign something wasn’t right. So I must ask you to lay the blame for this tragedy at my door. All I can do, in turn, is offer my penitence to God.”

Everybody got very quiet after that, and nobody said anything else about Felix.

22

Jesse’s funeral was Wednesday at the Presbyterian church, and I did go after all. I had to say goodbye to him. Mom came with me, and so did Ben. They both looked like they were about to cry and they actually sat together. Felix came, in the good clothes he’d worn to Wuffie’s for Christmas. Lily and her parents were there, and Noah and his mom, and lots and lots of people from school. I wish Jesse could have seen how many people came. Noah sat down beside me and whispered, “You okay?”

I nodded. He was trying to turn the pages in the hymn-
book with bandages on his hands. I turned them for him. “Do they still hurt?” I asked. They looked like they did.

“Not so bad. Built-in excuse for not doing homework.”

“You don’t do your homework anyway,” I whispered back, and he smiled at me. Then the smile faded out when Jesse’s mom and dad went past us down the aisle with his little brother and sister. “Dude, I tried to get him out of there,” Noah said to me.

“I know you did.”

The minister talked about how brave Jesse was, and dedicated to serving others, and I hope it made his mom feel better. But I still don’t know what could.

We didn’t have to go to the cemetery afterward because Jesse’s parents had him cremated, and now he’s in a little niche in the church wall. I want to go and talk to him through the bricks, but I don’t know what to say.

Thursday we were back at school again, and then after school I went back to St. Thomas’s. There weren’t so many people as on the first couple of days, but Mom and Ben and Grandpa Joe are all still showing up. Mrs. Beale, who really is a total idiot, thanked Ben and Grandpa Joe over and over again and kept saying how nice it was of them to come, since they’re Jewish.

Grandpa Joe finally got fed up with her, I think, because he said, “No problem. You’re probably all Marranos anyway.”

She looked like she wasn’t sure what he’d just called her, and he said, “You don’t know about the Marranos?”

Mrs. Beale said she didn’t, so he explained. I didn’t know either, but it turns out that Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain (yeah, the same ones who funded Christopher Columbus) told all the Spanish Jews that they had to either convert or leave the country. So lots of them pretended to convert because if they left they couldn’t take any money or property with them. But the Spanish Inquisition was always looking for
conversos
who had backslid, to torture them and burn them at the stake. So the Spanish Jews would eat pork to prove they were really converted. That’s what “marrano” means. It’s really kind of a rude term—it means “pork-eater” or just “pig.” After a while, the descendants of the
conversos
kind of forgot they were Jews. They had funny little family habits like lighting candles on Friday nights, but they didn’t know why.

“Lots of
conversos
in the New World,” Grandpa Joe said. “It was a fine chance to duck the Inquisition and get the hell out of Spain. Then you forget who you are. You intermarry with some Catholics, some Indians; maybe even the odd little traditions disappear.”

Mrs. Beale said, “I’m quite certain that’s not the case in my family. But how interesting.” She looked like she was sucking a prune.

“Oh, lots of them took new names,” Grandpa Joe said. He sounded like he was having way too good a time with this. “I’ve read that if your surname is the name of a Spanish city, you’re probably a Marrano. Like Burgos, or Zaragoza.”

Mrs. Beale, whose daughter married Bill Zaragoza and is raising lots of little Zaragozas, looked really ticked now. Wuffie must have heard them because she came swooping over and said, “Joe, help me with this ladder, please,” and practically dragged him off by the hair.

But I’m hanging on to that idea. Wuffie’s descended from one of the Spanish colonial families, and I hope we
are
Marranos. Those people held on to who they really were through all those generations, lighting candles on Friday night and saying prayers they couldn’t understand. Even if they didn’t know what it was all about anymore, they still had it. I only have Mom’s side of my family, because I don’t know anything about my real father besides his name. Grandpa Joe’s family are Ashkenazi, Jews from Europe. But Ben’s family are Sephardic Jews, like from Spain and the Middle East, so if we really are Marranos, then I feel like I have a connection to Ben, too.

I like the idea of everybody being connected like that, in all these mysterious, hidden ways, like traveling through secret tunnels. And maybe Gil Arnaz was one. Could be.

We went on cleaning up, washing the soot off the walls and shoveling out the disgusting crud in the basement. When stuff gets wet, it just rots. Sometimes you can’t even tell what it used to be. It’s like glop. But back under all the glop, I found the statue. I think.

It’s hard to tell, because all I found is a chunk of wood and it’s really burned, and then it was sitting in water for days (there was about a foot of revolting water on the floor, and they had to pump it out before we could even start to clean up). Not to mention we had to shut off all the electricity to the basement. They set up some spotlights that shone down the stairs until someone could check the wiring. But in the far back storeroom, I found this thing that’s the right size. I think I can sort of see his face, or where it used to be.

I also swear it was not in that room before. So I went looking for Felix to show it to him, and he wasn’t there.

For some reason that gave me the creeps, so I went to the park to look for him. His tent is still set up, but there’s no one in it. I went back to the church and asked Father Weatherford, and Mom, and anyone else I saw, and none of them know where he’s gone, either. Everybody kept saying, “Well, I just saw him,” but nobody can find him.

Now I can’t get the idea out of my head that Felix and the statue really are connected some way, and something has happened to him.

By that time it was dark out and I didn’t know where else to look, so I went home with Ben. And Mom came too, surprise! Grandma Alice had made dinner, and we all sat down to eat just as if Mom still lived here. I have no idea what she thinks she’s doing, or Ben either, but she was still here when I went to bed—in Ben’s office with him, doing their income taxes! I heard her car start up about midnight, so she didn’t stay the night.

I went to sleep worrying about Felix and hoping it wouldn’t make me have any of his dreams. Instead, I dreamed that Jesse wasn’t really dead; it was all a mistake. I kept saying to him, “We have to tell people, they’re all crying.” Then I woke up and remembered, and cried myself. But I wish I knew where Felix is. I am not going to be able to stand it if anyone else dies.

In the morning, Ben was still in his clothes from the day before and he hadn’t shaved. He was making waffles, which is my favorite breakfast.

He said, “Grab the syrup, Angelfish,” and plopped a plate down in front of me.

I said, “You look awful.”

“Up all night.”

“What were you doing?” I know it wasn’t shagging Mom, because I heard her car leave, but he looked cheerful.

“Fixing a script.”

“All night? Fixing it how?”

“Just something Sylvia thought didn’t work.”

Then it dawned on me. “You took out whatever it was she was mad at you about using?”

“Sometimes how someone feels about something is more important than whether they’re right,” Ben said. “So she’s still wrong, but I took it out anyway.”

I stabbed a forkful of waffle. “What was it?”

Ben grinned at me. “If Sylvia doesn’t want it in my script, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me to tell you about it, either.”

“Are you getting back together?” I asked.

“Plans will be announced.”

They are. I know they are. And it didn’t have anything at all to do with me, or Felix interceding, or anything else except them. They had to work out their own stuff, and I will never have any idea at all how they did it. It would make a very lousy movie—no role for the precocious teenage daughter.

And I’m happy about it and all, but somehow it seems like an anticlimax. I still don’t know where Felix is, and I’m so sad over Jesse that I think my heart will break. I guess that’s what Helen meant about the dance.

Then at school I heard the worst thing. The fire department found some evidence of arson, and they don’t think it was Felix, thank God, but they do think it might have been Jesse. It was all over school. In a small town, everyone always knows everything. Even if they get it wrong. But I’m really afraid they don’t have this wrong.

After lunch, a guy from the fire department was even at school interviewing people. They called me into the principal’s office to talk to him. He was a big guy with a buzz cut and hands the size of suitcases, but he seemed nice.

He said, “I’m Lieutenant Shaw. I understand you were a good friend of Jesse Francis.”

I nodded. My stomach felt crawly.

“You could say, maybe, he was romantically interested in you?”

“He’s—he was lots older,” I managed to say.

“Did he ever say he would do something to impress you? Be a hero for you?”

“He already lost his leg in the army,” I said. “How much more of a hero?”

Lieutenant Shaw looked unhappy, but he kept poking at it. “Sometimes, when young men like girls, they look for ways to impress them, maybe do something heroic for the girl. Sometimes they don’t think it through very well.”

I didn’t say anything. Lieutenant Shaw said, “Did Jesse Francis ever say anything like that to you? Like, ‘I’d do anything for you’? Things like that?”

I thought about Jesse saying, “I told you I’d be there for you,” and carrying those buckets. He doesn’t—didn’t—even live at our end of town. How did he happen to be there with buckets? I thought about Felix and how he might have gotten blamed instead, or been in the church and been trapped. Then I thought about Jesse’s mother.

“No, I don’t think he ever did,” I said.

“You do realize that more people could have died?” Lt. Shaw said. “And that my crew could have been killed trying to save a historic landmark?”

I nodded. But I don’t see what difference it makes now. Jesse’s dead. I’m not going to help them prove he did it when all it will accomplish is make his mother feel even worse, if that’s possible.