Read Page 47

“I barely knew her when she was alive.” Vimbai stroked the wooden plank by her side. “I don’t know if it’s really her, but I can’t know—I have very little idea of what she is supposed to be like. But you’ll figure it out.”Advertisement

“I guess so.”

“But again, does it even matter?” Vimbai said. “Isn’t it better than having no grandmother at all?”

“You’re right.” Maya shifted in the darkness, petting the dogs, and stood. “We better turn in—we’ll be there tomorrow. Need to get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” Vimbai said and rose too. “Good night, Maya.”

And now she lay in her room, her mind racing. Occasionally, she drifted into brief snatches of sleep, and dreamt of the crabs coming ashore where Vimbai’s mother waited for her, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, forever vigilant, forever waiting. She dreamt of the sun rising and touching the silvery ocean surface behind her back, lighting the land outline in front of her. And as she dreamt, the house touched the beach softly, its porch sliding over the sand compacted by the surf, over the tops of the dunes, until it found its old foundation, left free of sand. The house sighed and creaked and stretched its roof corners and its wainscots as it settled into the familiar grooves—but carefully, as if afraid of disturbing the delicate contents that filled it to brimming.

The half-foxes, half-possums crawled under the porch, sighing contentedly, as they curled up in the familiar dark cave, the sand underneath still wearing the rounded troughs left by their bodies. They wondered if they would be allowed back inside, and if they would go hunting tomorrow, fording rivers and running across the great golden plains of straw and couch cushions.

The horseshoe crabs remained underwater, sleeping, soulless for now, under the freezing waves, and dreaming of the days when the sun would rise high and warm the chilly waters, when the tides would rage high on the beach and they would put on their soul shells and perhaps fix them with the remnants of the souls still sluicing in these waters, become themselves again and come dancing through the surf, raising their legs high like chitinous ballerinas. They dreamed of the bygone days when wave after wave of spawning crabs flooded the beaches and crashed upon them in a frenzy of whipping tail spikes and burrowing legs, where the eggs of the crabs outnumbered the grains of sand.

The ghosts in the house slept too—unusual for the ghosts, but they welcomed the relief. Peb curled in the chipoko’s lap as she nodded off in a living-room chair, and both dreamed of the branches of jacaranda trees. Maya’s zombie grandma closed her terrible white eyes for the first time since she walked again, and she conjured up visions of downtown Newark and church service on Sundays, of the gospel choir whose singing reached through the honking, screeching traffic, all the way down the street.

And the human inhabitants . . . their dreams were more vague, more difficult to pin down—but they were the ones that filled the house with the forlorn memories of the past and the regrets of the present, they were the ones that gave the walls and the valleys and the ridges their shape. They were the namers and the creators, the wills that shaped the house so that it could remain itself, even now, when it was moored securely on solid land, in the forever shifting dunes.

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