Something important had happened, not only for Colette but for Tiger Island. Looking up the hot concrete of River Street, past the tin roofs, crape myrtles, and hackberry trees, he thought of people who considered themselves children again when they were around Principal Jeansomme. Now the man who gave them that youth was dead, and the old students in town were older still. Paul felt he’d aged in the past hour, and when he heard a huge door behind him swing open on a vast, incensed emptiness, he put a hand over his eyes, hiding from everyone’s loss.

*   *   *

Two days later, Colette’s sorrow was distracted by the number of people who came to the wake, the funeral Mass, the burial, the house. Her mother’s funeral had been large, but a high school principal’s contacts over the years expand like a family. Dozens of people she had never heard of attended the wake, squeezing her hand, telling her who they were. The funeral home was overflowing with strangers and their flowers. Her father’s six brothers and sisters and their families came out from Napoleonville and Bunkie, Paincourtville and Mamou. These were people with bits and pieces of her father in their faces and in the way they spoke and in how they scratched themselves and turned their heads and held their lips. The crowding at the funeral Mass reached the level of spectacle when her father’s chapter of the Knights of Columbus, old men dressed in feathered hats and bearing nickel-plated swords, rattled through a ritual of good-bye. Paul watched her weather the flurry of condolences, the storm of visitations. As they were leaving the Mass, he pulled her away from the stream of mourners for the first time in days.

“Oh, I’m okay,” she said, looking around her. “Can you believe this? It’s like he’s not completely gone.” She smiled at him.

But that night, after the last relative had gone down the steps, and after the last lady had dealt with the last bowl of potato salad or gumbo, and after Matthew had gone off to sleep, the house became the real tomb.

The phone rang in the middle of the night at Paul’s and he stumbled through the dark to pick it up, knowing who was on the line. “Colette,” he said.

She was crying fiercely. “I’ve got to move away from here. There are too many ghosts. I’ve got to get out.”

He listened without interrupting to the things she told him and did not try to stop her crying. Finally, he told her, “There’s no ghosts over there, babe.”

“Everywhere I look, I see him. I see her.”

“Think of something else.”

“What?”

“Think of the Saxon. Of all the people working on her, for us.”

She sobbed. “I’m in this house, not the boat.”

“That’s what it is—a house. Your house.”

“I can’t live here.”