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said there are other animals like that,” she went on. “‘The lost animals,’ he called them, that didn’t make it onto the ark at the time of the Great Flood. One day these animals are gonna be discovered, and all of their stories told, and the great mysteries will come clear.” She closed her eyes. “That panther promised me that soon my spirit’s gonna move on. If you’re lucky, it doesn’t live on in heaven—forget all that—but inside another creature on earth. Otherwise, it becomes a lost soul, like one of those seabirds that tries to fly to the moon but instead falls into what my grandmother Silvana called
il mare di tempo—
the sea of time—and never returns. When I was a girl, and we went to Messina, we waited in the dunes all night for a look at those birds. I don’t have to wait long now, Xeno, no matter where I’m going.”
    “Don’t say that, Grandma.” I choked back tears, but she was happy with the thought, and she pulled me close and kissed me.
    That last night, I was eating a sandwich in the kitchen when I heard a glass break in her room. Then Re started barking. Evgénia had just stepped out the front door, on her way home, and I cried out to her as I raced down the hall.
    At my grandmother’s door, I stopped cold. Her bed was empty. Re was barking at the window, where the red fox I had seen years before was slipping out onto the fire escape, into the snow.
    I turned to Evgénia as she reached my side, and when I looked back into the room, the fox was gone and my grandmother was lying in bed. Her head was tilted and her mouth was open. Her face was white as powder. Shadows from the lamp swam up onto the bedclothes. The tea from the broken glass was spreading on the floor-boards.
    It felt as if my own mouth was filling with sand. I was shaking as I ran over and laid my head on my grandmother’s chest, listening for her heart. Evgénia took hold of her wrist, then pressed her neck, searching for an artery.
    “I think I hear something!” I cried, but Evgénia shook her head and hurried away to the telephone.
    What I heard was my own blood pounding in my ears. I sank to my knees sobbing and at the same time felt as if I were floating far away from myself, that room, my grandmother’s body. Despite her bittersweet feelings toward my mother, and her strange ways, my grandmother had been the great constant in my life. I became inconsolable. If it hadn’t been for Evgénia, I don’t know what I would have done. She was the only one I had to fall back on in those terrible days, and she came through for me.
    The ambulance took my grandmother away. And then her family—the family of Rose Conti—prepared to bury her. She was theirs now. And I was not invited to the funeral. Even if my father had been around, I would not have been invited. Evgénia was outraged. “I won’t allow it,” she declared.
    She had never said such a thing before. Not in all the years she had watched my grandmother’s family shun me.
    It was Uncle Robert, of course, who made the funeral arrangements. Now, if only for a few seconds, I would see him up close, I thought.
    Two days after my grandmother died, Evgénia had me put on my one suit, itchy gray wool, with a black knitted tie that she bought me. She put on a black dress herself. Then at three o’clock, in sharp sunlight, we took the No. 14 bus up Webster Avenue to Cichetti’s Funeral Home. The front room, visible through the glass doors, was a kind of fake living room. It had sofas, a Persian carpet, and dim lamps. A poor reproduction of some landscape—trees along a river—hung over the fake fireplace. The air was dusty, waxen, and I didn’t want to draw it into my lungs.
    Outside the room where she was laid out, my grandmother’s name had been tacked onto a board in white letters, like the ones they used to spell out the daily menu in my school cafeteria. Evgénia took my hand and we went in. There were no other mourners present at that hour. The