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"Please don't make me fall asleep, like Pedro," Consuelo said.
"I'll try not to," Miriam said in her deadpan, no-promises fashion.
When Miriam was unbraiding Consuelo's pigtails, Juan Diego looked under the table for Pedro, but the boy had slipped unseen into Dr. Quintana's chair. (Juan Diego also hadn't noticed when Dr. Quintana had left her seat, but he saw now that the doctor was standing next to Clark, diagonally across the table.) Many of the adults had left their chairs at the tables in the center of the dining room; those tables were being carried away--the center of the dining-room area would become the dance floor. Juan Diego didn't like to watch people dance; dancing doesn't work for cripples, not even vicariously.
The little children were being taken to bed; the older children, the teenagers, had also left the tables at the perimeter of the dance floor. Some adults had already seated themselves at those perimeter tables. When the music started, no doubt the teenagers would be back, Juan Diego was thinking, but they had disappeared for the moment--doing whatever teenagers do.
"What do you suppose has happened to the big gecko behind that painting, Mister?" Pedro quietly asked Juan Diego.
"Well--" Juan Diego began.
"It's gone. I looked. Nothing there," Pedro whispered.
"The big gecko must be off on a hunting expedition," Juan Diego suggested.
"It's gone," Pedro repeated. "Maybe the lady stabbed the big gecko, too," Pedro whispered.
"No--I don't think so, Pedro," Juan Diego said, but the boy looked convinced that the big g
ecko was gone for good.
Miriam had unbraided Consuelo's pigtails and was expertly running her fingers through the little girl's thick black hair. "You have beautiful hair, Consuelo," Miriam told the girl, who was sitting only slightly less rigidly in Miriam's lap than before. Consuelo was fighting off sleep, suppressing a yawn.
"Yes, I do have nice hair," Consuelo said. "If I were ever kidnapped, the kidnappers would cut off my hair and sell it."
"Don't think about that--it isn't going to happen," Miriam told her.
"Do you know everything that's going to happen?" Consuelo asked Miriam.
For some reason, Juan Diego held his breath; he was waiting intently for Miriam's answer--he didn't want to miss a word.
"I think the lady does know everything," Pedro whispered to Juan Diego, who shared the fearful-looking boy's premonition about Miriam. Juan Diego had stopped breathing because he believed that Miriam did know the future, though Juan Diego doubted Pedro's conviction that Miriam had done away with the big gecko. (She would have needed a more formidable murder weapon than a salad fork.)
And the whole time, while Juan Diego wasn't breathing, both he and Pedro were watching Miriam massage Consuelo's scalp. Not a single kink remained in the little girl's luxuriant hair, and Consuelo herself was slumped against Miriam in a succumbed state; the drowsy-looking little girl had half-closed her eyes--she seemed to have forgotten that she'd ever asked Miriam an unanswered question.
Pedro hadn't forgotten. "Go on, Mister--you better ask her," the boy whispered. "She's putting Consuelo to sleep--maybe that's what she did to the big gecko," Pedro suggested.
"Do you--" Juan Diego started to say, but his tongue felt funny in his mouth and his speech was slurred. Do you know everything that's going to happen? he'd meant to ask Miriam, but Miriam held a finger to her lips and silenced him.
"Shhh--the poor child should be in bed," Miriam whispered.
"But you--" Pedro began. That was as far as he got.
Juan Diego saw the gecko fall or drop from the ceiling; it was another small one. This one landed on Pedro's head, in his hair. The startled-looking gecko had landed perfectly on top of the boy's head, inside the open crown of the paper party hat, which in Pedro's case was a sea-green color--not that different from the little lizard's coloring. When Pedro felt the gecko in his hair, the boy began to scream; this retrieved Consuelo from her trance--the little girl started screaming, too.
Juan Diego would realize only later why two Filipino kids would scream about a gecko. It wasn't the gecko that made Pedro and Consuelo scream. They were screaming because they must have imagined that Miriam was going to stab the gecko, pinning the little lizard to the top of Pedro's head.
Juan Diego was reaching for the gecko in Pedro's hair when the panic-stricken boy swatted the little lizard into the area of the dance floor, where his party hat also ended up. It was the drummer (the guy with the insect tattoos on his bare arms) who stomped on the gecko; he spattered some of the lizard's innards on his tight jeans.
"Oh, man--that's harsh," the harmonica player said; he was the one in the other tank top, the musician with the snakes and lizards tattooed on his arms.
The lead guitarist with the burn-scar tattoo on his neck didn't notice the spattered gecko; he was diddling with the amplifier and the speaker boxes, tweaking the sound.
But Consuelo and Pedro had seen what happened to the little gecko; their screams had turned to wails of protestation, not relieved by the teenagers who were taking them off to bed. (Screaming and wailing had brought the teenagers back to the dining room, where they'd perhaps mistaken the cries of the children for the band's first number.)
More philosophical than some lead singers, the waif of a corpse-colored girl stared at the ceiling above the dance floor--as if she were expecting more falling geckos. "I hate those fuckin' things," she said to no one in particular. She also saw that the drummer was trying to wipe the lizard's spattered innards off his jeans. "Gross," the lead singer said matter-of-factly; the way she said it made "Gross" sound like the title of her best-known song.
"I'm betting my bedroom is closer to the dance floor than yours," Miriam was saying to Juan Diego, as the freaked-out children were being carried away. "What I mean, darling, is that the choice of where we sleep might best be guided by how much of these Nocturnal Monkeys we want to hear."
