She looked out the window.
“I should go.”
“Tonight, then. At eleven. Come back and help me collect.”
For a moment, everything was finally clear, finally predictable: the efficacy of restraint, the value of dignity.
“No,” she replied calmly.
“There must be a way to convince you.”
“There’s not much—”
And then he was touching her scar, running the tip of his index finger along its numb length and then down her nose until it came to rest between her lips.
“Eleven,” she said.
“That’s right.” He nodded, removing his finger. “Wear your boots.”
That night, she watched the clock with an executioner’s eye. With the proper focus, she told herself, time itself could be bullied. It could be bullied into moving faster, so fast that by the time the agreed-upon hour arrived, she would be a grown woman capable of everything and answerable to no one.
When she poured her fourth cup of coffee, Anders put down his cards and glared at her.
“You keep drinking that,” he said, “and you’ll be up until dawn.”
She took another sip and stared even harder at the clock’s pendulum. Its swinging looked especially rhythmic tonight, in a way that spoke not of mortality but of mortality’s opposite: the universe winding itself up with such intense tightness that it might never be able to wind itself down.
“It’s your move,” he said.
“I think I’m done.”
She placed her cards on the floor and stood.
“Giana Agnelli was right.”
She sat back down. She looked at the ceiling. Her mother’s head was there again, and it was looking at Anders, but it didn’t seem particularly concerned with what he was about to say.
“What was she right about?” Margot asked.
“About me,” he replied after a long moment. “But she was also wrong. For one thing, I wasn’t a Methodist. I just lived with them because the tents were cheap. For another thing, the girl didn’t fish for squid or clean them. Quite the opposite, in fact. Her family owned one of the little carts that used to park at the entrance to the Seventeen-Mile Drive and sell things to the tourists. Junk, mostly. Painted abalone shells. Driftwood whittled into dollhouse figurines. Sometimes a whale vertebra or a shark’s jaw. But for the customers who were willing to pay, there were other things, too.”
She held her breath.
“Sea creatures,” he clarified. She exhaled. “Live ones. The girl would put them in jelly jars that you could take home with you. I bought them because I loved her. I followed her around like a dog, to be honest, and she trained me like one, too. She trained me in how the cart made and reinvested its money. She trained me in the concepts of scarcity and abundance, or at least the appearance of them. Before coming to California, I thought I knew. I thought New York had taught me everything I’d ever need to know. But this was business on a completely different level: shrewd, elegant, discreet. When she was confident I was ready, we opened our own little sideshow just outside the hotel grounds. All of our fish and crabs and snails arranged together in one big display. The children could look for free, but the adults had to pay.”
When he paused, she looked away. So I wasn’t the first, she told herself. And neither was he.
“And when the girl ended up preferring one of her own kind—a man who lived in the same fishing village—I didn’t know what to do. I got so jealous I poisoned the water in the jars. I busted the spokes of the wheels on her family’s cart. I wasn’t sure what point I was trying to prove.”
He shut his mouth abruptly, an awful bewilderment in his eyes. His hair was falling down around his face and he made no attempt to slick it back.
“What happened to her?” she asked.
“Her village burned to the ground.”
Her blood went cold.
“Don’t worry.” He sighed. “By that point, I had already been gone for years.”