This time, there was an accompanying pantomime. He donned the goggles and snorkel. He steepled his hands and thrust them forward. Dive. Nodding, she rose to her feet, the boat rocking beneath her. She stripped down to her underclothes and took the gear from him. Without thinking twice, she jumped.
And later, she would learn the names: whale shark, Rhincodon typus. She would acquire an exhaustive knowledge of its habitat, diet, and life cycle. Despite the promise she had made to herself after drawing the portrait of Tino’s father, she would begin to sketch again: the whale shark rendered over and over in pencil and pen and charcoal and crayon, whatever seemed to best memorialize its massive, philanthropic shape. On that first day in Donsol, however, she did none of this. She drew nothing and she learned even less. Instead, she simply hovered above the whale shark and allowed its current to pull her, its toothless mouth funneling untold trillions of plankton, its company so quiet and natural that when darkness fell and her time was up, the guide had to catch her by her bra strap and physically drag her back on board.
That night, in a borrowed hammock beneath a balete tree, she remembered Monterey.
To do so was a delayed act, foreign and fragmented, so she approached it carefully and with the buzzing of the insects as a buffer. Her father, during his remaining years, had never alluded to those last days, so she had been forced to piece it together on her own, which had left her with the following conclusions. Tino, first of all, had been good on his word. After learning of her pregnancy, he had gone to his mother armed with Margot’s offering: the photographs of Anders and the whore. But instead of taking the payment in good faith, instead of offering her assistance and discretion, Mrs. Agnelli used the information to her advantage. While Margot had sat in the lab waiting for Ricketts to return, Tino’s mother had gone up the hill and blackmailed Anders, who, fearing for his reputation and, to a lesser extent, that of his daughter, saw no choice but to finally admit defeat and return the cannery in exchange for his rival’s silence. After this, they’d stayed in Monterey for only one more day: long enough to finalize the transaction and to prepare for a hasty departure. On the train out of town, there were no words of either accusation or apology. It was only when they arrived in San Francisco that her father managed a sour smile and an assurance that things would rectify themselves in due course.
“But I want to end it now,” she told him. “It needs to be over.”
“You’re too far along for that, I’m afraid.”
For the duration of her pregnancy, she was confined to a room at the Sir Francis Drake: a hotel that, although only a dozen years old, already seemed haunted by the same ghosts as the Del Monte. When she began to fight, to endanger herself, there were sedatives and threats and then a span of gray stillness as she watched with hatred and disbelief as her belly grew. She counted the days until the mercy of the expulsion, until the rest of her life could rise up in the spirit of a new hollowness. The birth was a question of bright lights, the tang of an unknown narcotic, forceps, and darkness. If Ricketts was partially responsible for this, she told herself, it was only in the way that God is partially responsible for hell.
As for the child, it was stillborn, which came to her as a relief and to Anders as an inevitability. No one told her what was done with the body, but she had her suspicions: a fire as wet and prolonged as the one that had consumed her mother, a notion that, for the next near decade, dragged her down like leaden weights, her depression unshakable and misunderstood.