Inside, she found everything much as they had left it. Many of the other houses on the block had been abandoned and looted and given over to nature, but theirs hadn’t. The horsehair sofa was still inappropriate and cumbersome, the dust in its crevices as thick and white as frosting. A sheaf of her father’s papers was still in the wastebin beneath the kitchen table, a sherry bottle was still hidden in the cabinet above the sink. She drank what little was left and then spent the next hour finding things to clean. She tied a handkerchief around her mouth and beat the sofa with a broom. She scrubbed the grout between the bathroom tiles. She polished the door handles. She mopped the linoleum until she could see her own warped reflection in its surface. When the entire house was tidied to her satisfaction, she collapsed onto the sofa, too tired to sleep. But she slept anyway and, for the first time in years, dreamed. She dreamed she was exploring her father’s cannery by flashlight, its beam slipping across the barren walls like a yellow snake. There were no conveyor belts, packing lines, retort baskets, or boilers. No blood or oil or water underfoot, nothing that evoked the bio-efficient, almost intestinal quality of a fish cannery at work. Instead, there was a building as empty as it was cavernous, the floors swept clean.
When she was done looking at the cannery from the inside, she looked at it from the outside. She walked out a door and onto a narrow catwalk above the water that led from the main body of the cannery to the pump house. The ocean was angry, spitting and thrashing, punishing the shore with sets of closely spaced waves. The crescent moon was orange and blurry behind the fog. In its light, she could see Ricketts sitting on the edge of the catwalk, his feet dangling toward the water. She switched off the flashlight and sat down next to him, their legs swinging back and forth in near synchronicity. It felt good at first, but then it didn’t. She considered withdrawing her sketchbook. Her satchel, however, was empty except for her father’s penknife, and she could hear noises behind them, a crowd gathering on the street outside.
“Quick,” he said. “The knife.”
But the parade was already upon them, the hill ablaze with lanterns, the saint’s waxen face glowing within the confines of her bower, a book in one hand, a human skull in the other. Tino Agnelli was at the head of the procession. Arthur was behind him, his head shaved bare. Her father was last in line, walking slightly apart from the crowd, coatless despite the gathering cold. The air was full of smoke.
“Inside,” Ricketts said, taking her arm. “Before it’s too late.”
They ran back into the cannery. She leaned against him. For the first time, she noticed the vast difference in their heights. He was so short, he could fit his head snugly beneath her chin without bending or crouching.
“I did a bad job, Wormy,” he said, reaching for her forehead.
And when he reopened the scar with the knife, the cut wasn’t made on her skin. It was made on the seafloor beneath her, the earth splitting itself along a famous fault line: the one that, according to centuries of seismological fantasy, would break California free from the rest of the jealous landmass and send it floating off into the night.
The next morning, she walked to the wharf.
The waiter in the parlor car had been wrong. The town was still recognizable, but disappointingly so, like a beautiful woman without her makeup. It was only when she reached the doorway of the old Agnelli warehouse that things took a more hopeful turn. Unlike the rest of Monterey, this building had thrived since her departure. The single window had been scrubbed clean, the corrugated metal walls painted white, a crimson awning stretched over the entrance. Inside, there was no darkness, no statue, no sardine cans, no henchwomen. Instead, it was bright and tidy and outfitted in a way that was clearly meant to evoke the Agnellis’ homeland but looked like a caricature of it instead: ropes of garlic sagging from the rafters, a gaudy mid-Crucifixion portrait of Jesus and the Virgin Mary staring down at her in gory benediction, tables covered in red-and-white-checked tablecloths, candles weeping streams of wax onto basket-bottomed Chianti bottles. The barman awoke with a jolt when he heard her enter. As for Tino, he was there just as he had promised in his note: sitting at a large table near the kitchen, flanked by his brothers, his chin in his hands as if presiding over the world’s most anticlimactic Last Supper.
She studied him before approaching. Like the town itself, he had been eroded by the intervening years, but not necessarily disfigured by them. The primary difference was his nose, which was a good deal longer and narrower than she remembered and more emphatically wide nostriled. He had taken to wearing his dark hair slicked back from his forehead, which, in addition to highlighting the sharpness of his features, made the prematurely thin patches around his temples look as if they had been spray-painted there. He was still impossibly slim and spotlessly dressed. Even in this moment of what she assumed to be repose, he looked coiled and skeptical, thrumming with the exact same quiet, dissatisfied energy he had possessed as a boy.
When he saw her, he raised his small, bony hand in the resigned manner of a forcibly dethroned potentate. She waved back.
“You received my correspondence,” he said as she reached the table, the brothers tracking every inch of her approach.
“It’s a restaurant now,” she replied.
“To feed all the tourists.”
A lone cannery whistle blasted in the distance, its sound fuzzy and dilute, as if it had traveled across the distance of years instead of the distance of physical space. In her memory, Tino had been someone she had once known well, but now that she was actually in his presence again, she realized her mistake. She had never really known him at all. She had once put her future, and her father’s, in the hands of a stranger.
“Tourists?” she asked. “But the town’s a disaster.”
“Interestingly enough, they seem to like it that way.”