And with Mrs. Pool’s back to her, Mary made a clean slice of fish and plucked it up with her fingertips. She brought it close to her face and turned it from one side to the other for inspection. Then she passed it through her lips whole and let it fill her mouth. She bit down and felt its cool, firm resistance. As she watched Mrs. Pool—the soft roundness of her shoulders, the dromedary droop of her neck—Mary felt the lovely slow-release pleasure of hiding something.
“Didn’t Mr. Pool used to live over there?” Mary finally asked. Mary knew the answer but wanted to hear it again all the same. Though no one was aware of it, Mary had looked through Mr. Pool’s photo albums, seen the picture of him in his sand-colored uniform, read the bundle of yellowed letters written by his parents, and by a young, besotted Alice.
“Mmm-hmm,” replied Mrs. Pool. “After the war. He was stationed in Okinawa.”
Mary had found Japan on a map, run her finger along the crescent nation. “I want to go there,” she said. “Someday.”
Without looking up, Mrs. Pool chuckled.
Mary and Mrs. Pool canned more than a hundred pounds of tuna that evening, enough to line the pantry shelves with a winter’s worth of fish.
And after the last batch had been put into the pot, after Mary gathered up the wet piles of newsprint and brought them to the metal garbage can in the shed, she walked back to the kitchen and let the screen door again clatter shut behind her. She watched Mrs. Pool for a moment. “I guess I’ll go,” she said.
Mrs. Pool turned around and stepped toward Mary, pulling her into a hug. And perhaps it was the weariness from the hours of canning that made Mary forget. Or perhaps it was that Mrs. Pool’s embrace came so naturally, without the shifting, cautious hesitation that had started to precede all of Diane’s. But when Mrs. Pool rested her hand on Mary’s back, when she gently pulled Mary’s body into her own, that round hardness that had formed so insistently in her belly made its presence known—an orb between them. And before Mary could react, before she could sliver away, Alice Pool gave a small but certain gasp, then pulled back. With her hands on Mary’s shoulders, Alice’s frightened eyes probed Mary’s.
“Well,” said Mary, her face registering neither acknowledgment nor guilt. “I better get home.” And she pushed out the door into the night. Mary didn’t look back as she walked across the scrubby grass to the Water’s Edge, but if she had, she would have seen Mrs. Pool standing on the brick walk watching her, her apron still on, moths circling the bright beam of the floodlight above.
Glancing briefly through the glass of the door to the Water’s Edge office, Mary saw Diane and Barry sitting on the couch, white containers of Chinese takeout in front of them. The television was on, and Diane’s foot was under the coffee table, rubbing Barry’s ankle.
The bell of the door clanged when Mary pushed it open.
Diane straightened up, nudging Barry, whose eyes had been fixed on the television. “Hi, honey!” she said. “How’d it go with Alice?”
Mary assessed the spread of food in front of them. She was hungry. She was always hungry now. “Good. We’re finished.”
Diane clucked in amazement. “That’s great. Right, Bare?”
Barry nodded. “Yeah, nice job,” he muttered, before turning back to the television.
“Okay, well,” said Mary, with a stony calm. “Good night.”
“Night, hon!” called Diane.
And that night, as Mary walked back to her room, she knew it was all just a matter of time. That, really, it always was. Because, though Alice Pool had no children of her own, she would know the meaning of what she had felt in Mary’s stomach. She had felt it before. She had been the first one to know about Diane, too.
Twenty-six
1989
The hotel by the ocean was called Sea Cliff. She had been familiar with it for some time. When she was little and her grandfather was still alive, he’d show her pictures of grand old hotels, images he’d clipped from magazines of venerated establishments, places that hosted royalty, movie stars. Princess Grace stayed here, he’d say. Or They made a movie with Cary Grant at this one. And Mary would sit on his blue-polyester-clad lap and stare at the pictures, at the colors that looked so bright they couldn’t be real. And the girl who loved stories understood that hotels were their repository.
But she knew of Sea Cliff from elsewhere.
So after she and Hannah had first seen Sea Cliff, they drove to a beach nearby and parked the Blazer by the side of the road. With a blanket wrapped around her, Mary walked down the old wooden stairs to the sand. It felt cooler down by the water by a few degrees.
“I like it here,” said Hannah, as she stared at the shore birds diving and calling overhead.
Mary blinked. The morning sun on the water made everything look faded, pastel. “Yeah,” she said, her head nodding to one side with fatigue from the drive. “I knew you would.”
Mary lay down and she slept, the sand working its way into her black hair. And Hannah walked knee-deep into the water, letting the frigid, foamy surf swirl around her legs, feeling it rock her back as it spilled onto the shore, then watching the sand change under her feet as the Pacific took another great breath in.
When Mary had dozed away enough of the drive, she sat up with red-rimmed eyes closed against the light. “We need to get some food,” she said, to the air around her, having no knowledge of exactly where Hannah stood, only knowing that she was near. She was always near.
“We passed a place,” answered Hannah. “It looked like a bakery.”
“Are you hungry?” asked Mary.
Hannah watched as a ship moved slowly along the ink-blue horizon line. “Yeah,” she said, reluctant to leave the water. “I guess so.”
The Chase girls climbed the wooden stairs back to the street and drove to the bakery. Outside, they sat on the curb and ate their cinnamon buns, taking huge mouthfuls, not pausing to breathe or speak. Finally, Mary said, her mouth full of pastry, “I’m going to go to the hotel and get a job.”
“Do you think they’ll hire you?” asked Hannah. She was watching the cars pass, trying to hide just how much she wanted to stay there, in the town by the sea, where the sun sank rather than rose over the ocean.
“I don’t know,” said Mary. But right down to her bones, Mary knew that they would. Mary sensed some finality here, in this town. Some inevitability. A lovely trap, the door locked tightly. “But I bet they will. Hotels always do.”
And when she walked into Sea Cliff and asked to speak with someone about a position, she was ushered to a small conference room and offered a seat. As if her hair wasn’t matted and sandy. As if she wasn’t wearing the clothes she had put on the morning before. Human resources would be right with her, she was told.
And human resources arrived in the form of a portly man as pale as a poached chicken with thinning drab blond hair. He squeezed himself into the seat across from Mary, the thick of his thighs pressing against the arms of the chair.
“Bob Kossel,” he said, extending his hand.
Mary took it, feeling its damp warmth. “Mary Chase,” she said.
And the interview began.
“So have you worked in hotels, Ms. Chase?”
Mary gave him a solar grin. “All my life.”