20

THE NEXT MORNING, THE SMELL FROM THE canneries reached its apex.

Just as Giana Agnelli had predicted, the winter had been one of record-breaking sardine hauls, and now, as spring creaked in, the town found itself awash on a quickly souring tide, the supply vastly outpacing the demand. The municipal authorities, recognizing that a good portion of the populace had already gone half-mad from the stench, dusted off Ordinance 106: a dictate that all canneries and reduction plants install the proper deodorizing equipment, a violation of which was punishable by ninety days in jail. When the threat of the ordinance failed to enact the sort of change the townspeople had been promised, they took matters into their own hands and formed five-man “smelling committees” that roamed the Row at peak canning hours, enforcing a haphazard type of vigilante justice that climaxed in the citizen’s arrest of the seventy-five-year-old superintendent of the Carmel Canning Company.

And as the smell blossomed and bred, compelling everyone in Monterey County to consider the downside of taking from the sea exactly what they thought it had offered, Margot became a corpse. A corpse lying on the horsehair sofa, the hours inching by. Everything was merciless, aggressively lit, and all those details she had taken such great care not to notice—her earlier sickness, her recent fatness, the absence of her monthly bleeding—were insisting upon themselves, repeating themselves in the opposite of prayer.

A resurrection, in other words, didn’t seem likely, but it occurred nonetheless. She wasn’t sure where to go. She no longer had a mutiny in mind or a riddle to solve, so she just proceeded aimlessly, visiting all the places she knew would disturb her with their aftertaste. She returned to the Hotel Del Monte. She sat beneath the sickly palms and watched a skeleton crew of Japanese botanists dance through the pest-eaten topiaries in their small black shoes.

When she had grown tired of the hotel, she climbed the hill to the Presidio, sneaked through the gates, and gazed blankly out at the vista that, more than three centuries earlier, had been claimed under the authority of a careless empire. She loitered around the outskirts of her father’s cannery and listened for the noises she feared. She went to the Agnelli warehouse on the wharf and found Tino standing outside, a bag of saltwater taffy in hand.

“Would you like some?” he asked.

“No.”

He tossed the bag over the railing and into a waiting cluster of sea lions, who ripped the bag to shreds and swallowed the candies whole.

She looked at the sky. Somehow, it had become dusk.

“Are you expected at home?”

“No,” she replied.

“Me neither.”

So they continued the pilgrimage together, following the railroad tracks until, at the shared border of Monterey and Pacific Grove, they came to a stop.

“What’s going on here?” she asked.

There were lanterns everywhere: lanterns in every window of every big, cakelike Victorian home, lanterns casting an eerie orange flicker onto the black streets.

“Let’s go,” he pleaded.

“Not yet.”

And when the parade started, she wanted an explanation, but Tino refused, so she asked a fellow onlooker. The celebration, the onlooker said, was a local tradition that had been popular at the turn of the century but that for the past few decades had fallen a bit out of favor. He wasn’t sure of the exact details, but it didn’t really matter because the whole thing had been made up anyway: the story of the ancient Chinese queen who tried to drown herself rather than submit to her father’s desire for a tidy, profitable marriage of convenience. There was a brass band playing what sounded like a funeral dirge. There was a bejeweled bunch of white girls dressed as the queen and her royal court, waving at the crowd from a passing float. As for the actual Chinese, there was no trace of their presence. It was just the lanterns in the windows and the sardine boats in the bay, the land and sea white with fire, the earth’s skin a platinum cloak of heat and error.

“You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” Tino asked when the parade had ended, when most of the lanterns had been snuffed.

“I think so.”

“I’ll talk to my mother. She knows the right people.”

She hesitated and tried to think clearly. But she no longer knew how. She no longer knew the difference between a promise and a coercion.

“Please do.”

“She’ll need payment, though.”

She reached into her satchel and withdrew the canister of film.

“She’ll find this interesting.”

He took the canister and gave it a little shake.

“And for you?” she asked.

“I don’t need anything.”

“I insist.”

He thought for a moment and then glanced in the direction of the hill.

“One last portrait,” he said.

And it was the last one, she told herself as they entered his father’s sickroom, as Tino climbed into bed alongside him. After this, she would never put pencil to paper ever again. She would never create a single thing. Because what was the point? What was the point in the face of such sadness: Tino curled up against the one man who might have shown him a different way to be, his father so drunk on pain and the medication that was supposed to relieve it that, despite the presence of an audience, he was visibly terrified at having been left to die alone.

An hour later, she found herself standing outside the lab.

The door was locked for once, so she let herself in through the bedroom window. Inside, she listened for a while to make sure no one else was there, and then she sat on the bed. Then she wandered into the front room and lowered herself into the chair behind the desk. She pushed her hands against her ears, but the voices were too loud to silence, too big to suppress, so she went back to the bedroom. She lay flat on the bed and watched as night achieved its full expression, as the day’s mute circus packed up and set off for parts darker and unknown. She watched the shadows on the street stamp a changing, conjoined pattern against the green curtains, the shapes heavy and absolute. There was an unfamiliar feeling between her legs that reminded her of the blank, breathtaking millisecond that occurs between pain’s infliction on the body and pain’s registration by the brain, and she tried to rub the feeling away, but to no avail. At dusk, she heard the sound of an automobile engine and went to the window to see if it was the Buick, but it was not. And although the prominent feeling was one of queasiness—that of having accidentally bathed in something other than water—there was also a sense of weird expansiveness. It was almost as if she could see everything from above, the entire town laid bare in all its segments, everyone confined to borders that had more to do with the quality of the light and air than the presence of any real boundaries, everyone holding down their territories as if armies would rise from the water and rob them of everything save the dense comfort of their own kind.

At around midnight, she heard the front door crash open. She set her jaw and didn’t move, even when her father appeared in the bedroom doorway, his suit rumpled, his face bent with rage.

“Get up,” he said.

“No.”

He approached the bed. He grabbed her by the wrist.

“Where did you get those photographs? Why did you give them to her?”

He yanked her to her feet. She fought, gripping the mattress and pulling herself back down.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he pleaded.

She spit at him. His palm collided with one side of her face and then the other. When her nose began to bleed, he stepped away from the bed, his face frozen in fear and amazement.

“How could you?” he said, quietly this time, almost gently. “You were my life’s work.”

“No, I wasn’t,” she replied. “I was the thing that happened in spite of it.”