A passage from Monterey Bay by Lindsay Hatton

1940

Her body was eating itself.

That’s what it felt like. Head, neck, arms, legs rushing toward a pit of internal gravity. Upon her descent from the train, the pit had been no larger than a seed. Now, however, it was the size of a billiard ball and growing quickly, which meant there was work to be done. Keep steady, keep calm, notice things beyond yourself and let them distract you, let them stretch you back into a workable shape. Notice the tide pools, notice the fog. Notice the biologist picking through the water. Notice how he swings the bucket as he walks, how he whistles out of the corner of his mouth, out of key. Notice the bucket in your own hand: its emptiness, its rusty handle. Her father had told her to assist the biologist in his collections, to scan the water for the sort of boneless, brainless creatures the biologist prized. Heroes advance when it makes sense to retreat, her father had reminded her when she protested, and cowards retreat regardless of what makes sense. But he was wrong. He was wrong to have brought her here, he was wrong to have dismissed her, and now she knew without shame or regret that she would rather be a coward.

So she began her calculations. The retreat’s first phase would be the most difficult: jagged, weed slicked, a long stretch of water and rocks leading to a gray strip of sand in the distance. On the beach, she could start to run. The hotel lawn could be taken at a sprint, after which she’d have to improvise: hitching a ride in the gardener’s truck, stealing a delivery boy’s bicycle. At the train station, she could barter something for a ticket to San Francisco, and then she would be gone. Away from her father, away from this town, away from this dreary coast and the tides that rasped across it, away from the bleak half-moon of Monterey Bay.

The plan assembled, she put her bucket down and waited for the panic to loosen its grip. Escape was possible and, at fifteen, she was old enough. The hotel, however, seemed to be suggesting otherwise. From the water’s edge, she could see both the building and the shadows of its history. Once a playground for the sporting elite, it was now a sad husk of another era’s opulence, a grotesque hybrid of the Spanish Revival and the Carpenter Gothic, its grandeur eroded by diverse misfortune: arson, pine mistletoe, bark-boring beetles, a rash of unsolved murders and suicides, inklings of witchcraft on the polo grounds, a stench from the nearby canneries that was, on certain days in the high season, strong enough to be visible. If the hotel had endured, it was only in theory. Margot and her father were the establishment’s first paying guests in well over a month, and although this didn’t bother her in principle, it did in practice. The emptiness was like an accusation, the lobby and ballroom and dining room and hallways flaunting their vacancies as if delighted by the prospect of causing her personal offense.

In truth, she had sensed catastrophe from the outset. There had been the disaster in the Philippines, of course, and then two journeys of equal foreboding: the cargo ship from Manila to San Francisco and then the southbound train that had taken them the rest of the way down the coast. The drive to the hotel in the rented Packard had been no better, her forehead pressed to the window as she took inventory. Alvarado Street: Monterey’s jittery, provincial downtown strip. The Coast Valleys gas holding tanks: two cylindrical metal landmarks of uneven height and identical ugliness. The Presidio: a pantomime of military preparation, canvas-roofed convoys trudging through the unlocked gates. Lake El Estero: a man-made ditch of brackish water, its redundant shores just a stone’s throw from the bay itself. She waited for her father to echo her apprehension, to support it. But he remained silent as they reached the far side of town and came to a stop on the hotel’s gravel drive, and now, ankle-deep in seawater, she knew. It wasn’t just the fog, it wasn’t just the smell. It wasn’t just the fact that, after years of working at her father’s side, she had been exiled. It was a bone-deep certainty that Monterey was out to destroy her in the same manner it had already destroyed itself.

The escape, then. The Philippines beckoned, but so did other places: Indonesia, the Channel Islands, Bolivia. In each locale, her apprenticeship to her father had taught her many skills, most of them in lucrative fields. She had a flair for languages and a talent for negotiation. She wasn’t a beauty queen, but with the possible exception of her height, she wasn’t a sideshow freak either. The one thing that stood in her way, logistically speaking, was the biologist. She had been forced into his company almost an hour earlier and since then had genuinely grown to hate him. Here was a case in which the hammer had already fallen, the wings had already been clipped, life’s capacity for meaningful action obliterated. There were several dozen yards between them, the sound of his whistling obscured by the crashing surf, his shape like its own shadow moving across the bay, but even from a distance she could see it all quite clearly. The dullard’s delight with which he allowed himself to be engulfed by the shoreline, the unnecessary reverence with which he plucked a specimen from the water, gave it an inexplicable sniff, and then added it to his bucket. When a sea lion belched, he paused and bowed his head like a penitent at the steps of an oracle. Then a furtive yet urgent search of his left trousers pocket. The withdrawal of a flask. A long, guilty chug.

Run, coward, she commanded herself. Run.

But her legs refused. They had already been eaten by the black pit of panic. So she stumped along, slipping and hobbling over the rocks, until, just a few steps from the beach, the sound of laughter made her freeze. In spite of herself, she turned around. The biologist’s mouth was emitting the sounds of mockery. His eyes, however, were flashing with mockery’s opposite: a gentle sort of surprise that almost made her proud.

He frowned at her. She turned and ran.

And then it was over. She was on her stomach, limbs askew, eye to eye with something that could have belonged in her sketchbook: a small black snail, its dark foot sliding across what she knew to be a widening pool of her own blood.

Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Copyright Lindsay Hatton, 2016.