by Megan Chance
“Stupid,” he offered, leaning in. I felt the warmth of his breath as he touched my cheek. “At least you see it, unlike most of them. That picture you drew at Coppa’s said pretty well what you think of it all. Sit very still. I don’t want to take out an eye.”
I would have jerked back in surprise if he had not held me firm. “You saw that? Ellis didn’t.”
He was deft and quick; the knife pressed gently, I heard the faint snap of the stitch and forced myself not to make a face at the strange sense of the thread pulling through my skin. “Farge is an idiot. Haven’t I said that before? Anyway, you’re in the wrong crowd. You should be with the Hoffmans and the McKays. That set at least tries to make the world better, with all their charity work. Some of it’s misguided, but at least they make an attempt.”
My aunt had once done the same, Goldie had told me. How my cousin had objected when I’d thought to do some charity work myself. How my uncle had objected. Now I understood that they wanted to keep me close and isolated, where they could manipulate both me and society as they wished.
“I met Mrs. Hoffman once. At the Cliff House.”
Another press and pull. His fingers were warm and sure, his hand cupped my cheek. I’d not felt such tenderness in so very long that it was mesmerizing. He plucked another stitch. “Don’t tell me it was that time you were with Belden and the others.”
“It was. Why?”
“Because you were drunk. I’m sure you made a fine impression.”
“It was less tedious with champagne.”
“That’s why Ned Greenway makes a fortune selling it. There.” Dante sat back with a satisfied expression. “At least you don’t look sewn together now.”
I touched the wound, a puffy ridge, but smooth now without the roughness of the stitches. “Thank you. I had no idea you had so many talents.”
“That’s me. A veritable treasure trove.” He smiled, such an engaging, beautiful smile, one so real, one that asked nothing of me, and suddenly I felt unbalanced, as if the ground had shifted beneath my feet.
Hastily, embarrassed for no reason I could say, I looked away. “You should eat before it gets cold.”
“Oh yes.” He picked up his fork. But I could see his thoughts grow distant, and he kept looking at my sketchbook as if something there troubled him. I waited until I couldn’t stand it any longer, and then I said, “What’s wrong?”
He blinked. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Why are you looking at my drawing that way?”
“I’m just thinking . . . What did you intend to do with these?”
There it was, the question that had plagued me, asked so directly that there was no way to avoid my own uncertainty, or the fact that these drawings held my entire history: who I thought I was and who I meant to be, a future I had only just begun to consider before Blessington buried it—or so I thought. At Dante’s question, the possibility teased again.
“All of San Francisco has to be rebuilt,” Dante went on. “The interior architects that are here can’t possibly handle the work. Farge will be useless now without these, of course, and that means everyone will be looking for people like you. Maybe . . .” Dante trailed off tentatively. “I don’t know if that’s something you might want, but if you do . . . maybe I could help you make it happen.”
“But I’m a woman.”
“Needs must. Desperate people make choices they might not otherwise. People want their houses built now. Offer your services. See who takes you up.”
“I—I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
“Aren’t you?” He gestured to the books. “You’re more than ready. You’re just afraid. Think about it, May. Look—” He turned the pages quickly, stopping at the drawing of the library. “Farge didn’t change a single line. Not one. If he thought they were good enough to call them his, why can’t the person who really drew them?”
Again, that flicker of hope, or desire—along with fear. “I don’t know—”
“You have a gift. It would be a sin to waste it.”
His belief was tantalizing. Still . . .
“Let’s do this: let’s run an advert in the Bulletin. We’ll print one of these drawings to show them what you can do—what do you want to call your firm?”
“If I did that, the Sullivans would know I’m alive,” I protested.
Dante met my gaze. “They’ll know that anyway, when I write the articles. They’ll know it when you take your inheritance back. How long do you mean to hide?”
“Until we can publish my story, until I have my inheritance, I can’t risk that they’ll find me. They’ve hired a private detective. If I publish an advertisement, they’ll know exactly where I am.”
“We’ll ask that inquiries be sent to the Bulletin offices.”
“Then Ellis will know it has something to do with you, and he knows where to find you, doesn’t he? He knows who Alphonse Bandersnitch really is.”
“I can manage Ellis Farge.”
“But he belongs to the Sullivans now, and you don’t know them as I do.”
“No, I know them better. Wasn’t I the one to tell you? They’re not as clever as we are together. They won’t find you here.”
“No,” I insisted. “Not yet.”
His jaw tightened. “All right. As you like.”
I tried to make him understand. “If they find me this time, I’ll disappear.”
“You won’t disappear. I won’t let you. I’ll look for you. I’ll have the whole city looking for you.”
How intent he looked, how devoted. I should not feel so warmed by his concern. “At least someone would be out there searching this time. I could bear it better, knowing someone was trying to find me.”
For a moment, he was quiet. Then, hoarsely, he said, “I’m sorry, May. I’m so very sorry. For all of it.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I’m sorry anyway. I wish I’d been able to stop it. I would have done anything if I’d realized.”
The words raised in me a longing I didn’t expect, again that need to be close to him, to touch him. No one had truly cared about me since my mother had died, and in that moment the loneliness I’d borne since her death, the loneliness I’d told myself Goldie and my uncle had assuaged, swept through me so strongly that I rose and stepped away. I could not be still. I could not look at him; I was afraid I would cry if I did.
A week later, when I next met Shin, she rolled up her sleeve to show me the bruises on her wrist, but her voice was triumphant. “No opium since the earthquake, and she has bad nightmares. Now, she is worse than ever.”
I was horrified. “She hurt you?”
“She suffers. She does not know her own strength.” Shin rebuttoned the cuff and gave me a small and wicked smile. “It is all right, Miss May. It is worth it to see her this way. Mr. Sullivan does not care about his daughter’s problems these days. The Chinese are unhappy. They have asked for a meeting with the governor and he has granted it because of the stories in the newspaper. Mr. Ruef is worried about the meeting because he has no power with the governor, and he is not listening to Mr. Sullivan, and so Mr. Sullivan is not listening to his daughter’s complaints.”
Dante’s articles were working. I imagined my uncle watching his grand plans for Chinatown slipping away. It was satisfying, but it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. “What about Mr. Farge?”
“He is . . . sad. Upset. Nothing pleases him. They fight all the time.”
“Good,” I said.
“Miss May, there is something else,” Shin said urgently. “Mr. Sullivan had a visitor last night. Mr. Oelrichs.”
“Mr.—Stephen Oelrichs? You mean Goldie’s ex-fiancé? Why would he come to see Uncle Jonny? He didn’t see Goldie?”
Shin looked grim. “He saw your uncle. They spoke quietly, then they fought. They were both very angry.”
That was puzzling, and troubling too. I had thought Stephen Oelrichs wanted nothing to do with the Sullivans, so why would he come to Nob
Hill to argue with my uncle?
Of course, I’d been gone a long time. Perhaps things had changed. Perhaps Oelrichs and my uncle had business together.
“Did you hear anything they said?”
“No. But Mr. Sullivan was not himself the rest of the day.”
“I see. Well.” I took a deep breath. “I’ll see if Dante knows anything about it. Be careful, Shin. Please. And . . . don’t let Goldie touch you. She hasn’t the right.”
“It is almost over. I am doing my part, Miss May. I trust you to do yours.”
Again, my responsibility and obligation pressed. Things were going according to plan, and I should be content, but the scene Shin had described between my uncle and Stephen Oelrichs disturbed me. I didn’t understand it, and it seemed important, something I should know. I rolled my uncle’s vest button between my fingers as I walked back to Dante’s house.
I’d only gone a few blocks when a bright blue canary flew past my shoulder, so close I could have touched it. A sign, if I chose to see it that way, because I started from my thoughts and turned to see the man behind me. There were men everywhere, of course, but this one stepped casually—too casually—aside to study a half-standing brick wall. There were a hundred half-standing brick walls just like it, and the way this man studied it was strangely intense. I could not see his face; his hat shadowed it.
No one could possibly recognize me. It was just a man with a predilection for brick walls. But my gooseflesh told me otherwise, and I knew now to pay attention to my instincts, no matter how silly they seemed.
I turned back again, pretending not to see him, but now I was aware of him. I tried to give him no hint that I knew I was being followed, but at the next corner I turned abruptly, and then at the next. My excursions throughout the city in those days after the fire had given me a rat’s sense of safety. The moment I found a fallen chimney, I crawled into it and waited.
The man had been following me. I wasn’t wrong about that. He turned the corner onto the street where I was, hesitated, searched, and then turned away again. I did not move. I curled in that cramped and uncomfortable position for the rest of the day. When twilight came, I crept from the chimney and made a circuitous way back to Dante’s house. It took more than an hour, and I came to the back door, where I waited another fifteen minutes to make certain I had not been followed before I went inside.
The door opened into Dante’s bedroom—the bed neatly made, clothes hanging on hooks in the walls, boots encrusted with mud and ash, a tilting dresser cracked up the side, scattered with an overfull ashtray and hairbrushes and shaving things, and throughout the scent of cigarette smoke and Dante’s soap, which I would have recognized anywhere.
From the other room came the clacking of the typewriter. I closed the door softly behind me and leaned against it, catching my breath, trying to calm my pulse and my fear. I was safe. He had said he would let nothing happen to me. He would not let them take me away again. He would look for me . . . In some part of my mind it seemed impossible that I might trust him, or anyone, to do those things, but the truth was that I did. He had seen what I’d put in that drawing at Coppa’s. He’d recognized me in that library. He understood what no one else did.
The clacking stopped abruptly, and then he was in the bedroom doorway. “Where the hell have you been?” he snapped, and I saw the worry in his face, the way his thick hair stood on end as if he’d raked his hand through it a dozen times. “I was just getting ready to go looking for you.”
“Someone was following me.”
He took two strides to the door and pulled me into his arms, and I fell against his chest with relief. “Are they still?”
“I think I lost them. I know I did.”
He locked the door. “Who was it?”
“Some man . . . I don’t know who he was.”
Dante pulled me closer and rested his chin on my hair. His hands went to my back, soothing—I was trembling, I realized. “You can’t go out again, May. Not alone. Not until this is resolved.”
I pulled back. “I can’t not go out. Who knows when it will be over?”
His hands came to my face, his thumbs at my jaw, caressing, rubbing. “What’s this all over your face?”
I reached up to feel. “I don’t know. Soot? I hid in a chimney.”
“A chimney?”
“All day. It was very uncomfortable.”
He stilled. “You hid in a chimney all day.”
“I didn’t want to be found.”
He laughed. Short, at first, in disbelief, and then in real amusement. “What a survivor you are, May Kimble. You’ll still be among the ruins when the world ends. You don’t need me; you don’t need anyone.”
I gripped his wrists, keeping his hands on my face. “Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true. You have a remarkable—”
“I don’t want to be among the ruins when the world ends. I’m . . . I’m so very, very tired of . . . being alone.” The last words slipped out before I knew I would say them.
Dante’s smile died. In his eyes I saw an emotion I did not want to escape.
He whispered, “May,” and then he kissed me. It was as if I’d been waiting always for this kiss, and when he started to draw away, I pulled him closer. I put my arms around his neck and opened my mouth to him, and he made a sound deep in his throat that dropped into my stomach and pulled at my every nerve so I was like those houses during the fire, glowing from the inside out until they burst.
Disaster is the best aphrodisiac, he’d written. The knowledge that everything could change in a heartbeat, that a mother could die on the way home from picking up piecework, or a whole life could be upended by a word, by a lie, by the earth waking, or a spark catching from a fallen chimney. After what I’d been through, how did one stop at a kiss? Who knew what tomorrow would bring, if it came at all?
Whatever it was, the uncertain future, the city in ruins, the fact that I’d felt Dante belonged to me months before I knew him . . . I don’t know which it was. Perhaps all of those things. What I do know is that I wanted him. I was starving for him. I had his shirt open and my hands on his skin, my fingers in the hair on his chest, and it was not enough. When he shoved my own shirt from my shoulders, I pressed my breasts to him and it was not enough. His tongue on mine was not enough. I fumbled at the buttons of his trousers, and then we were at his bed, and it wasn’t until then that he paused, that he drew away and looked at me in question, and I knew he would stop if I said no, enough, and I heard my mother’s voice in my head as she warned me away from the boys in the neighborhood. “You must always watch yourself, May. There are expectations for you. You don’t want to be known as that kind of girl . . .”
“I’m a modern woman,” I breathed.
Dante lifted a brow and gave me a look that turned me inside out. “That you are.”
“Please don’t stop. I don’t want you to stop.”
His expression softened, so unbearably sweet and wondering, with that hunger too that matched my own. “I’ll be careful. I promise you.”
After that, we did not slow, and though it hurt when he first eased into me, it was a pain I welcomed, and one soon swept away as the pleasure mounted along with my desire, and then, at last, it was enough. Then, at last, I had what I didn’t know I was looking for: the antidote to my loneliness, which shriveled and withered away. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much of me it had been.
It wasn’t until long after, when we were physically exhausted but unable to sleep, that I said, “I’ve changed my mind. I want you to run the advertisement. Choose a sketch you like and we’ll have inquiries sent to the Bulletin office, as you said. I’ll call my firm the Brooklyn Company.”
He’d been tracing circles on my shoulder, but now he paused. “What of your family? What about this private detective?”
“You were right, what you said before. It’s time. In Blessington, I knew I had enough of their secrets to destroy them. All I needed then was
you and Shin. China Joe has the evidence, and I’m done running. I want them to know I’m alive. I don’t need to have my money to show the city what they are or what I am.”
A long pause, but I felt the tension in him, and I knew it for excitement and not apprehension. “Are you certain?”
“Yes. Maybe nothing will happen, but . . .”
He kissed my hair. “My dear girl, have you forgotten where you are? This is San Francisco. Anything can happen here.”
Long after he’d fallen into sleep, I lay awake, thinking of possibilities, until dawn broke and with it the bustle of the city waking. The world had opened for me at last. I had allies. I had my sketchbooks. All I needed was my inheritance. We had not yet received an answer to Dante’s telegram to New York about my father, though he checked every day. I was growing more anxious, but he’d assured me it would come. His fellow reporter was thorough, and once we knew who my family was in New York and contacted them, once they were told what happened and we contacted an attorney with all the information, Stephen Oelrichs perhaps, as he’d once—
With a start, I remembered my conversation with Shin.
I shoved Dante, who moaned and grumbled and squinted against the morning before he opened his eyes to peer at me. Then he threw his arm over his face and said, “Generally I prefer something gentler. Coffee. Perhaps a kiss.”
“I’d forgotten—I meant to tell you. Yesterday morning I went to see Shin.”
He sighed. “What time is it?”
“Early yet.”
“I don’t have to be at the paper until eight.” His hand went to my hip. “I can think of something better to do than talking about Shin.”
I brushed my lips against his rough cheek. “Dante, Shin said Stephen Oelrichs was at the camp to talk to my uncle. That they argued.”
“Oelrichs?” He sounded as surprised as I had been.