I let that sink in. The Manchester Act was something that Aunt Justine’s friends discussed over dinner, it wasn’t even mentioned in the smart set that I ran with normally. Sitting in a stolen car with Khai, however, it felt more real than it ever had.
“I guess you could go anywhere you like, right?” asked Khai, trying to be encouraging. “You could go to Paris or London…”
“I suppose I hadn’t thought about it,” I said stiffly, and he laughed a little, shaking his head.
“Lucky,” he said, without much rancor. “Well, if you want to come find us, we’re going to be in Shanghai. Probably trying to stand up to acts that have been cutting paper since before someone came up with paper, but in Shanghai nonetheless.”
“I may very well,” I said, and then because I couldn’t fathom the idea of being forced from my home, “my aunt Justine has perhaps been looking for a change of climate. Shanghai would be a change.”
He parked the car on Park Avenue, handing over the keys in exchange for the three dollars that he didn’t raise an eyebrow at this time. We probably both looked like we were ready for the trash bin. The morning foot traffic split around us, glaring, and I wondered if it had as much to do for what we looked like as it did for the fact we were in their way. I was more vulnerable with him, I realized. Alone I was a charming oddity. With him, I became a foreign conspiracy. Was that why I had never spent much time in Chinatown?
“A change,” Khai echoed.
“Yes. A change.”
He shrugged.
“However or whyever you come, just come,” he said. I thought perhaps he wanted to say something stronger, but we were very little to one another. It would have been oddly shaming for both of us.
He tried a smile.
“Me and Bai will teach you about proper paper-cutting, not the butchery you were doing last night,” he said, and then before I could tell him no, he walked away. It was, I thought, rather smart. If I didn’t say no, there was a chance I could find my way around my own pride and come looking for him in Shanghai after all.
I was shaking by the time I locked the apartment door behind me. I kept my head down so I wouldn’t see myself in the mirror by the door, and I staggered to my room that felt like I hadn’t slept in it in years. I stripped down and fell into bed, leaving my white sheets smudgy with the ash that clung to my hands, my hair, the soles of my feet, and even my belly.
I wonder what the world will be like when I wake up, I thought blearily.
I woke up at noon. The Manchester Act had passed.
Jay Gatsby was dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was George Wilson who shot him, of course, and Tom at the bottom of it, though I didn’t know it for some while. It was Tom who told him who must have been driving the car that night, Tom who directed him to Gatsby’s home where the smashed-up Rolls was all the proof Wilson needed.
I wanted to make Tom a lowering presence, the hand holding the gun that was Wilson, but I couldn’t give him that much. Tom was only shoveling the blame away from himself, and the scales tipped over, this time against Gatsby and all of his promise and all of his potential.
George Wilson came to the mansion in East Egg, and the iron gates did not stop him, and the paths of the gardens did not confuse him. He found Gatsby in the pool where I had once watched people turn into gorgeous ornamental carp as they slipped into the water, and as the newspaper said the next morning, he shot Gatsby twice in the head before moving off to shoot himself behind the boxwood bushes.
Before I knew all of that, I saw the gleeful headline that the Manchester Act had passed, sitting alone at the breakfast table because Aunt Justine was sleeping almost fifteen hours out of every twenty-four. I ate my toast, I read the article carefully, and then I called Nick.