By the light of the nearly full moon, Daisy was streaked with earth and sweat, her leg bleeding from where she had gashed herself with the sharp spade, triumphant. She had never looked saner as she stared down at her work. She reached down, picking through the mush for the pearls that were stained but somehow unbroken. For safekeeping, she fastened them around her own throat before turning to me.
Daisy lifted my hand to her lips, kissing it almost gallantly, and then she went to put her frock on over all that mess. The slip was a loss, and the dress might be too, but it would likely get her back into the house without any questions.
“You’re an absolute doll, my Jordan,” she said. “Are you sure you won’t take a ride home?”
“N-no,” I said. I managed to stop my teeth from chattering because she was so calm and cool. Perhaps I should have tried the demoniac after all. “I’ll walk.”
She kissed my hand again before pulling back.
“All right, dear. Remember, back here at seven, bright and early. Mother insisted on that beastly veil, and it will take you and the other girls to get it on me.”
“Of course.”
I went out of the yard, walking down the street with my shadow cast in front of me by the yellow-eyed streetlamps. There was no wind at all on that hot June night, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw prowling lions and the figures of young girls rattling in the shadows, thin enough that when they turned sideways, they would cease to be visible at all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nick appeared uncharacteristically late for lunch that next Sunday, hair ruffled and a summery red flush on his cheeks. The only reason he was wearing his jacket was because going without at the Plaza tea-garden was simply not done. He slid into the chair opposite from me with a muttered apology, and I excused him because I was probably going to ruin his summer.
“Gatsby?” I asked, and he looked down, nodding.
“He brought me into the city,” he said, and I waved him away.
“Darling, you must know by now that I do not care.”
He looked uncertain about that, but he took my hand gratefully when I offered it. I had chosen a discreet spot in the tea-garden for our meeting, one sheltered by tall Boston ferns, almost invisible from the main room. It gave everything an Eden-like green glow, and barring the gentle clink of silverware on china, the murmur of the other patrons, and the distant wail of the automobiles motoring by, it was a private kind of place.
Risking a quick look around, I brought his hand up to my lips for a quiet kiss, but before he could smile too much at me, I shook his head.
“Business before pleasure, I’m afraid. Let me tell you a story, and at the end, you shall tell me how it ends.”
“Is this a game?” he asked with a slight and willing smile.
“Of course it is, dear heart,” I lied. “Now shush and listen.”
I told him three stories.
The first was set in October of 1917, the time I had come walking down the road and seen, all unlooked for, Daisy with her arms around a dashing soldier, someone so poor and so unrefined that there was no way to predict the creature he would become. It had taken a war to change him, or a murder, or a deal with the devil, but whatever he was in October of 1917, he looked at Daisy as if she were his heart left his chest, as if he didn’t care where she went so long as he could follow.
“He looked at her,” I told Nick, “like every girl longs to be looked at.”
“Do you?” Nick asked, but I waved him away impatiently.
“I haven’t the time for that kind of nonsense,” I said, sidestepping the question, and then I went on to tell him about what had happened the night before Daisy’s wedding, though of course I gave him the version that Daisy wanted told, the one where she wept and then was ready to join the bridal dinner in half an hour. I could see that Nick believed an eighteen-year-old new drunk, heartbroken and half-mad, could pull herself together inside of half an hour, and it told me that he didn’t know his cousin very well. Some girls could do it. I could likely do it, though I preferred to make sure that I was never in such a situation in the first place. Daisy wasn’t good for that sort of thing. She could only lash out, quick and potentially deadly, but for anything that required a sustained effort, she was at a loss.