swooping between the pilings.”
“Did you catch it?”
“Catch it? No—God no. If I had hooked that, it would’ve probably taken me and all my tackle to the bottom of the ocean—thing probably weighed half a ton. It just kind of hovered around the pier and went right back out to sea again. Things like that blew my mind as a kid; they still don’t seem real.” Lowering his voice, strangely urgent, Henry says, “You should get the peanut butter.”
Uncomprehending, Ruby looks down at the jar at her elbow. “What?”
“Take the peanut butter before Moxie gets it.”
“Why?”
Moxie is standing by the little table set with their food and wine, innocuously fondling the big glass jar. Ruby starts to say, “She won’t—” but even as she speaks—before either one of them can move—the little girl whirls around and in one continuous motion pitches the container over the railing.
Too late, Henry yells, “Catch it—shit!”
The heavy jar falls from view, Henry’s heart plummeting with it to crash like a bomb below. He is electrified with fear—this is all they need: a lawsuit; property damage; criminal negligence resulting in death; manslaughter charges; family services brought in. Right here and now, at this moment, they stand to lose everything. This is the thought process of a split-second.
“Oh shit, shit—” Numb with dread, Henry jumps to looks over the railing.
The jar is directly below, smashed in the gutter. There is no one around; no victims, no witnesses. No shocked and accusatory stares. No damage—only an empty parking space starred with a peanut-butter splat.
Leaning against the railing, his knees wobbly, Henry suddenly has a strange revelation:
He is standing exactly where that dog-faced woman was, nearly thirty years ago. It’s the same balcony; the very same room. And if there had been a little boy like him standing in that spot down there—that exact same spot—he would have just been killed.
Ruby is still in shock, clutching the grinning baby in one hand and the camera in the other. “Moxie! Oh my God,” she says. “Honey, I wouldn’t have imagined in a million years she could do that so fast.”
“I know. It’s okay.” He’s annoyed that she still hasn’t stopped taping.
“I am so sorry. I just never would have dreamed—”
“It’s okay. Nothing happened. We were lucky.” His heart is finally slowing down. “We lucked out, that’s all.”
That night, after Moxie is asleep and Ruby’s camera is recharged, Henry starts to talk.
Chapter Five
Flying Fish
Once they had established a home base at the Formosa Hotel, Henry and his mother spent a few days enjoying the island. They had enough money to live on for a couple of weeks—the sum of their small savings and the severance check from her last short-lived secretarial job, from which she was let go for borrowing from petty cash. She would find another job, there was no rush.
In the meantime, they spent long, blissful days on the town beach, Henry snorkeling in the shallows while his mother lazed in the sun. Occasionally they got more adventurous and would trek the cliff-side road to Lover’s Cove, a stonepile of a beach south of Avalon that was famous for its undersea gardens. It was a spectacular spot, forever ice-cold from direct ocean currents, but teeming with colorful sea life and surrounded by lovely, spooky kelp groves. At regular intervals, glass-bottom tourist boats would pass close by, feeding chopped meat to the fish.
“Mom, why aren’t we rich?” Henry asked, drying off on the rocks.
“We are. There’s more to life than money.”
“Like what?”
“Like this. You and me here together. Don’t you know the best things in life are free?” Vicki stretched, languorously arching her body toward the sun like a movie star. In her bathing suit and big sunglasses she looked a lot younger than usual—Henry could see a couple of creepy old men checking her out. He wanted to go swimming but was afraid she’d start talking to them.
“But you always say there’s no free lunch. That you get what you pay for.”
“That’s different.”
“But how come rich people get to have everything? It’s not fair.”
“Nothing in life is fair. Being rich doesn’t guarantee happiness. It can be a curse.”
“How?”
“Well, when you’re born into something like that, it comes with a lot of responsibility—you live your life under the weight of it, and can never truly discover yourself, the real you. You have to be what they want you to be.”
She paused, so that Henry thought she was finished, but then she went on:
“You never find out who you are, or who