Cindy held up some fingers but Mary didn’t turn her head to count. “It was nice of Eddie to help us out like that,” Cindy said. “Roy’s always felt he was born to be an announcer.”
“He has the right voice for it,” Mary said.
“I always thought Roy could have been an opera singer,” Cindy said, and she sounded wistful.
It was a beautiful afternoon, the ocean ringed round with strings of clouds, the sky blue and clean. Cindy added more fingers. “Mary,” she said. “Look at me. You know your time is almost up, right?”
“What do you mean?” Mary asked.
She understood perfectly, though. The fingers meant how much time she had left. The problem was she couldn’t tell what unit of time Cindy was referring to. It could be years or months or weeks or days or hours or even — this was too terrible to consider — minutes. Whatever the unit was, she had six of them — three more than the number of Cindy and Roy’s grandchildren she’d seen out of the corner of her eye.
The thing about a life is how hard it is to make it shift course once it’s gotten going. There was no wind, no wind at all.
“It’s up to you,” Cindy said. “It’s always been up to you. Eddie isn’t going to be any help. He doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do. He was just an immature form of the species when he got taken. A little boy, you’d say.”
For some reason Mary found herself remembering a trip with the Darlings to a popular outlet store. Mary’s mother had told her how much money she could spend on a sweater if she saw one she liked. The sweaters were more expensive than Mary thought they would be, the Darlings better off. The only sweater Mary could afford was a cardigan in an unpleasant shade of burnt orange, neither a style nor a color remotely in fashion — she knew when she bought it everyone would feel sorry for her. Driving home from the outlet store she shut the hem of her new sweater in the car door but she couldn’t make herself tell Mrs. Darling what she’d done. The landscape swelled past, houses, trees, phone wires. My poor sweater, Mary thought. Enough of it had been left hanging out that it was probably dragging along the road. Poor, poor sweater! She hated it for being so stupid; it had gotten what it deserved.
And now what? Mary thought.
“Now you have to give this all up,” Cindy said. “All of it. Also you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself. The sweater no longer exists.”
Mary had known the robot could read her mind but this was the first time it hadn’t even bothered to pretend that it was doing something else.
“After you threw it away it was picked up by a scow,” Cindy said. “Everything that went into its composition got broken down into parts too numerous and too infinitesimal to ever be brought together again into anything even remotely resembling a sweater.”
“Like the Rain of Beads?” Mary said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! What is wrong with you people? The Rain of Beads? Get over it!” The robot’s voice jumped to a register that made Mary’s eyes water. For a moment she thought she could see something other than Cindy sitting in the chair beside her. “The Rain of Beads,” the voice echoed, disgusted.
“If I leave him he isn’t going to like it,” Mary said.
“Of course he isn’t going to like it.”
Mary swallowed. It wasn’t just that her eyes were watering, it was that she was crying. “What about Blue-Eyes?” she asked.
But the robot was done with her — she could feel it pierce her heart as it went.
Meanwhile the tide was coming in; Mary stood in the shallows where the littlest waves lapped around her ankles. The chairs were gone, the beach empty, it was growing dark. More than six minutes had passed, meaning the time she had left could be measured in hours, if not eons. Soon Walter would arrive home in his silver-gray car, the same car he’d taken Eddie away in. Then they would sit together watching the moon make a road of light on the water. His great melancholy golden eyes, his splendid nose with its curved nostrils like the drawer pulls on the highboy she inherited from her parents. If she left him it would be as good as admitting that practically her whole life had been a mistake.
She had just wrapped her cover-up tighter around the bag of bones that her body had turned out to be and begun to head back to the house when an even older woman caught her eye, trolling the dunes with a metal detector. She looked a little like Miss Vicks though of course it couldn’t be her — Miss Vicks had been dead for years. Whether it was friend or foe, robot or fairy, it was impossible to say. There had been so many Miss Vickses, including the shy human woman.
“Hello, Dearie,” the old woman said. “I don’t suppose you have a spare piece of change lying around for a poor beggar woman like myself? I haven’t had a thing to eat in days and this thing”—she lifted the metal detector and gave it a little shake—“is no use whatsoever.”
“I don’t have anything on me,” Mary said. “But if you come up to the house, I’ll see what I can do.”
For a starving person, the old woman looked well fed, plump even; a bright spot of light, its source indiscernible, rode the surface of each eyeball, lending her a fervent, overstimulated look.
“I see you’ve done very well for yourself,” the old woman said once they were inside. She was eyeing the curio cabinet where the sorcerer kept his collection of Mary-related flotsam, including the piece of blue-green beach glass he claimed was shaped like Mary’s torso, the jar of small translucent shells he said were the color of her skin, and the glossy dark brown seedpod the size of a lady’s compact he’d informed her was called a Mary bean. “No one wants to grow old,” the old woman said. “No one wants to get left to grow moldy in a corner.” She was still holding on to her metal detector, and when Mary offered to take it from her the old woman’s eyes grew brighter still. “Have you made the sign of the cross, Dearie?” she asked. “Have you smoored the fire?”
There was no good answer to these questions. Mary went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “I don’t have much,” she called. “How do you feel about leftovers?” During the week while Walter was away she didn’t keep a lot of food in the house. She located some chicken à la king in a plastic tub near the back but it didn’t look like it was good anymore.
The sound of merry-go-round music from the boardwalk drifted through the kitchen window — day had turned to night and Mary hadn’t really noticed. Often she didn’t. At low tide she would collect mussels, cook them in vermouth, and then drink whatever was left in the bottle. “How about some wine?” she asked, but there was no answer.
When Mary returned to the living room to see what had become of the old woman she found her opening the curio cabinet and reaching inside. “What do you think you’re doing?” Mary asked. “Give me that!”
“Don’t get all excited,” the old woman said. “I only wanted to have a look.” She cupped the Mary bean in the palm of her hand and stroked it like a pet, feeling around its edge with her finger. “Do you know how to open one of these?” she asked.
“No,” Mary said. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea.” The bean came from a far-off land where it grew on a vine so huge a person could live inside it like a house. Some people considered it a charm against drowning, but according to Walter, the darker the color of the bean, the more dangerous its contents. They’ll put anything in, he’d told her.
A car approached, its headlights riding the wall, lapping like water up and over the curio cabinet and toward the ceiling.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” The old woman handed Mary the bean and began sliding her metal detector back and forth across the floor at the foot of the wall. It made a series of whimpering noises punctuated with soft grunts, not unlike the sound a newborn puppy makes in its blind quest for its mother. “What are you waiting for?” the old woman scolded. “He’ll be here any minute.”