I stared at Daisy, silently pleading with her.

  Do it. Now. Tell him you want to come out on Gatsby’s arm. Tell him you want to come out on mine for all I care. Just tell Tom you don’t want to parade down a staircase with him. Once and for all, renounce this man who hates everything I am and who would hate everything you are if only he knew you.

  Beneath my wordless pleading I hid a deeper, more desperate hope. It had nothing to do with Jay Gatsby and everything to do with Daisy and me and the grain of Wisconsin earth under our feet.

  Remember how I helped you hide from your older sisters after you borrowed their lipstick?

  Remember flinging ourselves into the pond together?

  Remember how I stayed under so long everyone else gasped, but you threw your wet hair back and laughed, knowing I’d always come up again?

  Remember how you were the first cousin I told I was a boy?

  Please, claim me. Claim the brown of my skin and the black of my hair and my eyes that are a darker version of yours.

  Daisy Fabrega-Caraveo, admit that I’m yours.

  But Daisy Fay kept her demure silence.

  I nodded at Gatsby and Jordan. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Now why would you do that?” Tom asked. “We’re all having fun here, aren’t we? There’s plenty to drink inside.”

  I met Gatsby’s eyes, but the stoic set to his face told me nothing.

  “We’ve cleared things up, haven’t we?” Tom asked. “Mr. Pink Suit over here and I are just getting to know each other.”

  For a moment Gatsby was still, save for the hitch in his throat as he swallowed.

  “Of course,” he said.

  I took off down the drive and toward the road, no word over my shoulder until I heard the clicking of heels. It wasn’t the tapping of my cousin’s trotting steps but the certain, light striking of shoes on brick paving.

  “Why do you let him rile you like that?” Jordan asked.

  I paused at the last hedgerow before the gate. “Why do you put up with them?” I asked. “You’re better than all of them.”

  As I said it, I realized how much I meant it. Jordan had neither Tom’s cruelty, nor Daisy’s apathy, nor Gatsby’s senseless optimism. She was the only one who knew anything.

  “Why bother with them?” I asked.

  She looked at me strangely and asked, “You know it’s not your job to look out for Jay’s heart, don’t you?”

  “But it was my job to make sure he wasn’t reckless with Daisy?” I asked.

  “When it interferes with my golf game, I should say so.”

  For just that moment, the laugh we shared brightened the garden lamps.

  When it fizzled, I said, “I don’t care about his heart.”

  “Of course,” Jordan said. She kicked at a round stone. It went skittering into the grass. “The thing is, there’s more to your cousin than you know.”

  I was about to take off on telling her that I knew plenty about Daisy.

  Then I realized what Jordan had just said.

  “Wait,” I said. “You know she’s my cousin?”

  “Of course I know,” she said.

  “But how?” I asked.

  “Girls tell each other things they won’t tell their beaus.” Jordan smoothed the pin-tucked film of her skirt.

  “And you still want to be her friend,” I said, “knowing she’s like me?” Disdain tinted every word as lightly but clearly as the dye on Daisy’s dress.

  Jordan picked a leaf out of my hair. “What do you mean?”

  I looked back up the drive. As much as I despised my cousin at this moment, I didn’t want to announce to Tom the blood and color she shared with me. But they were distant enough not to hear us. Tom and Daisy and Gatsby were talking as though they were the best of friends. Tom gestured up at the architecture.

  “You’ve heard Tom plenty,” I said. “His speeches about the mixing of races. How everyone might intermarry. Well, what do you think Daisy and I are? We exist because our colonizers screwed our ancestors in more ways than one. We’re mixed.” I spread my arms, presenting my body, my skin, as evidence. “We’re the awful harbingers of everyone intermarrying, Jordan, haven’t you heard?”

  “Yes,” Jordan said in a dry voice. “And wouldn’t that be terrible?”

  My arms fell to my sides.

  “You’re a dense little thing, aren’t you?” Jordan asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Mírame,” Jordan said.

  I went still, beginning with the blood at the center of my heart, then out to my fingertips. In that second of hearing Jordan’s Spanish, the sound flawless and familiar, I was so still that the gust off the ocean couldn’t move the strands of my hair.

  “Look at me, Nick,” Jordan said. “Really look at me. Not like Tom and all those other men look at me. You. Really look at me.”

  So I did. I looked at the cool tones of her skin, the peach varnish on her nails, the hair she’d smoothed into a neat bun the same way Daisy did. And I saw her.

  Jordan Baker, the woman who was just as much a harbinger of Tom Buchanan’s nightmares as I was. Jordan Baker, the woman passing as white just as successfully and probably with just as much effort as Daisy.

  “Oh, Jordan,” I breathed out.

  “Oh, stop,” she said. “I don’t want your pity. Would you want mine?”

  “It’s not pity,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t want your admiration either,” she said. “Do you think I enjoy teeing up in front of a world that thinks I’m marvelous but wouldn’t let my own father attend my tournaments?”

  Maybe there was something foolish in thinking I should have known. My own cousin was proof that it was foolish to think you could know just by looking at someone. But Jordan had told me without telling me, when she’d told me about her family, only I hadn’t caught on quickly enough to realize. Her brother. The 65th Infantry Regiment. The number had called up something in my mind that I couldn’t place, but now I could. It was the unit I heard about in news of older cousins and of neighbors’ sons. In the ice-cube turn of my stomach, I imagined her brother coming home to a country that would never thank him for defending it and that loved his sister without ever knowing her. I imagined her father’s pained pride as she told him about the tournaments he never got to see.

  Still, the questions reverberated in me. How did I not know? How did I not know you?

  But when I opened my mouth, the first I spoke was another question entirely, the one I’d wanted to ask Daisy since she’d met me at the train.

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?” Jordan asked. “I wanted better for my family. I was good at something that could help me get it for them. And I wasn’t just good at it, I loved it. I still do. Daisy will complain until the moon goes to bed about how boring it is, but I love it. The precision of it. How quiet you’ve got to be in order to be good at it. But if I wanted to do it, if I wanted what I wanted for my family, I had to let everyone make me into what they wanted.”

  Jordan studied her nails, the shine of the lacquer. “So as you might imagine, I would be the last to judge what your cousin’s doing,” she said. “The problem is that she hasn’t truly reckoned with it, what it means to live as she’s living. She talks to her family, your family, as though nothing has happened, as though life is just as it was. I couldn’t do that. I had the conversations. Hard as they were, I had them. We had them. But she hasn’t done that with her family. I doubt she’s truly even done it with you.”

  In trying to make my face show nothing, I suspected I was accomplishing the opposite.

  “And she thinks she’s sparing you and them something by pretending there’s nothing to talk about,” Jordan said. “But that pretending … that’s what’s going to break their hearts. Because they’re supposed to be the ones she doesn’t need to pretend with. You’re supposed to be someone she doesn’t pretend with.”

  Jordan turned, and it seemed less as though she was turning away from me and more like she was looking for something, like in what direction the moon might be.

  Both rumor and newspaper print debated where Jordan was from, without clear consensus. She was a Chicago debutante. She was a small-town beauty from the Hudson Valley. She was raised in Boston, where Massachusetts cold dissuaded her neither from the golf course nor from going out dancing. So I didn’t know where Jordan was from. And I wouldn’t ask. She would tell me if she wanted to. The thing was that she knew. She hadn’t forgotten and wouldn’t forget. But I wondered now if, one day, Daisy might. She might stay away so long that the name Fleurs-des-Bois would elude her memory, the town she grew up in as vague and distant as the name of an old friend she hadn’t seen in years.

  Gatsby might have glanced my way, trying to hide it. But from this distance, and by the intermittent light of the garden lamps, I couldn’t tell.

  “What are you getting out of all this?” I asked Jordan.

  “I don’t follow,” she said.

  “Not the golf,” I said. “I know what you get out of that. I mean putting up with people like Tom. What is it you want?”

  “You came here, didn’t you?” Jordan kicked another stone, turning her back to me. “So don’t you know?” When she turned back, a pair of tears, tasteful as twin pearls, glinted at the inner corners of her eyes. “Don’t you already know all the things we want and can’t have?”

  * * *

  Querida Amelia,

  Mamá says you’re going to have another baby, which is just the most marvelous news. Less marvelous is hearing you’ve been sick with this little one just like the last. Mamá said that you’re up with the sun cooking and cleaning and seeing Rodolfo off to work, but that you’re sick in bed by sundown. (Why do they call it morning sickness anyway? It’s not as though it observes the clock.)

  I thought you could use a little entertainment while stuck in bed, so here I write some of the ridiculous things I’ve witnessed at parties lately.

  Some producer told us he lived so close to the Hollywoodland sign that the bulbs were too bright to let him sleep. He thought the complaining would make his bragging subtler.

  And you should see all the girls trying to get in front of the cameras! They stroll past the photographers as though they don’t care a thing about being named in the society pages. They’re all elbowing one another out of the way to be in the frame, but when the bulb pops, they give the camera a wide-eyed “Oh, I didn’t know you were there, how you’ve surprised me!” expression. They’re all trying to be famous by chance. Your eyes would roll right back in your head, and mine right after.

  Don’t get me started on the endless critique of debuts. Who can keep up with half of it? It seems that maidenhair ferns, roses, and carnations were the style of the moment yesterday, but woe to any girl who adorns her hair and banquet hall with them tonight. Pink and white roses with gold ribbon is some sort of mark of a country girl, but I think that sounds lovely, don’t you?

  A couple of awful little socialites were making fun of a third for having her party at a restaurant. And it was Delmonico’s, for goodness’ sake! How much more elegant could it be? They all consider judgment some competitive sport. As though the world waits in breathless anticipation for them to decide whether sapphire pins worn in the hair is chic or a sign of the nouveau riche.

  I think it’s just wonderful that the new times are bringing so many new kinds of debuts. It’s no longer just les bals blancs. There’s the bal rose, with married women. Women who drove ambulances for the war in their teenage years are having theirs now. Last month there was even a stylish old woman—all her hair was silver!—who decided she was going to have a debut for her sixtieth birthday. She wore long white gloves, carried a fan, and wore a dress with enough seed pearls that she must have strong bones. She even topped her silver hair with the loveliest tiara! And she’s a grandmother! Can’t you picture that’s something Abuela might have done if she’d had the chance?

  It’s all such a refreshing change from the only debutantes being girls who sit prettily in their window seats embroidering from breakfast until dinner.

  If you’ll let me, I’ll send you the most beautiful dress—I think you’d look divine in a Hilda Steward—and you can wear it and pretend you’re in New York with me. It won’t matter how pregnant you are, Rodolfo won’t be able to stop staring.

  I hate to ask for anything when you’re in your condition, but would you ask Mamá and Papá if they’re getting my letters?

  Yours,

  Daisy

  P.S. I’ve sent you all perfume again, but so the smell won’t bother you, Mamá’s holding yours until you’re feeling better.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  “I’d offer to take you home, but Daisy’s my way there,” Jordan said. “I’m sure she’d drive you too.”

  I didn’t want to get into Daisy’s car. And I didn’t want to ride home with Gatsby either. He would always choose watching my cousin across the sound over anyone close enough for him to touch.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m walking.”

  “Nick,” Jordan said. “It’s miles.”

  “Have you ever been to Wisconsin?” I asked.

  Jordan puffed a low, crisp laugh into the night air. “Do I seem like I’ve ever been to Wisconsin?”

  I smiled. “No. You really don’t.”

  Knowing Jordan better, and knowing what she had in common with Daisy, hadn’t made her glamour any more approachable to me. She still seemed polished with money in a way that made me feel rough as sackcloth. The black of her hair and the near-black of her eyes held all the elegance of a satin dress.

  “Where I’m from, it’s not Milwaukee or Madison,” I said. “It’s hours away from anything you’d call a city. If you need to get anywhere without a car, you’re walking a ways. I’m used to it.”

  “Are you sure?” Jordan asked.

  I turned back to see Jordan lifting her chin toward the pearl-gray clouds. “It looks like rain.”

  With hands in my pockets, I gave her a shrug. “I’m not water-soluble.”

  About half a mile out, the rain had soaked me, the wind blowing sheets of it across the road. I tried to think of it as something cleansing, a washing away of any instinct to help Gatsby or Daisy. But the more I walked, the more my clothes dragged, heavy on my back and shoulders. The weight of my pant hems pulled at my hips.

  A car slowed. On instinct, I moved off toward the trees.

  “Is this what all the young men do these days?” Martha Wolf called from the driver’s seat. “Go on long, brooding walks in a downpour?”

  I came back toward the shoulder.

  “May I offer you a drier form of transportation?” Martha asked. “I think I’m going your way.”

  I squinted through the rain. “He’s not at home.”

  “You think your boy’s the only one I ever come to see around here?” Martha asked. “I know everyone in both Eggs. I know every egg in the carton. Now get in.”

  “I’ll soak your car,” I said.

  “It’s seen worse.” Martha threw the passenger’s side door wide. “Now hurry up or it’ll really get soaked in here.”

  So I did.

  “I can taste certain things about rain, did you know that?” she asked. “Like I can taste that this is going to last through the morning and then clear right up.”

  “You’re putting me on,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Martha said. “Maybe not. We’ll find out in the morning, won’t we?”

  “So it is true?” I asked. “What Gatsby said about your palate?”

  “Everything around here gets at least a little exaggerated, but yes,” she said. “I can tell what kind of flowers bees made honey out of. Hand me a glass of wine, I’ll tell you the vineyard’s life story. Everyone needs a spectacular talent. That’s mine.”

  “Have you always been that way?” I asked.

  “Yes and no,” Martha said. “Some people talk like I was just born with it, but here’s what they don’t think about sometimes. Talent takes practice. You can be born with perfect pitch, but that doesn’t mean you’re born knowing how to play an instrument.”

  “So how did you learn?” I asked.

  “My grandmother taught me,” Martha said. “My mother is an excellent cook, and don’t you ever tell her I said anything else, but it was my bubbe who taught me to truly taste things. To go slowly enough to find the layers. I’m better with drinks than I am with food, but my grandmother, she could take a bite of something and know everything that was in it.”

  This enraptured expression was something I’d never before seen on Martha. She had such a cosmopolitan air, as though nothing in the city or the sky could surprise her, and I liked knowing that what sparked her wonder was her own abuela.

  Another half a mile down the road, Martha looked over. “Now’s your chance. Go ahead and ask.”

  “All right,” I said. “Does your mother know you’re a lesbian?”

  She let out a surprised laugh. “That’s not at all what I thought you wanted to ask me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” she said. “I like when people surprise me sometimes. And yes, my mother does know. I won’t say she’s had an easy time with it. She certainly wishes I were still observant. But she loves me. And we both know that if I want to keep coming home, which I do, then who and how I love is something we can’t exactly talk about with our friends and neighbors and even some of our family.”

  I thought of the relatives I hadn’t seen since I started living as the boy I was. That I’d told my parents and they’d taken it as well as they had, and that Daisy’s parents and sisters had taken it as well as they had, that was already more miracles than I thought I’d ever get.

  Martha adjusted her grip on the wheel, a pair of driving gloves helping her palms slide. The cuff of her sleeve slipped back, revealing a thread that looked white and then blue when the rain-silvered light hit it. That was the place she had touched so delicately the first day I met her.

  “It’s from my grandfather’s tallis,” she said. She still had her eyes on the road, and when she smiled, it seemed as much to herself as to me. “Most people don’t notice. But I was almost certain you had.”