Amelia turned to look at her mother.
Her mother nodded. “We’ll just have to think of someone else for you.”
Someone else. Amelia let her mother stroke her hair, let her eyes shut, and let her mind go wandering. Her mother likely meant some other missionary.
She thought of Captain Handsome and his offer of a salary. She thought of that deep pull in her gut, the one of megalodonic proportions. His offer felt like a memory that she didn’t have—as if it were something she had dreamed once and then forgotten. It seemed both strange and oh so familiar.
Make friends with your megalodon, he had said, and leaning against her mother, feeling the soft brush of those fingertips, brought back something that felt like a memory even though she knew it was not.
Amelia had been told the story so many times that she almost felt as if she could recall being there. Instead, the blurry images must have been invented after the fact. She had been six years old back then, and her actual memories of the time before Mrs. Acheson had taken her in were hazy and indistinct.
Nonetheless, she had a clear vision of that moment, one she had built up over countless recountings. She could see the road, dust rising in clouds. She could see the other travelers—too tired to run, too afraid to stop, faces and clothing painted in dirt and desperation. She knew the memory to be false because, in her mind, she was high—too high—above the shoulders of the adults, a dreamlike vantage point.
She knew what she had been told. Amelia and her Chinese mother had been traveling on the road. Amelia had been too big to carry for long, yet too small to walk much on her own. Amelia had been crying and feverish.
“So thin,” her mother had said. “That woman couldn’t have been feeding you much.”
Mrs. Acheson had always believed charity started with kindness, so she’d offered the travelers a meal. Over the course of bread and cheese, between Mrs. Acheson’s rudimentary Mandarin and Amelia’s Chinese mother’s tiny command of English, one important point had been communicated: Amelia needed help.
“She gave you to me,” her mother had said. “She knew you’d be better off with me.”
She left you, Amelia had always heard. Her Chinese mother had walked away from her into that cloud of dust and desperation.
“Which direction?” Amelia had asked as a child. “Where was she going? Didn’t she want me there?”
Her mother hadn’t known the answer to any of those questions. “Sweetheart,” she had said gently, “we could scarcely communicate. I’m sure she might have told us, but how would we have known what she was saying?”
Amelia had dreams of that time on the road. Of her mother—her Chinese mother. Sometimes she dreamed the woman shed tears as she left. Sometimes she imagined her relief at being rid of a burden. But she always seemed to remember one last thing as her mother stooped in the dust of the road and pressed a hand against Amelia’s cheek. She remembered words. One final communication.
Hold on to your heart, she remembered hearing. I will come back for you.
Those words were a lie. Amelia dreamed them sometimes, but they always came in English. It was a dream that she’d conjured out of time and wanting and a desperate desire to think she hadn’t truly been given up like the useless burden she must have been.
Captain Hunter was wrong. Amelia’s megalodon didn’t want to be her friend either. Her wants had been born extinct.
And yet every road leading to every house where she had ever dwelled, she had wanted. She had looked down those roads, and especially on dry, dusty days, especially on days when the wind kicked up, she had imagined someday someone would come for her. She had imagined she had been wanted.
On every birthday (which they had assigned to the day Mrs. Acheson had taken her in), she’d been told to blow out a candle and make a wish.
She had stopped wishing for her Chinese mother to return when she was ten.
Captain Hunter had it completely wrong. She had been wanting ever since she was six years old. Sometimes if she let herself slip, she found there was nothing inside her but a deep well of unfulfilled want.
The little wants? The surface wants? Those she could look to.
Maybe there was room to look ahead of her and dream of the future instead of yearning for the past.
Her mother’s hand drifted down the side of Amelia’s head again, caressing her. “Did your Captain Hunter say what he wanted?”
Captain Hunter. She tried to fix his name in her mind.
When the devil comes courting, he offers you what you want.
That wasn’t entirely apt. In all her years of desperate, unfulfilled wanting, she had never once thought, “Employment in a telegraph office, coming up with a version of Morse code for Chinese characters… That would be just the thing for me.”
It was just that as soon as he had said it, she had wanted it. Desperately. He’d talked of an office in Shanghai. Amelia had been found near Shanghai, and something in her yearned to return, to find what could not be found.
He’d talked about telegraphs. She had loved her time in the telegraph office, had always schooled herself to look sober and dependable when someone came to tell her Melvin Tabor was drunk again. The captain had talked about encoding Chinese and sending telegrams to every part of China, and the megalodon part of her brain had perked up, whispering that perhaps this way she might make inquiries, might someday find the woman who had left her behind.
Another day. Another variant of that dream of her mother returning down a lonely, dusty road.
Amelia sighed. She was in Fuzhou with Mrs. Acheson, the only woman she truly remembered as a mother. She turned her cheek into the caress.
“He wants to employ me,” Amelia said, editing all those wants to this bare statement.
She could feel her mother tense, every muscle in her body stiffening in reply. “Employ you as what?”
“As someone who knows the Chinese language.”
Her mother made a face. “As an interpreter? Is that what he means?”
“You remember how I spent time in the Hyderabad telegraph office a few years ago?”
Mrs. Acheson smiled. “Of course. I’ll never forget a thing about my children.”
“I tried to come up with a version of Morse code for Chinese then,” Amelia said. “He wants me to complete it.”
“How very peculiar,” her mother said. But she didn’t say anything else. She just stroked Amelia, quiet and comforting, and Amelia let it happen.
He only wanted her for her code, but at least he wanted her. Mr. Alden Smith, Mr. Alden Flappert… They had both thought she would fit the bill. There was nothing about her in particular that they had appreciated except for her availability.
Captain Hunter wanted her for something that she had personally done, not just as a blank sheet of womanhood to do all the things women were supposed to do. It was a more specific wanting than anything Amelia had ever experienced, and that frightened her.
Matters would have been easy if her mother had simply said that Amelia would have to marry Mr. Flappert. There truly would have been no alternative then; her entire being rebelled at the thought. She’d have fled to Captain Something immediately and hoped to repair the breach later.
“You know,” her mother said, “if you take employment, you’ll never marry. Men won’t want that in a wife.”