Monterey Bay(14)

5


    1940




THEY CHECKED OUT OF THE HOTEL DEL MONTE WITHOUT delay, their belongings loaded once more into the rented Packard, their departure just as unexplained and unheralded as their arrival.

To be honest, she had hoped for more of a scene. She had hoped her father would dole out a shard or two of his icy wrath, berating the hotel staff as to their many recent shortcomings: their failure to protect her, to retrieve him, to delegate her medical care to someone other than a man who mummified sharks for what barely passed as a living. But just as on the ride from the train station, just as on the preceding transpacific crossing, he said nothing as they drove away from the hotel and toward the property he had spent the prior day evaluating and acquiring: a small white house on a hill that overlooked Ocean View Avenue, a street the locals referred to as Cannery Row.

As was their custom, they brought in their trunks first. Then they assessed the structure, studying the place from the outside in, Anders nodding with the dour, crisp satisfaction he offered in lieu of compliments. It was, without question, a perfect fit: as decrepit as the place in Manila but without the extraneous square footage. In fact, it was little more than a shack, the external walls pale and flaking, the windows on either side of the front door looking blankly onto the street like a simpleton’s pair of wide-set eyes. The gable roof was yellow black with lichen and rot. Inside, there were four squalid, diminutive, half-furnished living spaces—a sitting room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen—all of which featured the same faded botanical-print wallpaper, the same forest of black green mildew unfurling from each damp corner. The house’s only favorable characteristic, to her mind at least, was the large bougainvillea bush to the left of the front stoop: a knotty, dark-leaved, pink-flowered behemoth that looked outstandingly capable of annexing not only the house itself, but the entire street on which it sat.

When his evaluation was complete, her father returned to the kitchen. She followed and watched from the doorway as he removed a coffee mug from the cabinet and attempted to fill it with water.

“You have to wait a minute for it to run clear,” she said.

He stepped away from the sink, brown water still flowing, and continued to take inventory of everything except her. Linoleum flooring, ornately dimpled and green with grime. A can of hardened bacon grease on the windowsill above the sink, the delights of which had not escaped the notice of nearly a hundred swarming ants. She had seen this type of behavior before: his impenetrable remoteness that stretched and lingered, his victim twisting in the wind. The difference now was that the victim was her.

“There’s only one bedroom,” he announced. “You’ll sleep on a straw pallet in the sitting room. Like you did in Indonesia.”

“The straw pallet gave me a backache.”

“We’ll get a sofa, then.”

She knit her brows, which made the stitches pull and burn. She touched her forehead and winced, but his disinterest remained immaculate.

“I need to know why we’ve come here,” she said finally.

When their eyes met, it was like a match striking.

“Then do something to earn it.”

He turned away from her and toward the open tap. He squinted at the water, filled his mug, and then emptied it in one noiseless, perfectly efficient swallow. She went outside and sat down on the porch next to the bougainvillea. Her earlier show of discomfort hadn’t been entirely feigned. Her skull ached, her eye sockets throbbed. She hadn’t eaten in well over a day, and her gut felt like the sort of hole in which one could find dinosaur bones or Roman ruins. Worst of all, she could sense the prelude to her body’s monthly rebellion, a riot of pinches and aches echoing in her lower abdomen: a feeling that reminded her of the Philippines, but not the good parts.

When she looked down the hill, however, the feeling disappeared. From this house, she couldn’t quite see the same tide pools in which she had taken her fall, but she could see the bay that had facilitated it. She could see how its blue black water became blue green in certain pockets close to shore. Most of all, she could see the shore itself, the rocks like scar tissue from the most violent meetings of ocean and land, the juncture crowded with human designs and animal ones: canneries, cottages, cormorants’ rookeries, rats’ nests. The biologist was out there, somewhere in or near the water, somewhere on the lip of that infinite black meniscus, and for the first time since leaving the lab, she allowed herself to remember it in detail. It was getting late, but she wasn’t sleepy. So she waited on the porch until the kitchen light had been turned off and her father had gone to bed. Inside, she unrolled her pallet, her body abuzz, her underclothes lined with folded sheets of cotton wool in preparation for blood. And when she awoke to find the cotton wool unstained, she read it as a sign from the universe that even though her father was determined to exclude her, he was too late. She had already been let in.





For the next week, mornings and afternoons that were unremarkable and long, a bit of wind in the evenings and then a silence so deep she could hear the advance and retreat of each individual wave.

To her father, it must have seemed like inertia, inexcusable and indulgent, but she knew she was doing important work, almost as important as the work she had once done at his side. She had been considering it obsessively, and had come to the following conclusions. Her time with the biologist had been more than just a drunken tryst, but that didn’t mean she could act on it. For one thing, there was no strategy in place. For another, she knew it looked hackneyed and girlish—the accident, the forced rehabilitation, the unlikely romance—even though it felt unique and vital, and she wasn’t sure how to manage the resulting dissonance. So she did the only thing she could do while conditions were still unstable: mimicking Anders’s stoicism and using it to silently engineer her return to the lab. The landscape seemed important in this regard, so she studied it closely. Soon she could recognize the trees by their shadows alone: Monterey oaks with their thuggish forearms; Monterey pines with needles she preferred to think of as syringes on account of how long and meaningful they looked once they fell to the ground. Off-black trees against an off-white sky, the crookedness of the cypresses, the vertiginous intensity of the redwoods. Occasionally, the head wound would reassert itself and she would feel a bit ill, as if she had eaten something on the verge of rotting; but she endured without complaint, watching her father descend the hill at sunrise and climb it at dusk.