Monterey Bay(31)
“How did this happen? It’s deep.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
He smiled, shook his head, and wiped a pair of nail scissors on his shirtsleeve.
“I can give you some ethanol if you’d like.”
“No. I don’t need it.”
“Well, in that case, try to do better than I did at sitting still.”
She nodded. As the needle entered and reentered her skin, she tried to pretend it hurt, but it still didn’t, even when he tugged the sutures into a knot and pressed a strip of gauze firmly against her leg.
“You probably should have taken that ethanol. You look a little green.”
“I’m fine.”
“Glad to hear it. Let’s hope I didn’t botch this one quite as badly as the first.”
She leaned toward him.
“I thought I told you to sit still,” he warned.
But when she touched the back of his neck, he didn’t move away. He just laughed quietly, as if remembering a particularly filthy joke, and she could feel the vibration of it as she put her mouth against his. When they moved apart, he wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Fifteen,” he said, shaking his head. “Fifteen years old. Am I imagining things, or aren’t they making girls like they used to?”
“My mother was married at seventeen.” Her fingers were still on his neck, pressing into the notch at the base of his skull, tracing the line of demarcation between his skin and hair. “I was born a year later.”
“And look what happened to her.”
She removed her hand.
“I’m sorry. All I’m trying to say is that these are different times,” he said. “Far different. A young woman of your caliber should have more useful things on her mind.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Your father’s right.”
“Then let me work here. With you. Inside the lab.”
He laughed again, but still no smile. “I trust you’ll understand why that’s completely out of the question.”
“I won’t be a bother.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
They exchanged a long stare, and then she backed away just enough for him to see her fully. She had never attempted this sort of thing before—this arch and this tilt, this throwing back of the shoulders, this parting of the lips—but she knew she had done it right when his eyes briefly wandered down to her waist and then back up to her face, his breath coming through his mouth instead of his nose.
“Tomorrow morning,” she said.
He squinted at her and tried to stifle something: a giggle or a whistle, or possibly a groan.
“I won’t get arrested?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Fine,” he said, making for the door and allowing himself one half of a grin. “Mind your manners, though. I’m not the sort of man who stands for being harassed.”
11
1998
HIS THIRD MESSAGE ARRIVES AT A BAD TIME.
Everyone is here, every last aquarist, in a conference room that is slightly nicer than a nonprofit should allow. She sits at the head of the table. The aquarists sit along the sides in a hierarchical phalanx determined mostly by tenure and a bit by skill. They are all dressed exactly like her, all of them in uniform, their blue shirts extending out to a vanishing point of which de Chirico would have been proud. She’s assembled them well over the years; she’s kept them to a certain type. Mostly men. Odd but not ashamed, or even particularly aware, of their oddness. Unkempt, ruddy, resilient, amenable to camping, bathing in rivers, repeated exposure to ticks, ingestion of iodine-treated pond water. Dressed as if for action: bleach-stained jeans tucked into black rubber boots that stomp across the wet floors with a specific sort of casual, unwarranted bravery. Most of all, though, there’s the fact of their relationship to their work. To a less enlightened soul, it could seem like drudgery: those endless loops of routine maintenance, knuckles permanently abraded by fiberglass and salt. They, however, treat it with a palpable sense of purpose, their aims so noble that they give her faith by proxy. Whenever she can, she invites herself along on their collecting trips. She’s afraid of seeming useless, so mostly she just watches them in admiration disguised, for the sake of her reputation, as evaluation. She watches them blast tube anemones from their sandy burrows with a gasoline-powered pump and a hundred feet of garden hose. She watches them catch half-moons with pieces of candy-colored yarn on barbless hooks. She watches them lure garibaldis and se?oritas into their nets with the luxuriant stink of fresh sea urchin roe, and by the time they return to the aquarium with their prizes in tow, she is drunk with secondhand excitement.
As for Arthur and Tino, they sit to her immediate right and left. Unmatched bookends, exceptions working overtime to prove the rule. Sometimes she wonders what her father would have done, but there’s no way of telling. He could have gone either way, embracing them as comrades or vanquishing them as rivals. As it stands, she’s pleased with her choice. They’ve each served their purpose nicely: Tino, in his long-ago willingness to turn over a crucial piece of property, to defuse the tension among the fishing contingent; Arthur in his jack-of-all-trades gregariousness, which in his old age has blossomed into something downright beatific. It seemed only fair to take them in, to give them titles, to pay them for a loyalty she appreciates but can’t explain.