Monterey Bay(44)

“Bow.”

“Naturally.”

She boarded. He handed her a paddle and hopped in behind her. When they pushed off and began drifting through the marina, it was with the practiced ease of people who had known each other for years. The clicks in her head were silent now and the colors were respecting their own boundaries, and it felt like a reprieve. But it also felt like an emptiness that needed filling.

“What’s the marina called?” she asked.

“Moss Landing. Which I’m sure you’ll find hopelessly obvious.”

Instead of replying, she dipped her paddle and watched it work. For a while, the water justified its name: soft, green, inert. Then, as he steered them away from the marina and into a channel, everything changed. A fast, clear current was pushing against them now, the canoe slipping into reverse, the landscape wheeling by in the wrong direction. She began to paddle faster, spurred on by the sound of him doing the same. Soon, she could feel blisters stinging on her palms like cigarette burns, her arms threatening to give out, until, all at once, the current vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The canoe moved effortlessly into the gray brown funnel of the slough’s midsection, into the black green of the eelgrass that reached out from the banks like fingers. She lifted her paddle as the canoe slid ashore. The water here was still and murky again, the dunes wet and fat. The shore curved around them in a lazy crescent, the half-submerged remains of an oyster farm dangling from its southern tip.

As they disembarked and unloaded the gear, she tried to keep her arms from shaking.

“Didn’t think we’d make it, did you?” he asked.

“Seems like a great deal of trouble for a handful of worms.” Her voice was overloud, but she couldn’t help it. She was far more fatigued than she should have been, and there were two strange, symmetrical pains throbbing between her hips.

“Oh, we’re not looking for worms today.” He unrolled a gill net and began to bait it with squid. He, too, seemed spent, but not physically. His earlier brightness was now almost totally extinguished, an odd flatness moving in to take its place. “In fact, I’m not sure what we’re looking for. I just needed to escape for a bit, I suppose.”

“From what?”

“From the lab.”

He handed her one end of the net, which she held in place as he got back into the canoe and rowed across the cove. He jumped out, secured his end to a section of the old oyster farm, and then returned to where she was standing. He tied her end to the beached canoe and then sat down on the slough’s wet banks, the mud receiving him with an audible squish. She raised an eyebrow.

“Ah, yes. I’m in the presence of a lady. I keep forgetting.”

He stood and retrieved a tarp, which he unfurled with a snap. Sitting next to him now, the tarp beneath them, she watched him watch the net. As always, the prospect of a capture had him completely focused, and she, too, felt certain something extraordinary was within seconds of happening. This time, however, his attention proved a poor predictor of action. For a long stretch, there was nothing: just the minutes ticking slowly by, the morning starting to deepen and shift into noon, the only sound that of the occasional car rattling up or down the distant road, that of the seals flopping their beefy shapes into the mounds of shattered clamshells that lined the lower edges of the slope.

“What did you bring for lunch?” she asked.

“Hungry?”

“No. Just curious.”

“Fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs.”

“And which shall we eat first?”

His eyes were widening now, his mouth curling, a portion of his good humor starting to resurface.

“Can it be true? Has Margot Fiske attempted a joke?”

“No good? You should have invited someone funnier.”

He wrenched his gaze from the net and let it fall on her face. “Funny or not, you’re the only person on earth I would’ve wanted to come along.”

She looked down and pretended to examine the blisters on her palms, which had begun to surround themselves with little hoods of clear fluid. He was a charming man, and he likely would have said the same thing no matter who was sitting there beside him. To Steinbeck, to Wormy, maybe even to Arthur. She didn’t care, though. She had goals in mind, and none of them would be achieved by convincing herself she wasn’t special.

“What did you mean about the lab?” she asked. “About wanting to escape it?”

He tucked both legs beneath him and then reconsidered, stretching them out to their full length, the heels of his boots digging into the mud.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It just feels different in there all of a sudden. I wish I could explain it better.”

“Money’s no longer a problem. That’s probably a relief.”

“Oh, money’s never really a problem.” His focus was on the net again, but a shred of it had been left behind with her. “Yet it’s always a problem. I’m sure you understand.”

She nodded vigorously to conceal her confusion.

“And with the trip coming up, I suppose we can use every penny we can get our hands on, even though I can’t shake the feeling we’re doomed no matter what.”

“What trip? And why is it doomed?”

He gave her a perplexed glance. “I could have sworn we already discussed this at length. Just yesterday, in fact.”