Monterey Bay(64)

“I emerged pregnant. Which was probably worse.”

Tino swallowed. The brothers traded glances.

“You’ve changed, too,” she continued. “I wouldn’t have expected you to want to take the helm.”

“Oh, life is less about what one wants, I suppose, and more about what one is willing to accept.”

“It was your mother’s plan all along,” she guessed.

“I suppose it was.”

“And you’re still willing to buy?”

“My family owes you at least that much, even though the reduction plant is barely worth the land it stands on anymore.”

“It’s gotten that bad?”

“It has. During the war, the government took over and then bled us dry. Requisitioned our boats for shore patrol while simultaneously forcing us to meet impossible quotas. Evacuated some of the poorer Italians and all the Japanese. When the sardines disappeared, most of the canneries went under, but we were able to stay open because we switched over to squid.”

She looked down at the table. The squid boats from Anders’s childhood. Orange sails. Women in the night water wrestling the heaving nets to shore.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look ill. Let me walk you home.”

“I’ll be fine.” When she drained her glass, another one arrived as if by magic, full to the brim. “Let’s discuss our terms.”

“Whatever you think is fair.”

“Market price. Minus expenses.”

“For both the house and the reduction plant?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll have my lawyer draft something. You’ll have it by this evening. I’m sure you’re eager to move on.”

“I am.”

“Then why, if you don’t mind my asking, did you come at all?”

She nudged her drink, watched the bubbles rise and gather.

“Call it nostalgia,” she said, half choking on the lie.

“That’s never a good reason.”

“I know. Thank you for indulging me.”





On the way back to the house, she chose the path closest to the beach.

At one point, when the beers began to take their toll, she found a dune and took a seat and watched how her nylon stockings—a postwar luxury that was just now becoming morally permissible—were acting like little sieves, letting the smaller grains of sand in and keeping the larger ones out. The sky was an intense, bright gray: a color that, in all her travels, had never materialized anywhere else in the world but here. After a long while, she stood from the dune and returned to the street. She was thirsty, but her flask was dry. So she went to the new liquor store on Lighthouse and bought their smallest, most expensive bottle of gin. At the house, she drew the curtains against the afternoon, sat down at the kitchen table, and drank as much as she wanted. Then she searched the rooms, looking into closets and cabinets for anything that would disprove her father’s death. She found an undergarment that was still stiff with starch, the pulverized nub of a pencil. She returned to the kitchen and rooted through the wastebin, hoping to find a fugitive drop at the gin bottle’s bottom, but there was nothing left. So she opened the door and went outside to her old spot on the porch, the air tightening behind her in a silent peristalsis, an expulsion of the living from the dead.

She sat there for several minutes, not thinking, not moving. When she saw a shape at the base of the hill, she rose to greet it. Tino’s lawyer, she thought, knees buckling on account of the booze. Right on schedule. But as the person continued his climb, she realized her mistake. This was not a lawyer, but a boy: a young man of the same age Arthur had been, but larger and coarser and somehow unknowable looking, as if the very nature of children had changed since she was last able to count herself among their ranks.

“Miss Fiske,” he said, his voice respectful and disinterested all at once.

“Yes?”

“Ed Ricketts sent me.”

She held her breath before responding.

“You work for him? Catching cats?” The very thought of it made her want to laugh.

“Cats?” He frowned. “No.”

“What does he want?”

“Just a moment of your time.”





24


    1998




HIS FINAL MESSAGE COMES TO HER FROM INSIDE A BOTTLE.

The first sip is an arrival, especially after so many years of abstaining. The second sip, however, is nothing more than a false portal, so she caps it up and returns it to its hiding place in her desk drawer. It’s night and the aquarium has closed hours ago, but she hasn’t gone home. Instead, she’s stayed here. The Mola problem persists, the anniversary of his death has come and gone without either resolution or recompense, and now she doesn’t know what to do.

She looks outside the window. In the light of the crescent moon, she sees that the dead Humboldts are no longer on the beach. They’ve been taken away. They’ve been taken to a biological laboratory, no doubt, where they will be injected and preserved and sold for study, and the students who study them will learn certain things. They will learn that humans and squid share a common evolutionary history. They will learn that squid ink contains dopamine, the chemical responsible for sex and drug addiction. They will learn that squid blood is the same blue as a swimming pool.