“Oh?” Tova sits up and rubs her temple.
“We’ve got an offer. Ten thousand above asking!” Jessica Snell proceeds to spew a litany of details about the buyers and their offer and instructions about what Tova should do next if she would like to accept. “Mind you, we haven’t even done the open house yet, so I wouldn’t blame you if you want to hold out . . . but I can tell you, this is a good offer. We priced it aggressively. We could counter to take it off the market before the open house. What do you think?”
“Yes, yes.” Tova fetches a sheaf of newspaper and a pen and jots down the numbers in the margin next to yesterday’s half-completed crossword. She simply hasn’t had it in her to finish the puzzles lately. Somehow it feels less important than it used to. “Yes, let’s counter.”
“Great. I’ll email you the paperwork. Let’s see, what’s your . . . We don’t have your email on file?”
Tova sniffs. “I don’t have email.”
“Oh, that’s right, you brought the seller’s agreement to my office,” Snell continues without missing a beat. “No problem, we can do it that way. I’ll drop a hard copy of the counteroffer by your house this evening, okay?”
“Very well.”
After hanging up, Tova ratchets out a breath. They’ll accept the counter. A contract will be signed. The house will be sold.
In the kitchen, she pours a cup of cold coffee from the percolator and zaps it in the microwave before heading out the back door. On the back porch, Cat is lounging in a patch of sunlight, and Tova lets out a bitter sigh at the sight of him. When she sits on the small garden bench, he leaps up to her lap, plants his paws on her chest, and butts his head against the underside of her chin.
“What will we do with you, little fellow?” Tova strokes the extra-soft patches of fur behind his ears. “I don’t suppose you can go back to living outside.”
In response, he purrs. Perhaps a problem to be solved another day.
THERE WAS A girl.
The idea of a girl continues to peck at the perimeter of Tova’s consciousness as she signs Jessica Snell’s paperwork. It tap, tap, taps on her brain as she makes supper. It hovers around her like a persistent fly during the short drive down the hill to the aquarium. The turn into the parking lot comes out of nowhere, and Tova almost misses it. The turn she must’ve made at least a thousand times.
Madness. This is how it begins. She’s losing her mind. Because of an offhand remark from a fellow with too many martinis in him.
Cameron seems like he’s in another world tonight, and the two of them work in silence: she fills the bucket with vinegar and water, while he rinses and wrings the mop. Finally, as they’re working their way along the easternmost side of the building, she asks, “Any word from your father, dear?”
“Nope.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She goes on, lifting her voice to an unnaturally cheery tone. “You’ll find him, eventually, and when you do, he’ll be tickled you did.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He works ahead of her, around the curve.
She catches up, pausing to peer into the thick front glass of Marcellus’s tank. He drifts out from behind his rock, blinking in greeting before pressing one of his tentacles against the glass. His perfectly round suckers look like miniature porcelain dinner plates for an army of tiny dolls as he squelches along the smooth surface.
An idea strikes her. Something to bring the boy out of his daze.
An Unexpected Treasure
Let’s use the other stool, shall we?”
Cameron watches skeptically as Tova drags the old, broken step stool out of the way and replaces it with the new one. Someone should deal with that busted old thing. Maybe he’ll haul it out to the dumpster on his way out tonight.
“Last time he hid,” Cameron points out. “What makes you think tonight’s any different?”
“He’s in a better mood tonight.”
“Oh, come on. A better mood?” Even the Octopus Whisperer herself can’t discern an invertebrate’s moods. Can she? Cameron peers into the tank. Marcellus looks how he always looks, floating around like some weird alien, his unnerving eye moving like it’s got a mind of its own. It wouldn’t shock him if someone cut Marcellus open and found his insides full of wires and circuits. A spying sea robot, dispatched from a distant galaxy. Isn’t there a movie with that plot? If not, there should be. Maybe he could write the screenplay.
He hesitates before the stool, glancing at the tank next door. Wolf eels. Seriously, the ugliest fish Cameron has ever seen. Two of them are out now, parked next to a rock, their terrifying teeth jutting up from twin underbites. “How about we play with them instead? They look about as friendly.”
Ignoring his sarcastic comment, Tova climbs up on the stool and dips her hand into the tank. Cameron watches as Marcellus winds his arm around her wrist. Tova touches the top of his mantle, and the creature seems to lean into her hand, in a way that reminds him of how Katie’s ridiculous little dog used to demand her attention when it sat on her lap.
“You’re going to say hello to my friend Cameron now, and this time, you’re going to be friendly,” Tova tells the octopus. She motions Cameron to replace her on the stool. He rolls his eyes. But the octopus seems to listen and releases his grip on her arm before turning his inscrutable eye on Cameron, hovering expectantly in his cold blue tank.
“Okay,” he mutters, shrugging off his favorite hoodie and tossing it on the counter before climbing up. He dips his hand in. The water is bracing. Worse than Puget Sound itself, the coldness of which Cameron now considers himself an expert on, after his outing with Avery.
The creature trails an arm upward, brushing his hand.
“Ack!” Instinctively, he yanks his hand from the water, which draws a gentle chuckle from Tova, who watches from below.
“It’s quite all right to be a bit alarmed,” she says.
“I’m not,” Cameron grunts. “It’s just really cold.”
“Try again,” she encourages.
When he does, he forces himself to keep his hand in the water this time, allowing Marcellus to prod at the veins on the back of his hand, to explore the tops of his knuckles. Then, in an instant, the octopus wraps the end of its arm around his wrist. Each individual sucker feels like its own tiny creature, and before Cameron knows it, it feels like there are hundreds of them crawling up his arm.
To his surprise, he laughs.
Tova laughs, too. “It feels funny, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” He looks down into the water. Marcellus’s eye is gleaming, somehow, like he’s laughing along with them. The creature’s muscular tentacle wraps tighter, up to his elbow now. How strong is this thing, anyway?
Cameron is so preoccupied with the circulation in his arm that he doesn’t notice the creature’s other appendage winding around behind him until Marcellus taps him on the opposite shoulder. He whirls around, turning the wrong way, of course. Had the octopus intended that? Like a joke?
“Ah, he got you!” Tova’s eyes sparkle. “My brother used to fool his nephew, my son, with that one. Oldest trick in the book.”
The octopus unwinds. As Cameron steps down from the stool, he examines the sucker marks along the underside of his arm.
“They’ll fade quickly,” Tova assures him.
“Yours didn’t,” Cameron points out.
“My skin is seventy years old, dear. Yours will mend more quickly.”
What does it matter? The marks look kind of cool, like a tattoo. Maybe Avery will be impressed. He grabs a roll of paper towels from the shelf and dries off his arm. He’s about to turn and shoot it, free-throw-style, at the trash can in the corner of the tiny pump room, when something in the octopus’s tank catches his eye. Something shiny, barely peeking through the sand near the big rock behind which the creature disappeared a minute ago.
“What’s that thing?” he asks Tova.
She looks up at him, confused.
“That shiny thing.” He ducks down and peers through the glass, and Tova does the same, adjusting her glasses.