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.
The only interruption to this stasis was when the cannery whistles blew. For some reason, the sound allowed her to relax a bit, to unclench her jaw. From her perch on the hill, it could all be witnessed from above: the sardine boats skirting the land, the gulls descending, her neighbors spilling onto the streets as if spit out by their own homes. At first, she expected all of them to look like Arthur, but they didn’t. The cannery workers in her neighborhood were entirely Italian, almost entirely women, denizens of that peculiar socioeconomic territory of the ascendant middle class. The husbands, she soon learned, had jobs on the boats, catching the fish the wives put into cans, and the circularity of this arrangement fascinated her. What was it like, she wondered, when both husband and wife came together at nightfall and began to move behind their windows? Was it clean inside their houses? Did they eat their dinners together? Did they share the same beds? Did the beds smell ineradicably of fish? When they had their festivals—processions that guided life-size plaster saints through the streets—did they feel better in the aftermath, did they feel as if something had been addressed or solved? Or did they feel the way she always did during moments of supposed import: holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, none of them signifying anything except the unfortunate human desire to kick the can of meaning further and further down an endless road?
The most important ideas, though, didn’t come to her on the porch. They arrived at night and they had nothing to do with the cannery workers or her father. Stretched out on the straw pallet, she would indulge in the gory, exhilarating specifics. She would stare at the walls, using their pocks and fissures to map out what had been taken from her, what had been given, the biologist’s body on top of hers, her mouth on his neck, her freedom so complete that she felt as though, if he moved aside, she would float up to the ceiling and stay there until someone found a gun and shot her down. She could no longer be patient, she told herself, she could no longer wait. But then the sun would rise and her father would remind her—not in words, of course, but in actions—that she would get what she wanted only by pretending not to want it. Keep calm, keep watchful, keep ready for the proper moment to take her aim and tighten her grip.
Then, one day, the moment was at hand. At first, the signs were subtle. In the morning, a doctor came to remove her stitches, utter a few stock phrases of reassurance, and then leave her with nothing but an aching head and a vial of disinfectant. Around lunchtime, someone from the rental company reclaimed the Packard, which had been sitting unused on the street since their departure from the hotel. That afternoon, the arrival of the promised sofa: a claw-footed, button-tufted, horsehair monstrosity. That night, when the water grew black against the sky, her father’s shape appeared at the base of the hill a few minutes later than usual. He looked the same as ever, at least in terms of attire: the three-piece cheviot suit, the striped necktie, the polished brogues, the same Surrey collar that she, too, had long favored. In his hands, however, was a bag of groceries and on his face an almost theatrical contentment.