At around three in the morning, she returned to the sofa, where she watched the walls wash themselves lighter and lighter, the daylight swinging across the land and water. Part of her was amazed at how well everything had turned out, her father’s schemes coming into miraculous alignment with her own. He had explained it to her succinctly and without room for dispute: how the lab’s finances were a disaster and how she was more than qualified to set things straight. Her real purpose, however, would be not that of the accountant, but that of the spy. She would eavesdrop on conversations, memorize statistics, and then report back to Anders. Even more important, she would curry favor with Ricketts himself: an element of the plan that, according to her father, was indispensable to victory.
So it was a simple arrangement and one that promised dual satisfactions. Ample reason to be optimistic, perhaps even joyful. But she wasn’t. Ricketts’s appeal, she remembered now, hadn’t exactly been benign, and his ambitions hadn’t exactly been straightforward. At times, he had watched her a little too closely. He had laughed at her terror and had offered her a beer, and now when she tried to summon the image of them sitting side by side on the bed, she saw not only their bodies and faces and her drawing on the wall, but also the green-curtained window. In her mind’s eye, she looked through it, hoping to see nothing more than the fog moving beneath the beams of the streetlights like the sorts of vapors some mistake for ghosts. Instead, she saw a face looking in at them, a pair of eyes assessing them with curiosity and envy.
She sat up. The daylight was growing stronger, the cushions seeming to actively repel her weight. A train whistle blew in the distance, a gull screamed. She stood and tiptoed over to the clock on the mantel—a German timepiece with a loud, bossy tick—and saw herself reflected in its glass face. She looked the same as she had yesterday: pale, scarred, perched at that odd inflection point between youth and adulthood. But there was also something else. A new severity, a new definition, almost as if her features were too sharp to belong to a child.
When she heard her father waking, she turned from the clock and listened. The rush of running water in the bathroom sink. The hollow plunk of one of his shoes and then the other. The rustle of his files and papers as they were swept into his valise. His suit, she knew, would be pressed and spotless. His thick, colorless hair would be neatly pomaded and parted down the middle. Their descent would be wordless, dignified, her father humming a little as he walked, chin raised and arms rigid. In these ways and more, she knew what to expect. What she didn’t expect, however, was how tall he would look when he finally emerged from his bedroom. As they left the house and proceeded down the hill to Cannery Row, his six feet and five inches seemed as distant and immovable as a cathedral ceiling, and she felt very small in comparison: as close to the ground as a dog, unusually aware of smells and the transitions between them.
When they were just a step or two from their destination, the sidewalks dense with cannery workers, the street loud with trucks, he stopped and searched her face and must have been troubled by what he found there, because what came next were the type of words that, in the wake of last night’s détente, shouldn’t have been necessary: instructions that assumed the worst about her instead of the best.
“You’re not to roam the streets. You’re not to come here after dark,” he said. “Other than that, all I ask is that you behave in a manner that is least likely to tarnish the simple dignity of your family name. Is that something you can manage?”
“I believe so.”
And moments later, there they were: shoulder to shoulder in front of the dark, salt-swollen door of Ed Ricketts’s lab.
6
THE MAN WHO ANSWERED THE DOOR WAS NOT ED Ricketts. Not in the least.
“John,” Anders said. “I was under the impression you had already left for Baja.”
“Not yet,” the man replied, shaking her father’s hand and then returning both long arms awkwardly to his sides. “Still trying to talk some sense into Ed, and that could take months.”
The man produced a labored smile, a horse’s set of big, yellow teeth layered across his gums like roof tiles. He was shorter than her father but looked as though he should have been taller on account of his coarse, oversize features. His brow was broad and bunioned, his nose a weighty bulb at the base of a funnel-like bridge, his ears those not of a human being but of some sort of huge nocturnal mammal. She stuck out her hand and tried not to startle when her fingers were engulfed by his.
“John Steinbeck,” he said.
“Margot Fiske.”
“I know. You couldn’t look more like your father if you tried,” he answered morosely, squinting at the scar on her forehead. “Plus, I can see the telltale damage. The sign of the beast.”
She met his gaze evenly. “That’s not the proper usage of the phrase.”
“Margot,” her father cautioned.
Steinbeck turned away without a word. Anders and Margot followed him inside. She scanned the front room anxiously. It was quiet and bright. The contents were much the same as before—the cluttered desk, the overburdened bookcases, the ancient phonograph, the Coast Guard buoy with a fern planted inside of it, the file cabinet in which there sat a half-empty bag of flour, the same wooden beer crate that had served as Ricketts’s bedside chair. The only change was an odd and obvious one: a ring of unlit tallow candles in the middle of the floor.