An interval of hellish silence, Steinbeck’s chair squeaking as its empty form continued to rock. In the distance, she thought she could hear the voices of the woman and the boy, Wormy and Arthur, laughing at something in the water.
Her father put on his hat and made for the door.
“Anders, I certainly hope—”
“Oh, let him go, Ed,” Steinbeck said. “He’s no friend of ours. And neither is the girl.”
On the street, Anders plowed ahead and Margot did her best to keep up.
Earlier, as they had made their way downhill, she had been too distracted to take in the detail of her surroundings, but now she seemed capable of nothing but, the entire landscape suddenly revealing itself as the sort of omen only a fool would misinterpret. There had been a half-dozen whistle blasts in the past twelve hours, so the canneries were full even though the high season was still months away. The buildings convulsed, some of them howling with the expulsion of cooking steam, some of them leaking gray smoke from tube-shaped stacks. The street itself, however, was strangely empty, a shallow, uneasy stillness in the air that made it feel like the moment before the revelation of some very bad or very meaningful piece of news. There were conclusions to arrive at, she told herself, new tactics to consider, second chances upon which to insist. She couldn’t, though. For now, all she could do was try to guess at her father’s next steps.
When they reached the Row’s terminus, she expected him to turn left on David Avenue, to begin the uphill climb. Instead, he stopped in front of the last building on the street. Unlike some of the neighboring canneries, which featured architectural nods to the Spanish-built missions that dotted the length of the state, this one was a blank white box, a message in its austerity that, more than anything that had just been said inside the lab, made her dizzy with panic.
“If you’ll just—”
“I trust you can manage dinner on your own,” he said.
“Nothing needs to change. You’ve never cared about—”
“It’s pointless now. Don’t you understand that? What will he tell you—what will you learn—now that you’ve already given him everything he might have wanted?”
“Might have wanted?” she hissed.
She straightened her back and stiffened her limbs, preparing herself for the obvious rebuttal. Instead, he did something much worse: he turned and moved toward what appeared to be the cannery’s only door, the heavy, steel portal opening with the push of a single outstretched finger.
7
DREAMS, VIOLENT AND VIVID ONES.
Animals fighting on top of the kitchen table, the blood flying onto the papered walls, onto the grease can and the ants. Their old home in the Channel Islands and their neighbor’s greenhouse, her body bound and gagged in the corner, the plants using their strange, snakelike tongues to lick her as she struggled. The fog suffocating her, the sand eating her alive, the salt water in the bay dissolving her limbs and torso until all that was left was an otter-mauled head that bobbed on the surface and paddled around with the help of ear-shaped fins. When these dreams woke her in the middle of the night, she would sit there on the sofa and rub the scar as if trying to erase it, promising herself that when morning came, she would retrieve the sketchbook from her satchel and record whatever she remembered and then finally commit the evidence to the flames. The sketchbook, however, couldn’t be found—a casualty, most likely, of their hasty departure from the hotel—so the things she might have drawn remained indefinite and free-floating, filling her with an apprehension that persisted well through breakfast, well past the moment at which her father descended the hill and left her alone on the porch yet again with nothing but the bougainvillea for company.
This time, however, she didn’t find any sort of peace. What she had tried to say to her father outside his cannery had been right. By his own admittance, he had never cared about the lesser mammal aspect of things, or at least he had never seemed to. Her physical self and the way in which she managed it: none of it had ever attracted his concern, much less his critique. A different sort of father might have shown escalating signs of nervousness as the years passed, as the biological determinants made themselves apparent, but even on the day she first began to bleed, Anders had remained professional, expedient, her new bodily complications assessed as drily and succinctly as if he were calculating the depreciation on a piece of factory equipment. But now he was angry about it, and his anger seemed deeper than logic: a fact that, as the days passed, made their interactions twice as distant and volatile as before.