“And what’s inside of it?”
She studied his face for traces of familiarity or suggestiveness, for any indication that he felt as unsteady as she did. But he was responding to her exactly how he responded to everyone else, with a happy crispness that seemed to shut the door to any possibilities except the honorable ones. And that, she told herself, was the cruelty of charisma: how it’s never satisfied with the capture of an individual. How it requires the ensnarement of the masses to thrive.
“Sardine heads.”
“What else?”
“A crab. A snail. A little fish.”
“You haven’t learned the Latin nomenclature yet?”
“You hired me to draw them. Not memorize their names.”
Then an unexpected yet deeply satisfying response: a whistle and a shake of the head, an exasperation that seemed more like the product of amusement than annoyance.
“Fair enough. Just put them in the right piles and that will suffice.”
“But your piles make no sense.”
“Of course they do.” He gestured at the three creatures, each one different in every respect save its general placement in relation to the waterline. “Things that live together should go together. And things that live elsewhere should go elsewhere.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t? I feel like I’ve made it perfectly clear. And on several occasions.”
“You find them in a certain spot today—”
“The high intertidal.”
“You find them in the high intertidal today. But by tomorrow, they could be anywhere. All the way out. At the bottom of the ocean. Any of them could go anywhere they like.”
“That’s precisely it, though! They could go anywhere. But they never actually do.”
She dipped a toe into the pool in question and stirred it around. She watched the fish panic, the crab scurry, the snail remain blindly in place.
“But a crab looks nothing like a fish,” she muttered. “And a fish looks nothing like a snail. Or haven’t you noticed?”
“You sound like the boys over at Hopkins.”
“You mean the real scientists? The ones who know what they’re doing?”
“For your information,” Ricketts replied, his tone still alarmingly good-natured, “they keep my specimen catalogs on their shelves. They use them for their graduate course work.”
He blinked and grinned. She didn’t desire her father’s intrusion, not in the least. She did, however, desire his clarity, his confidence, his brutal adherence to a system that had long since been praised and proven.
“I’m going back inside,” she said.
“Absolutely not. You’ll do it right today. Even if it kills me.”
She set her jaw and met his gaze, trying to hold it for several seconds longer than usual, to finally extract something from it. He was already on the move, though, approaching the shark tanks and beginning to inspect each one in turn, seemingly oblivious to her company. For the next few minutes, she just stood there, watching. Once or twice, she tried to stop herself. She tried to do something that would convey the presence of her free will and the absence of an infatuation so deep, it had begun to border on servitude. But it was hopeless. All she could do was marvel at him: the air gathering around him as he studied his captives, the world shimmering beneath his single-mindedness, eliminating everything in its periphery.