“From the new draft of your essay?”
“No. From Victor Hugo.”
“I don’t like it when people quote things. It’s better when they just say it for themselves.”
“I disagree. I feel like I always sound better when I sound like Jung.”
“Jung is even worse than Hugo.”
“Have you read either of them? No lying this time.”
“I haven’t. And I don’t intend to.”
“Really? I think you’d benefit highly from a little dip into the collective unconscious.”
She put a hand on his knee. He gently removed it.
“Margot Fiske,” he said. “You promised.”
There was a fast, sharp pain in her lungs, her eyes once again glued to the specimens in the hutch. They weren’t moving anymore. In fact, it was as if they had never been alive at all.
“It never should have happened,” he said softly. “I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Forgive yourself for what?”
“For disrespecting . . . for dishonoring . . .”
“You don’t actually believe that, do you?”
“I don’t know. I might.”
“You weren’t my first,” she lied.
“I wasn’t?”
“In Manila, I drank a flask of lambanog one night and ended up passing out in the pickers’ shed. With one of the pickers.”
He looked at her closely but not admiringly.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” he said. “But there are some women you can talk to, aren’t there? Friends? Neighbors?”
She shook her head.
He nodded. “As long as we’re in the process of confiding, I must admit that I still don’t know what to do with you. You seem to enjoy drawing these creatures, but you don’t seem especially fond of the creatures themselves.”
“I do,” she replied. “And I’m not.”
She looked down at her balled-up fingers. To have once touched him, she realized, felt strangely like handling the microscope slide, and now she was sorry she had followed his guidance so carefully, that she hadn’t just slid the worm directly off the rock and onto her palm.
“I want to be the one who kills them,” she said at last. “I’ll still draw them. But I want the other part, too.”
He swallowed loudly.
“Is that wrong?” she asked. “Does it make me bad?”
“I hope not. Because it would make me bad, too.”
And when the noises started from upstairs, she thought it was her father again, here to drag her out of the lab and back up the hill. But then she heard Steinbeck’s voice echoing down the stairwell.
“Oh no.” Ricketts jumped off the hood of the car and rolled down his sleeves. “I thought he was still up in Los Gatos.”
“Ed!” came the voice from above. “Ed!”
“Down here, John.”
Seconds later, Steinbeck burst through the doorway, a pink invoice clutched in his hand. Ricketts fiddled with his cuffs and studied the ground as Steinbeck approached.
“I should have known as much. First chance he gets, he’s bending you over the front of his Buick.”
“John!” Ricketts sputtered. “Enough.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you what’s enough.” Steinbeck waved the invoice above his head. “Fifty dollars! On syringes! How much, exactly, do you think I’m worth?”
“The book did so well. And now there’s the movie . . .”
“That’s not the point!”
“I’m good for it. You know that, John.”
“You haven’t had an order in months!”
“We needed them, John.”
“Fifty dollars!”
“We needed them for the octopuses. Immersion won’t work on cephalopods. We have to inject. You know that.”
Steinbeck lowered his hands to his sides, let out a moaning exhale, and then squinted at Ricketts. Margot watched them both very closely. She had never witnessed the full arc of a domestic dispute before—from the initial explosion to the eventual rapprochement—but this was precisely how she imagined one taking shape.
“Can’t argue with science, I suppose,” Steinbeck said at length.
“No.” Ricketts smiled persuasively. “You cannot.”
“Christ, my head aches. I think I’m coming down with the flu.”
“You always think that.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“Well, in that case, I know just the cure!”
Ricketts reached for a crate labeled SHARK LIVER OIL.
Steinbeck took a large step backward. “Unless that’s where you’ve started to hide the tequila, I want no part of it.”
Laughing, Ricketts turned away from the crate and grabbed the bin that contained the worms. He held them out for Steinbeck’s inspection.
“Look! Aren’t they delicious? Margot found them. Turns out she has something of a knack.”
“Of course she does.”
A noise escaped from her: something that sounded like a giggle but wasn’t.