At one point, when the beers began to take their toll, she found a dune and took a seat and watched how her nylon stockings—a postwar luxury that was just now becoming morally permissible—were acting like little sieves, letting the smaller grains of sand in and keeping the larger ones out. The sky was an intense, bright gray: a color that, in all her travels, had never materialized anywhere else in the world but here. After a long while, she stood from the dune and returned to the street. She was thirsty, but her flask was dry. So she went to the new liquor store on Lighthouse and bought their smallest, most expensive bottle of gin. At the house, she drew the curtains against the afternoon, sat down at the kitchen table, and drank as much as she wanted. Then she searched the rooms, looking into closets and cabinets for anything that would disprove her father’s death. She found an undergarment that was still stiff with starch, the pulverized nub of a pencil. She returned to the kitchen and rooted through the wastebin, hoping to find a fugitive drop at the gin bottle’s bottom, but there was nothing left. So she opened the door and went outside to her old spot on the porch, the air tightening behind her in a silent peristalsis, an expulsion of the living from the dead.
She sat there for several minutes, not thinking, not moving. When she saw a shape at the base of the hill, she rose to greet it. Tino’s lawyer, she thought, knees buckling on account of the booze. Right on schedule. But as the person continued his climb, she realized her mistake. This was not a lawyer, but a boy: a young man of the same age Arthur had been, but larger and coarser and somehow unknowable looking, as if the very nature of children had changed since she was last able to count herself among their ranks.
“Miss Fiske,” he said, his voice respectful and disinterested all at once.
“Yes?”
“Ed Ricketts sent me.”
She held her breath before responding.
“You work for him? Catching cats?” The very thought of it made her want to laugh.
“Cats?” He frowned. “No.”
“What does he want?”
“Just a moment of your time.”
24
1998
HIS FINAL MESSAGE COMES TO HER FROM INSIDE A BOTTLE.
The first sip is an arrival, especially after so many years of abstaining. The second sip, however, is nothing more than a false portal, so she caps it up and returns it to its hiding place in her desk drawer. It’s night and the aquarium has closed hours ago, but she hasn’t gone home. Instead, she’s stayed here. The Mola problem persists, the anniversary of his death has come and gone without either resolution or recompense, and now she doesn’t know what to do.
She looks outside the window. In the light of the crescent moon, she sees that the dead Humboldts are no longer on the beach. They’ve been taken away. They’ve been taken to a biological laboratory, no doubt, where they will be injected and preserved and sold for study, and the students who study them will learn certain things. They will learn that humans and squid share a common evolutionary history. They will learn that squid ink contains dopamine, the chemical responsible for sex and drug addiction. They will learn that squid blood is the same blue as a swimming pool.
What they won’t learn, though, is how to keep them in a tank. She knows this because for a span of several years, she tried it. She tried to put live squid—the small ones native to Monterey Bay—on exhibit. The challenges seemed great but by no means insurmountable: a short life span, an extreme sensitivity to changes in pH, a penchant for cannibalism, a tendency to kill themselves by colliding with the tank walls. She put her best people on the job; she consulted experts of international renown. But after a string of spectacular failures, the truth became apparent. It wasn’t worth the time or money or psychological strain. So, with a sigh of communal relief, the last crop of dead squid was returned to the sea, the tank was repurposed, the project was permanently abandoned, and, for the first and perhaps only time in her life, Margot accepted defeat with what an outsider would have certainly interpreted as grace.
The weird old clock on her desk, the same one that used to reside on her father’s mantel, strikes eleven forty-five. The bay is alive with squid boats.
And she didn’t get tired or sleepy, for the beauty burned in her like fire.
Good old Steinbeck. She smiles, rising from her chair. Always so much better with a modified pronoun or two.
By the time she arrives at the wharf, the squid boats are going out for their second set.
She finishes suiting up. In the window of the candy shop behind her, a hook works and reworks a giant pink tongue of saltwater taffy. In the water beneath her, rockfish hover and plot. Usually, the summers here are notoriously foggy, but this summer will be different. It will be wildly, inexplicably warm: the pinecones popping in the pine trees, their fat little grenade shapes bursting open under the shock of the unusual temperature. Crystal blue skies scarred with the thick, columnar evidence of forest fires. Algal blooms and acidic oceans, reports of extinction and collapse.
“Wait. Stop. Stop.”
The three-man crew of the nearest boat looks up at her in unison. She takes a step forward, her neoprene boots making low, muffled taps against the wharf. Feet on wooden planks? No: the fists of a giant on the skin of a huge tribal drum. She looks ridiculous in full scuba gear, even more ridiculous than that poor intern inside the otter costume. She doesn’t feel ridiculous, though; that’s the thing. She feels as though something is burning away her insides, something powerful and without precedent, something only an ocean can extinguish.
“Stop.”
The vacuum is already on. She has to scream to be heard.
“What do you want?” one of them screams back.
And there are, she supposes, many ways to answer. The simplest, most honest answer, though, is that she wants to swim with the whale sharks again. Or at least Monterey’s version of them.