Monterey Bay (12 page)

“God, I love these,” he said quietly. He plugged the vial with a rubber stopper and then tilted it up toward the sky. “Most people think they're appalling, but I just love them, I really do.”

In the high, bright glare of the shore, she could see, more clearly than ever before, the evidence of his age. There were wrinkles—deep ones—across his brow, a stubborn quality to the way he held his mouth. In his eyes, though, was that flintlike spark, the glow of the fog internalized.

“You try the next one,” he said, resting the vial beside the bucket and producing another microscope slide from his pocket.

“I don't think—”

“Just do it. Nice and slow.”

He passed her the slide, retrieved the rock from between his legs. She did her best to mimic him: holding the slide with a light grip, approaching the worm with a reverence that seemed wholly disproportional to the task at hand. For a moment, the worm seemed unwilling, its body contracting, its branches rippling, but she didn't flinch. Instead, she remained perfectly still
as the worm began to pour itself incrementally forward, making its deliberate transition off the rock and onto the slide.

“Oh,” he said. “Very nice.”

He held out his hand. She passed the slide to him. He slipped the second worm into the vial alongside the first.

“I'll draw them,” she said.

He looked away from the worms and into her face. And there it was: the expression she had been trying all this time to cultivate, waiting all this time to see, a new sort of wickedness framing his grin, a glad darkness born from the type of pain that, if you endure it long enough, eventually turns to pleasure.

“Yes,” he replied. “But first, we need to kill them.”

They were in a room she had never seen before.

“Sit over there, on the Buick,” he instructed. “I'll let you know when it's time.”

“Can I—?”

“A moment, please. Only a moment.”

His voice was brisk and methodical, as unfamiliar as her surroundings. She took a seat on the hood of the car. They were in a garage: a ground-level chamber flush with the back lot and one level below the main building. There were two metal sinks against the far wall, dozens of bottles on a series of warped, poorly hung shelves, all of them labeled in a chemist's obscure
script, an icebox just as dilapidated as the one in the kitchen, lidded trash barrels filled with what she could safely assume was not the usual sort of trash. On the raw-wood countertops was a variety of scientific equipment: microscopes, flasks, burners, tongs, an abundance of glass slides like the one she had used to capture the worm, all of them stored upright in a box marked
PROPERTY OF HOPKINS MARINE STATION
. What really drew her eye, however, was the old china hutch at the base of the staircase. It was filled with what looked like hundreds of bottled specimens, many of which she had seen in isolation before, but never all together.

“Come here.”

She looked away from the hutch. He was standing in front of the sinks. She slid down from the hood of the car, and went to his side. Most of the morning's collections had already been sorted and categorized into metal bins: hermit crabs cowering in their pilfered shells, snails stretching their gooey feet up the sides of their enclosures, small sea stars curling and uncurling their slender, spiky legs as if desperate to signal something. The worms, however, were still alone in their vial, untouched and alive, resting quietly on their microscope slides.

“Well then,” he announced, his voice perfectly amiable now, but also too jaunty, too official. “We'll start with one part menthol to nine parts seawater, which should get them nice and relaxed. And because we're feeling fancy, we'll add a dash of magnesium sulfate, but not too much because we're running low
and my current supplier is one of those shortsighted types who insists on being paid.”

He let out a snort, but she remained straight-faced, intent.

“Awfully serious today, aren't you?” he said.

“I thought this was serious business.”

“It is.”

“So what happens next?”

“Like I said, a nice splash of menthol.”

He selected a bottle and held it directly beneath her nose. When she inhaled, there was a brain-flushing odor halfway between pine and mint, the strength of it almost enough to push her over the edge.

“Into the bin?” she rasped, eyes watering.

“That's right.”

She took the bottle from him and let a glug or two escape. Then she watched him uncork the vial that held the worms, and as the worms slid from the vial and into the liquid, she expected something intense and purifying, something like the burning sketchbooks. But the worms barely moved, their edges making a slight upward curl before falling from the slides and stiffening into gradual paralysis.

“Are they dead?” she asked.

“No.”

He uncapped another bottle and poured its contents into the bin.

“Now they are.”

They both coughed, the smell in the garage unthinkably foul. Eyes watering, she searched his face, but he just smiled with the same vacant brightness as before and turned toward the icebox.

“And now we'll just give them another minute.” The ease in his voice was an insult now. When he opened the icebox door, she could see a stack of dead cats, a tapestry of bared teeth and stiff tails. “And then we'll rinse them down and get them into the formalin: a five percent mixture, just to be safe. As for the rest of our little friends, I suspect we'll use some Bouin's fixative on the mollusks, or maybe some Zenker's. And the brittle stars should be easy enough. Seventy percent alcohol and just a splash of glycerin. It's important to remember the glycerin. Keeps the articular membranes nice and flexible so there's no risk of—”

She backed away from the sink and reclaimed her seat on the car.

“You disagree?” he asked, shutting the icebox. “About the glycerin?”

“No.”

“Then what's wrong?”

She looked at the hutch again. She wasn't sure if it was the euphoria of working alongside him or the lingering effect of the menthol. Either way, the sea creatures in their jars seemed to be moving slightly. She blurred her eyes, hoping to erase
what she was seeing, but they came even more alive as a result. And she wanted to say something about it, but how to phrase it? How to put it in a way he couldn't possibly discard or misinterpret?

“I've been having dreams,” she said.

At that, his face finally darkened. He wiped his hands again, removed his apron, and joined her on the Buick's hood. Their legs were almost touching, both of their feet propped up on the front fender, and it reminded her of sitting on the bed with him, both of them admiring her sketch, both of them fully aware of what would happen next.

“‘The dream is the aquarium of the night,'” he said.

“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.

“Ed, please tell her I'm in no mood for levity. Or an audience.”

She looked at Ricketts. He jerked his head firmly in the direction of the stairway, and she didn't protest. She did, however, envision something seditious as she began to climb: that she was bottled up alongside the largest and rarest of his specimens. That she was still in the garage, watching and hearing their private conversation from the strange comfort of the china hutch.

Upstairs, she could, in fact, still hear their voices: loud yet entirely indecipherable, like a radio tuned just a few notches in the wrong direction. Arthur wasn't there, and she was unspeakably thankful for it. The canneries next door were an earthquake that never stopped. From the bedroom behind her, there was the sound of typing. On the desk, an unfamiliar tube of lipstick was serving as a paperweight, its cap missing and the red paste inside crushed down to a sore-looking nub. She could feel the wounds on both her forehead and shin as intensely as if they had somehow been reopened.

She sat down, moved the lipstick to where she couldn't see it, turned to a clean sheet of paper, and began to sketch. And just as she had expected, the worms appeared there with twice the accuracy and intention of anything she had ever drawn. When a wide-angled shadow fell across the floor, she was certain
Ricketts was in the doorway, ready to claim her. But Steinbeck was there instead.