Chapter 10
She escaped.
“You think this octopus came from the Monterey Oceanic Research Institute,” Wes confirmed.
Just that.
No questions, no prevarications. Not even a suggestion that she might be misinterpreting the sensory data before her, that maybe her Ceretobicin was causing mental fog—admittedly, a documented side effect for some users in Phase Two of the clinical trials.
Isabel nodded; she was grateful.
And scared.
Her logic was too sound for doubt.
The octopus in their reef tank must have escaped from the institute, since MORI was the only experimental marine lab in the area.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium and Hopkins Marine Station also opened onto the bay, but the uncamouflaged two-spot would never have survived her passage along twenty miles of sea currents to Moss Landing from either the aquarium in central Monterey or Hopkins in Pacific Grove.
So: she’d escaped from the institute.
“What did they do to you?” she asked the cephalopod suctioned to her thumb. “And. . . why?”
“How did you get out?” from Wes.
“That’s easier to answer.” Isabel swallowed against a tight wedge in her throat and took refuge in fact.
“Designing a secure enclosure for any octopus species is difficult. You saw how she contorted her body to enter my snorkel fin. She can wriggle through much smaller spaces, too. The giant Pacific octopus has been documented squeezing into openings the size of a tangerine—and that species can weigh as much as a man, and stretch to almost five meters in length. This two-spot is a twentieth of that size. If she pried off its nozzle, she could maneuver herself down the aquarium’s water tube to the rear pump chamber.
Not easily, but she could. Besides, octopuses are curious, and mischievous, and clever.
They’re motivated to explore and manipulate objects in their environments for predation and play, even when they aren’t subjected to experimental vivisection.
Even when they don’t have a compelling reason to get out. ”
Who knew what the octopus had endured at MORI?
“You’re saying she could get through something like MORI’s floor drains? The lattices on the grates were about three-quarters of an inch.”
“If she could escape her tank? Yes.”
“Right—”
“I’m not returning her, though. I—I won’t take her back there.
” She had to remain calm, had to be rational, not visceral.
But she’d interrupted Wes with too much anxious force.
His frown fractured the last of the hidden glow in her heart.
“Keeping her without a license is illegal. I know that. Taking her from the ocean, even if she’s not wild, if she’s from—and I can’t break the law, not before securing my visa, but I. . . I still can’t—won’t—I—”
“Isabel.” Wes’s fingers closed over the tank wall an inch from where her arm remained sunk to the elbow in the octopus’s grasp.
“We’re not sending her back to a place where she’s been hurt.
Of course we’re not. You were right to refuse going into MORI.
You were right to bring her here. You’re doing the right thing.
We’re going to do the right thing. I promise. ”
“We are?”
“Yes.”
I promise. . .
The block of fear loosened fractionally in her throat, her tongue softening.
Nature abhorred a vacuum, however. Even as her panic dissipated, a new upwelling of sensation—emotion—threatened to choke Isabel.
It was relief and it was gratitude, but something more dangerous as well: something sad and warm and wanting.
He’d refused to send the octopus back to MORI.
He’d refused to send Isabel back, too. He’d offered her—them—a choice, and a chance.
Wes Monaghan was a good man.
He was also still speaking. “The first right thing we’re going to do is octopus-proof this aquarium. Otherwise, the two-spot’s just going to escape from us.”
She breathed, shakily. “We have to make the tank safe for her.”
“You’re the expert.”
He tapped the glass and eyed the octopus’s fifth arm, which was speckled red and busy with the pump nozzle.
Another arm crept toward his fingers. Left to her own devices after dark or while they went to the grocery store, the two-spot could dismantle the aquarium’s metal mesh cover in minutes.
Then she’d be off to explore the electrical sockets behind the television.
Worse, what if she stranded herself away from the tank?
She could only absorb oxygen from the air by cutaneous respiration for thirty minutes, before her skin dried and failed her.
“So,” Wes continued, “how do we make her tank safe?”
With another exhale, Isabel told him.
Octopus-proofing the aquarium was a half-structural and half-psychological exercise.
Wes cut up a polystyrene box that he’d found nested inside the cooler earlier.
Duct tape came from a kitchen junk drawer.
He fit the foam pieces into gaps between the aquarium’s tubes and the glass, then secured them with the tape.
Meanwhile, Isabel ripped Velcro from a pocket in her cosmetics case and fixed the bristles to the interior of the tank, just where the tubes for the pump and protein skimmer passed into the rear chamber.
The octopus’s sensitive suckers would find the texture repellent.
Next, she located a depleted ketchup squeeze-bottle in the refrigerator, rinsed it, and retrieved an empty medicine vial from her bag.
Another rummage through the junk hidey-hole drawer unearthed a few mismatched binder clips and rubber bands.
Perfect. She stuffed them into the pill bottle, added the plastic toy from the Grocery Outlet cereal box, and squashed the smaller vial into the ketchup container.
She dropped the MacGyvered enrichment artifact into the tank.
Finally, Wes added lead diving weights from his duffel bag to the lid.
“What now?”
“She’ll open the bottles easily.” Following her pointing finger, the octopus was already reaching for them, drifting cloud formations of peachy pigment staining her skin.
“The puzzle should keep her engaged for now, but she’ll be bored soon.
She needs a more interesting environment than bleached coral and one oyster.
Ideally, I would’ve hidden something edible inside the capsules for her, but—”
“—octopuses don’t eat cereal?”
“She needs real food, like crabs. Or mollusks. Sardines. She might feed on that oyster, once she’s finished toying with it.”
“Playing with her meal? Great.” Shaking his head, smiling at the little predator, Wes retrieved his keys.
Sunlight flashed off the metal and across the suction rings marking his forearms, with their burns, blisters, and ink.
“Sounds like we need to head out for a second try at our date. How about that fish market on Old Fisherman’s Wharf?
We’ll be able to find something fresh-caught.
Though—we should drive. No point in spoiling the seafood with a scenic walk back.
And maybe the market’s not romantic, but at least we might remember to document ourselves this time. ” He shrugged into his camera strap.
He was right.
A fish market wasn’t romantic.
But as Isabel sneaked a last glance at the octopus (the two-spot was manipulating the ketchup container to pour her arms inside it, blowing excited bubbles), and collected her sweater, knotted her sarong more tightly around her waist, then followed Wes to the Jeep, she reminded her fluttering stomach: It doesn’t need to be.
“Come on, come on. . .” Baby’s engine caught on the third crank of his key.
Wes swung his wheels off the curb and rumbled up Beach Way.
He tracked sandwich-board signs posted at traffic intersections along Del Monte Avenue toward a fish market on the wharf adjacent to Loulou’s Griddle—where he had to pay for parking again.
He grimaced while feeding cash into the kiosk, and at Baby’s rough ride over the asphalt.
“Sorry. Erin was supposed to work on her engine before I drove to Monterey. But since I got in early, we’re on our own with the gears and wires. ”
One of Isabel’s palms gave a light, wordless pat to the dashboard; Baby decelerated smoothly into a stall.
His grimace smoothed into a grin, too. “She likes you! Did I mention that her name’s Baby?”
“Right, yes.”
“Yeah.” He yanked the parking brake, slung the Nikon back over his shoulder, then waited for Isabel to join him on the pavement.
Passing a waterside sign that implored tourists not to feed the sea lions, he followed his nose away from the parking lot and toward an alfresco market on the charmingly colorful and ramshackle Old Fisherman’s Wharf.
MORI’s briefing had included historical information on the area, including some old local children’s doggerel: “Carmel-by-the-Sea, Monterey-by-the-Smell, and Pacific Grove-by-God.” It wasn’t inaccurate.
“Will it seem weird to our immigration interviewer if I have a nickname for my Jeep, but not for you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think it might. So—what’s it going to be?”
Isabel’s elbows tucked into her sides. She ducked her chin as they maneuvered by a railing cluttered with bicycles, a taffy-pink gift shop selling Golden Gate Bridge snow globes, Old Fisherman’s Grotto with its waiters balancing toasted garlic bread bowls of clam chowder, and through the first lineup of market stalls: live bait, heaps of invasive European green crabs, oysters on ice, and rows of mackerel.
“Not Bella,” she said. “Not babe.”
“Done.”