Chapter 11
The octopus hadn’t shorted either the bungalow’s ancient wiring or Monterey’s electrical grid in their absence.
She hadn’t even left her tank. However, she’d employed the ribbon of drill-like teeth on her tongue to bore a hole through the oyster’s shell, injecting it with a salivary venom before presumably consuming it.
She was now batting Isabel’s deconstructed bottles against the aquarium lid, swinging a bivalve half-shell in one arm like a racket.
The other half of the shell?
Spreading a wet stain on the carpet.
“What the hell?” Wes retrieved the discarded calcium carbonate. The octopus unfurled herself from her coral nest and flowed over to him in a rush of red when he tapped that disc to the glass. “You see this? This is rude.”
Examining the tank’s steel netting for punctures, then checking the polystyrene packed around the pump tubes, Isabel shook her head. “She doesn’t understand you.”
“Bullshit. I don’t care if some scientist somewhere thinks I’m anthropomorphizing her. This isn’t a research project.” He pointed at their two-spot with the shell. “You understand, don’t you? Rude.”
The other half of the shell materialized again in the fluid tangle of her arms. She tapped back.
“No remorse? Then maybe you don’t want this shrimp.” He plucked a crustacean from his market bag. “Or this crab?”
She dropped the shell instantly. All eight ingenious tentacles roiled forward.
Her ocelli flashed. Her argent eyes followed the crab in his left hand, then the shrimp in his right.
But she was clever. Despite his provocation, she remained submerged, keeping the secret of how she’d jettisoned the oyster’s half-shell out onto the rug.
“Fine.”
Wes clicked his own tongue to his teeth.
Then he removed the tank’s dive weights, lifted its mesh while Isabel occupied the juvenile’s creeping arms, and surrendered the crab and a couple of prawns to their two-spot.
The octopus flipped upside down to pass both prawns from the tips of two tentacles, along a conveyor belt of suckers to her parrot-like beak (located in what for a human would have been her armpit)—before swallowing them. She flourished the crab in another arm.
“Toying with her food again. But at least she’s not a picky eater. Messy, though.” He rasped his thumb against the oyster shell. “The shrimp was a good idea. Maybe the crab will keep her occupied for an hour. We could buy a live one next time.”
“Maybe.” Isabel introduced a few textured rocks into the tank.
She connected the new protein skimmer. While she replaced the aquarium’s security measures, she told him, “She evidently wasn’t given living food in the lab.
She never acquired the camouflage skills to hunt effectively, and did you notice how she isn’t cautious around the crab’s claws?
A large and angry crustacean could do significant damage to her.
She’d need to learn to handle a live one safely. ”
“She’s smart. Too smart.” Wes scuffed at the half-shell’s moist imprint on the carpet. “She’d figure it out.”
“Yes, but I. . .” Isabel’s fingers knotted into the fringe of her sarong when she wiped her hands over its print.
“I worry about her being hurt again. Even accidentally. Here with—us. And I know we just returned to the house, and it’s late”—half past Surf’s Up, according to the funky wall clock, translating to fourthirty—“but I need to go back to MORI.”
“You want to sign up for your volunteering-slash-secret-agent gig.”
“Yes.”
She was exactly as patient as their nameless octopus: not at all.
“I’ll come with you. Do you want to change first, though? If you show up in that swimsuit and ask for dirty work, they might send you into a shark tank to do some teeth-cleaning.”
“Captive sharks don’t need oral cleanings from their keepers. Not when they shed and replace their teeth organically. . . But,” and now she fixed him with a look, shaking her head, “you’re joking.”
“Yeah,” he grinned.
Isabel disappeared into the bedroom. He barely had time to swap his trunks for this morning’s cargo shorts and his sandals for steel-capped boots, then crack open his new SIM card to start rebooting his phone, before she was back: cuffed trousers, otter sweatshirt, tight ponytail.
“Playing with fish guts and fire?” Wes pointed at her exposed toes as he grabbed his matching sweatshirt, pocketed his phone and keys, and checked the octopus’s tank one more time. Not that it mattered. If she got bored with her crab and wanted out, she’d get out. He led Isabel to Baby.
“My sandals have better traction than the ballet flats. I didn’t pack for Monterey. Or MORI.” She frowned and picked at her bare fourth finger, worrying the skin.
He’d been joking again. She wasn’t laughing, though. Or smiling. Or even looking at him.
“Sorry, that was a stupid thing to say—”
“It wasn’t wrong.”
“But—”
Ping.
With a chirp, his phone propped on the Jeep’s dashboard interrupted his ham-fisted attempts to apologize for being a numbskull.
Its automated voice began to read off a stream of incoming messages through an abrupt, awkward silence in the cab as he maneuvered onto Monterey’s northbound coastal highway.
Wesley Robert Monaghan had reentered the family chat.
Adrian Monaghan
Just booked my 11:35 p.m. red eye from Newark to San Francisco.
Erin Monaghan
Gross. That must mean you’re getting in around, what—6 a.m.?
Adrian
6 a.m. on September twelfth.
Erin
I can fit your pickup in before Ethan’s satellite launch. How much coffee do you want me to have ready when I get you from the airport?
Adrian
I’ve got an early meeting with investors on my arrival date. So how big is your bicycle basket? Can you carry a gallon of espresso?
Erin
Very funny. I’ll take Ethan’s hatchback. I might even vacuum up some of the dog hair first. Just for you.
Ellipses bubbled—and Wes hit his brakes to avoid flattening a surfer crossing the road toward the Eolian Dunes Preserve. In the passenger seat, Isabel’s anxious fingers froze. She clutched the seat belt.
“But she can’t. Ethan’s car is still here in Monterey. Because I. . .”
“Yeah.” Wes accelerated again.
Her voice was very quiet as they curved inland through agricultural fields of strawberries and broccoli; he had to strain to hear her over another flurry of texts, this time from his mother reminding Adrian to drink plenty of water and fruit juice on the plane—as if her younger son were one of her Michigan first graders instead of a grown man in his thirties, with Manhattan real estate and a fully funded 401(k).
“Does your family know? About me? About our. . . arrangement?”
He sneaked a glance at her. Her cheeks were pink but her lips were set, her shoulders hunched inside her otter fleece.
She didn’t like lies, did she?
Neither did he. He told her honestly, “I just swapped in my phone’s domestic SIM card. I haven’t told anyone anything yet. Only Erin knows that we’ve even met, since I bombed your call with Ethan on Saturday.”
“Right,” with a shallow exhale.
“If anyone in my family asks directly, I’m not going to lie to them about us.
But we don’t have to actually volunteer anything, except our whirlpool romance story.
Not until after we pass the immigration interview.
At that point it won’t matter as much if everyone’s sticking to the same script.
Adrian can run his mouth, and it won’t impact your legal situation.
Then I’ll tell them the truth—the parts that are mine to share.
But only once you’re safe. Right now, the real details aren’t their business,” whatever the other Monaghans might think.
He spun Baby’s wheels off the highway, over the Old Salinas River, by chain-link fences on Sandholdt Road and into MORI’s parking lot.
While the engine cooled through a pause in his text deluge, he continued, “We’ll break our engagement news when you want to.
When you’re ready. Though—not to put more pressure on your timeline, but—if you want to see Erin again, meet Adrian, and maybe start telling them about some of.
. . this? We’re planning to get together during my assignment.
It’s rare for us to be in the same place at the same time, except for holidays in Michigan.
Not always even then. My work contracts can strand me on Lang Tengah Island or Las Islas Malvinas in December. ”
“Oh.”
“But the three of us. . .” He drummed his thumb on the steering wheel. “It’ll be noisy. There might be roughhousing. We can be a lot, sometimes. Most of the time. I’ll understand if you don’t want to meet them right now, if you want to wait to tell them about. . . until we really have to, and—”
Silence.
Isabel’s hands were strangling each other.
He forced himself to slow down again.
Don’t screw this up.
“It’ll be whenever you want. However much you want to share about yourself, beyond the story we’re telling. But whenever and however much we share with my family, just be prepared. They’re going to like you.”
“Will they?” Brief as it was, her look raked him with dark skepticism. Her fingers interlocked tighter. “When they hear the full truth, won’t they be angry? I wouldn’t blame them, if they blame me for involving you.”
“Involving me?” This was safer ground. He snorted. “Remind me, Isabel: who on Sandholdt Beach—just down there, past the curb—proposed to whom? Then remind me: who’s getting tax benefits and a boat?”
“Yes, but—”
“Like I said, we don’t have to tell them any personal details that you don’t want people to know. We’ll just repeat our whirlpool romance script right now. Next September I’ll explain the boat-and-visa angle. Because, no lies. But anything private? About you, or about us? Zipped lips, I promise.”
“Won’t they—”