Chapter 13 #5
“Shit, yeah. . . I was diving alone near the Jardines de la Reina archipelago, off southern Cuba. Plenty of sharks. Crocodiles, too. But the scar’s just from a jellyfish.
” He wrinkled his nose, wrapping the tape snugly around his finger.
“A Bonaire banded box jellyfish, though, so it hurt like hell. It brushed me while I was adjusting my snorkel mask, and I thought I’d lit my face on fire.
Seems like I’ve got bad luck with these suckers. ”
“Stingers.”
“Right. I didn’t have a marine biologist to patch me up, either.”
Water glistening on the muscle cording his shoulders, wet hair curling at his nape, his freckles and tattoo ink stark against abraded skin—
“S-should—um, should you have been out there by yourself, so far from shore?”
“I was in my twenties. I was an idiot. That same trip, I drowned the pain with tequila and woke up in a tattoo artist’s chair.
I left with this albatross on my shoulder.
A jellyfish predator.” Wes tossed his knife into the sink.
He explained how he’d gotten his half-completed labyrinth inked on Corfu, before a financial upset in Greece’s economy tanked the currency conversion in his bank account.
Then there was a reef knot beside a compass over his heart, commemorating his receipt of both a boating license and navigation certificate.
“The written exams were bad, but I passed with my dyslexia accommodations. I earned the right to a shellback turtle tattoo after crossing the equator as well. It’s going to be expensive, so I’m waiting.
I might put it on my right hip, where the sea nettle got me.
The scarring’s ugly. Or I could get the one hundred and eightieth meridian around my elbow?
That scar tissue’s from a sea lion bite. ”
“Oh.”
Isabel didn’t ask to see the trophic white lines straddling his upper thigh. Nor did she trace her fingers over the marks on his elbow. Instead, she grabbed the shrimp and sank her hands into the aquarium.
“What about you?” Wes leaned against the credenza, absently rubbing his arm. “Any scars? Would you ever get a tattoo?”
Hands on her body, needles under her skin?
She converted her cringe into a shrug and offered a piece of prawn to the two-spot. “Possibly.”
“That’s fair.” He didn’t challenge her.
“But not a fish,” and maybe. . . maybe because he’d shared the history of his scars with her, the story came readily.
Or maybe she just wanted Wes to know? Or to warn him.
“I wouldn’t get a tattoo of anything from the ichthyology zoological branch because they—they called me a cold fish.
The other children. The guardians, too, when I was quiet.
They thought I wasn’t listening. They said I had a dead fish stare. ”
“Little bastards.” She braced for his anger. To her surprise, Wes only scoffed. “People called you a cold fish, so you went into marine biology? That’s some impressive resilience. Or—retaliation?”
“. . . what?”
“You’re hilarious. Sneaky and tough and smart.”
Baffled, she blinked. “Are you referring to me, or the octopus?”
“For a compliment like that? Don’t make me choose,” he said, just as the two-spot squirted them both through her funnel. “God damn it—”
It was too easy to laugh then, the catch in her throat softening.
But wasn’t that all right? Sharing questions and secrets, laughing moments—these were all in service of their immigration interview for her visa.
What if the agent asked her about Wes’s scars?
Or asked either of them about her theoretical tattoo choices?
What if the interviewer inquired how Wes looked while grinning in the rattan lamplight with water glimmering on his chin and in his eyelashes?
What if they asked how it felt to converse through taste and color and texture with an octopus into the dark hours, until the bungalow’s novelty clock read High Tide, until their fingers were ringed with suction kisses, prune-like and numb?
Until they gently pinched each other to gauge their circulation?
“Does this hurt?” He pressed his thumb and forefinger into the web between hers.
“No.”
“Can you feel it?”
She could.
And his smile, too.
*
On Wednesday, Isabel averted a possible headache with one of her Ceretobicin capsules and took another shift at MORI—where she arrived to find a sign reading “Keep Out” taped on the door to the computer lab.
Interesting. It wasn’t the most intuitive place to perform experimental vivisections.
But this notice signified the only restriction of access to lab spaces that she’d encountered at the institute.
She’d find a way or an excuse to slip inside the room soon; whatever the chances were realistically, she still had to be certain there weren’t any octopuses hidden away and hurting there.
Isabel mulled over ideas for an inconspicuous entry into the computer wing while she and Wes returned to the beach house and traded turns in the shower.
(As she stripped off for her time under the water, she didn’t think about him standing naked beneath the spray. She didn’t.)
Once they both smelled less like fish, Wes drove them past Old Fisherman’s Wharf to the west end of Monterey’s historic Cannery Row, paid for off-hours weekday parking, and meandered into the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
“Two adults, please.”
Isabel bought their tickets.
“Christ, I should’ve said I was a senior.
” He stuck a colored visitor dot to her clean flannel (they’d visited a laundromat on Tuesday) and his graphic shirt: Pick Your Submersible Unicorn Fighter!
with art depicting a face-off between a marlin and a narwhal.
They walked under a suspended gray-whale skeleton, skirted the sea otter enclosure, and followed signs toward the aquarium’s Kelp Forest exhibit, before edging into the dim recesses of the giant Pacific octopus tank.
A placard gave the majestic cephalopod’s name as “Mr. Nice I-Spy.” “With all my sun wrinkles, do you think I could pass for a fresh seventy?”
He was joking, of course.
Squatting beside the glass, laughter in his voice and a smile fanning the fine lines beside his eyes while he studied fragile pink sea urchins, their lumpy purple cousins, and a lazy rockfish, scanning the aquarium’s crevices of marine stone for a hidden predator? He was so beautiful.
“—can’t see! Where is it?”
“I don’t know, kiddo,” from a harassed father, handling a stroller with one hand and gripping a toddler with the other. “Maybe the octopus isn’t home right now.”
They wheeled and whined away.
A staff member reprimanded a young couple who seemed more interested in photographing their kisses with flashing phones (violating aquarium policy) than in spotting the cephalopod. They groused, but moved on.
Isabel and Wes remained, watching. . . until from the corner of the tank, with a burst of kinetic speed, a suckered arm appeared.
It reconstituted from its camouflage among the stone and urchins, flashed red, and lashed out to punch the circling rockfish in the head. An eye blinked open against the glass.
A boy clutching an otter plushie behind them screamed.
They shushed the screamer and caught each other’s excited glances—but the octopus’s arm was already fading back into invisibility against the rocks, the eye evanescing into raised, mottled papillae in a perfect replica of a sea urchin. The creature’s flush of enthusiasm dissipated.
“He’s bored,” she said.
“You’re not. You’d crouch here until your legs went numb, just watching him breathe.”
“And dream. Every pigment cell in an octopus’s skin is under their voluntary control. So when they change color and texture while sleeping?”
“They must be dreaming.”
“Not to anthropomorphize, but yes. . .”
Another group passed by with cursory looks into the tank, bamboozled into seeing nothing.
Wes eventually pushed to his feet. “Right, here’s a question that’s not on your list: what’s your octopus origin story?
What got you interested in them, instead of otters or orcas, or—hell, I don’t know, sea slugs? ”
—clutching an illustrated encyclopedia in the cafeteria of a school where she now attended Grade One with the family’s other children; it wasn’t so different from the kindergarten she’d gone to while living in the federal group home, but it was new—pressing the book over her rapid heartbeat while students yelled and threw straws or paper airplanes—wishing she could disappear, could be anywhere other than in this noisy, crowded room—wishing and wishing while a feverish pressure started to build in her head—
She dug her nails into her palms.
Stop.
But he should know. So she nodded and followed Wes to standing.
She gave him the facts—for their interview.
“I was six. We were learning about sea creatures in class at my new school. I got my first migraine that week, and I was scared. I didn’t know what was happening.
The pain. . . I was screaming, I think. On the floor, at night when it happened.
I’d fallen out of bed. I scared the other children at the house.
The adults, too. The parents. I just wanted to disappear.
To be anywhere else. A place that was dark and cool and quiet, where no one could find or touch me.
Or look at me. And—the teacher had told us about octopuses that day.
How they could camouflage. Make themselves vanish.
How they lived deep under the water. I’d had trouble focusing in class because of my prodrome—not that I knew what it was—but I was very interested.
Then I had my first migraine episode that night and I.
. . Later, at the hospital, the adults said I’d gone psychotic. ”
“Psy— You were in pain. You needed help.”
“I knew something wasn’t right with me. That I scared people. I didn’t want to. I just wanted to be left alone.”
Silence.
Then: “I’m sorry about that. All of it. But, Isabel. . .” Her name lingered. “Do you still—”