Part of her argued that she should be thrilled to be living with a father who, apparently, didn’t care what she did. She could stay out whenever she wanted to. She could get high. She could lie around all day. I could fuck any guy I want to, she added. He probably wouldn’t care if I did it right there in his bed.

  The problem, she saw, wasn’t that her father didn’t care what she did, it was that his disinterest took all the fun out of doing any of it. A number of sessions with her mother’s therapist—plus thousands of hours of watching The O.C. and VH1’s Behind the Music—had helped her realize that she frequently did what she did not because she really enjoyed it (although it did provide a temporary thrill that was undeniable) but because she liked getting a rise out of people. As she’d remarked to Sam and Bree following one of her meetings with the therapist, “It was way more fun to be a problem child before therapy and antidepressants.”

  Clearly, she hadn’t abandoned the whole bad girl thing entirely, and she didn’t intend to. Even though she knew it was a temporary diversion from figuring out who she wanted to be when she grew up, she enjoyed herself, at least usually. Bree called it psychological masturbation. And the way she felt when she shocked or angered people really wasn’t all that different from the way she felt when she came. It took her out of her body for a while, made her feel in control.

  Her father made her feel out of control. And she didn’t like it. She’d feel better if he agreed to fight her; at least then she could tell if she was winning. With an opponent who kept letting you hit him, who never got up after being knocked down the first time, there was no joy in the fight. She needed someone to hit back.

  At least her mother had tried. Their arguments were spectacular, the verbal equivalent of the most gorgeously fucked-up Jackson Pollock canvas, with splatters of blame and accusations streaked across the surface like ugly scars. In the midst of them, caught up in the wonder and the glory, Caddie felt alive. Inspiration sparked from her, and her soul was poured out in vivid color. It was only later, when she stepped back and saw the finished product displayed like art on a museum wall, that she found she hadn’t quite captured what she’d wanted to after all.

  Still, incomplete work was better than none at all. She’d succeeded in pushing her mother to the brink, hadn’t she? She’d managed to get herself sent away. And while she now dearly wished she’d never gone so far, there was some satisfaction in having accomplished it so neatly. She saw her success as a measure of her own powers, rather than the result of her mother’s failings, and from this she took strength.

  But her father, he was something altogether different. She didn’t understand him. She’d thought she knew where to begin picking him apart, where the edges of the scab were, but she’d been wrong. She couldn’t get to him by simply hammering away at his heart, as she’d hoped. He didn’t seem to have one to break.

  She needed to know more about him if she was going to get him to understand the depths of her loathing. She once again got out of bed, this time pulling on a sweatshirt against the coolness of the air and putting on a pair of socks. Then she headed down the hall to her father’s bedroom.

  The door was open, depriving her of the joy of physically invading his private space. She walked in and stood there, looking around. Like her own room, his was sparsely furnished. The bed, she noted with some interest, was not centered, as she would have expected, but pushed against one wall, so that the right side was unusable. Apparently, he didn’t expect anyone other than himself to be sleeping there. That explains a lot, she thought.

  She investigated the bedside table. On top were several books, all of them scientific in nature: a history of the oyster, the something about great white sharks, a guide to the seaweeds of the Pacific coast. No wonder you sleep alone, Caddie thought, overcome by the dreariness of her father’s nighttime reading. Only one novel—John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, a bookmark (really just a scrap of paper) stuck perhaps twenty pages in—provided any hint that her father might be interested in something other than his work. And even that’s about Monterey, thought Caddie, dismissing the book as nonrevelatory.

  The table had one drawer, which she opened hopefully. She’d often found interesting things in bedside table drawers. Her mother, for example, kept in hers a vibrator shaped like a dolphin and a bottle of Vicodin, and she’d once found, while snooping through the bedroom of a couple for whom she sometimes babysat, a stack of Polaroids featuring the husband of the pair dressed in women’s underpants while being spanked by a woman in a Mardi Gras mask.

  Her father’s drawer contained a number of objects, each of which she examined in turn. First was a pair of eyeglasses, utile and dull. Then there were a number of pairs of shoelaces, all of them meant for black dress shoes, and an assortment of plastic collar stays of the sort that came preinserted in department store dress shirts. A wristwatch, the hands stopped at 7:20, lay in an impotent heap of gold links. Beside it, an expired membership card to a local gym remained affixed to the paper on which it had been mailed.

  Caddie shut the drawer with a groan. There was absolutely nothing of interest. No condoms. No phone numbers on scraps of paper. No drugs, not even aspirin or sleeping pills. It was the drawer of an old man. An old man who died fifty years ago, she thought. Her father, she concluded, was completely devoid of personality.

  Across from the bed, a dresser leaned against the wall as if it were trying hard not to be noticed. She went to it and pulled open the uppermost of its four drawers. It was filled with underwear—boxer shorts—all of them white and each one folded into a neat rectangle. They were stacked like firewood, alternating directions so that the waistband of one aligned with the leg openings of the next. Beside the undershorts were rows of socks, equally neat and equally predictable.

  The second drawer contained T-shirts. These, at least, came in a variety of colors. Many featured the logos of dive shops, dive boats, or other diving-oriented businesses. Still, the sameness of them rendered them interchangeable in Caddie’s mind. She closed the drawer as if sealing a coffin.

  The third drawer held shorts and sweatshirts, and was rewarded with only the briefest of inspections. The fourth contained everything that didn’t, for one reason or another, fit into the categories represented by the other drawers. She gave the contents a cursory look, then abandoned her investigation of the bureau, which seemed to settle with relief back into its state of weary resignation.

  Her possibilities nearly exhausted, she opened the door of the closet. She was unsurprised to find it filled with shirts, all hung facing the same direction and with the buttons tidily done up, as well as a row of pants, all of them khaki in color and neatly pressed. On the floor several pairs of shoes sat obediently, like well-trained dogs.

  Above the hanging rod was a shelf. On this there were sweaters, and beside these was a box made of cardboard, about a foot long and half as much tall. Caddie grabbed it and lifted it down, carrying it without hope to the bed, where she sat. She lifted the lid, expecting to find inside further proof of her father’s dullness. Instead, she found it filled with papers and photographs.

  The first item she withdrew was a diploma, folded into thirds, from the University of Washington, awarding Ben Ransome a bachelor of science degree in marine biology. It was dated June 17, 1985, and there was a round brown ring, as if from the bottom of a coffee cup, on one corner of it. Caddie laid it aside and kept digging. There were other papers—certificates of commendation from various marine-oriented groups, the title to the Volvo, a stack of California Department of Fish & Game abalone catch report cards dating back half a dozen years.

  She was beginning to think that she’d hit another dead end when she came across the first envelope. It was red, faded to a dusty pink, and on the front was scrawled, in a child’s first attempt at writing, DAD. She lifted the flap and drew out a card. It was a Valentine, handmade and embarrassing, for she recognized the work as her own. On the outside was a drawing of what she guessed was a whale swimming in a sea of blue squiggles. A fountain of hearts spouted from its blowhole, and it smiled joyfully. Inside she had written a message: HAPY VALUNTINE DAY DADDY. I LOVE U. CADDIE.

  How old had she been? She tried to remember and couldn’t. Probably four or five. Had she made the card in school, or had her mother helped her? She stared at the card, but nothing came to her. It was as if the Valentine had been made by some other child who had signed her name to it.

  She quickly put it back into the envelope. Beneath it was another card, also from her. This one was store-bought, a birthday card featuring Snoopy, inside her signature and another declaration of love. This time she’d dotted the “I” in her name with a heart. Ugh, she thought, looking at it. When had she been such a freak?

  There were more envelopes, but she left them alone, having no interest in seeing further proof of her childhood sweetness. Instead, she leafed through the remaining items, only glancing at them, lest she come upon something else she didn’t want to see. In this way, she almost missed the photograph. It had been stuck between two envelopes, and she would have missed it had not the sudden flash of a face caught her attention amidst the sea of paper.

  It was a picture of her. Actually, a picture of her and her father. He was standing beside a Christmas tree, holding her in his arms. She was reaching out toward the tree, an ornament dangling from her fingers as she tried to hang it on a branch. She recognized the ornament. It was a glass mushroom. If you looked carefully, though, you saw that it was actually a short, fat girl with a mushroom hat. She had always loved that ornament, and her father had always helped her hang it in a special place on the tree.

  In the photo, her father was looking at her with a strange expression. It was a look somewhere between awe and fear, as if he’d just seen her for the very first time and half expected her to turn and bite him. Or like he’s afraid he might drop me, she thought.

  She spent another moment looking at the photo, then put it back. She’d suddenly lost interest in excavating her father’s past. She felt tired, and somewhat nauseated, as if by unsealing the box she’d released some kind of poisonous gas into the room. Wasn’t that how the archaeologists who’d discovered King Tut’s tomb had died? I’ve unleashed the curse of Ben Ransome, Caddie thought, without humor, as she returned the box to the closet and shut the door.

  She left her father’s bedroom. As soon as she was past the door, she breathed more easily.

  CHAPTER 19

  The inflatable boat rocked on the surface of the ocean. Ben, trying to put on his BC, nearly fell over the side as a swell passed beneath them. He was saved when Angela, reacting quickly, reached out and grabbed his arm.

  “Thanks,” Ben said.

  Angela, her BC already on and fastened securely, sat on the side of the boat, waiting for Ben to finish. “You seem a little distracted today,” she remarked. “Is everything all right?”

  Ben, cinching his waist strap, checked to make sure that the air hose was connected to his dry suit. “I’m okay,” he said. “I just wish we could have used the real boat instead of this bathtub toy.”

  Angela bit her lip, hiding her amusement by spitting into her mask, then turning and rinsing it in the water. She knew Ben preferred the other boat and that he was mad at himself for not requisitioning it as he was supposed to. Instead, one of the other teams had gotten to it first, leaving them with the Zodiac. She didn’t mind it so much. She seldom, if ever, got seasick. But Ben was cursed with a sensitive stomach. Already he’d thrown up once during the ride over. And sitting on a rocking boat was the worst thing for someone who was prone to motion sickness.

  “I’m just about ready,” Ben said, attaching the clip on his underwater light to one of the D-rings on his BC. He picked up the camera resting on the boat’s bottom and handed it to Angela. She took it and held it on her lap as Ben, placing his regulator in his mouth and adjusting his mask, rolled backward into the water. When he bobbed back up, he placed one fist on top of his head, the universal sign that everything was okay.

  Leaning over, Angela handed him his camera. When Ben had it securely in hand, she handed him a second one, hers, and then repeated his roll into the water. She came up beside him, and he handed her camera over.

  “We’ll go down and circle the pinnacle coming back up,” Ben said. “Nice and easy. Photograph whatever you see. It’s good practice.”

  Angela nodded. Ben gave her the thumbs-down sign indicating that he was ready to descend. She mirrored him, and they both released air from their BCs, gently submerging. As the water closed over their heads and the weight in their BC pockets helped them sink, they leveled out and floated horizontally.

  Ben fidgeted with his camera. It was a temperamental thing, and every time he used it he swore he was going to replace it. There was even a newer one sitting in a box on his office floor back at the station. But he knew how to use this one, and the thought of having to start all over again was unappealing. So he put up with its quirks and hoped each time that it would reward him with a good picture or two.

  The water was murky, a cloudy greenish-brown that provided only a few feet of visibility. Even Angela, only perhaps five feet from him, was nothing more than a shadow against the curtain of particulate matter that had turned the ocean into what one of his fellow biologists quaintly termed “a big bowl of ick.” It was one of the trade-offs they endured for being able to dive so close to the mysterious Monterey Canyon. The cold waters allowed for a greater diversity of marine life, but it came with a price, namely, the food that fed so much of that diverse life. Every upwelling from the canyon brought with it great sweeping drifts of microorganisms that covered everything in a living veil, much like, Ben always imagined, the dust storms that tormented the prairie states. Divers unaccustomed to it, and even some who were, often convinced themselves that sea monsters, both real and imagined, lurked behind this scrim and refused to dive when the visibility was low.

  Ben himself had experienced several times the unsettling sensation of being bumped by something unseen while passing through the shadowed water. While the likely culprits were the seals and sea lions abundant in the local waters, it was easy to see how a more active mind might go immediately to far more gruesome possibilities. He was pleased, therefore, to see that Angela seemed to be at ease in the conditions. She had been a diver for less than a year, and her experience prior to arriving at the station had been limited to the warm, clear waters of Hawaii. But she had learned quickly and was now Ben’s most able assistant.

  At about twenty feet they suddenly dropped into near-perfect visibility. It was momentarily startling, as if someone had thrown open a window shade. The pinnacle, which had heretofore been obscured, sprang into view, a massive tower of rock not a dozen feet from where Ben and Angela floated. Had he not been expecting it, Ben might have found himself chilled by the realization that the sea could hide such a monstrous secret from him. As it was, he greeted the pinnacle like an old friend, which is what it was.

  They continued their descent, stopping at eighty feet. The protocols of diving required them to begin their dive deep and move gradually to shallower water, where the air in their tanks would last longer and where the nitrogen that built up in their blood at depth could be off-gassed safely. Because they could stay at that depth for only a short time, Ben immediately began to search for documentable subjects. A quarter way around the pinnacle, he saw a flash of light from Angela’s strobe and silently congratulated her on her efficiency.

  The dive was primarily for Angela’s benefit, to give her more practical experience photographing undersea life. For Ben it was almost purely recreational, although he was shooting as well. He began with a Hermissenda crassicornis nudibranch he discovered feeding along the edge of a sponge. Looking through the view screen on the back of his camera, he zoomed in on the creature until he could see the distinctive yellow stripe, edged in orange, that bisected its body. On either side of this line, the gorgeous brown cerata, tipped in yellow and white, formed a dense forest covering the nudibranch’s back.

  He was trying to get a good shot of its rhinophores, the rings that circled them like bracelets on the slimmest of wrists so different from those of most nudibranchs. But he was having trouble with the zoom, and the Hermissenda’s head kept going in and out of focus as he fumbled with the controls through his thick gloves. It, of course, was the perfect model, holding its pose beautifully while he ineptly attempted to capture its beauty.

  Finally he got a shot that looked halfway decent. He pressed the button, was rewarded with a burst of light, and moved on. The pinnacle was, quite literally, crawling with life, and mostly he chose his subjects not by any scientific criteria but by how lovely they were to look at. When he framed a sea star within his window, it wasn’t because it was at all unusual (it was a common Dermasterias imbricata, he remembered, testing his knowledge) but because the blue-ring top snail crawling along across one leathery arm (Was it Caliostoma annula-tum or ligatum? He could never remember.) made it appear that the sea star was wearing a beautiful brooch.

  He snapped a number of pictures—a tiny kelp crab that waved its half-inch-long pincers menacingly; a corraline sculpin perched on a small outcropping, where it blended seamlessly with the purple and gray rock; a colony of translucent thumblike tunicates. These were the familiar occupants of the pinnacle, often seen yet still, to Ben, awe-inspiring. He looked upon them as he might a UFO, filled with wonder that things so alien and so beautiful could coexist with him, a great clumsy animal who had to strap a tank of air to his back to enter their world.

  They were working their way up, first to seventy feet, then to sixty. As they circled the pinnacle, moving clockwise up the spire, Ben looked at Angela, her fins fluttering as she attempted to stay still long enough to photograph a tiny pincushion-like Cockerell’s Dorid (Lima-cia cockerelli he recited automatically) and thought suddenly of Caddie. They weren’t that far apart in years. The girl swimming beside him could easily have been his daughter. But she wasn’t, and his actual daughter was on dry land some sixty feet above him.