“Why don’t we all go inside,” Ben suggested when Caddie didn’t say anything. “We can have some lunch.”

  “I’ve got to get going,” Carol said, looking at her watch. She’d yet to even remove her sunglasses. “I have an appointment.”

  “Oh,” Ben said. His smile faltered. “Can’t you even stay for lunch? It’s only half an hour. Maybe less. I can—”

  “I’m already late,” Carol said, cutting him off. She turned to Caddie. “Go get your bags from the car, honey.”

  Caddie, grateful for the reprieve from the awkward moment, took the keys her mother held out to her and retreated down the steps.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Ben asked Carol as soon as Caddie was out of earshot.

  “You’re going to have to be alone with her sooner or later, Ben,” said Carol.

  “But you’re just dropping her off like she’s a load of laundry,” Ben argued. “She’s your daughter.”

  “And she’s your daughter too,” said Carol. “If you think you can do any better with her than I can, be my guest. That’s why she’s here, remember?”

  “Maybe if you were a little nicer to her ...” Ben began.

  Carol laughed. “Good luck, Ben,” she said as Caddie came back, a bag in each hand. She turned and gave Caddie a far less effusive version of the hug Ben had bestowed upon her earlier. “Call me in a few days,” she said.

  She left the two of them standing together and returned to the Lexus. Backing up, she looked at the porch, seemed to shake her head, and returned the way she had come.

  Caddie and Ben stood silently for a minute, as if perhaps Carol might come back and save them from one another. Finally, Ben said, “I guess it’s just you and me now.”

  “Guess so,” said Caddie.

  Ben bent to pick up her bags, but Caddie grabbed them before he could. “I’ll get them,” she said as Ben pulled back reflexively.

  Ben held the screen door open as Caddie stepped into the house. She was surprised to discover that it was as hot inside as it was out. “Don’t you have air-conditioning?” she asked.

  Ben shook his head. “These houses are so old, I don’t think they could take it,” he answered. “Is it that hot?”

  “If there’s no air-conditioning, it doesn’t really matter, does it?” said Caddie.

  “I could get a fan,” Ben said vaguely.

  Caddie ignored him. She was looking around the house. Ahead of her, down a narrow hallway, she saw the kitchen. To the left was the living room, populated with a large sofa upholstered in what looked disconcertingly like faded pink velvet and a set of mismatched armchairs that stared at one another in mute hostility from either side of a fireplace.

  “Where’s my room?” asked Caddie.

  Ben indicated a set of stairs going up from the small entry area. “Second floor,” he said. “End of the hall.”

  Caddie marched up the stairs, her feet landing heavily on each step. The wood groaned, and she made a mental note to test them later and note the weak spots, in case she ever had occasion to sneak out of the house at night.

  The room was horrible. The wallpaper, a faded blue turned gray and patterned with ghostly pink roses, was almost certainly original. Against one wall an old brass bed, looking as ancient as the wallpaper, sagged beneath the weight of its mattress. The quilt atop it, a patchwork of dozens of different fabrics, appeared hand-stitched. Caddie imagined the room’s former occupant sewing it while she died, not leaving the room for a period of years, from some consumptive disease. Opposite the bed stood a five-drawer bureau with a mirror atop it. A framed print of something—mountains, was it?—hung over the bed.

  “The closet is over here,” Ben said, turning the handle on the only other door in the room, as if perhaps she would never have discovered it on her own.

  “There’s no TV,” Caddie realized, speaking the thought aloud. She tried to remember if she’d seen one in the living room but was sure she hadn’t. A kind of panic gripped her.

  Ben stood, his hand on the doorknob, looking at her as if she’d asked where she could stable her unicorn. Finally he scratched his nose. “Um, no,” he said. “I don’t really watch television.”

  Caddie sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the springs groan plaintively beneath her. “No air-conditioning,” she said. “No television. Do I have to get water from the well?”

  “The bathroom is down the hall,” said Ben.

  “The bathroom,” Caddie repeated. “There’s just one?”

  “Do you need more than one?” asked Ben.

  “Apparently not,” said Caddie. She closed her eyes. The Valium wasn’t doing the job; she would have to take another one. Why hadn’t her mother just sent her to prison? At least there they had television.

  Ben had walked over to the bed and was standing at the foot. His hands were in his pockets. “Look,” he said. “I know this is hard for you. It’s hard for me too.”

  Caddie looked at him. “Thanks,” she said. “It’s good to be wanted.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Ben. “I mean, I’m not used to living with someone else, especially a child.”

  “I’m not a child,” Caddie said sharply. “I know you haven’t been around much for, oh, nine or ten years, but just to let you know, I’ve grown up since you walked out.”

  Ben nodded. “I see that,” he said quietly.

  Caddie unzipped her backpack and riffled through it, pretending to look for something. She hoped her father would take the hint and leave her alone. He didn’t.

  “Your mother thinks ...” he began, then stopped for a moment. “Your mother and I think it will be good for the two of us to spend the summer together.”

  Caddie, still rummaging furiously, said, “My mother thinks I’m out of control, and she’s making you take me for the summer because she doesn’t know what else to do.” She stopped pawing in her backpack and looked at him. “I’m not stupid,” she said shortly.

  “I never ...” Ben retorted. He watched her face, her dark, flashing eyes. “No,” he said. “You’re not.”

  Caddie pushed a strand of her long, curly hair behind one ear. Her mother was right, her father had gained weight. And his hair was grayer than she remembered. He didn’t look old, exactly, just kind of more worn out. Like his house.

  “Do you want something to eat?” Ben asked her.

  She shook her head. He nodded. “I guess I’ll just leave you to get settled, then,” he said. He walked to the door, then turned. “We’ll have dinner together,” he said. “How about eight?”

  “Whatever,” said Caddie, shrugging.

  “Okay,” said Ben, leaving. He left the door open. Caddie listened to him walk down the hall. When the footsteps stopped, she went to the door and shut it. There was no lock.

  Unpacking her two bags took little time. She hung a few things in the closet, surprised to find that her father had actually remembered to put hangers in there, and threw the rest of her clothes in the dresser drawers. The half-dozen books she’d brought were piled on the shelf of the bedside table.

  Going to the window, she looked outside. Her room faced the street. Not that there was anything to look at. Across the street was another house almost identical to her father’s. A couple of little kids played on the small lawn, throwing a ball around and yelling at one another. She considered shutting the window, but the room was already hot enough. She hoped she’d be able to sleep with it open. Probably she’d have to take yet another Valium.

  That reminded her, and she went to her backpack and took out the bottle of pills. Opening it, she poured them into her hand and counted. She had thirty. Not nearly enough. But they would have to do. Taking one, she returned the others and capped the bottle.

  She put the backpack on the floor and stretched out on the bed. Lifting her hips, she brought her butt down on the mattress and heard it let out a complaining squeak. She did it again. Imagine what it would sound like if I was having sex on it, she mused.

  That just made her even more depressed, because it made her think about Sam. He wasn’t her boyfriend, exactly, but they slept together sometimes. Then again, he also slept with Bree. And there was that one time when ...

  She didn’t want to think about Sam and Bree. It just made her homesick. She kicked off her shoes and let them drop to the floor, where they made a dull thud like apples falling from a tree. Christ, you could hear every sound someone made in this house. She was going to have absolutely no privacy. She hated her mother for making her stay; she hated her father for saying she could.

  In the mirror on the dresser was reflected the picture over the bed. The mirror glass, like everything else in the room, was old. The reflection was distorted, almost grainy. She squinted her eyes and tried to make out the image. It wasn’t mountains after all. But what was it?

  She stood up, ignoring the bed’s protests, and turned to look at the picture full-on. It was a picture of a whale. More precisely, it was a picture of men hunting a whale. The men were in a small boat. They stood, harpoons in their hands, as the whale glared at them with its large, baleful eye. The whale’s mouth was open, showing its small, white teeth, and several harpoons stuck out from its sides. It was spouting water.

  It was a disturbing image. She felt sorry for the whale. She wished it could bring its massive tail down and shatter the boat, pitching the men into the ocean. Then she noticed the sharks. Around the whale, and around the boat as well, sharks stuck their heads above the water. Like the whale, their mouths were open, revealing dangerous-looking teeth.

  Caddie shuddered. Why had someone hung something so unpleasant in a bedroom? Why had her father kept it there? She knew the answer to that question; he probably had never even looked at the picture. To him it might as well have been a vase filled with flowers, or a kitten. She was sure that if she asked, he’d have no idea what she was talking about.

  She took the picture down. Behind it, in a patch exactly the size of the picture frame, the wallpaper was much bluer, the roses much pinker. Knowing that people had left the ugly image there for so many years made her hate it even more. She climbed off the bed, went to the closet, and leaned the picture against the wall inside. She would find something else to hang in its place, she told herself. Something she actually wanted to have hanging over her head.

  Or maybe she’d just wait and see if her father noticed the picture’s absence. He’d have to come into the room for that. She wondered if he would. Was he going to spy on her, the way her mother did? She kind of doubted it. But someone had to come in the room sometimes to clean it. She couldn’t imagine her father cleaning. So who did?

  She realized that her father’s entire life was a mystery to her. Not that she cared, really. It had just never occurred to her to wonder how he managed. Did he cook? He’d mentioned having dinner, but he hadn’t said anything about doing the cooking. She tried to picture him doing laundry, or vacuuming. She couldn’t even form an image of it in her mind. It was like he was someone she’d read about in a book; she knew just enough about him to believe that he existed. Everything else was a blank.

  The second Valium was kicking in, and that, combined with the warmth of the room, made her sleepy. She yawned. For a moment, she fought against the closing of her eyes. Then she remembered that she had absolutely nothing else to do, nowhere else to be. It was as if she were marooned on an island, alone except for the strange presence that was her father.

  She breathed deeply, settling into the mattress. Within moments, she slept.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ben shut the door to the small office, sat in the worn wooden chair at the desk, and realized that it was the first time since he’d moved into the house three years before that he hadn’t left the door open. How curious, he thought, that now he should do it without even thinking. Certainly he hadn’t been conscious of wanting—or needing—to hide himself away from Caddie. And it wasn’t as if he was going to engage in some activity he wouldn’t want his daughter to see should she come looking for him.

  No, it had been an instinctual act, the reaction of muscle and tendon to electrical commands barked down his central nervous system by some alert sentry bunkered deep in the recesses of his brain. The primitive need for protection, perhaps. An ancient defense mechanism triggered by approaching danger as yet unrecognized by his conscious mind, like animals that minutes or even hours before an earthquake could be seen scurrying for safety.

  But protection from what? He considered the question. Was he afraid of his own child? He had to admit that he was. Or, if not afraid, at least wary. And now he was hiding from her, shutting himself in his office, safe behind a door that, although it had no lock and could be opened easily, created the illusion of safety.

  He laughed at himself. You’re like a crab hiding under a rock, he thought reproachfully. Hoping the octopus won’t reach under and pull you out. He didn’t open the door.

  Leaning back in the chair, he listened to its familiar squeak and relaxed slightly. This was his place, his refuge. Apart from beneath the water, he felt most at home here, surrounded by the artifacts of his life: the books and papers, the pile of journals (some more than two years old) he intended to read, the coffee mug emblazoned with the name of the dive boat on which he’d spent two weeks in British Columbia photographing the underwater life of the Queen Charlotte Islands. On his desk sat a photograph of his beloved Cadlina flavomaculata, taken himself on one of his many dives at Pt. Lobos.

  His office was a museum, a repository for the things that made him who he was. It was the one room in the house to which he had devoted the most (albeit still minimal) attention. The walls were painted a shade of blue that recalled the house on Cape Cod where he’d spent summers as a boy. The sturdy wooden desk, discovered at a local antique shop, reportedly had once belonged to a sea captain whose successful involvement in the Pacific Coast lumber trade of the eighteenth century had made him a very wealthy man. While working, Ben often ran his fingers absentmindedly over the tiny lines scored in neat rows into the desk’s edge, remnants, he liked to believe, of the former owner’s primitive record keeping, an early ledger of trees shipped and monies received, kept before financial success allowed for a proper bookkeeper and account books bound in leather and inscribed in ink.

  Everything in the office was connected in some way with the sea. Even the lamp on the desk was in the form of an Art Deco mermaid, her tail curled gracefully about the base while one bronze arm extended up to hold the bulb beneath a shade of blue and green glass. It was the one fantastical element in the otherwise practical space, and Ben sometimes felt the need to apologize when, reaching up to pull the chain to illuminate the bulb, his hand brushed against the mermaid’s bare breasts.

  The lamp was currently dark. The afternoon sun lit the room more than adequately, throwing its spotlight directly onto the chair Ben occupied. He basked in the halo of warmth as he considered the problem before him. That, of course, being his daughter, and what, exactly, he was going to do with her for the next three months.

  It would be far easier, he noted, if she were something slightly less complicated than a human being. A sea star, for instance, or an urchin. Anything, really, that could be opened up and dissected, its internal activities studied and understood without complication. The thoughts of a barnacle were not much of a mystery; those of his own flesh and blood were completely indecipherable. Even if he could open her up, poke around inside her and reveal her smallest secrets beneath the lens of a microscope, he was certain he would fail to grasp the complexity of her.

  He had occasionally doubted, never with much sincerity, whether Caddie had, in fact, been partly his doing. Not because he questioned his then wife’s fidelity in any way, or at least not any more than he would ever doubt the ability of a creature whose basic impulses for survival were driven by the need to procreate as often as possible with the most genetically desirable partners to remain monogamous. No, it wasn’t because of any suspicions of adultery (what a peculiar word that was, suggesting the addition of impurity to something believed to be perfect), but simply because he didn’t believe himself capable of such a thing, not in any biological way, but in a larger, less easily defined sense.

  When he looked at Caddie, he did not see himself in her. He was, he knew, responsible for one half of her DNA strand and that, even so, she didn’t need to resemble him to be of him. Her difference, though, went deeper even than the genetic blueprint from which she’d arisen. It was something primordial from which he recoiled, as if allergic. When she was a child, he’d held her like he might an atom bomb, fearful of activating her. Carol had laughed at him, made jokes about his clumsiness and worry over causing injury to the baby. He’d been unable to explain that it was his own life for which he feared.

  Eventually Carol had discovered the weakness in him. He didn’t know when it had first dawned on her that he viewed their child as something altogether unknowable, but he could pinpoint the moment when she’d revealed her knowledge to him. It was on a summer evening when Caddie, three at the time and seeing him striding up the sidewalk coming home from work, ran out on unsteady legs to greet him. She’d stumbled over a crack, a toy, some obstacle, and fallen. Her knee, scraped, had begun to bleed and she, seeing it, had let out a wail of such indignant hurt that a jay, watching the tragedy unfold from its vantage point on a fence, flew up with a startled shriek and sought safety in an oak tree.

  Instead of rushing to her, picking her up, and whispering words of comfort, Ben had simply stopped and observed her actions. Her response to the actual level of physical pain he knew she was experiencing seemed excessive, and he wondered at the human inclination to overreact to stress on the body. It never occurred to him that she was merely frightened.

  Before he could bring himself to the point of helping Caddie, Carol had come running from the house, drawn by the child’s cries. Seeing Ben standing a dozen feet from their injured baby, she’d fixed him with a look so utterly fierce, so filled with disgust and wonder, that he’d stepped back as if struck. Only then was he able to move forward, to walk briskly toward his daughter, now cradled in his wife’s arms and sobbing quietly, and inquire, “Is she all right?”