Carol had pulled Caddie back from his touch, as if he were a stranger, and taken the girl back into the house. When Ben entered a minute later, Caddie was happily chasing the dog, a foolish red and white spaniel called Hartley, around the living room. A small bandage covered her knee, and she seemed to have forgotten entirely what had moments before been the greatest calamity of her life.

  Carol had said nothing, but her coolness betrayed her newfound understanding of Ben’s ineptitude as a father. He’d started to apologize, then stopped, unsure what he was apologizing for and unwilling to admit to a sin he couldn’t even name. But the evidence had been presented, and Carol, at least, had found him guilty.

  Caddie, oblivious to her father’s failings, had continued to behave toward him as she always had. And he’d attempted to act in all ways as a father should toward his child. But eventually he’d accepted that something was wrong. He loved his daughter; that was never in doubt. But he didn’t feel this love as he knew others did. It didn’t radiate out from his heart and enfold him in golden warmth. He felt constantly in shadow.

  Carol had tried to kindle the fire of emotion in him, striking at him as a person shivering from cold might dash a flint against a rock, praying for a spark. Failing at that, she’d resorted to quarreling. He remembered the last few years of their marriage as one long fight, marked only by the level of its intensity as one or the other of them tired of battle for a time.

  He’d left when Caddie was seven. She’d been old enough to understand that he would no longer be a daily part of her world, and the day he’d put a suitcase and several boxes of books into the car, she’d burst into tears that too much reminded him of the day that things had begun to unravel. Once again, it had been Carol who’d tried to soothe her pain, this time without success.

  In the nine years since, he’d spent less and less time trying to locate the flaw in himself that had resulted in the dissolution of his marriage. He and Carol forgot about the things that had brought them together, and now he thought of her as someone he knew once but only through accident of time and place, like a school friend or a neighbor from a former home. Caddie he thought of in more familial terms. He’d managed to maintain involvement in her life, albeit limited mostly to phone calls and occasional visits, both of which had decreased in frequency as she’d aged.

  He’d never spoken with her about the reasons for the divorce; he wondered if Carol had. If so, how had she explained it? Had she put into words what he’d seen in her eyes that day? He found it difficult to believe, particularly when she’d never done as much for him, and when he couldn’t do it for himself. How did you voice a disappointment so deep that it could only begin to be glimpsed?

  He hadn’t thought about these things in a very long time, and now he thought of them only dully, as if watching an old, familiar film whose action and dialogue were so familiar that paying attention was unnecessary. Still, there was the matter of the door. He looked at it again. Its blank, white face stared back at him, offering no help whatsoever. Rising, he went to it and pushed it open. It swung reluctantly, unaccustomed to being asked to perform its duty.

  Ben sat down again and looked through the opening. He could see the hallway, the top of the stairs. If Caddie were to walk by, to venture downstairs for a drink or simply to get out of her room, she would undoubtedly see him sitting at his desk. She could even, he told himself, stand unnoticed in the hall for quite some time while he, oblivious to her presence, thought himself alone.

  He got up and pulled the door partially closed, reducing the window on the hallway to a sliver half a foot wide. That was acceptable to him. He could see—and be seen—without being completely vulnerable. Besides, he reasoned, he was almost certain to hear her footsteps. The shortcomings of an aging house could also be its advantages.

  The question of the door having been settled, he looked once more at his desk, assessing the situation. There were hastily scribbled lab notes to type up, a clipped article to file, a letter from a colleague in Mexico to answer. He considered the notes first. It would be gratifying to set them in print on his old typewriter, a rattling old Underwood he preferred to the more convenient computers in the lab, despite the near impossibility of finding ribbons for the damned thing. He liked the sound the keys made when they struck the platen, imprinting ink into paper. He enjoyed the solidity of it, the warning chirp of the bell as he neared the end of a line, the satisfaction of hitting the return arm and watching the carriage slide back into place. He even delighted in the occasional dropped letter, the J that forever sat ever so slightly beneath the line.

  But Caddie might be sleeping, he reminded himself, and felt his enthusiasm fade. He couldn’t make noise, not even in his own office. It would carry through the thin walls, like the scratching of rats. He didn’t dare risk it.

  Suddenly, he was overcome with thinking about all the things he could no longer do comfortably. Type. Play music. Walk naked from his bedroom to the bathroom. Even flushing the toilet carried with it the potential for humiliation, revealing as it did his eliminatory activity. From now on, his actions were on parade.

  In a minor act of rebellion, he turned to the CD player situated on the bookcase behind him and hit Play. The mournful sound of John Coltrane’s saxophone slipped into the air. It wasn’t loud—he never played music loud—but for a moment he felt himself tense, awaiting the sound of a protesting voice. When it didn’t come, he allowed himself to settle into the music.

  That was better. He felt more normal, more himself. He wasn’t sure which of his selves had greeted Carol and Caddie, but he was embarrassed by him. He’d been too effusive, overeager to please, to be liked. And Caddie hadn’t liked him. He knew that. Nor had she liked the house, or her room. He knew that, too, although he was not embarrassed about that. He liked his house. If Caddie didn’t, it was only because she was too used to Carol’s extravagances—the big house and expensive car, the designer clothes and vacations in Aspen and Hawaii. He’d heard about these things from time to time, usually while treating Caddie to dinner at some restaurant overlooked by the Zagat guide.

  He was annoyed again, this time because his daughter’s disapproval was causing him to defend his home. He didn’t like answering to anyone other than himself, especially someone who was essentially an unwelcome guest. He shocked himself with the admission. He’d been trying hard to believe that he wanted Caddie there. But he didn’t. He wanted to be alone.

  This, he felt, was the irony of parenthood, the simultaneous satisfaction found in furthering your line coupled with the inevitable resentment of having time taken away from pursuing those things that made you an individual. Of course there were parents who willingly devoted their entire lives to their children, but he’d always suspected them of mental illness, of using their young as an excuse for not fulfilling their own dreams.

  He related much more to those creatures that, having fertilized their eggs, left the rest to chance. True, the mother trout never experienced the moment when her fingerling, after much toil, graduated high school. But then she rarely, if at all, had to endure the misery of being thought a bad parent. Not, he thought, that most animal parents had much to do other than care for their offspring. While the she-bear might spend two years at a time raising a cub, he doubted that she much resented the reduced opportunities for escaping uninterrupted into the pages of a Jane Austen novel.

  Now you’re being ridiculous, he chided himself. You can’t compare trout to humans. Which brought him, he realized wearily, back to where he’d started. Humans weren’t animals, at least not in an equivalent sense. His skills as a father could hardly be judged alongside those of a bull elephant or a tomcat. (Particularly, he thought, when such a comparison would result unfavorably for him.) But this also meant that he could hardly excuse his uneasy relationship with fatherhood by pointing to the laissez-faire approach of most male animals that, with some notable exceptions, limited their involvement with their progeny to the act that produced them.

  Maybe, he thought, he should just accept that he would never understand his daughter and she would never understand him. Having accepted the truth of that, they would both then be free to be themselves, without worry that they were in any way responsible for one another’s well-being. That seemed a fair solution to the problem, and in coming to it, he ignored the fact that Caddie had been involved in none of the discussions leading to the decision.

  A minute later, he changed his mind and determined to try. There was, he told himself, no reason why he couldn’t come to appreciate his daughter, if not as the flesh of his flesh, then at least as an individual. She seemed interesting enough. Perhaps, with effort, he could find something in her to cling to, some thought or feeling to which he could relate. Maybe she likes Coltrane, he thought hopefully. It would, at least, be something.

  He would start at dinner. He would ask her about herself, find out what she hoped to do with her life. He glanced at the clock. He had an hour and a half before they reconvened, enough time for him to write down some thoughts he’d been having about a paper he was scheduled to give in October at a symposium in Tokyo on the issue of promoting marine conservation in communities built on fishing. That would help him clear his mind before tackling the much-trickier issue of learning to be a friend to his child.

  Taking up his pen, he began to write.

  CHAPTER 6

  Caddie awoke with a start. For a moment, she thought she was still dreaming. The room she was in was the same one from her nightmare, in which she’d been kidnapped by a faceless attacker and imprisoned in a run-down house. Now, to her deep disappointment, she realized that it was all real. Only her jailor had a face.

  Then she remembered dinner. What time was it? She turned and looked at the clock that sat on the bedside table. Like everything else, it seemed antiquated, its face round and numbered. No red electric eyes, just hands that swept silently around and around. It took her a moment to remember how to read the damn thing.

  Seven-twenty. What time had her father said they would have dinner? Eight? She stretched and yawned. It felt more like two in the morning. The Valium had really knocked her out. Still, she wished she was still asleep. Even a nightmare was better than the reality of her situation.

  She thought about going back to sleep, maybe even pretending to be asleep so that her father would leave her alone. But she was a little hungry, and food didn’t sound so bad. Maybe sushi. If they even had sushi in Monterey. Somehow she doubted it.

  She sat up. Despite the hour, it was still light out, that soft summer evening light that made everything appear soft, sort of out of focus. She heard the kids outside, still playing at their games. She remembered how it was, that feeling of freedom, like night and bedtime would never come, like the summer would last forever. When did that time end? When had she realized that life wasn’t always going to be ice-cream sweet?

  Probably when I got my first period, she thought, only half-joking. It was funny how the onset of that rite of passage seemed to coincide with so many other unpleasant realizations.

  She picked up a paperback and opened it. It took reading half a page before she even remembered what the story was about. She’d chosen the book almost at random from a stack her mother had set out to take to Goodwill. It was a mystery, something about a woman who was being stalked by a man who might or might not be the same man who killed her mother twenty years before. The character interested her not at all, and the author’s clunky style didn’t make things any more appealing. Still, she wanted to see how it ended.

  When she next looked up, it was a few minutes past eight. She shut the book and sat on the edge of the bed, preparing herself mentally for the ordeal of dinner with her father. She located her shoes, slipped them on, and waited for his knock on the door.

  Ten minutes later, she was still sitting. There was no sound of her father’s footsteps in the hallway. In fact, there was no sound in the house at all. Maybe he fell asleep, Caddie thought. That would solve her dilemma nicely.

  But she knew that wasn’t likely. If she knew anything about her father, it was that he was practically a slave to schedules and routines. Predictable, she thought. He was predictable.

  Her stomach rumbled. For its sake, she decided to go in search of her father. She couldn’t avoid him forever, she reasoned; she might as well get it over with.

  She opened the door and stepped into the hallway. Probably, she thought, he was downstairs. Perhaps he was even making dinner, although she couldn’t imagine it. But that might explain his lateness. He was probably expecting her to come down on her own.

  She headed for the stairs, but paused when she heard a popping sound. It was coming from her father’s office. Then she heard the music. Low. Jazzy. Sad, although she couldn’t say why.

  The door was open a crack, and she peeked inside. Her father sat at his desk, typing. His fingers moved steadily but awkwardly over the keys, striking them like a chicken pecking at grain. His forehead was furrowed, and his lips moved silently as he worked.

  He didn’t see her. For a moment she thought about saying something, maybe just clearing her throat to get his attention. But clearly he was more interested in whatever he was working on than he was in having dinner with her. After watching him for another half a minute, she stepped away from the door, leaving him alone.

  The stairs let out only the slightest of creaks as she descended. The lower half of the house was darker, the light thinner and the shadows creeping in around the furniture as dusk settled over everything. Caddie walked quickly to the front door and opened it, stepping out into the warm air.

  Across the street, the playing children stopped momentarily to look at her. Apparently finding her of no interest, they then returned to their game. Caddie walked down the sidewalk away from them, heading toward town.

  As expected, she wasn’t impressed. What she assumed was the main street of town was hardly teeming with people. A handful walked up and down, but mostly the sidewalks were empty. Even the cars that drove by her seemed anxious to be on their way to somewhere else, somewhere more lively.

  She walked aimlessly, hoping against hope to find something—anything—of interest. Even a distraction would be welcome. Barring that, she decided she would settle for simply finding something to eat.

  Ahead of her, a red and green neon sign proclaimed the merits of Johnny’s Pizza, Best in Monterey! I wouldn’t brag about that, thought Caddie as she entered the restaurant. The place did nothing to change her opinion. A scattering of tables were covered in the ubiquitous vinyl red-and-white-checked tablecloths found in every cheap Italian joint. Harsh lights illuminated a scarred and battered counter where customers lined up to order one of the dozen or so specialties of the house spelled out in plastic letters on the menu board overhead.

  Caddie scanned the list, looking for something that sounded even remotely appetizing. She was considering a sausage calzone when a male voice interrupted her thinking. “What can I get you?”

  The speaker, a young man, stood behind the counter, wiping his hands on a stained white apron. He looked at Caddie wearily, as if he’d asked the same question a million times already, which she guessed he probably had.

  “I don’t suppose a Chinese chicken salad is an option?” Caddie said.

  “Funny,” the boy said.

  Caddie leaned on the counter. “I didn’t think so,” she said. “In that case, what do you recommend?”

  The boy laughed. “It’s a pizza joint,” he said. “How about pizza?”

  Caddie looked at him. Despite the apron, he was attractive. He looked a couple of years older than she was. His brown eyes sparkled, and his face, while certainly not model handsome, was rugged. In a blue-collar kind of way, she qualified. And was that actually gel in his black hair? She reappraised him favorably.

  “What’s your specialty?” she asked, her voice taking on a lighter tone.

  “The calamari and anchovy is a big hit with tourists,” he answered.

  “Do I look like a tourist?” asked Caddie.

  The boy gave her a lopsided grin. “You don’t look like you’re from around here,” he said.

  Caddie smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said. “But no squid for me. How about pepperoni and extra cheese?”

  “Good call,” said the boy. “Anything to drink?”

  “A Corona,” Caddie said.

  He looked at her. “You old enough?” he asked.

  “For what?” said Caddie, looking him right in the eyes.

  He hesitated a moment, then said, “Coming right up.”

  When he returned a minute later with her pizza slice and the beer, Caddie rooted in her pocket for her money. “How much?” she asked.

  “Eight even.”

  Caddie counted out the money and slid it across the counter to him. As he picked it up, she let her fingers touch his. “What’s your name?”

  “Nick,” he said. “You?”

  “Caddie,” she replied.

  “Like the car,” said Nick.

  Caddie laughed. “Just like,” she said, as Nick grinned at his own cleverness.

  “Nice to meet you, Caddie,” he said.

  Caddie retreated to one of the small tables. As she ate her pizza and drank her beer, she watched Nick. He was stupid, that was for sure, but he was kind of hot. No one she would ever date back home. Definitely not. But for Monterey, he was probably as good as it got. A couple of times Nick looked back at her, flashed his grin, and nodded.

  She finished her dinner and stood up. As she deposited her trash in the basket near the counter, Nick came over to her. “How long you here for?” he asked her.