“Depends,” she said.

  Nick looked confused. “On what?”

  Caddie leaned toward him. “On whether or not I find anything interesting,” she said.

  Nick nodded. “Got you,” he said. “So, I’m just about done for the night. I thought maybe you might want to, I don’t know, take a walk or something.”

  Caddie looked at him. She loved this moment—the guy waiting for her answer, both of them knowing that she could totally break him by saying no. That was one thing men had in common no matter where they were from.

  “Why not?” she said, seeing relief relax Nick’s tensed shoulders.

  “Great,” he said. “Let me go clean up.”

  She went outside to wait for him. The beer had lightened her mood. She’d forgotten all about her father. And now the promise of distraction offered by Nick made her forget how unhappy she was. When Nick emerged a minute later, she took his hand as if they’d known one another for more than half an hour.

  “Where shall we go?” she said.

  “How about the beach?” Nick suggested.

  Caddie, not really caring where they went, nodded, and they began to walk. Nick led her down a side street, away from the lights, until they came to what seemed to be a small park. In front of them, beyond a swatch of grass, was the ocean. It gleamed blackly beneath the stars, and the waves fell softly against the sand.

  “They call this the Breakwater,” Nick explained as they walked along a narrow sidewalk toward a wharf that stretched out into the water. “The navy built it back in World War II or sometime around then.”

  A low stone wall ran along the ocean side of the Breakwater. On the other was a parking lot edged with a boat supply store, a small dive shop, and what appeared to be a little grocery store with a restaurant situated atop it. Nick walked halfway down the wharf and stopped. Climbing onto the wall, he helped Caddie stand beside him.

  “I like to sit here at night,” he said as he lowered himself to the wall.

  Caddie joined him. The concrete was cold against her legs. The night air, still warm, blew lazily across the water. She heard a gull call out in the darkness.

  Nick reached into his jeans pocket and removed a crumpled cigarette pack. Tapping it open, he removed what Caddie saw was not a standard-issue smoke. Nick held the joint up. “Do you smoke?” he asked her.

  “Sometimes,” she told him. “But not usually with strange guys.” She bumped her shoulder against him affectionately.

  Nick lit the joint from a lighter he produced out of the same pocket. He drew on it, the end sparking up in a small orange glow. Caddie waited for him to hand it to her. When he did, she inhaled the sweet, sharp smoke and closed her eyes as it filled her lungs.

  “So, tell me more,” Nick said.

  “About what?” asked Caddie, taking another hit off the joint.

  “You,” said Nick. “All I know is your name.”

  “You know I like pizza,” Caddie countered.

  Nick retrieved the joint from her. “Come on,” he coaxed. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  Caddie turned and looked at him. “What’s the meaning of life? Does God really exist?” she said. “What difference does it make?”

  Nick blew out a cloud of smoke. “If I’m going to kiss a girl, I kind of like to know a little bit about her,” he said.

  Caddie felt the pot working its magic on her brain. It’s not as good as L.A. pot, she thought, but it’s not bad. She wondered where Nick got it and made a mental note to ask him to get her some. Then she remembered that Nick had said he was going to kiss her. Did she want him to? She hadn’t thought that far ahead. She supposed it would be okay.

  Apparently, he was waiting for her to say something, maybe to give her permission. That annoyed her. She liked it when guys were a little more aggressive. She decided to punish Nick for being too nice by ignoring what he’d said.

  “I’m here seeing my dad,” she said.

  “Seeing him?” said Nick. “What, like he’s in the hospital or something?”

  “No,” said Caddie. “I don’t live with him. I live in L.A.” She waited for Nick to be impressed by this piece of information, but all he did was nod while he took another toke on the joint.

  “My parents divorced a long time ago,” she heard herself say. “My mom thinks it’s time my dad and I got to know each other better.” Why was she talking so much? Suddenly, she was anxious. It was like by mentioning her father, now she couldn’t stop talking about him.

  To stop herself, she kissed Nick. When she first pressed her lips against his, he was taken aback, blowing some of the pot smoke into her throat. But then his mouth opened, and his tongue explored hers. Caddie felt her father’s presence retreat into the darkness as Nick’s hands pulled her closer. The agitated, flittering thoughts scattered like moths beneath the lights, and she relaxed.

  Nick tasted like pot and pepperoni and beer. Caddie kissed him hard, encouraging him to go further. When one of his hands slid to her breast, she let it stay there. His body beneath the skin of his T-shirt was muscled and firm, and when she ran her fingers over his cheek, the feel of stubble beneath her fingertips excited her. He was something she could lose herself in, something she understood without question. He was easy, and she welcomed that.

  After a time Nick pulled away. Still holding Caddie’s hand, he looked down at the water. “Look,” he said, pointing.

  Caddie followed his gaze and saw something glowing beneath the surface of the ocean below their feet.

  “Divers,” Nick said before she asked. “They dive here a lot at night.”

  “Why?” Caddie asked as the light moved slowly along the rock wall.

  “Lots of stuff comes out at night that you can’t see during the day,” explained Nick. “Octopus. Stuff like that.”

  Caddie watched the diver’s light. It grew fainter as it moved out to sea.

  “He’s going deeper,” said Nick. “Pretty soon you’ll just see a little spot of light. You should see it when there are a lot of them out here. The whole place lights up. Some of them use those colored glow sticks so they can recognize each other underwater. That’s the coolest.” He turned to Caddie. “You ever dive?”

  “No,” Caddie answered. “I don’t think I’d like it.”

  “I bet I could get you to like it,” said Nick. He leaned over and kissed her again.

  When he stopped, Caddie said, “I bet you could get me to like a lot of things.”

  “You’re a strange girl,” Nick told her.

  Caddie’s head snapped to his face. “What do you mean?” she said.

  Nick shrugged. “Not strange bad,” he said. “Just strange. Different. I don’t know what to make of you.”

  Caddie laughed. “You and the rest of the world,” she said as she started to stand up.

  Nick reached up and grabbed her hand. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t get mad. I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”

  Caddie hesitated. She looked out at the water. The diver’s light was barely visible through the water. How deep was he? What was he looking at? She thought about swimming through the black water, not knowing what was swimming around with her, and a chill shook her.

  “Sit down,” Nick said.

  Caddie waited a moment, just to let him know she was doing it of her own free will. Then she sat. Nick put his arm around her and pulled her close. This time when he kissed her, she pretended he was taking her down into the water. She closed her eyes and followed his light, going deeper and deeper, until all that lay before her was a small circle of gold light that kept the sea monsters at bay.

  CHAPTER 7

  It didn’t look like he expected it to.

  Hudson stood at the southeast end of Cannery Row. He’d parked his rental car in the lot of San Carlos Beach Park behind him. What had the clerk at the hotel called it? The Breakwater. “Look for the divers,” he’d said. Hudson had thought it an odd thing to say, as dark was quickly falling, but the man had been right. There were divers on the beach. Only a couple, but they’d assured him that he was in the right place.

  Cannery Row. It felt strange to be standing in a place he’d imagined so clearly in his mind, stranger to find that it resembled his idea of it almost not at all. Maybe in the daylight it would seem more like the Cannery Row depicted in John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name. But now, at night, it felt more like an arcade at a county fair, all bright lights and tourists.

  You’re just tired, he told himself. And he was. He should have just had dinner and gone to bed, venturing out after sleeping off some of his jet lag. But he’d been unable to rest, knowing that Cannery Row was only blocks away. Finally, overcome by the irrational fear that either it or he might not survive the night, he’d gone out to see it for himself.

  To his left, a large brick wall was painted with a mural of a whale. Next door, a dive flag flapped over the entrance to a shop offering 10% OFF OPEN WATER TRAINING: PADI CERTIFICATION. On his right, a hotel rose up from the street, the balconies of its rooms overlooking the Pacific. There used to be a cannery there, he thought vaguely.

  There had once been many canneries on the street named for the abundance of processing facilities that had lined every inch of it. Now there were none. They had been replaced by shops selling T-shirts, dolphin figurines, doughnuts. There was a Starbucks, a Bubba Gump’s, an ATM. Hudson felt slightly ill.

  What did you expect? he asked himself. He knew Cannery Row was a tourist attraction, visited by people who mostly had probably never even heard of John Steinbeck or his famous book. They came for souvenirs, postcards, earrings, and boxes of fudge that had nothing whatever to do with the Row and its history. Maybe they would pick up a replica of one of the old cannery signs, hang it in a kitchen or den, and never think about it again. “Oh, that,” they would say if someone happened to ask. “We got that in Monterey. There’s the nicest shop. I bought a picture frame made out of seashells.”

  He was being more than a little bitter, he knew. But he couldn’t help it. The commodification of history angered him. “But isn’t that what Steinbeck himself was doing?” Marty had once argued when Hudson was on a tear about the indignity of having a gift shop at Ellis Island. “Didn’t he manufacture a Cannery Row to fit his story?”

  It wasn’t the same, Hudson had argued. And it wasn’t. Steinbeck hadn’t invented a sanitized Cannery Row for public consumption. He’d written about it as it was, merely changing a few names. This was different. This was Cannery Row as strip mall, with all of the real history stripped away to make room for snow globes and key rings.

  He tried not to think about it as he walked, looking for what might remain of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. He looked for it in the windows of the stores that lined the street, seeing nothing that Steinbeck would recognize in the T-shirts (did that one really say HARRY OTTER?) and baseball caps and mountains of knickknacks presented for consumption. Even the smell was wrong, the stink of fish and oil replaced by the aroma of mocha vanilla lattes and potpourri.

  He came to the Wing Chong Grocery and stopped across the street from it. The run-down building, immortalized by Steinbeck as Lee Chong’s, was clearly meant to invoke the spirit of old Cannery Row. But it, too, suffered from the effects of being made over. Hudson tried to imagine Mack, the perpetually out-of-work but good-natured ne’erdo-well of Steinbeck’s books, walking in to talk the suspicious proprietor into letting him have a bottle of whiskey on credit. Then a young couple wearing matching Seattle Seahawks jerseys walked out, carrying shopping bags from the nearby Kinkade National Archive store (the Master of Shitty Art for People with Shitty Taste, Marty had once called the popular painter), and Hudson couldn’t muster the strength to keep trying.

  Where was it all? Where was the Bear Flag Restaurant bordello and the Palace Flophouse? Where were Dora Flood, and Eddie of the La Ida Café? When had they been replaced by women in flip-flops and men talking on cell phones? When had it all disappeared?

  You didn’t come here to see buildings, he reminded himself. And that was true. The buildings were merely part of something larger. Still, they were connections, physical links to another time and other people, long dead, who were very important to him.

  Doc’s lab should have been right here, he thought suddenly, sadly. Across from Lee Chong’s. He used to walk over there to get beer.

  He turned around. A plywood fence, its surface covered in a mural that was in turn defaced by graffiti (SKINZ RULES! LUV ME DOO) hid from view what he knew was the old Pacific Biological Laboratories of Ed “Doc” Ricketts, Steinbeck’s friend and cohort in adventure. He badly wanted to see it, but the fence effectively blocked his view.

  He turned and walked back the way he had come. In front of an El Torrito restaurant he stopped to look at the bronze bust of John Steinbeck. Passersby casually rubbed their hands over it, as if it were some sort of good luck charm. Hudson was tempted to stop a few and ask them if they even knew who Steinbeck was and why his bust was there, surrounded by a Ghirardelli chocolate shop and an As Seen on TV store. But he knew their blank-eyed expressions would only further depress him, and he resisted.

  Once he was past the stores and hotels, the street was deserted. The dive shop, closed for the night, was the last establishment before the little park. He started to walk to his car, then turned and walked instead toward the ocean. A set of stairs, half-covered by drifting sand, led down to the beach. To his left was the hotel, its lights illuminating the stretch of sand. To his right, farther on, was a jetty. Beneath the lights that lined it he saw some figures sitting on the low wall.

  Several large rocks dotted the beach. He walked to one of them and climbed up on it. The tide was ebbing, the ocean retreating and leaving behind a smooth expanse of sand. Only the longest fingers of water touched the rock when the waves reached for the shore. The top was dry, and Hudson sat without worry.

  The sky was clear, the moon just shy of full and the stars glinting against the blackness. The sea murmured steadily. In the darkness, if you didn’t know you were next to the ocean, it would be possible to mistake the water for a vast field of grass with the wind soughing through it.

  As he watched, a figure emerged from the waves and came toward shore. The heavy-footed walk reminded him of the Creature from the Black Lagoon movies he’d loved as a kid. This creature, however, carried a set of fins in one hand and a flashlight in the other. As it neared Hudson’s rock, he saw moonlight reflected off a face mask and heard the dull clinking of metal against the tank strapped to the diver’s back.

  “Evening,” the man said as he passed.

  Hudson wanted to ask him what he’d seen in the water, but conversation would have broken the mood. He was content to nod silently and let the diver be on his way. Alone again, he looked out into the night and thought about why he had come there.

  No, Cannery Row was not what he had hoped. And part of him had known that it wouldn’t be. Places changed. Nothing as fragile as Steinbeck’s Cannery Row—a world that depended for its survival on an industry that died out almost as quickly as it had sprung up—could have survived the changing American landscape of the past sixty years. Mack, Doc, and the others could not live in what Monterey had become since the days when a man could set up house inside a discarded boiler or live on the money earned from catching frogs.

  He imagined what Steinbeck would think of the new Monterey. Probably he would hate it, he thought. But perhaps not. The writer was, after all, fascinated by the progress of the human spirit. But not progress that resulted in emptiness, Hudson argued with himself, in a lack of spirit and absence of fire. Shopping, he was almost certain, would not be high on Steinbeck’s list of human accomplishments.

  And what of Ed Ricketts, the marine biologist who had so inspired Steinbeck, both in his writing and in his own deep interest in the ocean. Could he exist in modern-day Monterey? Hudson imagined him walking down Cannery Row, a collecting bucket in each hand. He saw him coming to the edge of the ocean, scouring the rocks for the tiny creatures he spent his life observing.

  Ricketts would have loved a night like this. Perhaps he would have rolled his pants to the knee and walked into the water in search of octopuses. Or maybe he would have just sat—as Hudson was—admiring the largeness of the sea and thinking that there was time enough later for work.

  Steinbeck and Ricketts. The two men had haunted him like ghosts for the past year, filling his thoughts and walking through his dreams. Now, seated in their backyard, he wished they would appear before him and answer his questions. That would make what he had to do so much easier.

  But it would also rob him of the thrill of the hunt. He had a scent, and he was following it. To have the chase end so soon, and so abruptly, would be something of a letdown after all the energy he’d put into it. Still, he would give anything for a chance to sit with either man for even a few minutes.

  The sound of laughter startled him from his reverie. He followed it to the jetty wall, where invisible figures sat watching who knew what. Separated by darkness, they might as well have inhabited different worlds. Yet they shared the night, the beach, the moon and the stars and the ocean.

  He thought, suddenly, of Charlie Tilling. Charlie of the manuscript he’d brought with him. Charlie, who had perhaps stood near this very spot considering his own death. He, too, shared the night with Hudson and the unseen sitters on the wall. He, too, was part of Monterey. But how much a part? That was the question Hudson had yet to answer.

  Behind him a dog barked. He turned and saw a shadow dart across the sand and into the water. It returned a moment later, shaking the sea from its fur and carrying a stick in its mouth. It trotted past Hudson, looking at him briefly from the corner of its eye, and he heard a man’s voice speaking to it in low tones. A moment later, the dog flew by again, flinging itself into the waves.

  “I’m always half-afraid he won’t come out,” said a voice.

  Hudson turned his head and saw a man standing beside the rock. Dressed in shorts and a windbreaker, he carried a leash in one hand. He looked not at Hudson, but at the waves. “He always does, though,” he added.