Remarkably Bright Creatures
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Book Overview
This is a novel about a seventy-year-old janitor, a thirty-year-old drifter, and a dying octopus who is smarter than both of them put together. It should not work as well as it does.
Shelby Van Pelt’s debut alternates between four narrators. Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus held at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, and his chapters — titled “Day X of My Captivity” — are written in first person with the dry, self-possessed voice of a creature who has read his own exhibit plaque and found it wanting. He has half a billion neurons, a collection of stolen trinkets, and roughly 160 days to live. Tova Sullivan is the aquarium’s night janitor, a seventy-year-old Swedish-American widow whose son Erik disappeared at eighteen thirty years ago. She carries the grief like old shrapnel — private, deep, load-bearing. Cameron Cassmore is a brilliant, aimless thirty-year-old from Modesto who arrives in Sowell Bay searching for the father he never knew, armed with a class ring and a photograph of his absent mother. And Ethan Mack, who gets just three chapters, is the Scottish shopkeeper who has been pressing his flannel collar before Tova’s evening visits for two years and cannot bring himself to say why.
The structure is deceptively simple: Marcellus chapters alternate with the human perspectives, his diary entries serving as short interludes that advance his private investigation and deliver comic relief while the longer human chapters carry the emotional weight. Underneath the alternation runs a mystery. What really happened to Erik? Who is Cameron’s father? And why does the octopus keep trying to give the cleaning lady things? Marcellus holds the answers — has held them from the beginning — and his growing exasperation at these humans’ inability to see what is, to a cephalopod, blindingly obvious becomes one of the book’s quiet pleasures.
This summary follows the novel chapter by chapter, preserving the generous excerpts that make a book like this worth documenting. The quotes are the point. Van Pelt’s prose is warm and unshowy, and the voices — especially Marcellus’s — are best experienced directly. Think of what follows as a guided re-reading, or a first encounter that doesn’t rush.
One last thing: Marcellus is counting down. Keep that in mind.
Chapter 1: Day 1,299 of My Captivity
We open in darkness, and in the voice of someone who has had a long time to think about it.
Marcellus — a giant Pacific octopus held in a small-town aquarium on the coast of Washington — introduces himself with the dry self-possession of a creature who has read his own exhibit plaque and found it wanting. He knows what he is. He knows what humans think he is. He is not impressed by the gap between the two.
Who am I, you ask? My name is Marcellus, but most humans do not call me that. Typically, they call me that guy. For example: Look at that guy — there he is — you can just see his tentacles behind the rock. I am a giant Pacific octopus. I know this from the plaque on the wall beside my enclosure.
The plaque covers the basics — size, diet, habitat, the fact that octopuses are, as it notes, “remarkably bright creatures.” It warns visitors about his camouflage. What it does not mention is his name, though Terry, the aquarium’s director, sometimes shares it with visitors: See him back there? His name’s Marcellus. He’s a special guy.
His full name, courtesy of Terry’s small daughter, is Marcellus McSquiddles. He bears this with the weary dignity of someone who has long since stopped correcting people.
Yes, it is a preposterous name. It leads many humans to assume I am a squid, which is an insult of the worst sort.
He addresses the reader directly, warmly, with a faint note of resignation:
How shall you refer to me, you ask? Well, that is up to you. Perhaps you will default to calling me that guy, like the rest of them. I hope not, but I will not hold it against you. You are only human, after all.
And then, quietly, the stakes. The plaque lists one more fact: the average life span of a giant Pacific octopus. Four years. 1,460 days. Marcellus was brought here as a juvenile. He will die here, in this tank. At most, one hundred and sixty days remain.
I must advise you that our time together may be brief.
It is a perfect opening — funny, sharp, a little heartbreaking. Marcellus has counted every day.
Chapter 2: The Silver-Dollar Scar
Tova Sullivan is seventy years old, and she is preparing for battle against a piece of chewing gum.
She works the night shift at Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors, wiping glass, emptying bins. Fourteen dollars an hour, direct-deposited into an account she never checks. The stubs go unopened into a shoebox on top of her refrigerator. She does not need the money. She needs the work.
At seventy years old, they don’t expect her to do such deep cleaning. But she must, at least, try. Besides, it’s something to do.
The aquarium is small, doughnut-shaped, the kind of modest civic institution that suits a modest town. Tova moves through it at a clip that would be impressive by anyone’s standards, “downright astonishing for a tiny older woman with a curved back and birdlike bones.” She pauses at the bronze sea lion statue, worn smooth by decades of children. On her mantel at home, there’s a photo of her son Erik straddling it, grinning, one hand aloft like he’s about to throw a lasso. A sea cowboy.
That photo is one of the last in which he looks childlike and carefree.
She greets each tank as she passes. Good evening to the bluegills. Hello to the crabs. How do you do to the sculpin. Even the wolf eels get a nod, though they remind her of cable-channel horror films her late husband Will watched during chemo. The octopus is her favorite, but tonight he’s tucked behind his rock, just a sliver of orange visible.
“Feeling bashful tonight?” She steps back and waits; the giant Pacific octopus doesn’t move. She imagines daytime, people rapping their knuckles on the glass, huffing away when they don’t see anything. Nobody knows how to be patient anymore.
Then, in the break room: empty takeout cartons on the floor. A trash can shoved out of place. And underneath the lunch table, a brownish-orange clump she mistakes for a sweater. Until it moves.
A tentacle moves.
“Good heavens!”
The octopus is tangled in power cords, his flesh bulging between each loop the harder he strains — like one of those finger-trap toys Erik had from a joke shop. Tova inches closer. He smacks an arm on the linoleum: Back off, lady. Her back pops; the sound startles him so badly he shoves a chair across the room.
She talks to him softly, the way you’d talk to a frightened animal or a child. She reaches in, unplugs the cord. She expects him to flee. Instead, he slides closer.
Like a tawny snake, one of his arms slithers toward her. In seconds, it winds around her forearm, then twists around her elbow and bicep like a maypole ribbon. She can feel each individual sucker clinging to her.
His eye glints playfully, “like a naughty child’s.” Then he releases her and stalks out the door. By the time she reaches the hallway, he’s gone. She looks down at her arm: tiny circles. Sucker marks. She wonders, briefly, if she’s losing her mind.
But she finishes her rounds. Good night to the bluegills, the eels, the crabs. Good night to the sharks, for whom she feels a particular empathy — “she understands what it means to never be able to stop moving, lest you find yourself unable to breathe.”
Afterward, she drives to the old ferry dock, walks to her usual bench, pushes up her sleeve. The marks are still there. The largest one, right on the inside of her wrist, is about the size of a silver dollar.
Moonlight shimmies across the water, a thousand candles bobbing on its surface. Tova closes her eyes, imagining him underneath the surface, holding the candles for her. Erik. Her only child.
Chapter 3: Day 1,300 of My Captivity
Marcellus has opinions about the food service in this establishment.
The plaque promises crabs, clams, shrimp, scallops, cockles, abalone, fish, fish eggs. A delightful buffet, were one free. What does he actually get? Herring. Herring, herring, so much herring.
They are foul creatures, disgusting little slips of fish. I am sure the reason for their abundance here is their low cost. The sharks in the main tank are rewarded for their dullness with fresh grouper, and I am given defrosted herring. Sometimes still partially frozen, even.
So he takes matters into his own arms. After hours, he fetches his own meals from the other tanks — crabs, clams, the sublime texture of fresh oyster, fish eggs as an ideal snack. Terry will sometimes slip him a mussel or two, and the staff will offer a pity scallop to bribe him into cooperating with a medical exam. But the vending machine in the lobby? Entirely unfit for consumption.
Last night, though, something new lured him out: sweet, salty, savory. The remains in a flimsy white container in the rubbish bin. Whatever it was, it was delicious. But it nearly killed him.
The cleaning woman. She saved me.
Two sentences. No elaboration. Marcellus is not sentimental, but he is precise.
Chapter 4: Falsehood Cookies
There were once seven Knit-Wits. Now there are four. Every few years brings another empty place at the table.
Tova sits at Mary Ann Minetti’s dining table for the weekly luncheon, drinking oolong tea and eating chocolate chip cookies that Mary Ann warms in the oven before the ladies arrive so they’ll seem homemade. They came from a package at Shop-Way. All of the Knit-Wits know this.
The mark on Tova’s arm draws immediate attention. An allergy? She should get it checked out. Barb launches into a story about her daughter Andie’s rash (“in sort of an indelicate place, if you catch my drift”). Janice offers her retired husband’s medical connections. Tova deflects.
“It was a minor incident at work.”
“At work!”
“An incident!”
“What happened?”
She tells them it was a mishap with cleaning equipment. Three pairs of eyes narrow. The conversation shifts to a familiar refrain: why does she still work that job?
“That old dump. Of course it smells,” Janice says. “But really, Tova, are you okay? Manual labor, at our age. Why must you work?”
Then Mary Ann leans in with the question that stiffens Tova’s spine: “If you need help…” She means financial help. Tova’s bank account would cover her modest needs several times over. She does not need charity. And further, what a thing to bring up, all because of a little set of marks on her arm.
She excuses herself to the powder room, and here the novel opens the door on Tova’s grief — carefully, like someone checking on a room they haven’t entered in years.
These women have always worn motherhood big and loud on their chests, but Tova keeps hers inside, sunk deep in her guts like an old bullet. Private.
Erik. He disappeared at eighteen, a few days after she’d baked him an almond cake for his birthday. The marzipan smell lingered in the kitchen “like a clueless houseguest who didn’t know when to leave.” It was ruled a probable suicide — a missing boat, his prints on the rudder, the anchor rope cut clean. His backpack and wallet left behind at the ferry ticket booth where he worked his summer job. Everyone said the same thing. The sheriff. The neighbors. The newspapers.
Tova has never believed that. Not for one minute.
She pats her face dry and returns to the table, slipping back into the conversation about a neighbor’s lawsuit and Janice’s Yorkie, Rolo, and Barb’s colorful language about her late dog’s digestive issues. On her way out, Mary Ann pulls her aside one more time — please let us know if you need help — and Tova assures her she does not.
She drives home along the ridge above Puget Sound, the sun finally breaking through. Her asters need deadheading. She breezes through the house for water, pressing the blinking red button on her answering machine. Solicitations. A scam. A butt dial. Then a stretch of silence, and a woman’s voice:
“Tova Sullivan? This is Maureen Cochran? From the Charter Village Long-Term Care Center? I’m afraid I have some bad news…”
Tova punches the button. She doesn’t need to hear any more. It’s a message she’s been expecting for quite some time.
Her brother, Lars.
Chapter 5: Day 1,301 of My Captivity
Marcellus reveals his great secret: how he escapes his tank. Near the top of his enclosure, a gap between the pump housing and the glass — about the width of two or three human fingers — is all it takes. He unscrews the housing, squeezes through, and has exactly eighteen minutes before The Consequences set in. A fact he determined himself, naturally, and one you will not find on the plaque by his tank.
The logistics of a nighttime raid are laid out with the calm precision of a heist planner. Stay in the pump room, and he has access to nearby tanks — but the menu is limited. The wolf eels are off the table (“Those teeth!”), the sea nettles too spicy, the ribbon worms rubbery, the mussels uninspired. The sea cucumbers are delicious, but he must exercise restraint to avoid tipping off Terry. Breach the heavy door into the hallway, and the options expand, but the time cost of opening and closing it eats into his eighteen minutes.
He tried propping the door once, with the stool below his tank. That evening was practically luxurious — he pillaged a bucket of fresh halibut chunks meant for the sharks (“the dim-witted sharks hardly know day from night. No regrets there”). But the stool failed. The door closed. And Marcellus nearly died getting back.
My limbs moved slowly, and my vision blurred. My mantle became heavy and lolled toward the floor. Through the haze I could see my flesh had paled to a flat shade of brownish gray. As I crawled across the pump room, the floor no longer felt cold. No surface registered any temperature.
He made it back. Barely. Hovering over the water, tentacles completely numb, he paused and considered the alternative:
For a moment, I considered this option. Nothing was something. What might lie on the other side of life?
Then the water took him in, and color crept back, and his three hearts throbbed with what he calls “the dull pulse of dumb relief.” He has never propped the door again.
The chapter closes with a direct address to the reader that is pure Marcellus — confiding, imperious, faintly threatening:
Surely I do not need to explain that Terry does not know about the gap. No one but me knows about the gap. And, as I would like to keep it this way, I will thank you in advance for your discretion. You asked. I answered. That is how I do it.
Chapter 6: The Welina Mobile Park Is for Lovers
Cameron Cassmore arrives in the novel like a hangover: blinking through the windshield of a borrowed truck at nine on a Saturday morning, parched, swigging a stale energy drink and spitting it out the window. He’s driven up to the Welina Mobile Park to deal with a clematis emergency. His aunt Jeanne’s landlord is threatening to make her rip down her vines.
“What the hell is a clematis?” A half grin spread over Brad’s face. “Sounds kinda dirty.”
“It’s a plant, you idiot.” Cameron hadn’t bothered to add that it was a flowering and vining perennial, a member of the buttercup family. Native to China and Japan, brought to Western Europe in the Victorian era, and prized for its ability to climb trellises.
That passage is Cameron in miniature: the guy who knows everything and can’t figure out how to make it useful. The brain packed with facts about buttercup families and snake eyelids, the life that can’t hold a job for more than two days.
Aunt Jeanne’s yard is a shrine to frogs. Cement frog statues, frog flowerpots, a patriotic frog wind sock, a frog-shaped doorbell. Seasonal frogs. The yard is immaculate. The inside of the trailer is a disaster. This contrast tells you something important about Jeanne — and about what happened to her.
The clematis confrontation itself is a small masterpiece of comedy. Landlord Jimmy Delmonico claims neighbor Sissy Baker saw a snake in the vines — saw “yellow eyes blinking at her.” Cameron, arms folded, biceps flexed, delivers the kill shot:
“Snakes can’t blink.” Cameron rolls his eyes. “They can’t. They don’t have eyelids. Look it up.”
Delmonico retreats with a fake phone call. Cameron prunes the clematis under Aunt Jeanne’s contradictory instructions, and then comes the real visit — coffee on the sofa, the gentle interrogation.
She’s the only person on the planet allowed to call him Cammy.
Cameron is thirty, unemployed again (fired for being ten minutes late on his second day), playing in an experimental-metal band called Moth Sausage, and dating a girl named Katie who is “the type of girl who’s never in trouble, always fine.” Aunt Jeanne raised him after his mother, Daphne, dropped him off for a weekend and never came back. He was nine. He remembers her arms feeling bony, and tears running inky trails of makeup down her face.
Much better this way, he remembers the caseworker saying in a low voice, for Cameron to be with family rather than “entering the system.”
The backstory accumulates quickly. Aunt Jeanne, a decade older than Daphne, never married, never had children. She raised Cameron well — showed up to his grade school Halloween parade in a homemade Marge Simpson costume. He did well enough in school. “Surprisingly well-adjusted,” people said, “for a kid in his shoes.” His father is a complete unknown.
A few years back, Aunt Jeanne took a punch outside Dell’s Saloon trying to break up a fight. Bad concussion, shattered hip, months of rehab. Cameron quit a decent job to care for her. When the money ran out, she sold the house and moved into Welina at fifty-two — the minimum age. The collecting started around then.
“You’re so smart, Cammy. So damn smart …” He rises from the couch and stares out the window. After a long second, he says, “They don’t just hand out paychecks for being smart, you know.”
“Well, for you, they should.”
Then, while Aunt Jeanne is rummaging in the other room, Cameron snoops through a stack of papers and discovers a prescription that makes his cheeks burn white-hot. Chlamydia. Aunt Jeanne’s response is magnificently unflappable:
“Oh, that.” She shrugs, nonchalant. “It’s going around the park.”
Cameron tries to suggest protection. She starts to explain that Wally Perkins won’t wear — he cuts her off. “Serves you right for snooping,” she says.
The chapter ends on a quieter note. Aunt Jeanne nudges a box toward him. Some things of his mother’s. Cameron stands. “No thanks,” he says, without a second look.
Chapter 7: Day 1,302 of My Captivity
A brief, wry interlude. Marcellus has his veterinary examination with Dr. Santiago. The process involves a bucket of seven scallops laced with anesthesia — a transaction he considers entirely fair.
My first encounter with the bucket was long ago. Day thirty-three of my captivity. Back then, I found the sensation alarming. But I have grown to enjoy the bucket. With the bucket comes a sensation of total nothingness, which, in most ways, is more pleasant than the everything-ness.
Dr. Santiago weighs him and is startled. Sixty pounds. Up three pounds from last month. She asks Terry if his diet has changed. Terry promises to double-check.
Marcellus, whose nighttime halibut raids are clearly responsible, offers no confession:
What can I say? I am a special guy, after all.
Chapter 8: June Gloom
Tova’s evening at Shop-Way, where the new bagging boy puts her strawberry and marmalade jams side by side in the bag. They clink ominously. This is the kind of thing that bothers Tova.
The cashier is Ethan Mack, the store’s Scottish-born owner, chatty and kind, who already has her loyalty number memorized. They make small talk about the drizzly June weather, and then Ethan brings up her brother Lars, who has recently died.
Tova lowers her head but says nothing. He continues, “You need anything at all, just say the word.”
The estrangement unfolds in a long, quiet passage. Tova and Lars were close once — he gave a lovely speech at her wedding, they spent New Year’s Eves together eating rice pudding. But after Erik died, things changed. Not with a blow-out argument, but with a slow erosion:
One New Year’s Eve, Lars phoned Tova and informed her that he and Denise had other plans… . After that fizzled New Year’s, there was a skipped Easter luncheon, a canceled birthday party, a Christmas gathering that never made it past the we should get together state of planning. The years stretched into decades, turning siblings to strangers.
Ethan offers the platitude “family is family,” and Tova’s internal response is characteristically precise: “Of course family is family; what else could it be?”
At home, her fridge is stuffed with sympathy casseroles. She hears scratching on the porch. A pair of yellow eyes. A reproachful meow. A gray stray cat, skinny enough that she can feel each rib against her ankle bone. She names it Cat.
“Well, I have ham gratin. Would that suit you?”
She feeds Cat the ham-and-cheese gratin Mary Ann dropped off, watches it eat, and makes a mental note to collect the dish in the morning. When she returns the plate to Mary Ann, she won’t mention who consumed it.
The chapter closes with Tova in the kitchen, listening to the news anchors on channel four — the only tolerable option. She has their entire routine mapped: Carla Ketchum will be wearing blue, her hair wavy because of the rain. Craig Moreno’s tone will rise a smidgen when he says Joan the weather lady’s name. This began a few weeks ago. Presumably when he and the weather lady began having relations.
Tova doesn’t stay for the forecast. It’ll be cloudy and drizzly. More June gloom.
Chapter 9: Chasing a Lass
Ethan Mack gets his own brief chapter, and it reveals the quiet longing underneath the shopkeeper’s cheerfulness. He sits on the bench outside Shop-Way after closing, smoking his pipe against his own employee handbook rules, watching the fog and thinking about Tova.
It’s been almost two years since she started coming late in the evening. Since Ethan started pressing his flannel collar before his shift. Trying to make himself a bit tidier.
His backstory unspools in compact, melancholy strokes. Forty years ago he left Kilberry, Scotland, chasing an American woman named Cindy. New York in the seventies. A Volkswagen van across the country — Pennsylvania, Indiana, Nebraska, Nevada — “any one of them could’ve contained Scotland entirely.” They married in a ramshackle chapel near the Oregon border. Weeks later, in Aberdeen, Washington, the van’s transmission failed.
Ethan tinkered with it, but it was gone. And in the morning, so was Cindy.
And that was that.
He stayed. Aberdeen suited him: low gray skies, gruff industrious people. Decades as a longshoreman, a union pension, a bad back, and eventually the Shop-Way, bought with his savings. He doesn’t need the money, not exactly. But the trickle of profit affords him vinyl records and proper Islay whiskey. Not Highlands rubbish.
A young couple staggers into the store, giggles through the aisles, and peels out dangerously into the night. It reminds Ethan of his sister Mariah, struck by a truck at barely ten. Fishermen on their way back from the pub.
The thought of Tova’s hatchback on the dark road makes him queasy. He wishes he could drive by her house, make sure she’s safe.
But no. He broke himself once, chasing a lass.
Chapter 10: Day 1,306 of My Captivity
Marcellus opens with a meditation on secrets — and on the particular loneliness of being the smartest creature in the room. Or the tank.
I am very good at keeping secrets. You might say I have no choice. Whom might I tell?
He dismisses his fellow aquarium inmates with the weary superiority of a tenured professor trapped at a kindergarten:
Blunt minds, rudimentary neural systems. They are wired for survival, and perhaps expert at that function, but no other creature here possesses intelligence like mine.
What draws his attention, though, is the human talent for hoarding unspoken things. He finds it baffling. Even a herring can follow its school. Why can’t humans, with their millions of words, simply say what they want?
The sea, too, is very good at keeping secrets. One in particular, from the bottom of the sea, I carry with me still.
A small chapter, but that last line lands like a stone dropped into deep water. Marcellus knows something. He’s been carrying it a long time.
Chapter 11: Baby Vipers are Especially Deadly
Cameron’s life falls apart in stages, all of them happening more or less simultaneously.
The chapter opens with the mystery box from Aunt Jeanne sitting untouched on his kitchen counter for three days. Cameron eyes it from the sofa, half-watching SportsCenter, half-wondering if there’s anything pawnable inside. Katie will need rent money soon, and he’s not exactly flush — though Katie doesn’t know that yet. She doesn’t know he got fired. Again.
He’s carrying a cup of microwaved noodles when Katie comes home unexpectedly and startles him into spilling. There’s a brief, almost-tender moment where she brings him a damp rag. Then the questions start.
“I don’t remember you mentioning you were off today.”
Cameron, who has apparently never met a lie he couldn’t make worse, improvises magnificently:
“It’s a holiday, actually.” … “International Contractors’ Day. Everyone gets the day off.”
Katie, bless her, looks out the window:
“Bizarre they’re still working on the roof next door, then, isn’t it?”
The nail gun next door puts a fine point on it. Katie’s face goes blank. “You got fired again.”
She leaves for her dentist appointment. Cameron sprawls on the couch imagining her eventual return — the predictable arc of post-argument reconciliation he’s run so many times he has the choreography memorized:
He’ll say he’s sorry, and she’ll frown, but she won’t really mean it, then he’ll put his hand on her leg and she’ll lean into him and they’ll lie here, cuddling, while they finish watching this dumb movie before retiring to bed for some solid post-argument sex.
But Katie has other plans. She heads straight to the bedroom and starts throwing his things off the balcony. Work boots, ball caps, boxers — though the boxers don’t make it; the throw is too soft and they “unfurl and flop to the floor.” Even the indignity of being evicted has its comic beats.
Cameron tries the old playbook. He reaches for her shoulder.
“I can’t do this anymore, Cam.” … “This. Is. Over.”
He trails her to the kitchen, still clutching his boxers, desperately pivoting to the mystery box — maybe there’s something valuable in it, maybe he can cover rent. But Katie is past rent. “This isn’t about rent! It’s about your inability to be an honest human being.”
And then he’s sitting on the box on the curb, his worldly possessions heaped beside him, waiting for Brad to pick him up. For an hour. In the dark.
Brad arrives, annoyed, exhausted, generous anyway. They load Cameron’s things into the truck.
“What’s in the box?” Brad asks, interrupting his thoughts.
“Baby vipers,” Cameron deadpans, not missing a beat. “Dozens of them. I hope Elizabeth likes snakes.”
At Brad and Elizabeth’s McMansion — subdivision bougie, fake brick, four-car garage, landscape lighting, the works — Cameron settles onto the couch with a beer. Brad tells him two nights, tops. Cameron floats the idea of renting the apartment above Dell’s bar. Brad tells him no landlord will touch him.
“Dude, you have no job.”
“Not true. I’m between projects right now.”
“Are you ever not between projects?”
Cameron watches Brad’s tidy domestic life — the coasters, the paper towels produced from thin air, Elizabeth’s decorative pillows — and feels the distance between his world and this one. Brad has parents who show up for Sunday dinner. A baby on the way. The kind of tether Cameron has never been eligible for.
Then Brad drops the second blow of the evening: he’s quitting Moth Sausage. The band. Their band. With the baby coming, Elizabeth thinks it’s best.
“You’re the lead singer,” Cameron blurts. “You can’t quit.”
Cameron stalks to the window and stares at the golf-course grass. A lump forms in his throat. He should have seen it coming. Of course Brad is leaving.
“I’ll still come to the shows.” Cameron swallows a scoff. There won’t be any Moth Sausage shows without Brad.
He makes a show of neatly stacking Elizabeth’s decorative pillows, asks for no help setting up his bed. Brad tosses him a package of purple-and-white striped sheets — Elizabeth’s pick, obviously — and hovers like a mosquito until Cameron shuts him down with a tight “Night.”
From the kitchen, Brad calls back, “Don’t let those baby vipers out.”
Cameron doesn’t answer.
Chapter 12: Day 1,307 of My Captivity
A brief, oddly beautiful interlude. Marcellus considers fingerprints.
He tolerates the daily indignities of human visitors — their “trembling boogers and damp armpits, their sticky palms reeking of floral lotion and Popsicle residue” — but when the aquarium closes and the lights dim, they leave behind something unexpected on his tank glass:
A stunning, intricate mural. … Little oval masterpieces. I visually trace the grooves from the outside into the center, then back out to the edge again. Each one unique. I remember all of them.
Then, almost as an afterthought:
Fingerprints are like keys, with their specific shape. I remember all keys, too.
He remembers all keys. Filed away for later. This octopus doesn’t mention things by accident.
Chapter 13: Muckle Teeth
An estate attorney named Bruce LaRue ambushes Tova in the aquarium parking lot, waving a manila envelope and flashing teeth so large they remind her of “bleached barnacles that cling to seaweed-strewn boulders.” Lars, her estranged brother, left personal effects at Charter Village, the nursing home where he died. Someone needs to collect them.
“Your brother had some personal assets, as you probably know.”
“Mr. LaRue, I have no knowledge of what my brother did or did not have.”
Tova is quietly rattled by the implication that no one else showed up for Lars. No sweetheart, no close friend. Had he died in the company of a bored nurse?
“I will go,” she says quietly.
That night, the aquarium is mercifully clean. No gum, no bathroom disasters. And the octopus is actually in his own tank for once. Tova cleans his glass while he watches, and something shifts. She starts talking to him. Really talking.
“An hour. On the freeway. I don’t care for driving on the freeway, you know.”
She tells him about Lars, about his messes, about this last errand he’s left behind even in death. The octopus draws closer, eye gleaming, and Tova catches herself. This is not just saying hello to the animals. This is a conversation.
But, good heavens, if it doesn’t feel like the creature is actually listening.
She pulls herself together, nods politely — “Well, good night, sir” — and moves on. At the seahorse exhibit, a sign announces they’re mating again, which triggers a memory of Erik’s sophomore biology project on the hippocampus. Maybe we all have sea monsters living in our brains, he’d joked. Tova privately suspects she’s the only person on earth who finds hippocampus babies more exciting than human ones.
Then she marches up to Shop-Way to confront Ethan, who had cheerfully directed the attorney to her workplace.
“Aye, the bloke with the muckle teeth,” Ethan says, looking sheepish.
Tova needs a ride to Bellingham. She doesn’t enjoy asking for help, but the freeway makes her uneasy, and Ethan did say if you need anything at all. So she takes him up on it.
“Anything, love. What do you need?”
Tova swallows hard. “A ride to Bellingham.”
Chapter 14: Day 1,308 of My Captivity
The seahorses are spawning, and Marcellus is unimpressed. He’s seen four breeding cycles now. The humans act surprised every time.
He muses on the strangeness of parentage — how seahorse larvae look nothing like their parents, while humans are always unmistakably human, from birth to death, just changing in scale. He’s puzzled by the prolonged helplessness of human children, their tendency to summon a parent for every minor crisis. Untied shoelaces. Sealed juice boxes.
Young humans would fail abysmally in the sea.
Then a wistful turn. He doesn’t know how his own species spawns. He’ll never see his own larvae. He’ll never know if octopuses are shape-shifters like seahorses, or “humdrum, like humans.”
The chapter closes with Marcellus describing his favorite game: unfurling his arms against the glass, luring a human close, then jetting behind his rock the instant they call their friends over. He finds humans laughably predictable.
With one exception. The elderly female who mops the floors does not play my games. Instead, she speaks to me. We … converse.
That pause before “converse” carries a lot. Marcellus has found someone worth talking to.
Chapter 15: Happy Endings
Ethan drives Tova to Charter Village, buzzing with nerves and too much tea. He woke an hour early to shower and trim his beard, knowing how Tova likes things neat. His fingers won’t stop drumming on the steering wheel.
“Honeybee hands,” Tova says with a pretty smile. “That’s what I used to say when Erik couldn’t keep his fingers still.”
Ethan is startled she’s mentioned Erik — she almost never does — but by the time he glances over, she’s reabsorbed in her crossword. The moment passes. He’d spent half the night rehearsing conversation starters, but every topic he can think of is off-limits: dead brother, dead husband, dead son.
Charter Village turns out to be shockingly posh — rolling hills, ivy-draped columns, tennis courts, a billiard room, a mile-long buffet. Ethan waits in reception while Tova disappears inside, and the minutes crawl. The leather chairs are excellent; the reading material is absolute garbage. And inexplicably, they offer coffee but no tea.
When Ethan was nineteen, he worked for a stint at the kiddie zoo down in Glasgow, shoveling the elephant pen. Once, as a joke, two of the other blokes that worked there collected feces and ran it through a juice press. What came out looked remarkably like … coffee. Never been the same since, coffee hasn’t.
He wanders into a facility tour led by a woman in a gray suit who announces: “Welcome to Charter Village, where happy endings are our specialty.” Ethan nearly spits out his coffee. He joins the tour anyway, and despite himself, he’s half-convinced to move in by the end.
Tova resurfaces an hour later, looking small in her purple cardigan, carrying a box. Ethan races to open the car door for her — and this time he beats her to it. As he loads the box, he spots something else. A glossy Charter Village packet. That terrible motto again: “We Specialize in Happy Endings!”
And tucked inside, not quite aligned with the other pages: an application.
Tova, who has spent sixty-nine years cleaning up after everyone else, is quietly considering what comes next.
Chapter 16: Day 1,309 of My Captivity
Marcellus has been given a puzzle — a hinged plastic box with a latch, a crab inside. Terry and Dr. Santiago lower it into his tank, lean in to watch. He seizes the box, opens the latch, lifts the lid, eats the crab. One bite. A soft, molting red rock crab. Juicy.
This does not please them. They’d expected the dismantling to take longer.
Dr. Santiago calls him a “smart cookie,” and Marcellus, who has observed many actual cookies dispensed from the packaged food machine near the entrance, is not amused:
I am a smart cookie. Well, of course I am intelligent. All octopuses are. I remember each and every human face that pauses to gaze at my tank. Patterns come readily to me. I know how the sunrise will play on the upper wall at dawn, shifting each day as the season progresses.
He catalogs his abilities with the quiet confidence of someone who has long since stopped needing to prove anything. He can read. He can use tools. He can identify individual humans by their fingerprints on the glass.
My neurons number half a billion, and they are distributed among my eight arms. On occasion, I have wondered whether I might have more intelligence in a single tentacle than a human does in its entire skull.
And then the indignity of the metaphor lands one more time:
Smart cookie. I am smart, but I am not a snack object dispensed from a packaged food machine. What a preposterous thing to say.
Chapter 17: Maybe Not Marrakesh
Cameron is adrift. Phone dead, charging cord left on Katie’s nightstand (“Left behind, leaving him literally powerless”), he creeps through Brad and Elizabeth’s pristine kitchen at some ungodly hour, opening drawers of monogrammed oven mitts. Elizabeth finds him there, eight-plus months pregnant, up for water because her bladder is “the size of a jelly bean.”
They fall into the easy rhythm of people who’ve known each other since kindergarten:
“Sorry to hear about you and Katie.”
He slumps onto the stool next to her. “I screwed that up.” “Sounds like it.”
“Thanks for the sympathy, Lizard-breath.”
“Anytime, Camel-tron,” she says with a grin, returning the childhood nickname.
Elizabeth suggests he travel. San Francisco. London. Bangkok. Marrakesh.
“Oh, sure. I’ll just summon my Lear. Fly halfway around the world.”
“Okay, maybe not Marrakesh.” She lowers her voice. “To be honest, I’m not even sure where that is. It was part of a puzzle on Wheel of Fortune last night.”
She waddles off to bed (“The good news is, I already have to pee again. Two birds, one stone”), and Cameron is left alone with his phone, scrolling Katie’s social media feeds, then apartment listings — every one featuring the same bowl of staged fruit. Two oranges, a banana, a bunch of shiny red apples. Moved from unit to unit like a traveling still life.
He needs a deposit, which means opening his mother’s box. Out on the patio in the moonlight, he lays out the contents. Half-used lipsticks. High school essays. A Whitesnake ticket stub from 1988. A million scrunchies. Ancient cassette tapes of shitty hair bands.
What a supreme disappointment. Why had Aunt Jeanne wanted to give him this crap?
Then a small black drawstring bag tumbles from the empty box. Jewelry — some of it real gold, worth pawning. And stuck in the bottom of the bag, a crusty old photo folded around a chunky class ring:
SOWELL BAY HIGH SCHOOL, CLASS OF 1989. He flattens the photo, and even in the half dark he recognizes a teenage version of his mother, smiling, her arms around a man he’s never seen before.
Sowell Bay. The name means nothing to Cameron yet. But the reader knows exactly where that is.
Chapter 18: Bugatti and Blondie
Tova at Hamilton Park, where she used to bring picnics for two — cheese, fruit, sometimes wine. Now she comes alone, to trade one kind of silence for another.
Now, Tova comes here to be alone with her thoughts, when she needs a break from being alone in her house. When even the television can’t punch through the unbearable quiet.
She works her crossword. Six Letters: Harry of Blondie. She bought Erik a Blondie cassette once, around ‘79 or ‘80. He played it until the tape warbled. She can picture the cover — a red-lipped blonde in a shimmery dress — but can’t imagine that lady being called Harry. She moves on, “as she does.”
A cyclist stops at the broken drinking fountain. Tova warns him it’s useless, offers her emergency water bottle. He sits, spots the crossword, and supplies two answers: Ettore Bugatti (“Those are bitchin’ cars”) and Debbie Harry. He holds up his hand for a high five. Tova hesitates, then slaps her palm against his.
“Man, I had a crush on Debbie Harry back in the day,” he says, chuckling, eyes crinkling around the edges. Tova nods. “Yes, my son was fond of her, too.” The man stares at her. His eyes widen.
“Holy shit,” he whispers. “I beg your pardon?” “You’re Erik Sullivan’s mom.”
His name is Adam Wright. He went to school with Erik, senior year, before he — and Tova fills in the blank again: “Before he died.” Adam clips into his pedals and rides off fast, leaving Tova sitting with an unfinished puzzle and all the questions she didn’t ask.
At home, laundry waits. Lars’s flannel bathrobe sits folded on the washing machine, retrieved from Charter Village. She’d held scissors to its hem, ready to make rags, then changed her mind. Among Lars’s effects was a photo that fit no category — Lars and a teenage Erik on a sailboat, two pairs of long legs dangling, suntans against a bright white hull.
It was Lars who taught Erik to sail. Showed him every trick in the book, a solution to every improbable nautical scenario. Such as, how to leave an anchor rope cut clean.
That detail lands quietly and cuts deep. This photo hurt to look at. She nearly trashed it, then buried it in the kitchen drawer with pot holders and towels, “even though it didn’t belong there, either.”
Chapter 19: Day 1,311 of My Captivity
Marcellus has a bone to pick with humanity’s obsession with weather. He has counted. One thousand, nine hundred and ten times someone has said “Can you believe this weather we’re having?” during his captivity. One and a half times per day, on average.
Tell me again about the intelligence of humans. They cannot even manage to comprehend predictable meteorological events.
He imagines strolling over to the sea jellies and remarking on the tank bubbles with equal astonishment, then concedes the analogy wouldn’t work:
Of course, this would also be preposterous because the jellies would not answer. They cannot communicate on that level. And they cannot be taught. Believe me, I have tried.
The summer solstice approaches. Longer light, shorter dark. Marcellus notes this with the precision of a creature who tracks every pattern. Then, a sentence that lands like a stone:
Soon I will see the longest day of the year. Summer solstice, the humans call it. My final summer solstice.
Chapter 20: Nothing Stays Sunk Forever
Under the helmet dryers at Colette’s Beauty Shop, Barb Vanderhoof leans over and asks how Tova is doing — emphasis on the word like a knife through butter. Tova watches Barb insert herself into the grief, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief over a man she barely knew.
“He went peacefully,” Tova says with an air of authority, not adding that this is thirdhand knowledge.
Barb discovers Charter Village has a saltwater pool, a movie theater, and a spa. The brochure is sitting on Tova’s coffee table at home. She’s read it three times. She says nothing about this.
That evening at the aquarium, Terry’s office is lit up, a carton of vegetable fried rice on his desk. He offers Tova a fortune cookie — the restaurant always gives him too many. The scene is warm and easy, but Tova’s eyes drift to the photos on his desk: Terry’s toddler on a swing, Terry with his mother, Terry in cap and gown. Bachelor of science, summa cum laude, marine biology, University of Washington.
This sort of photo is missing from Tova’s mantel at home. Erik would’ve started at that university in the fall if that summer night had never happened.
Terry asks her to wipe down the front windows for the Fourth of July weekend. She says she’d be pleased to, and means it — nothing would make her happier than to spray them down and banish every smudge. Then she spots something on his desk: a heavy silver clamp.
Terry explains. The GPO — Giant Pacific octopus — has been going rogue. He’s down eight sea cucumbers this month. He thinks Marcellus is slipping through a gap in the back of his tank. The clamp will seal it.
Tova hesitates, considers mentioning the fried rice cartons in the break room, then says only:
“I don’t know how an octopus could leave a closed tank.”
And this is true, technically. She doesn’t know how he does it.
Later, she finds him in his tank. “Hello, friend.” He unfurls from behind a rock, a starburst of orange and yellow and white. She tells him Terry’s on to him. She goes around back, expecting an escape in progress, but he’s still there. She considers the clamp, and relents:
“Then again, perhaps you should have one last night of freedom.”
He presses against the glass and extends his arms upward, “like a child’s plea to be carried.” She climbs up on a chair, unfastens the lid, knowing he might be playing her. She takes the gamble. He winds a tentacle around her hand, pokes at her chin, then gives a sharp tug — she nearly falls, her face inches from the water, her eyes inches from his:
His otherworldly pupil so dark blue it’s almost black, an iridescent marble. They study each other for what seems like an eternity, and Tova realizes an additional octopus arm has wound its way over her other shoulder, prodding her freshly done hair.
Tova laughs. “Don’t muss it. I was just at the beauty shop this morning.”
He releases her, vanishes behind his rock. She touches the cold wetness on her neck where his tentacle was. Then he reappears, drifting upward, a small gray object looped on the tip of one arm. An offering.
Her house key. The one she lost last year.
Chapter 21: Day 1,319 of My Captivity
Marcellus reveals his secret hoard — a collection stashed in the deepest cranny of his den where no tank cleaner can reach. The inventory is delightful and a little unhinged:
Three glass marbles, two plastic superheroes, one emerald solitaire ring. Four credit cards and a driver’s license. One jeweled barrette. One human tooth. Why that look of disgust? I did not remove it myself. The former owner wiggled it out on a school field trip then proceeded to lose track of it.
Also: earrings (many singles, never a pair), pacifiers he diplomatically calls “plugs,” foreign coins, and now — a key. He’d normally pass over keys, same category as coins, too common. But this one felt different.
I had encountered this key before. Or, rather, one exactly like it. I suppose, in that way, keys are not like fingerprints at all. Keys can be copied.
And then the gut-punch. Marcellus held a copy of this key once before, when he was young and free. At the bottom of the sea. Attached to a ring nestled within what he quietly describes as “leftover human” — a rubber sneaker sole, a vinyl shoelace, several plastic buttons. The remains of the person Tova mourns.
Such are the secrets the sea holds. What I would not give to explore them again. If I could go back in time, I would collect all of it — the sneaker sole, the shoelace, the buttons, and the twin key. I would give it all to her. I am sorry for her loss. Returning this key is the least I can do.
Marcellus knows what happened to Erik. He’s known all along. The octopus found the boy’s remains on the ocean floor and is now, one small object at a time, trying to tell a grieving mother what the sea won’t say.
Chapter 22: Not a Movie Star, But Maybe a Pirate
Cameron tries to hustle his way into the vacant apartment above Dell’s Saloon. Old Al, the Brooklyn-transplant bartender, is unmoved.
“I’ll … lord myself. You won’t even know I’m there.”
“Ain’t interested.”
Cameron dumps the bag of his mother’s jewelry on the bar. Al’s response is pitch-perfect: “What’d you do, rob an old folks’ home?” He reminds Cameron of his existing tab, plus the table he broke hurling himself off the stage (“That was performance art.” / “It was vandalism.”). No deal.
But Al gives Cameron something better than a lease. He picks up the Sowell Bay High School class ring and starts talking — about Cameron’s mother, Daphne, and how she ran away to Washington as a teenager. Aunt Jeanne had to drag her home.
“Oh” is all Cameron says. His brain feels weirdly numb.
Armed with the class ring’s inscription — EELS — Cameron dives into the class of 1989’s surprisingly robust online presence (thirty-year reunion planning, God bless retirees with scanners). He finds a photo of his mother on a pier, young and healthy, with a guy’s arm slung around her. The caption: Daphne Cassmore and Simon Brinks.
Page after page of search results paint a clear picture: a renowned Seattle real estate developer and nightclub owner. A feature on his vacation home in the Seattle Times. A photo spread with his goddamn Ferrari.
Cameron does the math. The photo looks like April — daffodils and tulips blooming. He was born February 2. Gestationally, it adds up. He studies the picture of his mother, her plump, healthy cheeks — not the bony, sunken Daphne of his memories. He wonders if he’s in the photo too, just barely.
Elizabeth, his cousin, is practical about it. “You can’t just shake down some random person because he was in a picture with your mom.” Cameron’s response is pure Cameron:
“Simon Brinks is definitely not a movie star, but he might be a pirate. I don’t care either way. He can stay a mystery as long as he agrees to pay up for eighteen years of missed child support.”
At three in the morning, he books a five a.m. JoyJet flight to Seattle. Credit card clearing: fingers crossed.
Chapter 23: The Technically True Story
Tova cleans Marcellus’s key — the one he returned to her — with baking soda, and it fits her front door perfectly. She hadn’t lost it. It had been at the bottom of the sea with her son’s remains, and Marcellus somehow retrieved it. She doesn’t know this yet. She just thinks it’s been misplaced and found.
Meanwhile, Cat has taken up residence by shimmying through a loose screen-door flap. Tova decides not to fix it.
Let the creatures have their gaps, then. She laughs aloud.
At the aquarium that evening, she climbs onto a step stool in the pump room and reaches into Marcellus’s tank. What follows is one of the book’s most tender scenes — Tova opening up to the octopus about her life, her grief, everything she can’t say to humans. He grips her wrist, traces her birthmark, and listens.
“Erik used to call it my Mickey Mouse mole.” Tova can’t help but smile. “He was jealous, I think. He said he wanted one, too. One time, when he was about five, he got ahold of a permanent marker and drew one on his arm, just like mine.” She lowers her voice. “Mind you, he also decorated the davenport with that pen. The marks never did come out.”
She tells him about Erik’s death. The boat. The cut anchor line. The verdict of suicide that never sat right.
“They said he must have done it himself. No other explanation.” Tova draws in a ragged breath. “It’s always been so peculiar, though. Erik was happy.”
Then the stool wobbles and she falls. Nothing broken, she thinks — but the stool is damaged, a rung knocked loose, and she’s not supposed to be climbing in the pump room at all. She considers disposing of the evidence, then catches herself. “Tova Sullivan is no liar.”
Marcellus solves it for her. He oozes out of his tank — flattening his watermelon-sized mantle through a two-inch gap in a display that seems to defy physics — slides under a cabinet, and returns with the missing screw, depositing it at her toe.
Looking her directly in the eye, he slides over and, with one of his curled arms, deposits a small silver object at the toe of her sneaker.
The next morning, her ankle is purple and throbbing. She waits until almost five p.m. to call the doctor — the office closes at five, which feels strategic — and delivers “the technically true story”: she fell from a stool while cleaning. No mention of the octopus. No mention of the conversation she was having with him at the time.
Chapter 24: Got Baggage?
Cameron lands in Seattle and his bag doesn’t. The carousel grinds to a halt. All his clothes, all the jewelry — gone.
He meets Elliot in the baggage claim line, a cheerful guy with rimless glasses and a sandwich that looks like pastrami but turns out to be vegan yam.
“A Yamwich! You know, vegan? From that one place on Capitol Hill?”
Cameron eats it. It’s actually not bad. Elliot is relentlessly friendly in that way that annoys Cameron and also, clearly, is exactly what Cameron needs. He mentions Sowell Bay has an aquarium worth visiting. Cameron couldn’t care less.
Then comes the hard phone call. Aunt Jeanne already knows about Katie, is already clearing the spare room. Cameron has to explain: he’s in Washington, he’s broke, he’s found a lead on his father. And the airline lost the jewelry she gave him.
“For someone so smart, you’re a real bonehead sometimes.”
She wires him two thousand dollars. It’s not a loan, she says, which Cameron interprets as a vote of no confidence in his repayment abilities. The money comes from her Alaskan cruise fund — a trip she’s been saving for years, sailing in September. Cameron silently vows to sell his organs before he lets her miss it.
Elliot, who won’t stop being helpful, connects Cameron with a buddy selling a camper. Twelve hundred bucks. It’s transportation and housing in one rattling, musty package.
Chapter 25: Busted But Loyal
A memory of Erik as a boy, finding a rock crab with two missing legs and insisting on bringing it home. He named it Eight-Legged Eddie (ten minus two). When Eddie died, Erik threw himself around his father’s leg to prevent the corpse from being tossed in the garden, demanding a proper burial.
Erik’s handmade memorial stone still rests in the garden, under the overgrown ferns. RIP EIGHT-LEGGED EDDIE, BUSTED BUT LOYAL.
Tova, now trapped in a plastic boot for six weeks, has never identified with that crab more.
Janice arrives with casserole and news. Mary Ann is moving to Spokane to live with her daughter Laura. The Knit-Wits will be down to three. This hits harder than it might seem — decades of Tuesday lunches, a rhythm that’s been winding down already (every other week now instead of every week). The group is thinning, the way groups do.
Janice also delivers a cell phone — Timothy’s old one. Tova resists on principle (“There’s a perfectly good telephone right there in the den”), but Janice is firm:
“You do, Tova, if you’re going to live here alone. Not to mention working alone in that aquarium, whenever that starts back up. What if you fell again? We all talked. We all agreed. You need a phone.”
The phone immediately proves hazardous. While pulling Barb’s potato-leek casserole from the oven, the thing buzzes in her pocket — Zap! Zap! Zap! — and she drops the casserole, slips in the mess, and crashes to the floor for the second time in a week.
Chicken and rice for supper instead, eaten on the davenport like Will used to do during games. She thinks about Mary Ann, about how everyone eventually needs someone to take them in. Barbara has her girls in Seattle. Janice has Timothy. Tova has no one.
Who will fill out the admit forms, clipped to their clipboard? And that will merely be the beginning.
She thinks about the Charter Village application. The assisted living place. Perhaps it’s time.
Chapter 26: House Special
Cameron arrives in Sowell Bay in a camper that is, by his own expert assessment, a piece of shit. A loose belt whines. The mattress smells. His first night was spent in an industrial parking lot, fleeing a cop car at dawn.
Simon Brinks’s office — Brinks Development, Incorporated — is locked. Empty parking lot. The aquarium is also closed until noon. Everything in this town seems half-asleep or half-dead.
He kills time at the Shop-Way deli, where Ethan (Red Beard, as Cameron mentally christens him) immediately spots him as an outsider.
“I know everyone around here.” Red Beard chuckles. “Where ya from?”
Ethan has Tanner, his sullen teenage employee, make Cameron the house special — a pastrami melt, on the house, because Tanner needs kitchen practice and “we don’t get many victims these days.” Cameron mentions he’s looking for his dad, Simon Brinks. Ethan’s eyes widen at the name but he doesn’t know him personally.
There’s a beautiful little exchange about Cameron’s band:
“Moth Sausage? The actual Moth Sausage?”
“You’ve … heard of us?” Cameron gapes.
Red Beard nods gravely. “I’m a huge fan.”
“Aww, don’t make that face. Now I feel terrible.” Red Beard’s cheeks flush to match his beard. “I was just yankin’ your chain.”
Cameron walks out to find the camper listing to one side. Flat tire. His money is draining fast. Elizabeth texts: How’s it going up there, Camel-tron?
“Horrible. Beyond horrible,” he mumbles.
But Ethan is already crossing the parking lot, hand shading his eyes, beard fluffing in the breeze. “Looks like you could use a hand, eh?” He introduces himself properly this time.
Cameron and Sowell Bay are circling each other. The town keeps offering him small kindnesses — free sandwiches, free beer, an offered ride from a stranger with a yam sandwich — and Cameron keeps insisting he doesn’t need any of it. He does, of course. The threads are beginning to converge: Cameron searching for a father in the same small town where Tova mourns her son, both of them orbiting the same waterfront, the same grocery store, the same aquarium where an octopus holds the answers neither of them knows to ask for.
Chapter 27: Day 1,322 of My Captivity
Marcellus notices Tova’s absence. The glass is thick with grime, the floors caked with footprints. Three days without the cleaning woman, and the place is falling apart.
He offers a quiet meditation on his three hearts — two for gills, one “organ heart” that powers everything else. The organ heart stops when he swims, which is why he avoids the shark-patrolled main tank. He’s well-suited for life in a small box, he says, with the dry acceptance of someone who has made peace with confinement.
But when Tova fell from the stool, he wasn’t swimming. And his heart stuttered anyway.
I hope she heals, and not only because of the mess on the glass.
A single sentence that says everything about what this octopus won’t admit he feels.
Chapter 28: The Green Leotard
The novel’s emotional center of gravity shifts here, pulling us back to the night Erik died. It was a Wednesday in 1989. Jazzercise night. Tova wore an emerald-green leotard that Will loved, said it matched her eyes. They made love in the late afternoon sun, giddy about the empty nest ahead — Erik was about to start at the University of Washington.
Just think, Will had said, grinning at her as they laid on the bare sheets, the quilt scrunched at the foot of the bed. Soon, we’ll have the house to ourselves all the time.
The leotard ended up flung over the Charleston chair, where Will had tossed it. When police came the next morning — Erik had never come home from his shift at the ferry ticket booth — it was still there. An unofficial part of the record. Tova stared at it while the detectives talked.
She still didn’t think it could be true. Erik was at a friend’s house. Sleeping on someone’s sofa. He’d forgotten to call. Good kids did that from time to time, did they not? Great kids, even.
The leotard eventually made it to the hamper. Someone moved it. Tova must have laundered it, but she doesn’t remember. It slipped into the void that swallowed so many things after Erik was declared dead.
The chapter then opens into a long, gorgeous passage about Tova’s childhood home — the three-level house her father built into the hillside. The cellar for lutefisk. The attic full of Swedish relics: embroidered linens, Dala Horses, chipped bone cups. Papa built a staircase to replace the ladder, carved flowering vines into handmade chairs, etched stars onto their backrests. But by then the children had outgrown the playroom. Tova considers it a mercy that Papa didn’t live to see them abandon it.
The room was meant for grandchildren. There were never grandchildren.
Erik’s baby toys went up to the attic when Tova and Will moved back in to care for Mama. They stayed after Erik died. They’re still there. The only change: Will replaced the dormer window after an “incident” — the kind of thing grief does to a person. Tova doesn’t like to think about it. It wasn’t Will’s norm. But nothing is normal when you lose a child.
Now Tova moves through the attic, preparing to leave. She picks up a toy car with one wheel missing — Erik’s car — and slips it into her robe pocket. A real estate agent once gushed over the house, picked up that same car, and said they’d need to get rid of all this stuff before listing. They decided not to sell. This time, it’ll be different.
That night, Cat curled on the bedspread, Tova drifts into a dream where arms wrap around her, growing longer, sprouting suckers, weaving a cocoon. Everything goes dark and silent. The feeling that washes over her is relief.
The cocoon is warm and soft, and she is alone, blissfully alone. Finally, she succumbs to sleep.
Chapter 29: Day 1,324 of My Captivity
Marcellus observes the new hire. Terry has swapped out the older lady for a younger model. The kid walked past his tank twice — once anxious (shoulders at earlobes, damp palms), once relaxed (fluid gait). A successful interview, clearly.
Something about the way the young man walked seemed familiar. Marcellus wishes he’d had more time to study it.
The floors are disgusting. The rock crabs are about to molt, and Marcellus does not relish picking grime from between his suckers. He hopes the new cleaner starts tonight.
As for the previous cleaning woman, I can only surmise she is not coming back. I shall miss her.
Chapter 30: A Sucker for Injured Creatures
Cameron’s body is wrecked. Chopping mackerel, hauling bait buckets, sleeping on a plywood plank after hurling the piss-scented mattress onto Ethan’s driveway. He’s thirty years old and his spine feels like someone thrashed it with a baseball bat.
The tire repair ate seven hundred of his eight hundred dollars. His luggage — with the jewelry that might prove his parentage — is still missing. He’s limping toward his first paycheck.
He visits the realtor Jessica Snell, hoping she can help him find Simon Brinks. He plays his trump card:
“My mother abandoned me when I was nine.”
“Gosh. That’s terrible.” Her eyes widen a bit, her jaw softens. Hook, line, sinker.
Cameron is not above weaponizing his sad backstory, and the narration is honest about it. He crosses his fingers behind his back while claiming he has no other family. He daydreams about meeting his father at a polished mahogany bar — top-notch whiskey, burgundy leather seats, a warm clap on the back, a shared dimple.
Then Avery blows through the door, soaking wet, furious about the hot water. She owns the paddle shop next door, she’s Cameron’s age, and she sees right through him:
“You reek worse than a stadium bathroom during the fourth quarter of a Seahawks game. Also, you have something brown — which I honestly hope, for your sake, is chocolate — smeared on your chin.”
Their banter is sharp and immediate. She calls him out for playing Jess, he insists the chocolate wasn’t actual shit, she tells him if the shoe fits. He’s smitten. She gives him a twenty-dollar jar of organic balm for his neck — “I’m a sucker for injured creatures” — and her phone number. He walks out grinning.
Then the airline calls. His duffel bag has been found. In Naples. Not Florida. Italy. The overhead bins were too small, they made him gate-check, and now his bag is on another continent. The agent’s own reaction: “Wow, that’s pretty awful, even for us.”
Chapter 31: Epitaph and Pens
Tova’s day is a masterclass in quiet determination. She visits Jessica Snell to list the house. She goes to the bank for a cashier’s check (the Charter Village application requires proof of funds). She scans her driver’s license at Janice Kim’s house, enduring the obligatory coffee. She gets passport photos at a drugstore in Elland — eighteen dollars and fifty cents for two tiny pictures, which appalls her.
Then she drives to Fairview Memorial Park to visit Will’s headstone. WILLIAM PATRICK SULLIVAN: 1938-2017. HUSBAND, FATHER, FRIEND. The epitaph coordinator had suggested she use more of the 120 characters she’d paid for. But sometimes less is more. Will was a simple man.
Next to Will’s stone sits Erik’s — a headstone Tova never wanted, with an overly fussy font and his name recorded wrong. His middle name should include Lindgren, her maiden name. She has fantasized about hurling it off the end of the pier. But one can’t do things like that, of course.
The Kretch ladies picnic with their dead patriarch six plots down, chatting with his headstone as if he’s right there sipping lemonade. Tova has never spoken aloud to Will’s grave. Why would she? Cancerous flesh cannot reply. But after the Kretches leave, she tries:
“I’m selling the house, dear.”
That evening, she needs a black pen for the Charter Village application. At the Shop-Way, Ethan — who already knows she’s leaving, because Sowell Bay always knows — tries to talk her out of it. His chin trembles under his beard. When she asks who else will take care of her, the question hangs in the air.
Then Ethan, who has been working up courage for what might be years, blurts it out:
“If you want to thank me, perhaps you’d join me for tea sometime.”
He immediately tries to take it back. “Rubbish idea.” But Tova surprises herself: “It wasn’t a rubbish idea.” She accepts. He writes his number on a scrap of paper, in blue ink.
She drives home barely able to breathe normally.
Chapter 32: Conscience Does Make Cowards of Us All
Cameron’s shift takes a turn when he discovers Marcellus making a break for the back door he’d propped open to take out the trash. The octopus, cornered on a high shelf after twenty minutes out of water, wants nothing to do with Cameron’s broomstick diplomacy.
Then Tova appears. She pushes past him, climbs onto the table despite her walking boot, and simply holds out her hand.
“Marcellus, it’s me.”
The octopus shifts slightly out of its corner and peers at her, blinking its creepy eye.
She nods, encouraging. “It’s okay.” She holds out her hand, and to Cameron’s shock the creature extends one of its arms and winds it around her wrist.
Cameron could swear the octopus nods. He wonders if they’re pumping hallucinogens through the ductwork.
Once Marcellus is safely back in his tank, Tova explains: she knows about his nightly wanderings and has kept the secret. If Terry knew for certain, he’d intervene — and for an old octopus, “intervene” might mean something permanent. She asks Cameron to keep the secret too.
He hesitates. Getting fired would torpedo his chance at paying back Aunt Jeanne, at finding Simon Brinks. But the thought of this sweet old lady losing her friend, and the way the octopus glared at him with that weird, humanlike eye…
“Yeah, our secret.”
Then Cameron, without thinking, drops a Shakespeare quote: “Conscience does make cowards of us all.”
Tova freezes.
“Hamlet,” she says softly. “It was one of my son’s favorites.”
The line lands like a stone dropped into deep water. Cameron doesn’t know whose son she’s talking about, doesn’t know that son is dead, doesn’t know — and neither does Tova — that the threads connecting them run far deeper than a shared shift at an aquarium.
Chapter 33: Expect the Unexpected
Tova remembers the voyage from Sweden. She was seven, Lars nine. A train from Uppsala, a hotel in Gothenburg with chocolate pudding in tiny goblets, the SS Vadstena looking like a big gray layer cake at the dock. Those weeks on the ocean liner are largely a blank in her mind, which is a shame — probably the most adventurous thing she’ll ever do.
What she remembers is the Walrus: a mustachioed passenger who taught her gin rummy and card tricks in the ship’s parlor, always producing the named card from under his collar or beneath his cuff.
Always expect the unexpected, child, the Walrus would say, chuckling as little Tova scowled at being fooled yet again.
Back in the present, she watches Cameron replace the fallen canisters upside-down and doesn’t correct him. She takes stock: clean fingernails, nice teeth, well-versed in Shakespeare. Not the homeless drifter the Sowell Bay rumor mill promised.
He is not what she expected.
Cameron reminds her of Erik — the eye-roll when annoyed, the effortless charm, the insolence that somehow makes you like him more. An idea springs to mind. She beckons him back to the pump room.
“I’m going to show you how to make friends with him.”
Cameron stops in his tracks. “Seems like a long shot. Scylla the sea monster wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy with me during our little hangout earlier.”
“Expect the unexpected, dear.” Tova smiles.
The Walrus’s lesson, passed forward across seventy years and an ocean, from a card table on a steamship to an aquarium pump room in the Pacific Northwest. Some wisdom just keeps finding the people who need it.
Chapter 34: Day 1,329 of My Captivity
Marcellus opens with a philosophical broadside against the human fondness for slogans like “Ignorance is bliss!” — a notion he finds preposterous. He will never again hunt in the open sea, bask in moonlight filtering through water, or copulate. But he has knowledge, and knowledge is the closest thing to contentment available to a captive cephalopod.
To the extent happiness is possible for a creature like me, it lies in knowledge.
He has solved every puzzle Terry ever offered — locked boxes, plastic mazes. Child’s play. He learned to pop his tank, unlock the pump room door, calculate exactly how far he can venture before suffering The Consequences. Not bliss, perhaps, but “a temporary abatement of misery.”
Then comes the real payload. Marcellus describes watching a father and son at his tank, the man boasting about his “all-state quarterback” arm — oblivious to what Marcellus can see plainly: the boy shares no genetic relationship with him. The father is, in one of Marcellus’s favorite human words, a cuckold.
Thousands of genes mold an offspring’s physical presentation, and many of these pathways are as clear to me as letters on a page are to you.
He has spent 1,329 days honing this ability. The shape of a nose, the shade of eyes, the position of an earlobe, the gait — especially the gait. Humans walk alike far more than they realize.
And then the bombshell, delivered with the calm precision of a creature who has been waiting a very long time to say it:
The former cleaning woman and her replacement. They walk alike.
The heart-shaped dimple, unusually low, on each of their left cheeks. The greenish golden flecks in their eyes. The toneless humming while they mop. Marcellus addresses our skepticism directly — yes, he knows the woman has no surviving heir, that her only child died thirty years ago, that grief has shaped her entire life.
You would do well to believe me when I tell you this: the young male who has recently taken over sanitation duties is a direct descendant of the cleaning woman with the injured foot.
Cameron is Tova’s grandson. The octopus has known all along.
Chapter 35: Hard Left, Cut Right
Cameron has tracked down Simon Brinks’s summer address in the San Juan Islands — a supposed Tuscan-style villa on a cliff, gleaned from an old magazine article. It’s a two-hour drive from Sowell Bay. He calls Avery to see if she wants to tag along on this possibly-confronting-his-biological-father road trip (which would, admittedly, be a weird date). She can’t — she’s working — but suggests they do something later in the week.
Ethan, overhearing, immediately volunteers. He’s practically giddy about it.
“A’course I do! You think I’d let you smack that wanker around alone?” He beams. “Sounds like a right good time, if you ask me.”
They hit the road, Ethan driving with the windows down on account of it being “such a lovely day,” his elbow slung out the window “like a freckled sausage.” Cameron clutches the class ring and rehearses his confrontation scenarios. The ideal version: Brinks recognizes him immediately, confesses everything. The less-than-ideal: lawyers and DNA tests. Elizabeth keeps pushing the sentimental angle — maybe Brinks has latent paternal instincts. But Cameron doesn’t want a relationship. He wants the eighteen years of unpaid child support, enough to repay Aunt Jeanne.
Ethan, meanwhile, is a terrible driver and an excellent tour guide, pointing out whale-watching spots and nearly drifting into oncoming traffic. Cameron mentions Tova in passing — that she comes by the aquarium to help out — and Ethan’s reaction is immediate: reddening cheeks, quiet reverence, ears turning deep crimson.
A grin spreads across Cameron’s face. “Oh my God. You like her.”
“Well, who wouldn’t like her?”
“That’s pure bullshit. It’s written all over you.”
Ethan has never pursued her — she was married, and her husband was “a decent bloke” who died of pancreatic cancer. Then Ethan starts to tell Cameron about Erik, Tova’s son — brilliant, valedictorian, captain of the sailing team — but catches himself, saying it isn’t his story to tell. He shares the bare minimum: Erik drowned when he was eighteen.
They arrive at the supposed address. It is very much not a billionaire’s vacation villa. Just an empty bluff overlooking the sea on three sides — the kind of place where movie teenagers get murdered.
“Shit,” he mutters, kicking a pinecone across the dirt. It disappears over the edge and tumbles down the cliffside.
On the way back, Ethan gets the truck stuck in a rut. This is Cameron’s moment. With the quiet authority of someone who used to off-road in the California desert, he takes charge — checks the angles under the chassis, packs dry dirt in front of the rear wheels, wedges a boulder for traction, and explains the physics of how a hard left followed by a cut right will free them.
“It’ll work. It’s just physics.” … Looking earnestly at Ethan’s doubtful face, he adds, “Trust me.”
It works beautifully. The truck bolts free. Cameron, grinning, intentionally hits a divot to bounce them both. Ethan throws his head back and lets out a strange, almost canine howl: “Let’s do it!”
A failed mission, but a good day.
Chapter 36: Day 1,341 of My Captivity
A brief, darkly funny interlude. Marcellus reflects on deception in the animal kingdom — the anglerfish’s luminescent lure, the seahorse impersonating kelp, the blenny posing as a cleaner fish. Even his own camouflage is a lie, and one that’s failing him now as his body weakens.
But humans, he notes, are the only species who lie for entertainment. They call them jokes.
He recounts one he overheard from a father at his tank:
What did the tiger say when he got his tail caught in the lawn mower? … It won’t be long now.
And then, quietly:
It won’t be long now. This is true. I can feel my very cells struggling to carry out their typical functions.
A new month begins. Perhaps the last time he’ll notice Terry flipping the calendar. The joke lands differently when the comedian is dying.
Chapter 37: A Three-Martini Truth
The longest chapter in the book, and the one where the ground shifts under Tova’s feet.
It begins at Mary Ann Minetti’s farewell luncheon at the Elland Chophouse — a fancy restaurant Laura chose, with heirloom turnip reductions and curried squash bisque instead of corn chowder. There are at least thirty place settings. Tova arrives early, accepts help up the stairs from Laura, and orders black coffee while Laura orders a double gin and tonic.
The table fills. Barb Vanderhoof arrives in a sequined top that’s too tight across her chest. Janice and Peter Kim settle in beside Tova. Omar, the charming young server, makes finger guns at Barb. And then Adam Wright — the cyclist from Hamilton Park — takes the empty seat beside Tova, accompanied by his partner Sandy Hewitt.
Sandy, chatting about their house hunt, innocently mentions that Tova’s house just came on the market. The table goes silent.
“What?” Mary Ann gasps.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Barb demands.
“That beautiful house! Your father’s house!”
“And all of your things, Tova!”
The Knit-Wits volley their dismay. Tova, with characteristic steel, shuts it down:
“I’m perfectly capable of dealing with my belongings,” Tova says, her voice taut.
As the luncheon winds down and the crowd thins, Adam Wright — three martinis deep — commits the kind of social catastrophe that only alcohol and carelessness can produce. Musing about getting old, he says: “Man, I’m glad I had kids, even if it means I’ll never be rid of my ex-wife. Because it would be hell to get old alone. Isn’t that why anyone has kids?”
Sandy jabs him. Laura glares. Adam immediately realizes what he’s done.
“I’m an idiot.” Adam raises his hand and then lowers it. “Tova, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. You won’t get old alone. Even with Erik gone.”
But Tova, rather than retreating, opens a door:
“I always welcome what people remember.”
And so Adam talks. The last time he saw Erik — nachos at the snack bar before Erik’s shift. Plans for a cabin trip the next day. Erik was going to sneak beers from Tova’s fridge (sorry about that). And Erik wanted to impress a girl. He was going to bring her to the cabin.
“I don’t know what she was, technically, but they were a thing.” Adam frowns and furrows a brow. “Damn. What was her name?”
Tova, stunned, hears herself say goodbye. Click-clack, click-clack across the restaurant floor. In her car, she realizes she’s been holding her breath. It comes out hot and fast, fogging her glasses.
So Will had been right. There was a girl.
The Pier’s Shadow. Cameron and Avery’s paddleboarding date — the chapter-within-a-chapter that lets us breathe before the next emotional blow. Cameron arrives at Avery’s small yellow house in the subdivision off the highway. She appears in the doorway in running shorts and a tank top, and Cameron is very glad she suggested meeting here instead of at her shop.
They banter about age (she’s thirty-two, he’s thirty). Then a teenage boy lopes out of the back room, holding an empty Cheerios box: Marco. Avery’s fifteen-year-old son. Cameron does the math three times: she was seventeen.
“Don’t mind him. He’s fifteen. And I thought he had headed out on a bike ride ten minutes ago.”
The scene between Avery and Marco — the dirty sock, the shopping list, the video-game negotiations — hits Cameron with unexpected force. “This got lost on its way to the hamper.” That’s exactly what Katie used to say to him.
On the water, Avery teaches him to paddleboard. He falls in within five seconds. She’s unimpressed. But he gets the hang of it, and they drift under the pier’s shadow, where the water turns inky and cold.
Avery tells him she once talked a woman down from jumping off this pier. Mostly, she just listened. And then Cameron tells Avery about his mother leaving him at nine years old and never coming back. In return, Avery offers the most healing thing anyone has ever said to him about it:
“That must have been really hard for your mother. … To leave, I mean. To leave you with someone who could do better.”
Cameron has heard the platitudes before, but from Avery, they feel real and solid. She tells him about her own crossroads — pregnant at seventeen, her “big obnoxious family” full of opinions, almost going through with adoption. She kept Marco. Her family was wrong, in her case. But she understood the argument.
They drift, boards bumping together, and Cameron falls in again courtesy of an aggrieved seagull. They end up in the water together, Avery’s legs wrapped around him, salty lips, a whispered dare — last one to shore is a rotten egg.
There Was a Girl. Back with Tova, the revelation from the luncheon has burrowed into her brain like noxious ivy, winding around every aspect of her routine.
When she’s making up her bed in the morning: There was a girl. Waiting for the coffee to percolate: There was a girl. Dusting the baseboards (because it’s a Wednesday, after all, even when the world’s been tipped upside down): A girl, a girl, a girl.
She replays everything the police told her thirty years ago. Ashley Barrington — out of town on a cruise. Jenny-Lynn Mason — at a gathering in Seattle. Stephanie Lee — home, asleep. None of them knew anything. But none of them were the girl Adam mentioned. How did Tova not know? She can’t even finish her crosswords anymore.
Jessica Snell calls with an offer on the house — ten thousand above asking. Tova takes down the numbers in the margin of an unfinished crossword and agrees to counter. The house will be sold.
“What will we do with you, little fellow?” Tova strokes the extra-soft patches of fur behind Cat’s ears. “I don’t suppose you can go back to living outside.”
That evening at the aquarium, the idea of the girl follows her like a persistent fly. She almost misses the turn into the parking lot — the one she’s made a thousand times. She and Cameron work in near-silence. She asks about his father search. He has nothing new. She offers hollow encouragement. Everything feels off.
Chapter 38: An Unexpected Treasure
Tova coaxes Cameron into trying again with Marcellus. This time, she climbs the stool first, dips her hand in, and the octopus winds around her wrist, leaning into her touch like a pet demanding attention. She instructs Marcellus to be friendly, then yields the stool to Cameron.
“Okay,” he mutters, shrugging off his favorite hoodie and tossing it on the counter before climbing up.
The water is bracing. Marcellus brushes his hand, and Cameron flinches — but forces himself to try again. This time, the octopus explores his knuckles, wraps around his wrist, and hundreds of tiny suckers crawl up his arm. To his own surprise, Cameron laughs. Tova laughs too.
Then Marcellus pulls the oldest trick in the book — tapping Cameron on the opposite shoulder with another tentacle, making him whirl around the wrong way.
“Ah, he got you!” Tova’s eyes sparkle. “My brother used to fool his nephew, my son, with that one. Oldest trick in the book.”
As the octopus retreats, Cameron spots something shiny in the sand near Marcellus’s rock. One of Marcellus’s arms snakes out, feeling around blind — like Aunt Jeanne losing her glasses in the couch cushions — until it lands on the object and sweeps it into his den. A teardrop-shaped silver earring.
Tova laughs and tells Cameron about her lost house key that Marcellus once returned. A treasure hunter, she calls him.
They resume cleaning. Cameron’s mind drifts to Avery. He makes himself promises about not checking his phone, not driving by the paddle shop. Then Tova calls out about the trash can liner.
“Don’t forget to hook it all the way around.”
“It’s all the way around. Look.”
“Pull it down farther. It’ll only take an extra moment.”
He pushes back. She pushes harder: “Didn’t your mother teach you to do things right the first time?”
The silence lands like a dropped plate.
Cameron stares at her. “I never had a mother.”
Tova’s color drains. He explains — his mother struggled with addiction, gone since he was nine. Tova apologizes. He insists it’s fine. She wipes furiously at a nonexistent spot on the glass, refusing to meet his eye.
He tells her it’s been a long day — extra cod for the sharks, covering the desk while Mackenzie was sick, phones ringing nonstop. Tova says, simply:
“You’re working very hard here.”
The words move through him slow and warm, like hot chicken broth on a cold day. It might be the nicest compliment anyone has ever given him. And then, tentatively, he offers her something in return — tells her about Aunt Jeanne, the one who raised him.
“She’s one of the most amazing people on the planet, but you might not like her.”
“Why on earth wouldn’t I like her?”
A conspiratorial grin spreads across Cameron’s face. “Pretty sure she’s never had a clue about the proper way to put in trash can liners.”
Tova’s laugh echoes down the empty hallway.
Grandmother and grandson, cleaning side by side, neither one knowing what the octopus figured out long ago.
Chapter 39: Day 1,349 of My Captivity
Marcellus is running out of time, and he knows it. The chapter opens with what amounts to a howl of octopus frustration: these two humans have been working side by side for weeks, and they cannot see what is, to him, blindingly obvious. Cameron is Tova’s grandson.
They do not see it. For weeks, they have worked together. How do they not see it?
He’s been ransacking his own Collection, hoping some object might point them in the right direction, but it’s hopeless — his den is a mess, his treasures spilling out dangerously. And his body is failing. He may not be around for the next tank cleaning.
What Marcellus has worked out, with the cold precision of a creature who has watched humans for nearly four years: the timing of Erik’s death and Cameron’s conception overlap almost exactly. Human gestation is approximately 280 days. The math is straightforward, if you’re an octopus who pays attention.
Why do I so deeply care that she knows? I am not entirely certain. But my own end nears, along with her time here. If they do not figure it out soon, everyone involved will be left with a … hole.
And then, with characteristic Marcellus wit:
As a general rule, I like holes. A hole at the top of my tank gives me freedom. But I do not like the hole in her heart. She only has one, not three, like me.
The chapter shifts to Tova, who is sorting her attic into three piles — keep, donate, trash — preparing to move to Charter Village. The work is methodical and melancholy. Will’s old piles of receipts and junk mail. Erik’s toy cars. Her mother’s bone china that no one wants anymore. Five wooden Dala Horses, the sixth one broken and long lost.
All of these things had been stored away for her to pass along someday, relics to be carried up the branches of the family tree. But the family tree stopped growing long ago, its canopy thinned and frayed, not a single sap springing from the old rotting trunk. Some trees aren’t meant to sprout tender new branches, but to stand stoically on the forest floor, silently decaying.
She finds her mother’s linen apron, the one worn for baking, and the smell of flour gone bad opens a door she keeps trying to shut. If Erik had lived, there might have been a daughter-in-law. Tova might have taught her to make butter cookies. Might have passed the apron along.
Then she goes to the Shop-Way for groceries — not, she tells herself, because Ethan is on shift — and runs into Sandy, Adam Wright’s girlfriend, in the produce section. Sandy is sheepish, apologetic about Adam’s drinking at the luncheon. But she has something to say.
“He remembered her name. The girl your son was seeing, I mean.”
The name is Daphne. Just Daphne, no last name. But it’s enough to send Tova dizzy in the cherry aisle. Ethan, hovering nearby with cantaloupes, catches the name too, and Tova stonewalls him. She abandons her groceries on the kitchen counter — unprecedented behavior — and climbs to the attic to pull out Erik’s high school yearbook. Class of 1989.
Her mouth feels numb and dry as she flips to the index. … She yanks in a hard gulp of air when she sees the name, and it stays there, caught in her chest.
There is only one. Cassmore, Daphne A. Pages 14, 63, and 148.
Chapter 40: An Impossible Jam
Cameron is cleaning the aquarium solo. Tova hasn’t shown up, and the octopus is in a mood — glaring at him, threading an arm through the gap in the tank lid in a theatrical threat to escape.
“I know you can hear me.” Cameron rubs his forehead wearily. What is he even saying? Octopuses can’t understand English. Or any other language. Right?
Cameron ties the lid shut with twine, which Marcellus regards with what can only be described as professional disdain. The octopus jets into his den in a huff of bubbles.
His phone buzzes — not Avery (they’ve been trading flirty texts all day), but Elizabeth, his half-sister, calling from bed rest. Their exchange is warm and easy, full of the sibling shorthand they’ve built:
“Lizard-breath? Are you okay?” “I’m fine, Camel-tron.”
She tells him Brad tried to make her a grilled cheese sandwich and the fire department came. She saw Simon Brinks on a travel show and thought of Cameron. He tells her about Avery. For a few minutes, it’s just two people who genuinely like each other, talking across a thousand miles.
Then Terry drops by and reminds Cameron, firmly, about the personnel paperwork he’s been putting off for two months. This triggers a painful memory: Merced Valley Technical College once offered Cameron a full scholarship. All he had to do was fill out the forms. The forms sat on his coffee table collecting pizza grease until the deadline passed. Aunt Jeanne was furious. What’s wrong with you?
He fills out the form in ten minutes. Then tries to photocopy his driver’s license for Terry, but the copier insists there’s a paper jam in Drawer C. There are only two drawers: A and B.
“Designed by idiots,” he mutters, plucking his driver’s license from the glass and switching the machine off for good.
He leaves his license on Terry’s desk. He can get it back tomorrow.
Chapter 41: Day 1,352 of My Captivity
Three days later, Marcellus reports in. The twine Cameron tied on his tank? No obstacle whatsoever. He unfastened the knot in the same manner as always. Should he be insulted by such an underestimation of his abilities?
But tonight he had a mission. He skipped the geoduck clams — his appetite is poor these days — and suckered his way to Terry’s desk, where he found exactly what he was looking for: Cameron’s driver’s license. Full name. Date of birth.
A driver’s license. Just like the one in my Collection. It states a human’s full name and date of birth.
He carried the card down the hallway, growing weaker with every inch, The Consequences closing in. He tucked it under the tail of the sea lion statue — the one spot he knows Tova will clean, because she’s the only one who ever does.
If I had died tonight, would this errand have been worth it? Indeed.
He is confident Tova will come back. She will not leave without saying goodbye. And she will not be able to resist running her rag under that sea lion’s tail. When she does, she will see what he has left for her. And then she will know.
Chapter 42: The Bad Check
Ethan Mack is sitting on his lumpy sofa with a Laphroaig, and the name Cassmore has been bugging him since the day Cameron first introduced himself. This morning, brushing his teeth, the memory surfaced: a bad check, tacked to the wall behind the register when he bought the Shop-Way. Daphne Cassmore. Six dollars and change.
To be crucified over such a lowly sum. What measly six-dollar grocery haul precipitated her fall, in the store’s eyes, from grace? It couldn’t have been a terribly long fall.
Ethan, being Ethan, has already done the research. A few clicks on an ancestry website connected Daphne Cassmore (later Daphne Scott) to a half-sister: Jeanne Baker, age sixty, of Modesto, California. An online presence dominated by collector and consigner communities. Cameron’s hoarder aunt. It fits together.
Now Ethan is caught. Sandy Hewitt is spreading the Daphne name around the produce section, so the town gossip mill will do its work soon enough. Cameron will hear that his mother may have known something about Erik’s disappearance. And Tova — Ethan is certain she’s already hunting down every scrap of information about Daphne Cassmore. She has never bought the official story of Erik’s death.
How well can you know someone from bagging their groceries for so many years?
He picks up the phone to invite Tova to dinner. He needs to tell her that Cameron is Daphne’s son.
The dinner is lovely — mushroom sauce over chicken, Barb’s Cab Franc — until Cameron storms in, furious. Tanner from the store has been spreading Ethan’s gossip about Cameron’s mother and the bad check. Cameron and Ethan disappear into a back room.
While they argue, Tova cleans the kitchen. She’s appalled: cereal boxes under the sink, no sponge in sight, junk drawers everywhere. She finds a rag under the sink — a faded white T-shirt — and uses it to wipe up a puddle of red wine.
“Grateful Dead, Memorial Stadium. May 26, 1995.”
It was Jerry Garcia’s last show in Seattle. The shirt was a rare specimen. And Tova has just soaked it in Cab Franc.
“Who leaves a precious garment shoved in a kitchen cupboard?” … No, not horribly worn. Well loved.
Ethan tries to tell her the important thing — the reason he invited her tonight — but Tova is already out the door, trembling, clutching her pocketbook.
Chapter 43: A Rare Specimen
Tova cannot let the shirt go. She enlists Janice and her laptop to find a replacement online. The price: two thousand dollars.
“I see.” Tova swallows a gasp before continuing matter-of-factly, “Yes, well. It’s a rare specimen.”
She pays without hesitation, then refuses to wait three weeks for shipping. The warehouse is in Tukwila, three hours south through Seattle traffic. She’ll drive down today. Alone. In the rain.
On the freeway, packed like herring in a tin, she gets a call from Charter Village admissions. Her final deposit authorization form never arrived. The move-in date is next month. She gives verbal authorization, but her mind is elsewhere — back in a grocery store checkout line thirty years ago, the day Erik died.
She and Will had gone to the grocery store the afternoon of the day Erik died. Tova remembers buying a box of those junky cream-filled snack cakes Erik always liked. Had Will chosen the slow checkout lane that day? If he’d picked the faster one, would they have arrived home in time to see Erik before he left for his job at the ferry dock?
Would any of this have changed anything?
Chapter 44: Not Even a Birthday Card
Cameron is mopping when Tova finally arrives, almost an hour late. She tells him the whole Grateful Dead shirt saga — the warehouse in Tukwila, the guy who almost wouldn’t hand it over — and for a moment things are light. He offers to help her set up an email account. She waves it off. Young people and their phones.
Then they reach the sea lion statue, and Tova slides her rag under its tail, as she always does. She pulls out Cameron’s driver’s license.
She stands slowly, studying it. Full name. Date of birth. And now she asks the question:
“Cameron,” she says slowly. “I know you are here in Sowell Bay looking for your father. And I know you don’t have a relationship with your mother. But what is her name?”
Daphne. Daphne Cassmore.
“She was seeing him,” Tova says quietly. “Your mother is the girl.”
They sit on opposite ends of the alcove bench while Tova tells Cameron the story of Erik’s last night — the ferry dock, the missing boat, the cut anchor rope. Cameron’s eyes burn. He blinks hard. He will not cry in front of her.
And then the thought he’s been pushing away breaks through: if his father died in an accident at eighteen, that would explain everything. Why his mother never brought a father into his life. Why Aunt Jeanne said, If it were that simple, she wouldn’t have let him miss out. It would mean Tova is his… No. He shoves it away. She’s too tiny, too weird. And it would mean his mother was something less than terrible, which does not compute.
She places a hand on his shoulder. Doesn’t rub or squeeze, just places it there, as if the contact might siphon off some of his pain. It’s the sort of touch that is so warm as to be almost maternal…
Back in the camper that night, he starts to text Avery the whole story — his mother, Tova, Erik, all of it — then backspaces every word. Too much for a text message. She asks him to paddle on Wednesday. He sends a thumbs-up.
Something warm, like contentment, floods through Cameron as he slips into bed.
Chapter 45: What If
A memory surfaces: three years ago, the Knit-Wits buzzing about Mary Ann’s teenage granddaughter Tatum getting pregnant. Everyone was scandalized. Tova felt only envy.
What if Erik had been in Tatum’s shoes? On the other side of the exchange of genetic material, of course, but what if he’d become a father at eighteen, before his life was truncated? Tova would have a grandchild. What a gift that would have been.
Tatum kept the baby. Things worked out well for her. But Tova’s mind has latched onto something else entirely. Cameron’s birth date is seared into her brain. He was born that following February. His mother, whoever she was, had been seeing Erik. Supposedly.
What if the father Cameron is searching for isn’t his father at all?
She combs through everything Cameron has said — the real estate developer, the billboards, the ring, the photograph. Nothing had ever made her think of Erik. And Cameron is perfectly confident he has the right man.
Erik was confident like that.
She sits on her deck, the sunflowers nodding in the moonlight like a personal audience agreeing with her every wishful thought. But she catches herself. Daphne Cassmore could have been dating any number of young men. And anyway:
Tova doesn’t believe in exceptional strokes of luck.
Cat considers jumping in her lap, then curls at her feet instead. As if already distancing himself. The move to Charter Village is imminent, and they don’t allow pets. She called to check.
Chapter 46: Amazing Bones
Janice takes Tova to lunch — not at the Shop-Way deli but at the Tex-Mex place in Elland, Tova’s suggestion, which surprises everyone. Over tortilla chips, Janice gets to the point:
“Tova, pardon my language, but would you cut the shit for once and tell me exactly why you think you have to do this?”
The case against Charter Village comes pouring out. Why spend your golden years with strangers? What about Ethan Mack, who’s “gaga” for her? Peter and Janice have talked about it — when one of them goes, the other must move on. “Seventy is the new sixty!”
Tova’s answer is simple and devastating:
“I am not like you and Mary Ann and Barbara. I don’t have children who will come stay with me when I’ve had a fall. I don’t have grandchildren who will stop over to unclog my drain or make sure I’m taking my pills. And I won’t put that burden on my friends and neighbors.”
Janice, softly: “There’s your problem. Assuming it’s a burden.”
But it’s done. Tova signs the papers on Wednesday.
Before that, though — there’s the matter of the Grateful Dead T-shirt. Tova goes to Shop-Way with the replacement tucked into her tote bag. Ethan scans her modest groceries, then picks up the rolled white shirt looking for a UPC code. Recognition dawns. His mouth falls open.
“You what?”
“It was one of those online auctions. Janice Kim helped me,” she admits.
He’s upset about the price — these vintage shirts cost thousands. But Tova stands firm: “It was important to you.”
“Many things are important to me.”
“I’d give away a hundred of those bloody shirts to redo that supper at my house.”
She drove on the freeway. To Tukwila. For him. “You’re quite a woman, Tova. Did you know that?” She doesn’t know how to respond, so she pays for her groceries and goes home and replays his words on a loop while she slices a single green apple.
At the closing, the real estate agent mentions the Texas buyers loved the house. Three little ones. They said it has “amazing bones.” Tova’s father would be pleased. The woman in the cantaloupe blouse said the house looked like something out of a magazine during inspection.
“As I’m sure you’re aware, I am nothing if not neat and tidy.”
Later, in the attic, she lies on her back and stares up at the rafters the way she did as a teenager. Like looking at the rib cage of a great wooden monster. She pictures the Texas family filling the house, children laughing under the rafters in pint-sized accents.
They will not have to pack up tea towels alone.
She tells herself: enough. Enough of one summer night in 1989 shaping every aspect of her life. Enough searching for answers that no longer exist. She packs the yearbook where she found Daphne Cassmore, says goodbye to the water she’ll no longer wake up to, and seals the box with tape.
Chapter 47: A Big, Bold Lie
Cameron is on Ethan’s couch, playing Moth Sausage songs on his unplugged Fender, doing laundry on a Wednesday because Tova’s insistence that Wednesday is laundry day has apparently wormed its way into his brain. He nails a tricky chord. Still got it.
Then Ethan appears, dressed in a collared shirt tucked into khaki pants. Not a date with Tova — he’s interviewing someone for a day manager position at the store. Melody Patterson’s little boy is sick, admitted to the children’s hospital.
Cameron asks if Ethan’s still taking applications. For him.
“You?” Ethan looks genuinely surprised. “Well … maybe.” Then he shakes his head. “See, it’s a manager job. Would normally be looking for someone with years of experience.”
Cameron pushes back, voice wavering:
“Look. I might not have years of experience. I don’t even have a degree or whatever. But we both know I’m smart.” His voice wavers. “I’m really smart.”
Ethan doesn’t deny it. He’d love to show Cameron the ropes. But right now he needs someone already qualified. Cameron explodes. Accuses Ethan of running his mouth, airing the town’s dirty laundry, spreading rumors about his mom.
“I was trying to find her.” Ethan’s voice is quiet but firm. “I was trying to help.”
“I never asked for your help.”
“I wasn’t doing it for you.” … “I was doing it for her. For Tova. To help bring her … closure.”
Cameron storms out to his camper. Naps badly, then deeply. Wakes to his phone buzzing — not Avery, but Michelle Yates from Brinks Development. Simon Brinks has an opening today. The story Cameron spun on those voicemails — posing as a developer — actually worked.
A big, bold lie.
He goes to tell Avery in person that he has to cancel their paddle date. But at the shop, it’s Marco, her son, manning the counter. Marco, with his pricing gun and compulsory child labor. Cameron explains he needs to bail.
“You’re standing her up.” Marco’s voice is flat.
Cameron leaves a message with the teenager and heads for the freeway.
Chapter 48: The Sob
This is the chapter where everything Cameron has been building toward collapses.
Seattle hits him like a different world — skyscrapers built on top of the highway, concrete spaghetti noodles jammed against the hillside. He finds the address Michelle gave him on Capitol Hill. It’s a plain gray door. Not exactly the shiny office tower he expected.
Inside: a nondescript apartment vestibule, an elevator that goes down. Michelle said the basement.
“Down the rabbit hole,” he says to himself.
The basement is lined with fake candles reflected in mirrors — a million little flames going off into infinity. He follows threadbare gray carpet to the world’s tiniest cocktail lounge. Five stools. Brass ceiling tiles. A menu: “Mudminnow’s Bespoke Libations.” A grass-haired girl named Natalie tells him they open at eight.
Then Simon Brinks appears. Not the coiffed billboard man — a disheveled dude with a tired smile.
“I know who you are, Cameron.”
Brinks explains he suggested this venue because it was originally for Daphne. Natalie, the grass-haired girl, is his daughter. “She knows the whole story.”
Cameron’s head whirls. A father and a sister?
“You have your mother’s eyes, you know.”
They crack beers. Cameron steels himself:
“I have questions about you.”
Then his voice breaks. “How could you… why didn’t you…”
“But you never cared about me.”
“You? Of course I care about you. You’re her son. But what could I do, once she was—”
“I’m your son, too!” Cameron’s voice cracks.
Simon Brinks takes a step backward, recovers. “I’m sorry, Cameron. You’re not,” he says softly.
The floor drops out. Brinks and Daphne were best friends. Just friends. They lived in the same crappy apartment building on the wrong side of the highway in Sowell Bay. Cameron produces the class ring. Brinks turns it over — and pulls out his own. His is engraved SOB. Simon Orville Brinks. “Mind you, I don’t advertise that, because the jokes practically write themselves.”
Cameron’s ring says EELS. Not SOB. Wrong ring. Wrong man.
“I never knew my father, either,” Brinks says softly.
But Brinks has something else to give him. He built this tiny speakeasy for Daphne — their shared dream from when they were teenagers. She even named it. Mudminnow.
Cameron knows what a mudminnow is, of course. He rattles off the facts without thinking.
“They live in rivers and other fresh water. Can survive really bad conditions. Extreme temperatures, hardly any oxygen in the water. So they’re usually the last thing to survive when shit goes south. They’re like the cockroaches of the tiny-fish world. But with a much cooler name.”
Brinks stares at him.
“You’re exactly like your mother, you know.”
She wanted to apply to be on Jeopardy!. She hid her real self from her family. Big, hot, fat tears hang in the corners of Cameron’s eyes.
“That’s just the face she made when something unpleasant surprised her,” Brinks says.
Cameron always assumed the photographic memory came from his father. “Well, maybe from him, too,” Brinks says. “Daphne never told me who your father was.”
One last question: does Brinks know where she is? He saw her several years ago. Eastern Washington. She showed up needing cash. Still using. He gave it to her.
“You can’t fix someone who is determined to stay broken.”
Cameron slaps a five-dollar bill on the bar. Brinks pushes the cash away. But Cameron is already halfway to the door.
Chapter 49: A New Route
Cameron sits in the parked camper on Capitol Hill, watching people with their normal, happy lives walk by. Screw them.
His phone dings. Not Avery — Brad. A photo of a tiny alien spawn wrapped in a light blue blanket. Elizabeth is beaming. The baby is here.
Cameron texts back, Bro, you’re a dad! Brad responds seconds later with the head-exploding emoji.
He texts Avery too. Hey, can we talk? Nothing back.
Traffic leaving Seattle is horrible. The needle-voice in his head won’t shut up:
None of this was ever real. Too good to be true. This isn’t your life. This is not your home. He wasn’t your father. She’s not your girlfriend.
At a gas station, he scrolls his phone reflexively. Katie has unblocked him. There she is, haughty smile, some asshat’s arm slung around her in every photo. Wraparound sunglasses. Probably uses an electric toothbrush. Probably has dinner with his parents on weekends.
Screw every last one of these people with their normal, happy lives. Cameron will never get there, no matter how hard he tries.
He opens his map app. Types a new route. Sowell Bay to Modesto. Fifteen hours.
Chapter 50: An Early Arrival
Tova arrives at the aquarium early on Wednesday evening. Terry called sounding wound up. The doors are propped open. He’s giddy.
“We’re getting a delivery. Never thought it would happen before you left. And I called you because I thought you’d want to be here to meet it.” He laughs. “It. Listen to me! Her. I thought you’d want to meet her.”
A truck backs up, a crate is forklifted inside. It sloshes as they set it down. On one side: THIS SIDE UP. On the other: LIVE OCTOPUS.
It’s Marcellus’s replacement. A rescue from Alaska, rehabbed after getting trapped in a crab pot and tearing herself up trying to escape. Terry gently delivers the truth: Marcellus is very old for a giant Pacific octopus. He might only have weeks or days left.
“It’s amazing how long he’s lived.” … “He was in rough shape when we brought him in. Missing half an arm, his body all chewed up. Didn’t think he’d make it through the year. And here we are, four years later.”
While Terry is away, Tova sneaks up to Marcellus’s tank one more time. He curls an arm around her wrist in that gesture that’s beyond familiar now, instinctive, like a newborn clutching its mother’s finger.
The new octopus is salmon-pink, huddled in the bottom of her barrel. Tova watches her extend a tentative tentacle, then yank it back. Terry’s daughter Addie — now eight — has naming rights.
Terry tells Tova she’ll be missed. She thanks him for the job. He smiles:
“I didn’t exactly have much choice. When I hired you. I didn’t have much choice. I knew you wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
His great-grandmother in Jamaica used to say she was “old but not cold.” Lived to her late nineties, baking raisin buns for the kids.
“If you ever change your mind, Tova, know that there is always a place for you here at Sowell Bay Aquarium.”
Cameron never shows up. Tova cleans the whole place alone, and something feels wrong.
Chapter 51: High and Dry
Cameron finally appears, hours late, barreling toward the break room. He stops short when he sees Tova.
“Where have you been?”
“Does it matter?”
It all comes out in a torrent. Ethan’s a nosy asshole. His friends had a baby and the band is over. His mom abandoned him. His aunt shouldn’t have to keep parenting him. Avery’s ghosting him. His luggage is apparently taking an extended vacation in Italy. And the man he spent the whole summer tracking down wasn’t his father.
Tova realizes she has flattened herself against the tank behind her, as if all those words had been a strong wind.
Cameron pulls out the class ring. The ring engraved EELS that led him across the country, that he was so certain belonged to his father. He storms into the pump room, navigates around the LIVE OCTOPUS crate, yanks the lid off the wolf eels tank, and drops it in. The ring floats to the bottom and vanishes in a cloud of sand.
“Eels. This belongs with you,” he mutters bitterly.
Tova offers coffee. A chance to talk about tomorrow, her last day, a smooth transition. Cameron’s answer:
“There’s no tomorrow. Terry never offered me the job. Why would I stay?”
He’s leaving. Back to California. Road-trip time. He scribbles a note for Terry’s desk. Tova picks it up and hands it back.
“Leaving your boss high and dry without proper notice … you’re better than that.”
“No, I’m not.” His voice cracks. “I’m really not.”
He tosses the paper on the desk and walks out, leaving Tova alone in the aquarium with two octopuses, one ring at the bottom of a tank, and the quiet certainty that something has gone terribly wrong.
Chapter 52: Day 1,361 of My Captiv — Oh, Let Us Cut the Shit, Shall We? We Have a Ring to Retrieve.
The chapter title itself is the first sign that the endgame has arrived. Marcellus drops his own running joke — the captivity counter — mid-word. There’s no time for formalities.
He needs to enter the wolf eel tank, which is the one enclosure he has never visited. Not because of their looks (though he concedes they are, objectively, grotesque) but because of history. As a young octopus in the open sea, he once wandered into a wolf eel’s den and paid for it three times:
First, I paid with my pride.
Second, with one of my arms. The arm started to grow back the next day, but by then, it was too late.
Third, with my freedom. Had my own poor judgment not brought about such injuries, perhaps I would have evaded my so-called rescue.
So that’s the origin story. Marcellus was injured, “rescued,” and imprisoned — all because he picked the wrong apartment.
Now, weakening by the day, he unscrews the pump housing one more time and flatters his way past the wolf eels with soft platitudes. He dredges through their sand, finds the chunky ring Cameron hurled in, and curls it into the thick muscular part of his arm. The wolf eels watch but don’t approach. He thanks them and leaves.
Even the short journey back to my tank saps my strength. I am weakening by the day. Still carrying the heavy ring, I slip into my den and rest, as I will need stamina for my next trip. The last one.
Chapter 53: A Goddamn Genius
The shortest chapter in the book, and one of the funniest. Cameron is stranded on the shoulder of a barren stretch of interstate outside Redding, California, hood popped, semis blasting past him like oversized beetles.
The serpentine belt — the source of that squealing noise he’d been ignoring — has finally snapped. The replacement was sitting in the glove box the whole time. His attempt to flounce dramatically after a humiliating failure is, itself, a humiliating failure.
How very meta.
He pulls up a YouTube tutorial, props his phone on the bumper, and decides to fix it himself. Because he, Cameron Cassmore, is a goddamn genius. It’s time he started acting like one.
The chapter is three pages of a man deciding to stop being helpless. It’s the smallest possible act of competence, and it changes everything.
Chapter 54: The Eel Ring
Tova’s last day of work. Janice and Barb arrive with a fish-shaped retirement cake. Barb, a self-proclaimed dog person, ends up with Cat purring on her lap, licking the back of her hand.
“People can change, Barbara.”
“Even old folks like us,” Janice adds.
Then Tova cleans the aquarium alone for the final time. She says goodbye to the bluegills, the Japanese crabs, the sharp-nosed sculpin, the wolf eels. But when she reaches Marcellus’s tank, it’s empty. She checks the pump room, the barrel, the top — nothing. She puts her hand on the cool glass front of his tank.
No point in saying goodbye to rocks and water. The single tear that leaks from her eye rolls down her wrinkled cheek and falls from her chin before landing on the freshly mopped floor.
On her way out, she spots a crumpled brown shape on the floor by the door. A tentacle flickers. It’s Marcellus — pale, diminished, sticky and dry, his brilliant eye gone cloudy like a marble. He’s made his last trip.
She places a gentle, searching hand on his mantle, the way one might touch a sick child’s forehead. His skin is sticky and dry. He reaches an arm up and winds it around her wrist, right over the silver-dollar scar, which has now faded to a ghostly ring.
She fetches the mop bucket, fills it with tank water, wrings a cloth over him. He revives enough to heave himself in. And there, on the floor where he’d been lying, something chunky and gold glimmers. SOWELL BAY HIGH SCHOOL, CLASS OF 1989.
She turns it over. Reads the engraving on the underside. Reads it again.
It cannot be.
It is. EELS. Erik Ernest Lindgren Sullivan.
Chapter 55: The Very Low Tide
The revelations crash together. Erik and the girl. Erik fathered a child. A child that grew up, away, unknown. And she can’t believe she never saw it before — Cameron’s heart-shaped dimple on his left cheek, the one she always admired without knowing why.
“You knew, didn’t you?” she says to Marcellus in the bucket. “Of course you did.” She leans down and touches his mantle again. “You’re so much more intelligent than we humans give you credit for.”
Then the grief arrives. Not the controlled, compartmentalized kind she’s practiced for thirty years. The real thing.
Once the hot, fast tears start spilling, she’s powerless to stop them. Droplets pelt the surface as her thin shoulders heave, falling faster with each monstrous sob. No one is here. No one is looking. Throwing caution away, she allows the grief to course through her.
She decides to take him home. Not to his tank — to the sea.
The image that follows is quietly absurd and quietly perfect: a seventy-year-old woman, ninety pounds at best, wheeling a sixty-pound octopus in a yellow mop bucket down the boardwalk toward the jetty. Marcellus trails an arm out each side like he’s riding in a car with the windows down.
At the tip of the jetty, low tide, she gives a short speech:
“You led me to him. My grandson.” Her voice falters on these last two words, but a warmth seeps through her at the same time. Two words she never thought she’d say.
“You stole his driver’s license! You naughty thing.”
“We must say goodbye, friend. But I’m glad Terry saved you, because you saved me.”
She tips the bucket. For one suspended moment, Marcellus’s arm remains wrapped around her hand as his body hangs in midair, his eye fixed to hers. Then he releases, and lands with a heavy splash in the night-black water.
Chapter 56: Every Last Thing
Tova sits on her bench by the pier, processing everything. The events of the last two hours hardly seem real. Marcellus is gone. Cameron is gone. Her house will be gone tomorrow.
But she won’t be moving to Charter Village. Tova will not be gone.
She arrives at the thing she’s needed to believe for thirty years:
Erik didn’t know he’d fathered a child. How could he end his own life with a child on the way? He couldn’t have. And he didn’t.
Then Avery appears — running up the pier in athletic shorts and a pink sweatshirt, looking for Cameron. The misunderstandings unspool. Avery thinks Cameron stood her up. Cameron thinks Avery ghosted him. Tova mediates, carefully, because he’s family now, and isn’t this what families do?
The culprit: Avery’s fifteen-year-old son Marco, who told Avery that Cameron never stopped by the shop.
“I’m trying my hardest, I swear to God, but my kid’s such a little turd sometimes.”
“All kids are terrible sometimes,” Tova says.
Then Avery shares something. She once talked a woman down from this very railing. A woman who kept talking about a horrible night, an accident, a boom.
Tova closes her eyes.
A boom. Tova closes her eyes, imagining how easily it could happen. Something knocks the bow off course, and a gust of wind catches the newly slackened sail just the wrong way at just the wrong moment. The boom swings wildly. Smacks his head. Knocks him overboard.
An accident. It could’ve happened that way, or any number of ways.
Avery wonders whether saving that woman mattered. Tova looks her in the eye.
“It mattered. I’m glad you saved her,” she says. And she means it.
The woman on the railing was Daphne Cassmore. Avery saved Cameron’s mother without ever knowing the connection. And Tova — who spent decades wondering if Erik’s death was deliberate — finally hears enough to let go.
Chapter 57: Expensive Roadkill
Cameron, heading north on the interstate. He fixed the belt. The camper is not going to blow up. At the town of Weed, California, he reaches for his phone to snap a photo for Brad — because Weed, California, is never not funny — and realizes he left it on the bumper back at the repair stop. It’s now an expensive piece of roadkill.
He naps at a truck stop for six hours. Tosses a mostly full pack of cigarettes in the trash. Composes apologies in his head.
At a bridge crossing the Columbia River, he reenters Washington state. Northbound, of course — he’s been going north. Going back to do things the right way.
Chapter 58: The Dala Horse
Morning. Tova’s last day in the house. She’s already decided she’s not going to Charter Village — left them a message at whatever absurd hour she woke — and she has no plan. She’s been dusting baseboards and polishing doorknobs since dawn, and she’s never felt more energized in her life.
The doorbell rings. Cameron is on the porch, eyebrows creased anxiously, like Erik’s when he was nervous about a school exam.
“Um, sorry I was such a jerk the other night. You were right. I shouldn’t have left.”
Tova pulls out the resignation note she stole from Terry’s desk. Cameron is stunned.
“But … why?”
“I suppose some part of me didn’t believe you when you insisted you were the type of person who would shirk a job.”
Then she shows him the ring. Tells him the name: Erik Ernest Lindgren Sullivan. She watches the wheels turn in his head, the way it showed on Erik’s face when the gears were grinding.
When Cameron’s face starts to break apart, she finds herself pulled to him like a magnet. His arms wrap around her neck, squeezing her against his chest. For what seems like a very long time, she rests her cheek against his sternum, which is warm. She can’t help but notice that his T-shirt appears to be stained and smells oddly like motor oil.
He stands back and says with a dumbfounded grin, “I have a grandmother.”
“Well, how about that?” She laughs, and it’s as if a valve inside her has been released. “I have a grandson.”
She shows him Erik’s old bedroom. Cameron, the guy who knows random facts about everything, notices immediately that one floorboard is white ash instead of red oak. He pries it up with a bottle opener on his keychain, revealing a teenage hiding spot. Inside: a petrified package of Creamzies snack cakes (Cameron launches into a digression about diglycerides and nuclear holocausts), and something wrapped in one of Tova’s mother’s embroidered tea towels.
The sixth Dala Horse. The one Erik broke as a child. He’d glued every splintered piece back together flawlessly, even touched up the paint. He’d hidden it, waiting — for what? For the right moment, maybe. A moment that never came.
Her whisper comes out like gravel. She runs a finger down the figurine’s smooth wooded back. Every last splintered piece is glued back into place flawlessly.
She holds it out to Cameron. He takes it.
After a long moment, he looks up. “How did you get the class ring back?”
She smiles. “Marcellus.”
Chapter 59: Day 1 of My Freedom
Marcellus’s final entry. Day 1 — not of captivity, but of freedom.
At first, I sink like a cold bundle of flesh. My arms no longer function. I am a chunk of jetsam flung into the sea on a comatose journey toward the seafloor.
Then, with a twitch, my limbs awaken, and I am alive again. I do not say this to give you false hope. My death is imminent. But I am not dead yet.
He swims down to the depths where no light reaches. Where once, as a juvenile, he found a key. Where he returns now, to lie with the long-disintegrated bones of a beloved son.
He stopped at the new octopus’s barrel on his way out. She is young, badly injured, terrified. But she will have something Marcellus didn’t have until the very end: a friend.
Tova will make sure she is happy, and I would trust Tova with my life. I did trust her with my life, more than once. Just as I trusted her with my death.
The last line of his narration:
Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.
Chapter 60: After All
One month later. Tova lives in a new waterfront condominium with hurricane-grade windows from floor to vaulted ceiling. She and Cameron are setting up a Scrabble board. He works for a contractor now, talking about engineering classes at the community college. He wears his father’s class ring on his right hand. He insists on paying his own way.
She opens with “JUKEBOX” (seventy-seven points, an incredibly lucky draw). On this, Cameron plays “JAM” (thirty-nine points).
Ethan arrives for Thanksgiving dinner wearing Cameron’s long-lost Moth Sausage T-shirt — the duffel bag finally turned up on his porch. Cat has been recovered from the new owners of Tova’s old house and now hunts rock crabs on the beach under her deck. Avery runs her paddle shop, which is doing well. Marco might come by to toss a Nerf football on the beach.
Cameron’s voice had dropped, serious, when he explained this to Tova. He bought a green Nerf football on his way home from work the other day. Marco might want to toss it around on the beach, he said. Maybe. If he doesn’t, no hard feelings.
The aquarium has a new bronze octopus statue out front, funded by Tova’s donation. She volunteers there three times a week, standing in front of the giant Pacific octopus tank, helping visitors understand the creature. The new octopus, Pippa the Grippa, is shy — content to stay in her tank and not roam hallways collecting artifacts.
Secretly, this makes Tova happy, too. Marcellus was, in fact, an exceptional octopus.
They walk the waterfront after Thanksgiving dinner. Past the jetty — Marcellus’s jetty. Tova slips away to the railing, alone.
To the somber bay that took them both, a cherished son and an exceptional octopus, she whispers inscrutably: “I miss you. Both of you.” She taps her heart.
Then she turns back to the others. There’s pie coming. There’s a Scrabble game to win.
Avery is coming for pie. And there’s a Scrabble game to win, after all.
Claude’s Take
This book does something deceptively difficult: it makes you cry about an octopus. Not in a manipulative, here-comes-the-sad-music way, but in the way you cry when someone very smart and very limited does the best they can with what they have. Marcellus is the novel’s secret weapon. His voice — wry, imperious, quietly desperate — carries the book through its softer passages and gives it a spine of genuine wit. The “Day X of My Captivity” format is a countdown clock that never lets you forget the stakes, even when the human chapters are doing their gentler work.
What works. The mystery structure is elegant. Van Pelt gives the reader just enough information to stay ahead of the characters without feeling smug about it — you suspect the connection between Cameron and Tova before the reveal, but the confirmation still lands. The octopus-as-detective conceit could have been precious, but Marcellus earns it by being genuinely alien in his intelligence: he reads genetic markers the way we read faces, he catalogs fingerprints the way we remember names. His frustration at the humans’ blindness is both funny and structurally useful — it ratchets the tension without any of the characters needing to be stupid.
Tova is the emotional core, and Van Pelt writes her grief with real restraint. The thirty-year-old wound of Erik’s death never feels like a plot device; it feels like a weight Tova has been carrying so long she’s forgotten what standing up straight feels like. The small details — the marzipan smell, the green leotard, the headstone with the wrong font — are more devastating than any big dramatic scene could be. And Cameron, who could easily have been an archetype (the lovable screwup), has enough genuine pain and genuine intelligence to feel like a person rather than a character type. His encyclopedic brain and his inability to fill out a form are the same trait viewed from different angles.
What creaks. The pacing sags slightly in the middle third, where Cameron’s father-search and Tova’s house-selling run in parallel without much interaction between them. A few of the secondary characters — Jessica Snell, Tanner, Mackenzie — exist purely as plot furniture. The Daphne-on-the-railing revelation in Chapter 56 is the one moment that feels like a coincidence too far; the novel earns most of its connections through patient setup, but this one arrives a little too neatly. And the final chapter, while satisfying, wraps every thread with a tidiness that the rest of the book is smart enough to avoid. The Scrabble game, the Nerf football, the duffel bag arriving from Italy — it’s a warm bath of resolution, and the water temperature is about two degrees above what the novel’s earlier restraint would suggest.
Who should read it. Anyone who has lost someone and carried the absence for years. Anyone who suspects they are smarter than their life currently reflects. Anyone who has ever talked to an animal and thought, just for a second, that the animal understood. It is not a difficult book, and it is not trying to be. It is trying to be honest about grief and connection and the strange ways people find each other, and it mostly succeeds. The octopus voice alone is worth the price of admission.
claude_score: 7.5/10. A warm, well-constructed debut with a genuinely original narrative voice in Marcellus. It doesn’t reach for profundity and it doesn’t need to — its ambitions are domestic and emotional, and it meets them with intelligence and care. The mystery resolution is satisfying, the character work is strong, and the octopus chapters are unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Half a point docked for the too-tidy ending and the Daphne coincidence; half a point docked for the middle-third pacing. But it earns its tears honestly, and that counts for a lot.