Page 44 of Sucker For You

He towed them to the surface to breathe. Then he stroked away from the submerged wonders and dangers of the kelp forest, leaving the dogfish behind through the thrashing of Elkhorn Slough’s cloudy breakers, into the surf. Isabel released her hold on him and clambered awkwardly out of the water on her single fin, the other still clutched to her chest.

“Thank you,” spitting out her tube. “Bring the cooler, please.”

He did.

She emptied their picnic and his sun-blistered Nalgene bottle onto the sand, replaced their sandwiches with rocks scavenged from the tidal flats, and filled the container with seawater. A hand inserted into her fin convinced the octopus to emerge; she tilted it out into the makeshift tank. Leaving Wes to retrievethe lunch fixings, water bottle, and their towels, she lugged the cooler to MORI’s parking lot and climbed into his Jeep.

“Wait—shouldn’t we take it into the institute?”

“No.” She folded her arms over the lid. “The bungalow.”

“Why?”

She didn’t answer, just gripped the cooler tighter.

He drove them all back to the beach house.

9

Isabel refused Wes’s assistance with the cooler. She heaved its precious, unwieldy, sloshing weight up the porch steps, and barely caught her breath at the stretch of his rash guard over his ribs when he reached for the key under the eaves. She shouldered past him into the living room.

Thunk.

The cooler landed on the credenza beside the television and the reef tank. Electronics wobbled. Water splashed. She didn’t grab a coaster or a towel. She didn’t check the stability of the aquarium. Instead, she carefully cracked open the cooler’s lid.

There she is:Octopus bimaculoides.

Floating near the surface of her itinerant tank, seven arms anchored to a rock purloined from Sandholdt Beach, the juvenile two-spot octopus returned Isabel’s stare with a prismatic eye. Her blue spots were vivid against the russet-mottled amber of her skin, its texture rippling from sleek to bristling with papillae, before transmogrifying back to smoothness again. Her eighth arm crept up the cooler’s plastic siding into the air.

You’re so beautiful. . .

Even in this strange new environment, the octopus hadn’t displayed any cryptic behaviors: camouflage.

Isabel frowned at the little creature while she removed the aquarium’s mesh covering. She coaxed the octopus’s adventurous arm back to its stone and lifted her in cuppedhands from the insulated container, settling her instead into the fifty-gallon reef tank with its oyster-and-coral occupants. The two-spot slithered over to the oyster and immediately began to prod at its shell with questing suckers. Another arm investigated the coral spires. A third looped around the pump nozzle.

Fortunately, the aquarium had been running clean for several hours. It wasn’t ideal, though. The gravel bottom was no substitute for the benefits of live rock, and its protein skimmer had seen better days. But the oyster had made rapid and substantial filtration inroads against the algal buildup in the water, and the tank had a functional fluorescent light. This enclosure was also certainly safer for the octopus than swimming uncamouflaged in the open waters of Monterey Bay had been. Everything in the ocean ate cephalopods: baleen whales, manta rays, petrels, morays, dolphins, otters, sea lions, and seals—while sharks, orcas, and sperm whales had even been documented attacking the giant Pacific species.

The two-spot snapped off a coral spire and poked the oyster harder.

“Rude.” Wes huffed with laughter. He squatted down to eye-level with the juvenile and the target of her teasing. His nose skimmed the glass, dried salt glittering in his eyelashes. “So, aside from a major attitude problem, what’s wrong with it?”

“Notit.Her. See the tip of her third arm?”

“There are a lot of arms in this tank, Isabel. Which one am I looking at?”

“The third arm counting from the right side of her head,” she told him. “The one that’s knotted in the coral? Its suckers extend all the way to the tip. It’s not a hectocotylus.”

“Bless you. What?”

“It’s not a modified mating arm,” she tried again. “There’s no male ligula—no groove to transfer sperm packets to a female during copulation.”

One of Wes’s eyebrows rose. He squinted at the coiling mass of suckers. “I’ll take your word for it. But what’s wrong withher?”

She answered with a different question. “Was the octopus from your swim on Saturday morning uncamouflaged?”

“Huh.” He cocked his head while the two-spot continued to explore her tank. Her false eyespots—ocelli—were iridescent against the gravel and calcium carbonate spears. Her skin dappled beneath the aquarium’s light, rubricating from a neutral russet to an interested red when she discovered that she could wiggle the pump nozzle in its socket. “No, that one was behaving more normally. It was avoiding predators in the kelp, camouflaged like a gas float. I almost swam into it before I spotted its suckers.”

Suckers were the sole part of an octopus’s electric skin that couldn’t replicate environmental hues and textures.