Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

She stopped to look at a replica of a tropical coral reef. The coral lagoon was filled with fish, wildly colored and patterned, with aptly cartoonish names like Clown Triggerfish and One Spot Rabbitfish and Humbug. They floated around the coral, wriggled through waving plants, looking peaceful and contented despite the fact that the coral was, on close inspection, fake. Christine remembered a scene from a nature show she’d seen on TV a few years before, a shark raid on a coral reef at night. Sharks zoomed out of the black depths like gangsters and attacked the sleeping fish, wrecking the coral and eating everything in sight, then swam away, leaving it all devastated. Yes, this coral was artificial, but at least these fish didn’t have to worry about being attacked. Things could be worse, she supposed.

Farther down the hallway, she caught sight of a placard that said GIANT OCTOPUS next to a tall, narrow tank. There didn’t seem to be anything in there but a couple of lobsters and some plants. She bent down and studied every crevice between the rocks and in the fake coral, but there was no sign of the octopus. Where was it? Had it escaped? Had it died? She went over to a young woman in a brown AQUARIUM OF THE PACIFIC T-shirt who stood behind a group of children thronging the petting tank full of creatures.

“I can’t find the octopus,” Christine said to her, startled to hear a note of actual panic in her own voice.

The young woman, whose nametag said LIZA, looked thoughtful in the professional, practiced way of someone who spent her paid days catering to people’s questions and befuddlement. “Oh, he’s in there all right,” she said. “He’s probably just hiding.”

“He’s not,” said Christine. “I looked everywhere for him. I think he got out.”

Liza left the children to do whatever they wanted and followed Christine back to the octopus tank.

“Octopuses are amazing at getting out of their tanks,” Liza said as they stood looking in together. “Another aquarium just lost one of theirs. It squeezed through a hole the size of a nickel and went through pipes connecting three different tanks and back into the ocean. They really travel, they’re very curious and smart. But so far, ours has stayed put.”

“It doesn’t look like a big enough tank for a giant octopus,” said Christine.

“Oh, he’s fine in there. Don’t worry! We all love him.”

“What is there for him to do in that tiny tank, all alone?” Christine felt a tightness in her chest. She couldn’t seem to draw a breath.

Liza gave her a sidelong look. “He probably crawled behind a rock. He’ll come out again, I’m sure! He always does, eventually.”

She went back to her post behind the petting zoo. Christine stayed in front of the tank, breathing shallowly, her pulse fluttering. She hadn’t had an actual panic attack in years, since her twenties in New York. But she couldn’t stop picturing the intelligent, solitary octopus searching its tank obsessively for a nickel-sized hole to slither through, yearning to compress its body and slide along a narrow pipe to freedom in the open ocean.

Christine forced herself to move away. With her head down, she walked quickly past the remaining exhibits, through the lobby, and straight out the door.

Back out in the warm, bright air, she sat on the nearest bench on the marina, with her eyes closed, taking deep breaths until she’d finally calmed down enough to walk back to her hotel. She looked forward to seeing Valerie, having a drink on board the ship. She couldn’t wait to sail away.

“How’s your cancer this afternoon, Isaac?” Miriam asked her ex-husband. They sat in a couple of armchairs, waiting for Sasha and Jakov to join them in the lobby so they could all take a taxi to the ship together. “Do you still want me to look?”

“In the light of morning I think I may have overreacted to a negligible discoloration,” he said. “I was exhausted from the flight and wasn’t being rational.”

She laughed. “That’s not like you at all.”

“It is exactly like me.”

Miriam caught sight of Rivka and Larry Weiss coming from the elevators, making their slow way through a crowd of people wearing nametags thronging the area by the check-in desk, a convention of some kind. She was surprised to see them; she had expected them to stay somewhere far fancier, more elite and sumptuous. For that matter, she also would have expected them to cruise on a private luxury boat rather than an aging, crowded commercial cruise ship; no doubt they owned at least one yacht. But she knew the Weisses prided themselves on living as normal a life as possible. They made a point of mentioning this whenever they could. And this cruise was a sentimental journey for them, commemorating the anniversary of their first meeting on board the Queen Isabella thirty-five years before.

“If it isn’t my favorite musicians,” came Larry Weiss’s penetrating voice.

“Hello,” said Rivka in her husky growl as Miriam and Isaac stood up to greet their benefactors. “Are you ready for the cruise?”

“We’re very excited,” said Isaac.

Miriam exchanged air kisses with Rivka and let Larry plant a smooch on her cheek. “Absolutely,” she said, looking with stiff politeness at them, feeling as if her face had been rubbed with ice. She was never sure how she felt about Larry. He was always breezily friendly in an impersonally general way that held an edge of condescension, but he wasn’t overtly horrible like his wife. “We’re all very excited.”

“You, I believe,” Rivka said to Isaac with a thin smile, “but I’m not so sure about your wife.” Rivka spoke affectedly, like certain artistes and poetesses Miriam had known, with grandiose dramatic gestures and exaggerated expressions. She also dressed like a poetess, in flowing tunics and tights and ballet slippers. She was bony if you disliked her, gamine if you were generous; the clothes suited her, and her manner could seem elegant and sophisticated if you looked at her in the right light, but Miriam couldn’t stand the woman, so she chose to view her solely as pretentious. Well, she was married to a billionaire; she could take it. But then of course she and Larry had met before all of this, back when they were both still struggling to make it, she in the competitive, male-dominated world of classical music, he in the risky, fraught arena of speculative investment. So Rivka hadn’t married Larry for his money, and he hadn’t married her for her artistic success. They had evidently married for love, and then they’d both worked hard and been incredibly lucky in about equal parts. Even though Miriam couldn’t fault Rivka for being a gold digger, she could still hate her in the privacy of her own mind.

But she still had to placate Larry. “We really are,” Miriam said with disingenuous brightness. “In fact, we were just discussing today’s rehearsal of your quartet. We’re going to perform it for you on the cruise.”

“And I couldn’t be more excited to hear it played by the people for whom it was written.” Rivka’s slender white-gold bangles tinkled as she lifted both arms and dropped them again. “That in fact is the whole reason I insisted that you come on this cruise.”

Miriam knit her eyebrows together, thinking that “the whole reason I insisted that you come on this cruise” sounded like an ominously pointed threat.

Jakov and Sasha came over, followed by a bellhop with their instruments and luggage piled on a rolling cart.

“Hello, dear people!” said Sasha. He looked almost like himself again today, brighter and more alert. Miriam felt a flash of warmth at the sight of him, tinged with relief.

“Come,” said Rivka. “We have a minivan waiting outside to take you all to the ship.”