He looked at the telephone. He wanted to call Carol, to tell her to come back and take Caddie home with her. Barring that, he wanted her to tell him what to do. She was good at that; why couldn’t she do it now? Maybe if he asked, he thought, she would give him some advice.

He reached for the phone, but drew his hand back as if, like the pan that morning, it would burn him. He couldn’t call Carol. That would just prove to her that he was incompetent, which he knew full well she already believed anyway. And right now he couldn’t say he didn’t agree with her.

He looked at the framed print hanging on the wall across from his desk. It was an antique image—torn from some outdated scientific journal published who knew when—of a sea cucumber. The artist’s rendering, although not entirely accurate, was nonetheless beautiful. The animal was shown in cross section, its innards painted in completely unrealistic reds and purples, the intestine that composed most of the body looping around on itself in graceful coils, while the featherlike respiratory organs were done in blue, presumably due to their association with breathing. The cucumber’s skin was depicted in mottled browns, the most authentic aspect of the painting. Ben had always assumed that was because the outside of the creature was the only part actually seen firsthand by the artist.

Carol had given him the picture upon his graduation with his doctorate from UC Santa Barbara. It had cost her more than she could then afford, and he had been touched by the gesture. The print had hung in every office he’d since inhabited, a reminder to him of what had attracted him to marine biology in the first place, the deceptive simplicity of the ocean’s creatures.

How easy it was to understand how a sea cucumber worked. Essentially a bag containing digestive, respiratory, and reproductive organs, it ingested food, processed it, and shat it out. The cucumber had no worries save eating and not being eaten. It didn’t question its place in the order of things or have to negotiate the land mines of interpersonal relationships. Even its mating was offhand, involving the releasing of ova or spermatozoa into the surrounding water and letting someone else worry about it.

He longed for a diagram of Caddie, some neatly labeled chart that would point out the salient details and make understanding her a matter of memorization. He didn’t mind study, or even research, but understanding something as complex as a sixteen-year-old girl apparently seemed to be beyond his capabilities.

A knock at the door interrupted his thinking. “Come in,” he called out, and Angela entered, holding something out.

“The reports,” she said.

“Thank you,” Ben said kindly, hoping his tone would pass for an apology.

Angela nodded and turned to go. Ben stopped her. “Angela, can I ask you something?”

The young woman turned. How old was she? Ben wondered. Probably twenty-two or twenty-three. Still young. “Sure,” she said.