Expect the unexpected

“Expect the unexpected” is a piece of advice that recurs in Tova Sullivan’s memories and in her guidance to Cameron Cassmore. First spoken by a card-playing passenger who delights in fooling Tova, it returns when she encourages Cameron to reconsider what friendship with Marcellus might mean. The phrase connects the unexpected with the possibility of seeing another being differently.

A lesson aboard the SS Vadstena

During the voyage on the SS Vadstena, Tova and Lars Lindgren call a mustached passenger the Walrus. After dinner, he tries to coax Tova and her mother into playing cards. Though Tova’s mother initially objects that ladies should not play, she eventually joins in, and Tova learns rummy, hearts, and twenty-one beneath the dim light of the parlor’s glass lamps.

The Walrus makes the games a lesson in surprise as well as chance. While shuffling, he slips in card tricks, challenging Tova to guess the card between his fingers, then producing the card she named from beneath his collar or cuff. When she scowls at being fooled, he laughs and tells her, “Always expect the unexpected, child.” The advice emerges from a specific pattern: Tova is repeatedly certain she has understood what is happening, only for the Walrus’s trick to unsettle that certainty.

Tova’s advice to Cameron

The phrase returns when Tova prepares Cameron for another encounter with Marcellus outside his tank. Cameron assumes she is going to show him how to capture the octopus, and Tova corrects him: she intends to show him how to make friends with Marcellus. Cameron doubts the prospect, recalling that Marcellus—whom he calls Scylla the sea monster—was not warm toward him during their earlier encounter. Tova answers, “Expect the unexpected, dear.”

The second use transforms the childhood lesson into practical counsel. Tova is not promising that Marcellus will behave predictably or that Cameron’s first impression was mistaken; she asks Cameron to leave room for an outcome he cannot yet anticipate. The shift from the Walrus’s card tricks to Tova’s proposed friendship also gives the expression a change in emphasis: surprise is no longer simply the pleasure of being fooled, but a reason not to treat an uncertain relationship as already decided.

Recurrence and significance

Across the two scenes, the wording stays concise while its application changes. On the ocean liner, it follows the Walrus’s concealed cards and playful reversals; in the aquarium, it precedes Tova’s attempt to help Cameron approach Marcellus differently. Both moments begin with someone expecting to know what comes next, and both make that expectation provisional.

The expression thus links Tova’s recollected past with her present mentorship of Cameron. Its recurrence lends her advice a personal history: she once learned to tolerate being surprised by a passenger’s tricks, and now uses the same principle to invite Cameron toward patience with a creature he has misread. The phrase does not guarantee a happy result. Instead, it keeps possibility open where certainty would close it.