“The army promises a lot,” said the man at the recruiting station in the little shopping center next to the post office. “Don’t worry. You’ll all catch up with each other.” And maybe Thomas knew he lied, but it was too late. Now he was owned.

On the day Thomas left, Ruth was torn in half. The two of them, who’d always laughed together, floated in the water and talked together, who saw with the same eyes, were now separate. She wept when he left and she couldn’t stop for days. Then she set her lips in tight resignation, more akin to sorrow, and went about her life of fishing.

Soon she moved onto their boat, an old Trophy, a Cadillac of boats, she’d always been told. It had a decent enough living space. Besides, she of the independent spirit and born with gill slits had always wanted to live on the water, and now she and her father would always be ready when the salmon came down from the north.

She was pregnant when Thomas left for war. She didn’t know it until it made her sick to fill the boat with gas, too sick to head toward the salmon run or out deeper to the halibut, as they sometimes did. Her father watched her vomit over the back of the boat and said he’d go alone that day. He sent her home on his worn-out little excuse for a dinghy. She barely made it, and then her mother looked at her and said, “You don’t even need a doctor to tell you that you are having a baby. I give you seven months.”

Evenings, or early mornings, drenched in salt water, loneliness, an infant inside her growing by division she thought, not multiplication, she brought in the nets, counted the fish, sometimes only eleven trying to leap from net into water, both shining.

She already saw the child she was going to have and so she named him Marco Polo, the infant with black hair who was going to do what she’d always wanted and travel the world. Oh, he’d see camels and deserts and silks and people wearing orange and red robes. He’d see temples and monkeys and paintings and hear sounds of the world she’d never heard, jungle sounds, and he’d see the far north.

Guess what? she wrote to Thomas. You would have loved it today. I saw the bald eagle nest. Remember it? It has grown. They added another room. But even better, I saw an octopus in the water. Thomas, best of all, we are going to have a baby. Yes, a baby. He is a boy. I can see him. He looks like you. My mother will be so disappointed. She swears he will look like Dad.

That same day she mailed the letter. After she talked to the gossip Carlene, who worked at the post office, she was followed by a scrawny spotted dog. “Go home,” she hissed at him. But no amount of stomping her foot, of saying “Shoo,” turned the dog back away and when she went to the water, the little thing stood at the shore watching her leave, howling like a baby wolf, until she turned back. “Okay, come on.” He hopped in the dinghy with her and, to her amazement, climbed onto the boat like a human, a few steps up and then a leap. A master at boats already.