“My, you have a talent,” says Aurora, looking in the mirror. “Have you ever thought of going to school?”

Lin smiles. She never boasts of her accomplishments. “I’ve thought of it.”

A few days later, it is time for Ruth to prepare the boat for fishing. She and Lin go out first in the rubber Zodiac, the engine roaring, the two of them puffy round with life jackets.

They pull up to the boat and climb to the deck. When Lin first steps onto the Marco Polo, she looks around in surprise. “Oh, it’s like a home in here. There’s even a bathtub.”

“In the bow. Yeah, it used to be a horse tank.”

Lin looks around at the table, the cracked leather chair, chained down, the bunks, the built-in seating. Ruth has made it comfortable. There are rugs on the floor, braided out of old clothes that belonged to her mother, her grandmother, and even herself. They are clean. Paintings are on the walls, an octopus, women dancing in red dresses. There are black-and-white photographs in black frames against a blue wall, the face of a young boy, young Ruth with an infant, older Indian people dancing, standing together by a fire at the ocean. Even plants.

“Yes, it’s been my home.”

Ruth already fixed up the bunks. She gives Lin the top bed because Ruth’s back hurts. This is better anyway, because Lin needs a light all night or she feels nervous. Ruth can barely make up either bed any longer. Even making up the lower one hurts her back, bending.

After watching Ruth work for a while, Lin says, “Let me do that. You work so hard.”

They have just carried in groceries. Ruth bought condensed milk for Lin’s coffee. Ruth carried the heavy box of ice for their trip out fishing. Then there was some maintenance, cleaning, lifting, bending, coiling ropes, folding nets, putting them in place. Ruth is constantly at work, in motion.

They motor out. They pass an old cemetery, which appears to be under a soft layer of moss. “It’s where I hope I will be buried one day,” Ruth tells her. It is the one the archaeologists dug up for bones and artifacts so many years ago against the will of the people. The bones came back not long after. “They came back because they heard them singing and grew afraid.” The employees wouldn’t work in the rooms where the bones were. She tells this to Lin and Lin sits down and listens.

“Ghosts have great abilities,” Ruth says.

“Yes. I am with them every day. They wander every where.”

Then Lin tells Ruth about the American soldiers digging up the ancestors and urinating on them. But not about the old man who opened the bag of bones.

Like Ruth, Lin loves the sea and stares into it. She doesn’t know ocean, but she loves the small white jellyfish, the occurrences of tides that speak of the moon. Then, when Ruth starts up for business, Lin learns how to fish. She screams when a line begins to unravel. Ruth laughs and Lin hangs on and pulls. But soon Lin works with her length and graceful, smooth motions. Later she writes her husband about the different ways the people here fish. Trolling. Longlining. Netting. The tall poles and lines of the boats, the lights at the top when they move out or in at night. How once, out at sea, they caught a fish so big they used a winch. She sends him some Kodak pictures Ruth took of her with a fish. She has red eyes in them. He laughs when he sees them later and calls her his demon. He writes back and asks when is his demon coming home.