He passes through a door, not the kind that opens and closes.

RUTH WATCHING

Ruth knows that on the day the whales went away, the blood of the whale and that of her son must have been mixed together. Marco and the whale were related once again. He was the boy who went to live with the whales. He left to travel far distances. He learned the bottom of the sea. He began to see with the whale’s eye.

She wraps a shawl around her. She stood years ago in the same shawl watching the ocean, the wind blowing her sleeves and hair, light on water. It was the same shawl she had wrapped around baby Marco, and now she cries. Now ocean and tears become one. It is the same element.

The whales have left them since their hunt. The whales Ruth loved to watch. When she is far out, she still sees them rise and turn, open the water like new stones, new planets, breathing their eyes wiser, older, than her own. She thinks that now all she has in common with Thomas was giving a child to the sea, and where has he gone?

Over where the round rocks are, where the river comes into the sea, and the kelp forests farther out, Ruth watches.

Many of the men are now gone. She thinks perhaps the men have taken a trip together, or perhaps to visit whalers up north, or to piece together another way to hunt the whales, which of course she would fight.

Thomas was the young man who had once followed her prints in the sand to the large dark rocks. They made cairns and left them as messages on the beach. Some of these were elaborate in their balance, more than a message, but something beautiful and full, large-seeming, even as limited as the two young people were in truth and experience. But it was years ago.

Now she comes back inside her mother’s house and the sound of the wind is sometimes like singing.

She sees herself. She is a shadow on the wall at her mother’s house.

Her mother says, “They’ll be back. As for Thomas, did he ever sweep the floor?”

He didn’t. Ruth only shakes her head no.

“Did he eat the food you left him?”

“No.”

“Did he go to the water?”

“Only at night.”

“Did he cry at night?”

“Yes, I think so. I think I heard him a few times. Or it was the wind.”

“Good. That is what matters in these cases.”

Ruth thinks, We are in the town where everything is stolen from the sea. Most of the people have always lived here. A few mobile homes behind and among the houses now take away the old feeling, but where do you put a growing family? And everyone knows each other’s business, who drinks, which man yells at night when frustrated by day. No one even bothers to close their curtains at night unless they are fighting or making love, and they look into each other’s windows and then they can tell which purchase they must next make or how to arrange their furniture.