Aurora watches from the roadway and stops and waits for Thomas to leave her front door.

Inside, she asks Ruth, “Why didn’t you let him in?”

“It didn’t feel right.”

“There’s water on the front step. Where did it come from?’

“Maybe it rained.”

“I don’t know. I was out here and it didn’t rain.” And then she tells again about the octopus. Ruth has heard it before but she doesn’t tell her mother about the Rain Priest and the octopus old Gus saw leaving her boat when it was stranded far away out there in the water. She just listens and knows the water has fallen from Thomas’s body. It is all of his uncried tears.

That night Ruth loads up the Zodiac with things she needs for the boat and makes her dark way out through the water, home to her Marco Polo, and as she travels the water and sees her boat it is a strange presence rocking there in the fog but the wind is rising and so the trees on the nearby shore are moving and if she could hear them, they would be creaking.

She knows it is only a matter of time before Thomas will want to speak with her some more. She could hear that, not just in his own words but in the many voices that emanated from him where he stood. He was waiting for something to open, but it wasn’t the door. Nor was it her.

A few days later he comes to her on the boat. She’s tired. She sold all her fish early and the price was too low. She is cleaning the decks. But she stands and she watches him.

This time his face is relaxed, his eyes not haunted. Our brave people, she thinks when she sees his face in the light and shadows. We have continued.

She rinses herself off with the hose and she invites him in and looks him over as she wraps her brown shawl about her and combs her wet hair. She dries her face and waits, watching him from where she stands beside the stove. He sits down, but then he changes his mind and he looks at Ruth and gets up and holds her, standing behind her. She is wrapped up in warmth, her hair down over the brown wrap, a black river of hair that could flow on out to the ocean. For Thomas, it all passes through his heart again. Remembering. Then he begins to sob. He thinks, And I’m a grown man, and she is thinking, Thank God, stepping out of his hold and turning to him. The boat is moving sideways and back. At last, at long last, the tears are there for him. She wept for many years. Now it is his time. She looks at him. She brushes hair back from his face even though none is there, as if he is her son, or as if they are children again and his mother has just died on the road, in the car, the father drinking, the other car, all the people in it. It was in the terrible times and his father, the man of artistic gifts, so highly treasured, the mask-maker, was never the same, yet he was alive. Still sometimes he made spirit faces, transformations.