“I have practiced now, like Witka. I have gone beneath the water. I have learned to stop breathing.”

“I know.”

He looks at her. “What do you mean, you know?”

“I followed you to be certain you wouldn’t drown. But you did, didn’t you?”

She gets up and turns on the lights. Now it seems darker out. He says, “I loved you. I loved them. I loved. I tell myself that is what matters.”

“It is.”

“And at the end I loved Marco. No, I loved him before then. When I first saw him. I was a coward. I should have gone over and hugged him. But I talked to him on the boat. He was beautiful. He was one of us. An A’atsika.”

“Yes. He was.”

She’d been so proud of him, to see him paddle, to see his strength and hear his voice singing the songs. “If you’d only known. And the way he moved.”

She stands at the table, as if waiting for Marco to arrive.

She hears the splash of oars in water. The voices leave with him.

Thomas paddles on from there out to the white house people. He paddles, staying close to shore at first, passing away from Ruth’s boat. Along the way he stops. He feels it in his muscles, sinew, where things meet in the body. It hurts at first. Not just tendons, but whole histories. He doesn’t hear them speaking, but he follows what they tell him to do, as if now he, too, hears the voices inside him.

It is nearly morning. The houses are white again, now from rains and mist, but that doesn’t mean that grief has disappeared. It has more staying power than weather. The people are busy. A man sings in a crack of light from atop a black rock, as if he were inside a clamshell. He stands with his arms outstretched and his eyes closed and he doesn’t lose his balance. Thomas is invisible in the night, but it is as if the man is singing Thomas toward him, as if the voice leaves the man’s body, travels outward, and is a path to their world. Thomas follows. His back and arms hurt, but he paddles and he closes his eyes and follows the voice. When he opens his eyes, two women are standing in the water, ready to pull his canoe in.

“Look,” one says. “It’s one of the old canoes.”

He thinks it must be very late. He is surprised they are awake because he doesn’t realize how long it has taken him to arrive, but they knew the man with many voices was coming. They summoned him. One has her hair down, gray and disheveled. The other is dressed and tidy. “Well, father of Marco, grandson of Witka, Thomas Just,” she says formally. “So.”

On land one woman with twine for hair steps toward him. She says to his body, “Be quiet, you are driving me crazy,” and the voices subside. He feels calm and even laughs.