Now, at night, she pulled her dreams and memories into a net like a school of silver fish. There was the time she dreamed a short-haired Thomas eating with a tribe of people. They wore faded blue and brown clothing, and so did he. They talked rapidly and laughed. They ate fish and rice.

But after the man in the shining car arrived, there were times she doubted herself. “What if he’s sharing food with the ancestors? Or fishing for them and not for earth people?” she asked Linda.

Linda, who owned the only restaurant on the reservation, said, “You always know things, Ruth. Trust your feelings. Your intuition is always right. Yeah. He’s alive.”

Linda was thin from moving all day and her hair was dyed too dark now. She wore it in a bun when she worked, although no customer would complain to Linda about a hair in the food. Some had, and she had merely removed it and said, “There you go.”

“Sit down for a while,” she told Ruth, and poured her some coffee. “For one thing, the ancestors don’t catch fish at rivers. They fish the clouds. They only eat ground acorns and flowers. Like the people of the past.”

But when Linda put her arms around her, and Ruth was an armload of grief, Ruth knew Linda didn’t believe her. She felt it. Linda was thinking, after all, they had the dog tag. And Ruth had it in her pocket, constantly fingering the chain, the cheap metal that should have been gold. Throughout the day, she caressed and felt and read it with her fingertips, that thing which had touched his chest, his sweat.

After Death had come to her mother’s door, Ruth began staying awake on the boat where she lived with Marco. She watched Marco sleep, his lips parted, his skin smooth, eyelashes like his father’s, his eyes already with lines at the side as if he’d spent a lifetime laughing. He was an astute child. Born an old man, was what people said of him. He was also a quiet child. Still, he had a sense of humor from infancy and he was set apart by his inborn wisdom. He was the incarnation of an ancestor, the elders said, those who still believed in such things.

Like his father, like Witka, the boy began to go into the salt water of the plankton-filled ocean and not come to the surface for a long time. Ruth, unable to bear the thought of losing him, waited in tears and then reproached him. “It scares me. I wait for you to be alive. Don’t you understand?” She had already lost her father, her husband.

Marco didn’t. Every day he stayed longer, telling his mother, “I can’t help it. Something else makes me do it.”

Over the next years, Ruth’s visions were a wave that flowed from her bed on the boat and floated her out to the waters of another world. She merely floated, her body lying on the bed moored to her place on the sea as she journeyed. Now and then she had a dream of Thomas with a little girl on his lap like a spirit child.