But things would have been different if he was alive. There would still be fights among the tribe and now things have calmed down. Dwight is in jail down in Lompoc and the world around them seems to have been growing right again. Thomas has been gone for many months. He looks so good! It’s as if he’s shed a skin.

“We had a wake and a great service for you. You should have been there. All your friends were there. They turned Dwight in. He’s in jail. For murdering you. We had beautiful flowers at your wake, and even bamboo, for your time in the jungles. There was a giveaway of all your things, so now you have nothing.” She pours the coffee into cups.

“Be sure to tell your mother I am thinking of her,” Thomas says.

Ruth is quiet now. “She’s gone, too,” she says. She died shortly after you did.”

“I am so sorry.”

“She wasn’t buried. She wanted to go out to the ocean with the whales. We wrapped her in the grass cloth. I wove it for her and stitched it together and sang for her. We had a sing for four days.” Ruth goes to straighten things on the cabinet, the saltshaker, the sugar. “We won’t have the memorial until next year. Are you going back over right away?” To the white house people, she means.

“Yes. But I have tickets to go see Lin. I am going to use them.”

When he leaves, he says, “Ruth, you have always been so kind. I will be living with the old people now. I want you to take Witka’s house when you go back. He left it to both of us. I know you love it. You can live there like you have always wanted. I can see that you are almost done with this fishing life.”

“Yes. I will.” She doesn’t know what else to say. “Thanks, Thomas. I already have sold the boat.”

“Who to?” he asks.

“I sold it to two guys from the village. One is Vince’s son and the other is Dimitri’s brother. Remember them?”

Ruth has always loved the house on top of the black rocks.

“Thank you, Thomas.” She is older now and wants solitude.

After Thomas leaves, Dick says. “I can see you love him.”

“Yes, but not like what you think. I knew him as an infant. All my life.” She leans against him. “He and I had passion once, the young kind, and we had a son but we never really shared him, but that kind of love has gone away. He’s a brother to me now.”

On the day Ruth moves into Witka’s old gray house, she opens all the shutters and windows to the sea air and looks out. Three dolphins are curving above the ocean. The seals are napping in the shade of the rock.

At times she walks through the forest and it is a green lamp; sometimes with the fog weaving between trees, at other times with light shining.