Then the back of this world, all across the land, began to break. Ruth herself heard the sound of its back breaking, almost inaudible, but she could hear it, for her ears could even hear the fish and the whales. It was to that she owed her fishing success. Hearing the country break, she knew nothing would ever be the same.

Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.

What she cried over was nothing. Chipped plates. Another form of oblivion. The Mayans knew the concept of zero. Most other cultures did not. A parrot, they say, also knows it. She lived at Zero and thanked god she did not have to pay rent on it, yet she had to add One to it, and keep a life for her son Marco until she knew they would come for him. She knew because it was in his face at birth. He was a full number, a whole one. He would lead people, so calm, so laughing. And so singled out. At an earlier time he would have worn only white. Always the ones who would be singers wore white, to show their place, but now he wore a T-shirt that said MARINERS or DOLPHINS or one that said POWERED BY JUNK FOOD. Ruth bought him one that said U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA, but he didn’t wear it because he didn’t want to be treated badly by anyone.

Marco, her son with Thomas, had been an unusual child. He smiled when he heard the sounds of birds and he blew feathers into the sky with his breath. He laughed his first laugh at three months, an adult laugh they said sounded exactly like Witka’s. Not only was he watched by all; he watched everyone, everything, but he especially watched the ocean with great care and told Ruth what he had seen beneath it.

Once he said, “I see tiny jellyfish in a forest.”

Ruth looked at him, thinking, Who are you? but she said, “That’s wonderful, my boy.”

“I see a school of silver fish woven into a ball.”

She knew he was right because she heard them. And when he held his breath at night, she said, panicking, “Marco,” and shook him. She realized he dived into the water in his sleep, and then he did it in his waking, too, and she would keep watch to make sure he surfaced. She wished his father could know him. He was chosen.

“You need vitamins,” Aurora told her daughter, placing an amber bottle of pills in front of the young woman.

Ruth took a pill, then said, “We’re going out for a while.”

She and Marco went to the river where she once lived with Thomas and showed him their CALIFORNIA ORANGES house. It had never been repainted. It was faded and in disrepair.

Then she took him to Witka’s up on the black rocks. It would, after all, belong to Marco one day although it might have been hers. She loved it there, her eyes constant on the sea. They sat at the table near the old stove in the corner and listened to the ocean below them.