To the griever there is darkness anyway. Nights are lengthened, time is endless. Even in daylight darkness is a room of corners and shadows, things are not there. After the fourth-day sing, awkward, kind neighbors bring food to be eaten. Those who loved Ruth—so many—touched her hand, her shoulder, held her lightly, but no one could read the world inside other human bones. They could touch the skin and not feel the grief and pain it held only a skin’s-width away.

“You haven’t been sleeping. I can tell.”

Ruth was pale. Her mother wanted her to eat. Ruth’s hands wanted only to touch Marco’s hair, his cheek. She wanted to go backward in time and watch him sleep, count every eyelash, and then to tell him, No, you can’t go. It is all wrong.

No one but Vince, the old weathered fisherman, saw her walking the pier at night. He thought she was a sleepwalker. It would not have been strange. But Ruth was looking for the remains of her son, Marco Polo Just, the one now traveling worlds she would never know, just as she’d always hoped, although she wanted it to be land he traveled, not the spirit world, not water.

She looked for the white shoes he had worn that day instead of his moccasins because the rubber was more secure against the sides of the canoe. She never dreamed how tender the vision of a Nike might become.

Vince, the old, weathered man whose body was created of coffee and cigarettes, wondered if he should tell Aurora, at least, that Ruth was walking in her sleep near water and it might be a dangerous thing.

Because she was so lost, it was a good thing when Ruth looked up one day and saw that the white houses on the other shore had disappeared. “My God,” she said, coming back to her life for a while. “Look!”

Aurora could not see the houses, either. But she had a new worry now, knowing Ruth would go there. “This isn’t a good time to be on the water,” she told Ruth. “It’s so rough.” It was the season of quick changes in the ocean. “I don’t think you should go just yet.” Aurora fiddled with her spoon at the table, warning her strong-willed daughter.

“But they might need help. I have to check it out, at least.” It took her worries off Marco and herself.

“Call someone else. Old Vince could go there.”

Ruth feared that a sudden wave, like the swell that surged high enough to carry the whale back into its world, had taken away the old people and their homes. It had been an unusual wave, too high, too close. Who was to say there wouldn’t be more? Ruth took off her robe, dressed, and went to prepare the dinghy to travel to the shore of the elders, the old houses where the People Who Remember lived.

It was a poor decision in the continuing stormy weather, but she was overcome by the thought that the elders were in need. As it turned out, there was a high wind. Soon the water itself seemed to cry out. She “felt bottom,” as they say about water in ocean storms before the big wave comes.