He looks at her without commenting. He knows she was born with gills. All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one.

Ruth says to him, the boy she grew up with, “Why didn’t you build yourself a corner instead of a wall? You’ve lost all the beauty now. Even if the rain does come, you won’t be able to watch it fly toward us from over the water.”

She hasn’t lost any of her own beauty in spite of her grief. She still has her nearly black eyes in a face golden and fine.

As it happens, he does have a corner in Witka’s little place where he remains trapped with his own memories, where he sits and recalls. Like the water, he reflects. Unlike water, there is no light, no sign of clouds or blue sky.

Ruth asks, “Do you need anything?”

“No.” He needs more than he knows, but she has left him a thermos of juice and a bag of cookies. Pecan Sandies. She remembers his favorites all these years later.

The next thing he sees is Ruth leaving. She stands in the air and light and holds out her arms and holds her face into the sea breeze and rare sun, eyes closed. The wind blows back her hair, her shirt against her. He remembers her younger, but the years have fit her well. She, like Thomas, looks too thin.

She should scream at him, he thinks. She should hit him.

She is kind because he is a lost soul. Now he will live, if you could call it that, behind a wall, in the gray house of his grand father Witka, the old man who sat in this very place and watched for whales and smiled at dolphins and sometimes frowned on his own people for their behaviors.

Ruth doesn’t know that Thomas, crying, saw the seething of the sea, the pain and death of the whale, that the loss of Marco was the final thing for him as well as for her, the breaking thing. She doesn’t think that she opened his windows only to have him shut them again as he went into the darkness like the octopus coming from water into the cave when he was born. And Thomas doesn’t know how she weeps for hours alone, how when she fishes and empties the nets or repairs them or turns the winch on the Marco Polo, she wishes that she, too, could turn her back on water, close herself in, except at night when it is peaceful and the sea shines in the moonlight, compelling. Then the world is new and she watches the water.

A month to the day after Thomas built the fence, a memory comes to him, but it comes in flesh and bone and blood, in the shape of two humans, a mother and father, still grieving their own son. So many years later, they arrive, the parents of one of the boys in his platoon, his special operations group, come to find him in Witka’s gray house on the sea. They are Murphy’s parents, visiting him. Murph, who had died on their search-and-destroy mission. Murph, the one with red hair. They drove by the tribal office to ask for the whereabouts of Thomas Just. Ruth’s mother was there that day asking why her health benefits were no longer available. “They broke into my house. Now they are cutting off my health insurance.” She was being persecuted, she said, because her daughter had protested the whale hunt. Without thinking, hardly looking them over, she told the woman where they could find Thomas. She still looked gray.