She wants to take this up with the elders. Perhaps they know a ceremony. All this is what Ruth thinks as she walks over the sand to the still-black houses where the old people live. It is no longer a shore because the ocean has gone away from their place, too, leaving large dark rocks, sand, and debris. The sand seems infinite. The birds are gone now. Silent races have lived on this salty ground, whitening in dry places as the once-rare sun now pours down on it. The water in the distance looks like a mirage, a heat wave with gray wavering lines above it in the air.

Ruth picks her way past the beached trees, enormous ones, her sweater catching on them, as if they are grabbing her to ask for help. She walks with her eyes always scanning the black volcanic rock, the sand, and realizes she is looking for something of her drowned son Marco, a piece of shirt, a bone, as if she could find a particle and use it to revive the whole young man back into being, the way the tree roots want to become trees again.

When Ruth arrives at the dark houses, no one comes to meet her. Maybe they know why she has come. The absence of people makes the houses look like old carvings with open mouths. She is afraid of two things: that no one is there, that the people have disappeared as was said happened once in the past when the ancestors sought places with water, or that they knew she had arrived to ask for the impossible and perhaps they’d gone into hiding up into the black rocks.

But then an old woman in a dark dress, her hair loose, comes out of a house and says, “Anina, it’sak amin,” looking at Ruth, the mournful, lovely woman who had let her son come to them to learn how to carve, to make fishhooks out of bone, to dig out a canoe, to speak his own language. The old woman tries not to cry. She pushes back her hair, which itself is still down with mourning and is gray twine undone. She looks at the face of the generous mother of Marco Polo, the man who travels the world somewhere beneath water now. Into Ruth’s dark eyes she looks, seeing there Ruth’s father, and she looks at Ruth’s graying hair. She thinks, Ah, the bones of Ruth’s face are as beautiful as the carving of the women gods, and she thinks, Perhaps one day this woman will come here to live. She is becoming one of us, always she has been becoming one of us, but she ignores what she wants Ruth’s destiny to be and says, “We still have water to drink. Do you?” and she takes Ruth inside and pours a large bowl of it for the younger woman.

Ruth drinks so fast some spills down her chin, but it feels good. “No. We don’t have much water. The river is just a trickle. There isn’t much underground. The drought has gone far inland. It is dry and brown there, too. Anamsi’ika’a ja nin. All the people are becoming afraid.”