She opens her suitcase and begins packing what she has left, not much, not forgetting anything that reminds her of her son Marco.

“I’d make coffee,” he says. “But you’d better be going before it is too wet.”

She smiles, declining his offer. Somehow it seems ludicrous to think of him making coffee and she even laughs, despite the fact that he is, after all, a holy man.

It doesn’t take her long to be ready. “Goodbye. Thank you.” She is looking at the sky, the fast movement of clouds.

He doesn’t shake hands when she leaves. He merely says, “It’s restored.”

It is raining hard when she walks down between the black rocks to her mother’s house, carrying the case, changing hands often because it is so heavy, and the wetter the sand becomes, the more difficult it is to walk, and it is not a short distance. She thinks that now she has nothing except what she carries, and while she is afraid, there is a kind of freedom in it, too, a sense of relief strange to her, of having nothing, of the rain meaning something. Everything of the past is still there. Time is an unstable element, but it doesn’t matter; the birds are returning.

The rain has started inland, too, without her knowing it. The man’s words come to Ruth: Part of the sacrifice. What else was given, she wonders. What was the other part?

She walks up the steps and knocks once on the door before opening it. “Hi,” she says.

“Oh my.” Aurora hands her a paper towel. She wipes the water off her daughter’s face and looks at all her angles and bones. Then Ruth puts down the suitcase, which is ruined, and removes her shoes.

“Mom, I don’t have the boat.” She will have to explain it all, her visit to the once-white houses, her sacrifice to the drought, the loss of her father’s boat.

“Shh.” Aurora waves her hand, sitting on her usual place on the couch, and listens to the news. “I’m watching the flood. It’s better than watching the fire or hearing about the drought. Look.” The news is full of talk and pictures, water running down the streets, water back in creeks.

Dry grasses will magically turn green again. The farm animals will find relief. Drop by drop, the world will live.

But it rains without stopping. The veterans say it reminds them of the war and monsoons. Some of them go into their houses, now leaking, now wet around the edges, and they don’t want to come out. There is rain upon rain. It even rains on days when there is not a single cloud in the sky. The ponds fill and the people finally conclude it had been him, the man who disappeared the same time as Ruth’s boat, stole the old thing, but who knows, maybe he wasn’t a thief or a womanizer, but instead maybe a rainmaker; surely he’d been a strange one and Ruth hasn’t even reported the theft to the police and that in itself is strange, now, isn’t it? She’d never part with the Marco Polo willingly. It was her life. It was her father’s life.