Vince sits on a chair as she examines it. Then he decides to look for tentacle tracks. “They’ve got to be here.” He tries the engine with her. “She starts, all right, but I better follow you back, just in case. Strange that someone would just take her and then leave her out here. What do you think they wanted with it?”

Sacrifice, Ruth wants to say, but doesn’t. She does want to stay and touch every last thing, to understand the octopus, all eight legs of it climbing away from the boat left behind by the peculiar, handsome Rain Priest who did, for a time, own the boat. But she must return and go back to her life and get the Marco Polo ready for salmon season. Before long she’ll have it tuned up and full of gas and ready to go out. Still, she looks around lovingly and touches things, the coffeepot, so clean, the bed, so unused. And then, that night, just as she goes to bed once again in her own place, she sees it on her own pillow. The pearl sitting in the middle of it. The pearl that had belonged to the mother of Thomas, the one that had once been left in the cave, according to everyone who told the story.

Ruth tries never to think of Thomas. But still she does. She takes him food, coffee. She checks on him. One day, taking coffee and a kettle of chicken soup, she thinks she will soon say, This ocean is the place of life, damn it! Turn around! And she will start to tear down the wall, using a crowbar, the claw end of a hammer, breaking the wood, pulling out nails. On this day there will be smooth water, a light breeze. After she does all this she will sit down, calm, on the ground, and he will come out and take her in his arms and rock her and tell her that he always carried her picture and someone will drive by with the car radio playing “Ain’t Nobody’s Business But My Own.”

But of course she will never do that.

One day, visiting, she sees he is different. He is clean and awake. He is packing. He has changed his mind about going to DC to see the Wall with his former buddies. He couldn’t say why.

“Thank you for the soup,” he tells her, but that’s all he says.

She wants to ask him, Where are you going? but something about the way he speaks, she understands something. He has made a decision. She is silent.

HE GOES BENEATH

Someday we’ll hide in the ocean. We’ll swim out and hold our breaths like old Witka and disappear. This was what he said with his friends when they were boys. We’ll never come back. We’ll become whales like the story says.

Thomas goes to the sea only at night, the same time Ruth walks there. He goes down to the pier or the docks, carrying a wool army blanket. He turns his back and drops himself into the water of the Pacific, of Peace. The Great Being. Awkward at first he holds to the dark pilings and looks around him to be certain no one watches, but Ruth had caught sight of him one night, so now she follows just out of sight and afraid. At first he stays beneath the water briefly, then surfaces, gasping for air. She is more intimate with water. She knows how much goes on beneath its surface. There are currents and undertows, the unseen. There are tides within, beneath, that would take him far out to sea. If he would let them. She knows this.