His father sold cultured pearls. His father worked the trees. His father worked the mines. His father knew how to cook meals of fourteen courses. His father traveled in a submarine, loathed oppression, and felt contempt for surface dwellers, and, Lord, he was handsome. His father had been imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread—a pain bagnet, in fact—and, having escaped, was implacably pursued by the authorities, who were on the lookout for a man with a yellow passport. Why did Leland want a father when he had a mother like Emily Wheeler?

He heard the kitchen door open, and he shuffled across the room to the window, and he saw his mother standing on the porch, gazing out to sea. He had hurt her feelings. He swore he would never do so again. Which did not last (how could it?), but it helped him regain his math skills and made him wonder whether—if he was good enough—his father would ever come back.

“Careful by that ridge,” his mother said. It was spring of 1904; he was twelve years old now, and they were spending yet another Sunday at the tidepools. He was too old for this, and resenting his mother having repeated this phrase for perhaps the four hundredth time. But he gave his considering nod, as if he hadn’t thought before about being careful, thank you for having suggested it. He imagined he had an audience for such things; his audience had grown from the time he was young and hanging upside down from the trees. He felt that his life was being recorded some—

His mother was gone.

Water was washing over his feet, flooding into the tidepools, and stirring up pockets of sand. Plumes of ocean water spilling up the side of rocks, and retreating. Then he saw her—she was on her hands and knees in the water, and one hand was held to her mouth. She had slipped. She took her hand from her mouth, and it came away bloody. “I’m all right. Be careful on that ridge.”

He rushed to help her up, aid that she accepted.

“Walk me back toward the house. We have tincture of iodine there. I cut my lip, but my teeth are all there. We’ll have a lot of blood, and my tongue is going to swell, so I’ll sound odd, but otherwise I think I’ll be fine.” She talked this way, and at first he held her hand, which she disengaged from, as if she needed both hands to balance while walking across the volcanic rocks. “Are you all right, Lee?”

“I’m fine.”

“Because this could be frightening to you.”

“I’m not frightened,” he said. Although he was frightened, he suspected that, like crying, mentioning this wouldn’t be worth it.