She saved all the bills she’d paid, the receipts for household items, all the hospital bills, and the prescriptions in one file, the insurance claim in another file, and in that a copy of the police report, “Details of the Accident,” “Action Taken,” “Summary”—paragraphs of evasions and half-truths and outright lies, signed by Sharkey and the reporting officer, the lines under “Victim”—name, race, physical appearance, date of birth, home address, marital status, Social Security number—all blank. The only item entered, the one certainty, was the “Injury Code,” 04, in a box: fatal.

Beneath the reporting officer’s illegible signature, a blue scrawl, his name printed in a child’s block letters: Ronald DeSouza.

“We have to see this guy.”

Sharkey’s expression was unreadable, perhaps one of boredom, perhaps one of agony, or he might not have heard. Preoccupied, he sometimes seemed breathless or deaf, as patients in pain often were. But Sharkey’s absence was extreme, as though he were underwater.

Rounding Waimea Bay, late afternoon, in the southern quadrant of the sky billows of soot-black clouds dragged long gray curtains of rain across the distant ocean. To the west was a gaudy flare at the horizon around the crimson mouse hole of the setting sun, its hot ferocity puddling the sea around it, the fire blazing on the water of its finality. The waves were distinct—backlit as they advanced—and Sharkey thought, Waves are thresholds.

Sharkey resisted saying this, and adding, You learn to step over them and become someone else on the other side. But what did that mean? Thoughts like these bewildered him, and kept him silent.

Olive was driving again, with thoughts of her own she could not share. On the way to Wahiawa, through the darkening pineapple fields, in the traffic at the bridge, and then parking at the police station—near the entrance steps, because it was raining—she was keenly aware of Sharkey crouched beside her. She hoped he wasn’t sulking. Guiding him through the parking lot into the station, she had felt a heightened sense of him as someone fragile, and another little glimpse of what motherhood must be like. Sharkey was reduced, he was numb, he needed to be reassured and humored and reminded to be careful. He scuffed next to her, obedient but vague, his arms swinging loose, unusually conspicuous in his tattoos and yet looking fraudulent, shuffling shyly with all that outrageous ink. In the rain, sudden gouts of it lashing him, his wet face framed by his lank hair, he bent over in a futile effort to avoid it, the big clumsy child.

“Officer DeSouza,” Olive said to the desk clerk.

But the man in uniform looked past her and spoke to Sharkey. “He expecting you?”

Sharkey’s feeble smile of confusion indicated that he had not registered the question.

“I called this morning,” Olive said. “I was told he’d be off-duty at six.”

“Please take a seat.”