The pregnancy was not a provisional state; it was a child within her, growing bigger each day—not a cluster of cells, fishlike in the water of her womb, but a little person, with a head and arms and feet, with fingers and toes, waiting to be released, to become—she saw this too—a swimmer in the world, a companion, a friend, a joy and a consolation. That was what she saw, that was what she had lost.

And Sharkey, who had been so enthusiastic about the child—the potential surfer, buddy, dude—had lost his fervor, did not seem to remember now that she’d been pregnant. He sank back into his half-smiling delusion in which he believed he was active, the waterman, the gardener, the chicken farmer, the orchid-grower. Yet he hardly left the house.

Thinking back to his rescuing her when she’d panicked in the waves at Leftovers, she now remembered how slow he’d been to see her, how clumsily he’d dug at the water with one hand while holding his boogie board—and she’d clung to him, feeling the struggle in his shoulders, and that tension had added to her fear. She’d sensed that he was weakening, not the Waimea lifeguard she’d known, nor the Sharkey who refused to be towed, who paddled out and dropped in to ride the long faces of waves on big North Shore days. He was slower and uncertain, and why?

In the suddenness of blood at the beach, the scorching pain of the miscarriage—the mess, his bewilderment, her grief—she hadn’t given much thought to his insisting that they swim out to this distant wave, farther than Chun’s or Alligators or the others. And he had abandoned her there. Nor had she preoccupied herself with his clumsy rescue—his lumbering in the surf. But now it seemed to her that he had contributed to the loss of the baby—and more, that it was another disturbing feature of this recent life of his, a blundering, a vagueness, a forgetting, a step backward, another accident, a repetition in the limbo that was his life now.

It was hard for her to admit that this strong person was weakened, or if not weakened physically, then diminished; that he needed her and that his dependence on her was something he still could not acknowledge.

It was news: that in the seemingly endless repetition of life—the back-and-forth—there was something imperceptible, a slowing, a diminution of vitality, and so the apparent sameness was misleading. He repeated his stories, but at the same time he abbreviated them in the slippage of his memory. His life appeared to be going in circles, but they were narrowing circles.