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complete another novel, she had
decided instead to write about the years she had spent taking care of her mother, who’d suffered from Alzheimer’s. Now, looking at the pile of pages, she felt a quickening flush of
panic at the thought of all her own lost time, the confused mess she’d made of this draft, and the work that still needed to be done to sort it all out. What was she doing wasting precious
hours on someone else’s story?
    She picked up the diary and, using the side of her thumb, started riffling through the pages. She wasn’t reading, in fact she was trying not to. She only wanted to ascertain whether the
handwriting continued all the way to the end, or if it petered out partway through. How many diaries and journals had she herself started and then abandoned? How many aborted novels languished in
folders on her hard drive? But to her surprise, although the color of the ink occasionally bled from purple to pink to black to blue and back to purple again, the writing itself never faltered,
growing smaller and if anything even denser, straight through to the very last, tightly packed page. The girl had run out of paper before she ran out of words.
    And then?
    Ruth snapped the book shut and closed her eyes for good measure to keep herself from cheating and reading the final sentence, but the question lingered, floating like a retinal burn in the
darkness of her mind:
What happens in the end?
    2.
    Muriel examined the barnacle growth on the outer freezer bag through the reading glasses she kept perched on her nose. “If I were you, I’d get Callie to take a look.
Maybe she can figure out how old these critters are, and from that you can calculate how long the bag’s been in the water.”
    “Oliver thinks it’s the leading edge of drift from the tsunami,” Ruth said.
    Muriel frowned. “I suppose it’s possible. Seems too quick, though. They’re starting to see the lighter stuff washing up in Alaska and Tofino, but we’re tucked back pretty
far inland here. Where did you say you found it?”
    “At the south end of the beach, below Jap Ranch.”
    No one on the island called it by that name anymore, but Muriel was an old-timer and knew the reference. The old homestead, one of the most beautiful places on the island, had once belonged to a
Japanese family, who were forced to sell when they were interned during the war. The property had changed hands several times since then, and now was owned by elderly Germans. Once Ruth heard the
nickname, she stubbornly persisted in using it. As a person of Japanese ancestry, she said, she had the right, and it was important not to let New Age correctness erase the history of the
island.
    “Fine for you,” Oliver said. His family had emigrated from Germany. “Not so fine if I use it. It’s hardly fair.”
    “Exactly,” Ruth said. “It wasn’t fair. My mom’s family were interned, too. Maybe I could lodge a land claim on behalf of my people. That property was stolen from
them. I could just go there and sit in their driveway and refuse to leave. Repossess the land and kick out the Germans.”
    “What do you have against my people?” Oliver asked.
    Their marriage was like this, an axial alliance—her people interned, his firebombed in Stuttgart—a small accidental consequence of a war fought before either of them was born.
    “We’re by-products of the mid-twentieth century,” Oliver said.
    “Who isn’t?”
    “I doubt it’s from the tsunami,” Muriel said, placing the freezer bag back down on the table and turning her attention to the Hello Kitty lunchbox.
“More likely from a cruise ship, going up the Inside Passage, or maybe Japanese tourists.”
    Pesto, who had been twining himself around Muriel’s legs, now jumped up onto her lap and took a swat at her thick grey braid, which hung over her shoulder like a snake. The end of the
braid was secured with a colorful beaded elastic, which Pesto found irresistible. He also liked her dangling