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from her lap, and then limped off toward the mud room. She’d gained some weight since her hip replacement and still found it hard to
get up and down. She was wearing an old Cowichan sweater and a long skirt, made out of some rough peasant fabric that covered the tops of her gum boots when she put them back on. She stomped her
feet in the boots and then looked up at Ruth, who had come to the door to see her off.
    “I still say this should have been my find,” she said, pulling a rain parka on over the sweater. “But maybe it’s better you got it, since at least you can read some of
the Japanese. Good luck. Don’t let yourself get too distracted now . . .”
    Ruth braced herself.
    “. . . How’s the new book coming, anyway?” Muriel asked.
    3.
    At night, in bed, Ruth would often read to Oliver. It used to be that when she’d had a good writing day, she would read aloud what she’d just written, finding that
if she fell asleep thinking about the scene she was working on, she would often wake with a sense of where to go next. It had been a long while, however, since she’d had a day like that or
shared anything new.
    That night, she read the first few entries of Nao’s diary. When she came to the passage about perverts and panties and the zebra-skin bed, she felt a sudden flush of discomfort. It
wasn’t embarrassment. She was never shy about this kind of thing, herself. Rather, her discomfort was more on behalf of the girl. She was feeling protective. But she needn’t have
worried.
    “The nun sounds interesting,” Oliver said, as he fiddled with the broken watch.
    “Yes,” she said, relieved. “The Taish ō Democracy was an interesting time for Japanese women.”
    “Do you think she’s still alive?”
    “The nun? I doubt it. She was a hundred and four—” “I meant the girl.”
    “I don’t know,” Ruth said. “It’s crazy, but I’m kind of worried about her. I guess I’ll have to keep on reading to find out.”
    4.
    Do you feel special yet?
    The girl’s question lingered.
    “It’s an interesting thought,” Oliver said, still tinkering with the watch. “Do you?”
    “Do I what?”
    “She says she’s writing it for you. So do you feel special?”
    “That’s ridiculous,” Ruth said.
    What if you just think I’m a jerk and toss me into the garbage?
    “Speaking about garbage,” Oliver said. “I’ve been thinking about the Great Garbage Patches recently . . .”
    “The what?”
    “The Great Eastern and Great Western Garbage Patches? Enormous masses of garbage and debris floating in the oceans? You must have heard about them . . .”
    “Yes,” she said. “No. I mean, sort of.” It didn’t matter, since he clearly wanted to tell her about them. She put down the diary, letting it rest on the white
bedcovers. She took off her glasses and laid them on top of the book. The glasses were retro, with thick black frames that looked nice against the worn red cloth cover.
    “There are at least eight of them in the world’s oceans,” he said. “According to this book I’ve been reading, two of them, the Great Eastern Patch and Great Western
Patch, are in the Turtle Gyre, and converge at the southern tip of Hawaii. The Great Eastern Patch is the size of Texas. The Great Western is even larger, half the size of the continental
USA.”
    “What’s in them?”
    “Plastic mostly. Like your freezer bag. Soda bottles, styrofoam, take-out food containers, disposable razors, industrial waste. Anything we throw away that floats.”
    “That’s horrible. Why are you telling me this?”
    He shook the watch and held it up to his ear. “No reason. Just that they’re there, and anything that doesn’t sink or escape from the gyre gets sucked up into the middle of a
garbage patch. That’s what would have happened to your freezer bag if it hadn’t escaped. Sucked up and becalmed, slowly eddying around. The plastic ground into particles for the fish
and zooplankton to eat. The diary and