Branko was quiet. In the next bay Vesna had stopped crying.
"I don't forgive you," Branko said. His voice was very tired. "I want you to know that. I want to be honest, if you're going to be honest. I don't forgive you. Maybe someday. I don't know. Not now."
"I know."
"But you came out to the rocks." He looked up. His eyes were red and wet. "So. I know what you are. Whatever you say in that room. I know what you are."
He turned and went back through the curtain, holding the blanket around him.
Duncan sat on the gurney. Sig was sitting in a plastic chair against the wall in borrowed scrubs, with his wet clothes in a paper bag at his feet, and his hands, which had been steady as stone on the boat hook, were shaking again.
"That was well done," the old man said. "Out there."
"You called the seas."
Sig nodded. "First time in twenty-three years," he said, "anybody let me tell them where to go." He looked at his hands. "It felt like being forgiven. A little. Not all the way."
The Marine Board into the loss of the Santa Rosalia convened at nine o'clock on Wednesday, the twelfth of November, in a hearing room on Terminal Island with a flag in the corner and folding chairs. Duncan sat in the second row in the suit he had bought for his father's funeral, which pulled across the shoulders now and pressed on his taped ribs. His mother sat beside him. She had taken the day off from the cannery for the first time in nine years. When they sat down she put her hand on his knee for a moment and took it away again.
Sig sat on his other side, shaved, in a jacket Ilda had found him somewhere, with his watch cap folded in his lap.