Tova Sullivan’s bereavements and unresolved grief

Tova Sullivan’s bereavements are defined above all by the unresolved disappearance of her only child, Erik Sullivan. Although the sheriff, neighbors, and newspapers settled on suicide after a boat was found with its anchor line cut, Tova has never believed that explanation. Her grief is therefore not only the pain of losing Erik, but the enduring uncertainty of not knowing what happened to him. The story shows that uncertainty returning through family memories, familiar places, and the sea itself, while Tova’s usually private sorrow gradually finds a listener in Marcellus.

The disappearance and its unanswered record

Erik vanished at eighteen, during the summer before he was due to begin at the University of Washington. The night he failed to come home, he had been working the late shift at the ferry ticket booth, a responsibility he took seriously. The last person known to have seen him was a deckhand on the eleven-o’clock southbound ferry, who reported nothing unusual. When the booth was found unlocked, its register cash was accounted for; Erik’s backpack remained beneath the chair, along with his cassette player, headphones, and wallet. The sheriff initially considered that Erik might have stepped away briefly and intended to return. To Tova, the abandoned belongings and the ordinary duty he had left unfinished have never resolved the essential question: why would he leave the booth while on duty?

A week later, a rusty Sun Cat was found washed ashore. It had gone unnoticed as missing from the small marina beside the ferry dock, and its anchor rope had been cut cleanly. Erik’s fingerprints were on the rudder. The evidence was thin, but the sheriff concluded that Erik had taken his own life; neighbors, newspapers, and the wider community repeated that conclusion. Tova’s response remains unequivocal: she has never believed it. The public account has an ending, but it does not give her an explanation she can accept.

The account of the search also leaves a brutal absence where certainty might have been. Tova remembers that authorities continued looking for Erik’s body, but she believes it would already have been consumed at the bottom of the ocean. When she later tells Marcellus that Erik drowned alone in a little boat, she describes both the search and the cut anchor line, then returns to the thought that nothing lasts long on the ocean floor. The sea is at once the place associated with Erik’s presumed death and the force that has kept the facts beyond her reach.

A grief carried inwardly

The disappearance altered Tova’s sense of belonging among the Knit-Wits. The group had begun as a knitting club and had become a refuge for women whose children had grown up and moved away. Tova initially resisted joining: the other women’s empty homes held a bittersweetness she could not share, because Erik was gone and her own emptiness held no sweetness. Five years after his disappearance, she still experienced reminders as wounds whose scabs could be disturbed and made to bleed again.

Motherhood is especially isolating in these gatherings. The women speak openly and expansively about children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, while Tova keeps her own motherhood private, feeling it sunk deep inside her. She can participate in the club’s ordinary conversations and friendships, yet still feel like a misplaced piece in the group’s puzzle. Her reserve does not mean that Erik has become less important; rather, the scale and character of her loss resist the familiar stories through which the others share family life.

The small, domestic memories of Erik remain vivid. A few days before he disappeared, Tova baked an almond cake for his eighteenth birthday, and its marzipan smell lingered in the house. Years later, she recalls his argument with her over a broken Dala horse, a favorite that had come from her mother. The quarrel was slight, but the object’s damage became part of the remembered life around his disappearance. Even the removal of old furniture could renew the sense of loss: when Will Sullivan and Tova eventually got rid of a davenport, she hid in the bathroom while the movers carried it away, unable to watch another piece of Erik’s life leave the house.

The last ordinary day

Tova’s memory of the Wednesday Erik disappeared is marked by what she did not know. In 1989, she attended her usual Jazzercise class, then came home expecting to draw a bath. Will intercepted her, and they made love on the bare sheets, with the quilt pushed to the foot of the bed. He imagined that soon the house would belong to the two of them, since Erik was expected to start university that autumn. The intimacy of that afternoon stands beside the unknown facts: Tova still does not know where Erik had been, and when police questioned her, she could only say that he was probably with friends, as he often was.

The following morning, after Tova and Will reported that Erik had not returned from his shift, the Sowell Bay Police came to the house. Tova’s green leotard was still draped over the living-room chair. It became an unofficial part of the record, a trace of the ordinary evening that preceded the search. The contrast between the couple’s private expectation of an empty nest and the police arrival makes the loss feel less like a story with a clearly marked boundary than a rupture in an otherwise familiar day.

Memory, the sea, and Marcellus

Tova’s memories of Erik repeatedly meet the present through the sea. Looking toward Puget Sound, she imagines Erik beneath the surface, holding candles for her. The image brings tenderness into the same landscape that represents his disappearance, without resolving what happened. Elsewhere, in Marcellus’s presence at the aquarium, she points toward the dark window that overlooks the water and explains that Erik died at the place beyond it. She also wonders whether the sea would comfort Marcellus, a captive creature able to see his natural habitat nearby but not reach it. Her comparison with caged birds reveals how readily she recognizes the ache of being separated from a life that remains visible.

Tova’s account of Erik’s death is not a simple acceptance of the official verdict. She says that he drowned, but continues to describe the explanations as peculiar and incomplete. She remembers that he seemed happy and that the argument over the broken Dala horse was silly; neither detail proves what happened, but both resist the reduction of his life to a presumed motive. Marcellus listens while she speaks. At one point he averts his eye after hearing about Erik’s fate, a small gesture that Tova reads as if he were acknowledging the place of octopuses in the food chain. The exchange does not supply answers. It does, however, create a setting in which Tova can tell the story rather than keep every part of it sealed inside herself.

A continuing bond

Tova’s dream of being enclosed by octopus arms gives her grief a strikingly intimate form. Lying in her own bed, she imagines suckered arms growing around her until they make a dark, silent cocoon. The feeling she recognizes is relief: the enclosure is warm, soft, and lets her be alone. The dream does not explain her loss or promise that it is finished. Instead, it places solitude and comfort together, reflecting how isolation can both shelter her and contain her.

By the time Tova stands at the pier railing and tells the bay that she misses both Erik and Marcellus, grief has become speakable without becoming resolved. She taps her heart, then turns back toward the others and the life still waiting at the condo, including pie with Avery and a Scrabble game. The movement back to company does not erase the address to the bay. Tova’s bond with Erik continues through memory, place, and speech; her return to ordinary plans shows that remembrance and continued living can occupy the same moment.