Erik Sullivan’s disappearance is the unresolved loss at the center of Tova Sullivan’s family history: an eighteen-year-old leaves for a late shift at the ferry ticket booth and never comes home, while the sea offers no body and no explanation. Years later, Tova can imagine several ways Erik might have died, but none becomes certain. The event persists not as a solved account of his final hours, but as a gap that reshapes what she knows about her son and what she can know at all.

The Last Known Evening

In 1989, on a Wednesday, Tova attended her usual Jazzercise class at the Sowell Bay Community Center. She was thirty-nine, wore an emerald-green leotard beneath her sweatpants, and returned home expecting to bathe. Instead, Will intercepted her, and the two made love in the bedroom in the last sunlight of the day. He spoke of the future, imagining that soon the house would belong to them alone. Erik, meanwhile, was eighteen and expected to begin at the University of Washington that fall. The ordinary intimacy of his parents’ evening would later stand beside the fact that neither knew where he had been that afternoon.

Tova had stopped keeping close track of the details of Erik’s social life a couple of years earlier. He was often out with friends, and she thought of him as a good, even great, kid. That trust is part of the circumstances of the disappearance: she did not know his exact plans or whereabouts, and in retrospect she cannot fill the afternoon with a reliable account. The next known point is his late-night shift at the ferry ticket booth. When he did not come home, Tova and Will reported his absence to the Sowell Bay Police.

The Morning After

The police arrived at the Sullivan house early the following day. In the living room, the green leotard still hung over the arm of the Charleston chair, where Will had left it after their lovemaking. While detectives spoke with Tova, she kept looking at the garment and could not believe that Erik was truly missing. She pictured him sleeping on a friend’s sofa or having forgotten to call. Her repeated insistence to herself that good kids sometimes did that reveals the distance between what she feared and what she could yet accept: for a time, absence still seemed capable of ending in an ordinary explanation.

The leotard’s small domestic detail becomes an accidental witness to the break in that ordinary evening. It remained visible during the police visit, then at some point was moved to the hamper and laundered. Tova does not remember doing it. After Erik’s disappearance was confirmed and he was declared dead, the action slipped from memory, as did so many details of that period. The garment’s movement from bedroom to chair to hamper is not evidence of what happened to Erik; its force lies in the way an unremarkable household object marks the last evening before the family’s life divided into before and after.

What Tova Can and Cannot Know

Much later, Tova tells Cameron Cassmore the story herself. Erik had gone to work at the ferry dock one July night after the summer following his senior year of high school and never returned. In her account, a boat had gone missing without anyone noticing, and the rope on its anchor had been cut. These details sharpen the mystery without resolving it: they establish circumstances around the night, but do not show what Erik did, where he went, or how he died.

Tova says she never believed Erik killed himself. Learning that he might have been seeing a girl—someone his friends did not really know about—complicates the story she had carried for years. She connects the girl to Cameron’s mother, whom she identifies as the former classmate she had remembered. The possibility of a concealed relationship gives Tova a new way to think about Erik’s private life, but it cannot supply a cause of death. A relationship may illuminate what Tova did not know about her son; it does not prove what happened at the ferry dock.

Competing Explanations and the Unanswered Loss

The physical circumstances admit another possibility. When Avery speaks of having once imagined trauma from combat or an explosion, Tova pictures a sailing accident: a shift in the boat’s course, a gust catching a slackened sail, and the boom swinging into Erik and knocking him overboard. The sequence is imagined, not witnessed. Tova can also set it against other facts: Erik had captained the crew team and was an accomplished sailor, but there had been stolen beer, and there was a girl. Each detail makes a different account imaginable; none settles the matter. The text preserves the distinction between a plausible reconstruction and knowledge.

The family’s memorials make that uncertainty tangible. Erik’s body never left Puget Sound, yet his headstone stands beside Will’s at Fairview Memorial Park. Tova resents the stone’s presence on land and its incorrect inscription, which omits Lindgren, her maiden name, from Erik’s full name. She has imagined throwing the marker from the pier, but does not do so. The stone commemorates someone whose final resting place is unknown, and its error repeats the larger incompleteness of the record: even the memorial does not fully say who Erik was.

The event is therefore presented through belated recollection rather than a witnessed final scene. Tova’s memories move between the unremarkable Wednesday at home, the police visit, what she later learns about a girl, and a hypothetical accident at sea. That structure lets new information alter her understanding without closing the case. Erik remains at once the trusted eighteen-year-old she expected home and the young man whose plans and last hours she never knew. His disappearance becomes a permanent boundary on Tova’s knowledge, not a mystery the story pretends to solve.