Tova Sullivan and Will Sullivan

Tova Sullivan and Will Sullivan’s marriage is presented through the intimate scale of shared routines and the lasting weight of their losses. Their affection surfaces in an ordinary evening of lovemaking and a plan for the quieter life they expect after Erik leaves for university; the next morning, Erik is missing. Later, Will’s cancer, death, and the decisions surrounding their home leave Tova to carry their family history forward largely on her own.

Marriage and Shared Home

In 1989, Tova comes home from her regular Jazzercise class expecting to draw a bath. Will intercepts her, and they make love on the bare sheets in the last sunlight of the day. Their ease with one another is visible in the scene’s unceremonious details: the quilt is bunched at the foot of the bed, and Tova’s emerald-green leotard ends up draped over a chair in the living room. Will likes the leotard and has told her that its color matches her eyes.

The tenderness of the evening is inseparable from their anticipation of a change in family life. Erik is expected to begin at the University of Washington that fall, and Will looks forward to having the house to themselves. His remark expresses not rejection of their son but the couple’s expectation of a new chapter together, with the family home once again belonging chiefly to the two of them.

That anticipated transition never arrives in the way they imagine. Erik fails to return from his late shift at the ferry ticket booth, and Will and Tova report him missing. When the Sowell Bay Police come to the house the next morning, Tova is still focused on the leotard left in the tidy living room. It becomes an unofficial part of the record of that night: an intimate trace of the life she and Will had been living, left in place while detectives discuss the disappearance that will reshape it.

Illness, Death, and the Work of Bereavement

Will later dies of cancer. Tova regards his death as relatively straightforward for him, but the illness brings hospitalizations and treatments, while its aftermath requires paperwork, insurance appeals, and arrangements. She spends hours alone at the kitchen table trying to manage them. Her recollection makes bereavement practical as well as emotional: the surviving spouse must attend to systems and decisions even while coping with the loss.

The work also sharpens Tova’s anxiety about her own future. Having handled Will’s affairs, she wonders who will take on such responsibilities when her time comes, and whether the paperwork will instead pass into an heirless void. Her concern is connected to the life they made together: with Will gone, she faces both the prospect of aging alone and the prospect of losing the house that has held their family’s history.

Memorials and the House They Leave Behind

At Fairview Memorial Park, Will’s headstone records his name and dates, 1938–2017, followed by the brief epitaph describing him as a husband, father, and friend. Tova chose that inscription and declined the opportunity to add more. Her judgment that Will was a simple man gives the concise wording the character of a considered memorial rather than an incomplete one.

Erik’s headstone stands beside Will’s, although Erik’s body never left the sea. Will had insisted that their son have a stone; Tova, who had not wanted one, remains troubled by the mismatch between the grave marker and the fact of Erik’s disappearance. The inscription also fails to record Lindgren, Tova’s maiden name and Erik’s second middle name. Her irritation at the error and her fantasy of throwing the stone off the pier reveal how the memorial can preserve a family bond while also fixing an absence in a form she cannot accept.

At the cemetery, Tova eventually tells Will aloud that she is selling the house. It is her first time speaking to his grave. The announcement links her present decision to the marriage: she is addressing the person with whom she shared the home before undertaking a change he will not witness. Her gesture does not erase their connection; it gives the impending sale a place within it.

Continuing Bonds and Loss

Tova’s memories of Will remain attached to particular objects, places, and habits: the leotard left after their last ordinary evening, the headstone whose wording she selected, and the house she must decide whether to leave. These details keep their relationship present without making grief a simple refusal to move forward. She can remember their shared future and still make a decision about the house after his death.

The family losses also converge in Tova’s private thoughts. Beneath the moonlit water, she imagines Erik holding candles for her, while at Will’s grave she speaks of the house they shared. Near the bay, she later whispers that she misses both the cherished son and the exceptional octopus the water took from her life. The statement names the scale of her bereavement, but her relationship with Will remains legible in the domestic history behind it: their marriage was one of the bonds through which Erik’s absence, the work of mourning, and the question of what to do with home became part of Tova’s continuing life.