Tova’s enduring grief over losing her son and husband

Tova’s enduring grief over losing her son and husband is not a single episode but a continuing presence in her life: Erik’s disappearance remains an unanswered wound, while memories of Will surface in domestic routines and in the exhausting work that followed his cancer. The two losses differ in what Tova knows and can recall, yet both shape how she inhabits the present and imagines the years ahead.

Two losses, and the unanswered night

Erik vanished at eighteen, after failing to come home from his late-night shift at the ferry ticket booth. Tova still does not know where he was on the afternoon before that night. The police asked repeatedly, but she could only say that he was probably out with friends; she had stopped tracking the details of his social life because he was a good, independent teenager. The ordinary freedom she had allowed him became inseparable from the fact she could not account for his final hours.

The last evening she remembers began as an ordinary Wednesday in 1989. Tova went to Jazzercise, came home ready for a bath, and was intercepted by Will. They made love in the last sunlight, with her emerald-green leotard flung over a chair and Will imagining the day they would have the house to themselves. Erik was expected to begin at the University of Washington that fall. By the following morning, the leotard was still in the living room when the Sowell Bay Police arrived after Tova and Will reported him missing. The intimate trace of an ordinary marriage and the officers’ questions occupied the same room, while Tova still expected Erik to turn up at a friend’s house or call to explain himself.

At first, she could not believe the detectives’ account of the situation. She imagined Erik asleep on someone’s sofa, having forgotten to call, because even good children sometimes did that. Later, the leotard was moved to the hamper and must have been washed, but Tova cannot remember doing it. After Erik’s disappearance was confirmed and he was declared dead, some memories seemed to slip into a void. His death is also described to Cameron as drowning; thirty years later, the fact of his loss remains more definite than the circumstances of his last hours.

Will in the house and in its work

Will’s death had a different shape. His cancer brought hospitalizations and treatments, followed by paperwork, insurance appeals, and arrangements. Tova spent hours alone at the kitchen table late at night trying to manage it all. She describes the process as nearly as terrible as the illness itself, a practical burden that fell to her while she was losing her husband. His death is relatively straightforward in contrast with Erik’s unresolved disappearance, but that clarity did not make the work of surviving it easy.

The house preserves small, almost inadvertent records of their life together. Tova remembers the green leotard, which Will liked because it matched her eyes, still lying over the Charleston chair when the police came. She later had the chair reupholstered in cheerful blue-and-green paisley, yet it continued to seem complicit in the memory of that night. In the attic, Erik’s baby toys remain where Tova stored them after her mother urged her to save them for possible grandchildren. Their presence marks a future once imagined and then interrupted.

The attic changed after Will had an incident a few years after Erik’s death. Tova does not like to think about what happened and stresses that it was not usual for him; she understands it as something grief can do to a person. The incident led to a larger, brighter dormer window. Her practical account of that improvement sits beside her recognition that nothing is normal when a child is lost. The room now opens toward the treetops and has the house’s best view of the water, but its light does not erase the history held there.

Memory carried into ordinary life

Grief enters Tova’s present through gestures rather than formal observances. Looking across the bay at a freighter under moonlight, she closes her eyes and imagines Erik beneath the surface, holding the reflected lights for her. The image brings him close without resolving what happened to him: the sea remains both the setting of her loss and the space in which her imagination can still meet her son.

Will returns in a different register. Eating chicken and rice on the davenport, Tova recalls that he sometimes ate there when a game was on. The familiar meal and the television are part of an evening alone, but the memory makes their former domestic routine briefly present. She is also glad to share her bed with Cat, though she once could not have imagined doing so. New companionship does not replace the people she has lost; it settles into a life already shaped by their absence.

Tova’s thoughts about aging show how bereavement has made future care feel personal and uncertain. When Mary Ann’s news suggests that she can no longer live independently, Tova thinks of friends and acquaintances who will be cared for by their children or live near family. She remembers the paperwork she handled after Will’s death and wonders who will return that favor when her own time comes. Her concern is not only for the loss already endured, but also for what may happen when she needs help herself.

Solitude, connection, and continuing absence

Marcellus recognizes that Tova has no surviving heir and that her only child died thirty years earlier. From his perspective, grief has molded her life and is currently driving her into seclusion; he fears it may eventually drive her to something worse. His concern gives the private state an outward consequence: Tova’s sorrow is not merely remembered in scenes from the past but is visible in the way she withdraws from the living world. When Ethan tells Cameron that Tova’s son drowned at eighteen, Cameron responds with shock, and the loss becomes part of how another person understands her.

The novel also places that solitude beside the possibility of renewed attachment. Cameron is drawn to Avery, and he describes his growing interest in her as one of the reasons life seems to be going his way. At the same time, he finds Tova’s company enjoyable during his evening work at the aquarium, even while he cannot understand her devotion to Marcellus. These connections do not cancel Tova’s bereavement; they show that her life can contain companionship alongside grief.

In a dream, Tova feels arms with suckers grow around her, enclosing her in a warm, silent cocoon. She recognizes the feeling that comes over her as relief and is blissfully alone. The dream makes solitude both shelter and risk: it offers quiet, while Marcellus’s account has already linked her seclusion to the force of her grief. Later, standing alone at the pier, Tova tells the bay that she misses both Erik and Marcellus, then taps her heart and returns to the others. The scene distinguishes the cherished son she lost from the exceptional octopus she has loved, while letting the same water hold both absences. Her grief persists, but it does not prevent her from turning back toward company, pie, and a game of Scrabble.