Ford leans forward and sees that Cecile is crying. He has done his fair share in the seven hundred sixty-five days since the boy disappeared, but she had refused the process. Refused to believe it was anything but a temporary sacrifice to be later redeemed, this tiny amalgam to be re-forged, made even more whole, returned as a zygote skirting an ocean’s placental waters.

I can hardly remember him anymore, Cecile says.

Ford reels her in with his arms and asks, Don’t you remember his eyes?

Describe them to me, she says.

Ford wants to, but finds he has no words other than those he would also use to explain the ocean. And in the silence, he knows: He won’t be able to stop her, and he won’t be around to hear her splash, the sound of the sea absorbing its oblation without thanks.

Ford becomes a counter of days. Seven hundred eighty-eight since the boy was born. Seven hundred eighty since he went sailing. Sixteen days since Cecile joined him in the blue beyond. Eight hundred twenty-five days since the ocean last offered an oblation improved, as if still churning over the nameless child, over the woman he loved. As if still unsure of how to return them improved, or return them at all. Ford burrows the tally in drink, carries its depth like a soldier proud of the miseries he has seen and wrought.

In the hours between one day and the next, he takes comfort in thinking about Cecile swimming through an oceanic institute for the not-quite-there, dolphins for psychologists, so that she might emerge once again from the water further distilled, more perfect, knowing that mistakes had been made and are forgiven. He thinks about her hair becoming more white than before, stained by salt, until it becomes something untouchable, like the loci of stars.

For his son’s third birthday, Ford gives only beer bottles. He has been collecting them for three hundred twenty-three days—ever since Cecile struck the ocean and passed on. He pulls a dozen heavy black bags out of the garage and hefts them up to the edge of the cliff. He ribbons the plastic with an eight-inch fillet knife that had once been the rusted pocketknife from his father’s childhood. The bottles squirm inside like the guts of fish. He pushes the bags over the cliff until the water beneath him is littered with the sound of glass clanking against glass. Every now and then, a shattering punctuates the night.

The glass urns are empty, which means they will soon fill with water and sink, but they are nonetheless brimming full with everything Ford wants to say to his son. Facts, lessons, taxonomies of animals and plants. How to read stories out of the stars. Among the messages, there are a few conclusions and more questions. The un-living can be returned improved, but are there limits? The un-living can return alive, as Cecile had, but was that a circumstance never to be stumbled upon again? Even more important, can the living return living? Can the living be improved, or are they already perfect? Can one drown in the ocean and be roiled against the rocks and still live? And worse of all, can death be considered an improvement?

A beach littered with cassette tapes, seaweed wrapped into the take-up reels. Old 8-tracks Ford had thrown into the ocean years ago, before Cecile was even a possibility. Before his son’s arrival and disappearance etched markers into his timeline. These, the first oblations returned since Cecile gave their son away, since she joined him. He almost throws them back straightaway, cursing the ocean for its skewed priorities—how can these sounds be in more need of improvement, of return, than a woman, than a child? But he tries to take solace in the fact that the process is still working. That alone is hope. He peels the seaweed out of the take-up reels and slips them into the player and listens to all the static, the ocean’s voice, thinking that if he waits long enough, he might hear their voice among the waves. Again and again, he flips the tapes and turns up the volume.

Ford told Cecile about the sea and its oblations on the day she told him she was pregnant. In that way, they traded secrets to keep each other bound. Before he took her out onto the cliff, he told her to pick anything in the house that she would have liked to see made better. She touched everything he owned as though she had never seen any of it before, bringing each to her lips. Finally, she shook her head and reached to the twist of hair at the back of her head, unfurled it by peeling away the blue-jeweled hairpin he bought for her in the time between her washing-up and his proposal.

This, she said, her hair flowing down over her shoulders.

Ford nodded and took her out to the headland, explained to her the way oblations given would be returned in time, and improved. Explained to her how everything they owned together had once been
something lesser.

He said, But if you would let me, I would promise to never give anything to the ocean again. I would say nothing could be improved upon this. You and her, or him.

If you let me, she mimicked.

You’ve never liked when I make promises, he said, reaching out for her, touching her face, more beautiful than the one that had come before, that he had taken first into memory and then into flesh.

She said, Why make promises when the ocean is right there.

She threw her hairpin and they watched it strike the ocean, disappear. She dove into his embrace, and Ford couldn’t tell if she was asking a question or making a statement of fact. Couldn’t tell if she had come to understand her own origin from the truth’s refraction, the spaces between the truths he did speak. From then on, until the day she gave herself to the ocean, she wore her seableached hair down, as if to remind him of the fact that she, too, were still in process and in waiting.

If the ocean is mothering and then birthing these treasures, it has a varied gestation, Ford knows. He thinks about zygotes diving into the uterus and clinging, cells dividing, twisting, crawling. Waves on a beach, over and over, mitosis against sand. There is a placenta—the muck in which Ford’s oblations settle before they were rendered anew. There is the accumulation of systems and procedures, bonds formed. Every oblation becomes a pregnancy, Ford knows, some longer than others. But the consequence is the same: one offers a piece of themselves and is returned a future that they must love.

For his son’s fourth birthday, Ford buys a pair of baseball gloves and a few baseballs. He conditions his glove with oil and wears it around the house, constantly working the fulcrum until it’s loose, until he can fire a baseball straight into the air and snap the leather around the stitch ing on its way down. Then he conditions his son’s glove, barely wide
enough to hold the baseball, and he forks a thumb and two fingers inside. He presses and stretches and imagines, in place of his hand, his son’s, a shape he cannot even image. There is no frame of reference but his days-old palmprint, one floret never meant to be offered.

Ford takes the gloves and the baseballs up to the cliff, where he sits, tosses one ball in a circular pattern like an unpracticed juggler—left hand to air, to glove, rolling back into the left, again and again. He begins the ritual by throwing his son’s baseball glove, which lands palm-up, and as the leather takes on water, the fingers open like a flower. Ford tries to throw the baseballs so they land in that space, as if
the ocean might catch what the boy cannot. He misses every time, but knows that one way or another, they’ll get where they need to be.

Ford holds on to his glove. No telling when he might need it again.

One night when he can’t sleep, Ford lurches from bed and cocoons himself in a blanket Cecile once brandished across her shoulders for the winter between her arrival and the birth of their son. He walks down to the beach, which glitters in the moonlight like a wash of stars, sand replaced by fragments of glass. They are perfectly smooth like marbles, burnished and sparkling clear or amber or azure. The remnants of the bottles he offered four hundred forty-three days ago. As he walks, the pieces tinker as they waterfall against each other. Most are the size of pebbles, the width and length of his thumbnails, but a few of them are large, concave fragments that smell of salt, that seem to hold onto a fleeting warmth from the sun as he holds them up to his cheek.

But he remembers that these are more oblations returned, more improvements senseless, before the only two he cares for. He
has questions for the ocean: Had it even delivered the messages within these bottles? Did it care about the boy, about his wife, these lives offered? He remembers what it feels like to mourn as he takes handfuls of the glitter glass and throws them into the water. They catch moonlight until they drop into the waves and disappear like the slow fade of fireworks in a hazy sky.

And then he’s sorry.

He strips himself naked and dives into the surf, taking in mouthfuls of saltwater, as he tries to collect the fragments he threw away. When he can breathe, he apologizes to the ocean for what he’s done. He’s grateful. He is. Not just for this, but for many things, going far back. He dives again and pulls a handful of glass from the muck and when he breaches again, he hears a whisper, or the wind, or the waves, or her voice, but by the time he clears his eyes to look, it’s gone.

He opens his hand and inside, among the marbled bottles and shining through a slick of mud, is a key.

Cecile herself went post-term, three hundred days even. On the long side, a slow pregnancy. Maybe that’s all, Ford thinks, key in hand, and he has already proved to himself, in the agonizing days when that little boy stayed wrapped inside his mother and refused to budge, that he is capable of waiting.

A key opens doors and unlocks passages unseen. A key is a marker, a sign. Even its teeth have some truth embedded in them, even if it’s only a promise. Ford tries the key with all the doors in the house, as if it might lead him to a new world beyond, but finds the keyways incompatible. This key, these ridges, do not lead anywhere he can yet see.

He has questions, then. What does this key unlock? Where did it come from? What is improved into a key? And then comes the more pressing question, whether to keep this hope or throw it back, have
faith in deeper improvement. The lock could be the water itself, his javelin-throw, the necessary binding. Or, the metal could sink into the muck and rest alongside the graveyard of forgotten oblations swaying in the tide. He stands at the headland and twists the key around in his fingers.

For now, just to be safe, he keeps the key tucked between the mattress and box-spring.

For his son’s fifth birthday, Ford buys a red bicycle with a coaster brake, one gear, training wheels. He rests it atop the rocks, rear wheel facing toward the water, so that he can kneel down by the front, hands on either end of the handlebars, as if to give a pep talk.

You can do this. Just pedal pedal pedal. And don’t try to look back at me. You’ll fall that way.

He lets go of the bike, thinking gravity and the sloped ridgeline will guide it backward into the water, but the coaster brake catches, leaves one training wheel without purchase, spinning idle. Some force, ocean or beyond, teasing him. Testing his patience, the depth of his love. He tries to break his voice against the ocean’s flow, tries to push away the water and see what has come of his boy and his wife. When nothing happens, he kicks the bicycle and sends it tumbling off the cliff. As it falls, Ford sees that he’s kinked the handlebars.

Sorry, he says. Sorry. Please, just be safe. Pedal pedal pedal. Don’t fall. Don’t look back, but, please, come back. Come get born.

Ford steps out of this house one morning and sees, just cresting over the top of the dune, a rooftop, multicolored. He puts down his mug of coffee and runs to find a shack made of colored bricks resting atop the marbled beach. There are windows and a door—it is, more or less, in the shape of the house he built for his son. And there is a panic in his heart.

He pushes against a door resting on salt-rusted hinges. Inside, nothing. No boy to be named, no Cecile. The interior is bigger than it looks from the outside, but in the same proportions as the structure he
made from interlocking blocks years ago. Inside, the colors are muted and the blocks seem to bleed together. He runs his hands along the walls, feeling for the cracks between them. Yes, it is real. Yes, it is better.

He runs around the dune and jumps into his truck, backs it down the dirt pathway leading to the beach, unsheathes a metal-coiled tether, which he strings in through one of the front windows and out
the doorway, secures with a carabiner. When Ford steps back into his truck, slowly bringing up the engine, the house drifts along the marbles more easily than he would have thought. He deposits the oblation along the curved path between his house and the water, but well within the ocean’s sightline.

Coming from the beach, there is a stream of glass that shines in the morning light like the trail of a tear.

Ford takes the key to the headland. He stands with his back to the water, key in fist, fist to chest. He closes his eyes and thinks about jumping himself. It is a game of probability. There is a chance he finds his wife and nearly six-year-old son somewhere in the depths of the ocean, where they have been waiting for him. There is a chance he dies. There is a chance he misses his family in that world beyond, and they return improved and ready for his love, only to find the home behind the dune emptied of him. Still, he knows every day he remains on land is a chance, too, but not quite like the others.

He looks at the key again, and now he sees how alike in shape it is to the hairpin Cecile offered on the day she announced her pregnancy. He kisses this oblation improved, because what he likes about keys is that there is nothing other than true or false. Yes or no. Either it works, or it doesn’t. There are no chances. And he feels sure that nothing—not even this ocean—would make a key for a lock that does not or never will exist.

The more Ford contemplates the ocean’s statutes, the more he believes in its tragic simplicity. The inanimate can be improved with a heartbeat, as Cecile once had, but once there is the bud of a brain, a lattice on which to hang the emotion of love, there is already perfection, and by then, it’s far too late.

When Ford takes the key out from beneath the mattress and holds it in his hands until the metal warms and feels alive, he thinks about Cecile. Thinks about the night she arrived on the beach naked in the moonlight. The night he woke on some premonition and stepped out on the front porch and found her crossing the dune, arms looped around her own chest. How she stumbled toward him and into his embrace, as though they had already shared years of history that only she remembered. Began that night their performance, how she said she felt as if she was made not of matter or moonlight, but rather its reflection off the surface of the ocean.

And over the first months they spent together, she wondered about her forgotten history, the people she thought she’d left behind. Parents of her own, siblings, perhaps. Ford offered to help her, feigning ignorance, but she didn’t know where to begin, so why not stake a claim, say that life began here, on this beach, in these arms?

She said, That’s all. You found a part of me no one else had, and you unlocked it. Toward her chest—not quite her heart, but close enough—she made a fist and twisted it, like someone turning a key. And then she tossed her hand over the shoulder, spread her fingers, throwing imagination into the waves. He tried to track its invisible flight through the sky, as if it contained the truth she needed to hear to make her forever happy, to make her completely moonlight, the one thing so perfect even the ocean turned it away nightly.

He needed to see, but she blocked his vision with a kiss.

Ford wakes to the sound of splashing water. He opens his eyes and listens—sometimes a heavy wave rolls through, carried on a long westward fetch—but no, this is something else. A struggle in the surf. Ford is out of bed and out the door, sprinting straight up the dune, not around. As he reaches the crest, he sees not his wife or his half-grown son, but a horse, white-coated, struggling against the waves among a veneer of glittering glass orbs. Its muscles strain and its eyes glow, and it wears a red-and-white saddle blanket across its back.

Ford stumbles down the opposite side of the dune and approaches the horse. It eyes him sidelong and stutter-steps further into the ocean. He says, Just stay calm. Welcome back.

The horse brays and opens its mouth, and when Ford reaches out his hand to touch its muzzle, it strains to reach him. And then he sees what is holding the horse back: a cuff around its right hindlimb,
a chain strung out beyond the waves. Ford glides his hand down the horse’s body and whispers to it and looks at the lock as best he can through the swell.

It can’t be. It must be.

Ford runs back toward the house and the horse tries to follow, bawls as the cuff grinds into its skin. As his body pumps, Ford knows a gestation has been completed, and here is the remainder: one thousand six hundred forty-seven days to gestate a horse from a child’s toy.
For a moment he hesitates. The key’s purpose, here, ordained. Not to mark the return of his wife, or enable his son’s rescue. But a purpose nonetheless, which he must love.

Ford takes up the key and when he returns, the horse lowers its muzzle to meet him, as if knowing, by the same kind of reflective memory that haunted Cecile, of his instantaneous love. Its wide eye on him, saying what it could not, however improved. Ford holds the key to the lock. It fits. He twists, the cuff disengages. The lock and key and chain slip beneath the water and disappear.

Ford thinks the horse will run, take to the dune, then the hills, and the city beyond that, but it only steps nearer to him. He presses his head into the red-and-white saddle blanket, wonders if his boy, his wife, ever did touch it, did ride it, did whisper into it messages for his keeping, tallies of how terribly they miss him, registers detailing the beautiful creatures they are still becoming. Here, beneath his hand, beneath his lips as he kisses its coat, is more proof the process is still working, a confirmation that he will never stop waiting, because all pregnancy must come to some end.

Ford leads the horse unsteady up the beach adorned by glassy revisions, a handful of alabaster mane wreathed between his fingers.