The Back of the Turtle

Gabriel contemplates his growing affection for Mara. He has never been at ease with intimacy and has always felt separated “from his family [and] the world” (184). This alienation worsened after his father’s death. He shuns close relationships entirely because people inevitably leave, whether due to death or other circumstances. Mara, on the other hand, feels that it’s possible to start over and form new relationships despite losing everything.

Returning from his shopping spree, Dorian gets more bad news. Word of the Athabasca River leak has gotten out, and the reporter Manisha Khan called looking for a comment. The search for Gabriel’s lineage has stalled. As a teenager, he lived in a First Nations community in Lethbridge, Alberta, with his whole family but later moved to Minneapolis with his father Joe. Joe was a police officer who was later killed in the line of duty. Gabriel’s mother and sister have since moved away from Lethbridge and cannot be located. Dorian is alarmed by Gabriel’s apparent isolation and mental instability, wondering how someone like that was allowed to work with such lethal biological material.

On the beach, Sonny meets the black-haired girl and presents the trunk, welcoming her back to Samaritan Bay.