EIGHTY YEARS LATER, on a crystalline afternoon in a calm patch of the South Pacific with the sun coming hard across the sky and nothing on any horizon but endless saline blue, a gangly ninety-two-year-old woman pitched backward over the gunwale of a five-meter dive boat and sank wakeless into the sea. Curled up like a fetus from the plunge, she relaxed, unfolded, and surrendered to sinking. She
