"He is looking. He is seeing me, and his hands are coming around to feel the honeydew curve, the swell that is more than a swell, the fat that is not fat, the budding baby, and his eyes are so black they are all black, and they are a night without stars. All I have ever wanted. He knows. "Fuck!" Manny yells, and he is throwing me up and off of him. I hit the door behind me, the rough cat tongue of his face gone, and I grip steel, air, northing." (p.146)

Much like how Jason accepts Medea's help and companionship, but rejects her love, Manny wants to hook up with Esch but rejects her love and her pregnancy. This is a pivotal moment in Esch's character development because she goes from wanting Manny more than anything else to hating him, similar to the one-eighty Medea has when Jason gets engaged to the daughter of the King of Corinth. For the setting of modern day Mississippi having a child is when one has to commit to a relationship fully, and in the setting of ancient Greece that point was marriage. When both Medea and Esch get rejected at this point they have lost what they wanted most. This connection between Esch and Medea is important to the novel because it shifts from the perspective of trying to achieve a goal to trying to recover from the failure to reach that goal. This is the point where Esch's and Medea's paths start to differ, because while Medea dedicates herself to revenge after being rejected by Jason, Esch is able to move on and recover from being rejected by Manny, although it is a slow and painful process.

This representation of Medea was done in 1898 by Alfons Mucha as a poster for a French play telling the story of Medea.

At the end of the novel, Bois Sauvage lies in ruins, all of Skeets dogs are dead, Randall can't pursue his basketball career, Esch is pregnant and has been rejected by the father of the baby. Despite all the chaos and destruction around her, Esch remains calm and fights through it all, like this guy on the boat.