Amarjeet approached Jivan, managing to smile. Karak slapped him on the back, Jivan and Ram and Kishen embraced him. His uncle did not comment on his lack of a dastar, his clean-shaven face. Amarjeet grinned at the gleaming motorcar. Rosa was holding Federico and he touched the toddler’s cheek. She announced that she was pregnant again, speaking with so much enthusiasm that they all laughed. He gave Leela the French doll he had brought for her. But he could not keep up the display of happiness. When he was eating Kishen’s food on the back porch, the tears came, the first he had cried since Harry’s death. The conversation fell quiet. He rose from the table and went to the olla, splashed water on his face. When he returned they were still silent. He expected the sympathy in his aunt’s face, perhaps in Ram’s. But he had not expected the kindness he saw in his uncle’s eyes, the deference in Karak’s manner. Then he was reminded: they had been soldiers too.

AMARJEET HAD RETURNED FROM FRANCE, but he could not leave it behind. On the train to the French coast, journeying through a blood-soaked, pockmarked, desolate land, shredded churches, schools, courthouses speeding past the window, he thought only of the gloom in the church hospital, of the way that Harry had looked at the end. The nurse had allowed him to see the body. Harry seemed asleep, a burden lifted. Distant. They would never again be together. Death is the boundary that cannot be crossed, even by love or adoration.

When Amarjeet boarded the ship for the two-week journey home, it was Harry’s voice that he kept hearing: how the fella in the neighboring bunk was crackers, how the ship had shuddered during the storm, how he loved the desert much more than the stomach-lurching rhythm of the sea. There were other Imperial Valley boys on that boat and Amarjeet ate with them and talked with them while they smoked on deck. One had been a high school classmate and had known Harry too. The morning they sailed past the Statue of Liberty, the entire ship surrendered to a sacred stillness.

They entrained in Hoboken and sped west across the continent, seeing their own country transformed but unravaged by war: billboards proclaiming MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY. FREE DOUGHNUTS FOR DOUGHBOYS IN UNIFORM. Everywhere appeared murals of French orphans, widows in rags, arms raised in defiance. He did not immediately understand that the billboards and posters were of a place that he had just been. He had come home to an unfamiliar land, one he had once known, an immigrant now from army lines. But he had a job to do for Harry. And he knew now what he had not known when Harry was alive, that the emotion he had felt was love. His heartbeat had quickened whenever Harry was near. He could not deny that now.