As the realization came to him, he shrank away from the field, from Jivan’s home, from the letters and newspapers and dust and sand. He knew where she would be. Long ago, sitting together on the back porch of Jivan’s home, she had told him herself. The place that was her haven. For the first time, he knew what he wanted. He knew where he belonged.

He slept and rose early. There were few things he needed. He carried them in one bag, rolled inside his blanket, just as he had when he rode the train into the Valley. He said goodbye to Jivan Singh and Kishen Kaur. He blessed Leela. She was crying, even though he had not said that he was crossing the boundary, had not explained that, after reaching the other side, he might not be able to cross back. She was fourteen now and felt deeply things that adults had long ago lost the capacity to feel.

Amarjeet drove him east on the road to Yuma and beyond. They stopped at Andrade; he would cross at the checkpoint at Los Algodones. The younger man embraced him, and Ram took his bag and blanket and walked. The officer at the border patrol shed waved him through. The earth was crusted with alkaline. A hot breeze blew from the west, carrying dust from the dunes. He turned to look at Amarjeet, who raised his arm to hail him, a small figure across the expanse of the boundary.

He began to walk. The sun beat down. It was exactly the way that she had described: The sand dunes. The dance hall. The lonely street that led directly west to the grove of mesquite, and the tree with a double trunk, twenty meters high, the tree that everyone knew. Walk five hundred paces north. There was the friendly shack. The garden that her aunt tended, housing chickens and peppers. And yes, there she was, near the fence, her hair swept back, hanging laundry in the breeze.

He had not known what he felt for her, this person bred from different soil. He had not known home could also be a second place, far from the land of one’s birth. A long time ago, he had thought it was not possible.

When Adela saw him, her face showed only surprise. Then there was something else, ancient and deep and of the earth. He recognized it inside himself. And he knew, finally, how to name it.

41

April 1974

TWO THIRTY A.M. ON HIS NIGHTSTAND ALARM CLOCK. THE NEIGHBOR’S white light shone through his window, but his mind was still filled with the images of his not-dream. He had sweated through his nightclothes. He rose to use the bathroom, shuffling stiffly past Anika’s room, past his son and daughter-in-law’s door, making himself remember other images that were not not-dreams, things that he had seen on the television just that night: Cronkite reporting the South Vietnamese air strikes. The Hearst girl’s voice on the audiotape. An American Indian with a single tear in his eye, seated on a paint. For some reason, when he needed other memories in the middle of the night, when he needed to ward off the not-dream, the television pictures came to him most easily.