But for now her father, too, is light-years away, and as she thinks of him she remembers more than she has told anyone. She was always one for memory. She remembers her life near the rice paddies and water. She remembers that he did not want to leave her. She knows that. She cannot blame him or be angry and so her feelings belong only to her. She remembers the day the dark machine came down from the sky. They’d been there before, but this time the men in uniforms showed up in the early morning at the funeral of Lin’s mother, amid the smell of incense, the burning joss sticks. Strangely she does not remember everything about her mother’s death, just the smells and the helicopter.

Always before when the machines arrived, they heard them cutting through the sky. There was time for her father to hide beneath the ground in one of the damp caved-in tunnels. She was afraid of the tunnels. She still smells them, sees the tree roots, the green molds and mosses growing. Underground, secret entrances known only by a few. Most of these had not held up because they were too close to water and the clay was poor. But some of the tunnels were numbered, mapped, and then later forgotten. The Americans never knew how much underworld the tunnels covered. They were known and forgotten by the North Vietnamese who had lived there, even cooked there. Later, the Communist Party with their insistence on a different kind of order did not even recall them.

Sometimes, too, before ambushers and thieves passed through, her father hid in one of the places where their food had been stored.

But that particular morning, her mother was dead. Her father had too much grief to think of hiding, maybe to even notice when they dropped down from out of the sky. The Americans were there to make him leave. To take him “home.” When they tried to take him, he protested and fought them off, walking away from them. The village was his home. She still sees one of them reach toward him, her father’s arms rising up out of the man’s grip, his tight back as he walked away and back toward her, his child.

Lin doesn’t know her mother was killed by a land mine while chasing Lin. There is no one left to tell her.

She doesn’t know, either, that her father remembers the same day over and over. That he remembers how the old man in the village, the one who always smelled of lime and flowers from his meditations, postponed their departure. Maybe he thought Thomas would disappear if he distracted the captors. The old man put them off as long as possible, the blue cloth in his hand. The Americans were made to wait. Their impatience was obvious, a shaking leg, darting eyes, the way they exchanged glances. Thomas explained to them that this was how it was done on a day when everyone was grieving.