Behind her grandmother she could see the fields of rice, the water almost invisible, hidden like everything waiting both for rain and the next wave of history. A sudden wind blew the rice and the field bent and glistened as the last of the sunlight moved like waves of water. The sunset over the fields glowed red.

Everyone was convinced that he’d never return. “Huh! The Americans would never let him.” She lit an oil lamp. The old woman knew. She knew the Americans. “They could do anything. It’s worse than the raw nerve in my broken tooth to think of these things,” her grandmother said. And so it had to be enough that he loved her, her mother, the village. Her grandmother kissed her forehead. “You are alive because of him. That is good enough, my girl.” Moist with the humidity, her shadow falling on the wall, she rearranged the comb in her silver-black hair, this comb unlike the one with pearl made of carved bone. Lin heard that she once searched the jungle for the one the monkey stole until her husband put a stop to it. “You’ll get killed over a hair comb.”

Later Lin understood about her grandmother not wanting to think about the past. Auntie, Grandmother’s sister, told Lin how the old woman had been raped and left for dead, cut at the neck. Auntie said she found her, the woman’s long hair red with blood all about her neck and shoulders. Auntie grabbed her and lifted her. “You! Sister, wake up! You are breathing!” Auntie yelled. By some miracle, the artery was not cut, even though Grandmother thought she was dead, wished she was, and lay back weak and limp, but she was yelled into life by a woman almost too thin to have a voice.

Auntie squeezed the skin together, using sticky sap to hold it, the very same sap Lin’s mother once used on shoes. “Okay, now, let’s go,” she told her sister, wrapping her neck with a sleeve from her blouse. “Hurry!”

“What else was there to do?” she said to the girl about the sap. “But it worked.” Still, it was why Grandmother always wore one of her two scarves. It was why her eyes saw only as far back as they would; not far. All this accounted, also, for her grandfather’s—“Uncle,” as he was called by everyone—scars. They were symmetrical, not the result of an accident.

“That’s enough now for a young girl to know,” Auntie said, combing the tangles out of her own long gray hair.

Lin buried her head against her great-aunt’s chest. “Is it human?” Lin asked. “To do that. Is that human?”

“Such a question.” Yet Lin had been born as a different child. They knew that. She saw everything. She learned quickly. She had watching eyes as a baby. If they were still tribal, she would have been set into a special place in the tribe and trained for a future. But perhaps she got this from her father. They thought him a man of compassion and great strength. The aunt remembered him. She had been off selling American beer when she came back to the village and found him standing there like a statue, before he collapsed into a deep sleep. They ran off with him and hid him when the helicopters came to take the bodies, knowing they’d be blamed and killed for the deaths of the Americans. “Yes. I think it is human. There is so much to a human.”