Ruth laughs. “It’s true.”

“They always called him a man of beauty, a loved man. Even Thuy Su Linh gave him the prized jewel in all the town. Why? I ask now.”

The water is seamless tonight and still. It is listening to what she has to say.

“They say once he even tamed a mean dog. He saved us. I used to think it was because he stayed and he caught fish for food and he worked all hours in the rice fields. But that wasn’t how he saved us.” She sounds so matter-of-fact.

Ruth doesn’t see the vast expanse of rice, the water in it like a mirror, the people bending, but Lin does. “He said he’d come back. He never did. I remember him. But I expected a different man. The way he used to be.

“I always waited for him to return. I looked across the burned old forest watching for him. I looked out at the water where the market was. I thought he would step out of every boat or come down any path whistling just before he arrived. Even in the city, I looked for him around every corner.”

How often Ruth had done the same thing before she was told Thomas was dead. Even after, because she didn’t believe it in her bones. Something in her knew what the army didn’t. She had looked around every turn in the road, watched every door that opened, knowing he was alive somewhere.

Lin tells how she had traveled by water partway to the city, then had to walk, finally running. “I rode in the back of a truck, behind and under other people, maybe even dead bodies. I don’t know because it was hard to get out from under them. There was always yelling. Somehow, in the confusion, I slipped away.

“When I left my grandmother, I touched her arm, her hand. She was narrow as a grain after all has been taken from it. ‘Hurry,’ she told me, but I didn’t want to leave her.”

On the water, Lin’s cheeks are rosy from the sea air, the fog. Her eyes, Ruth realizes now, listening, are still those of a village girl born closed into a small world, a sad girl showing through all the education, the appearance of a young woman with a profession. She was a lost girl, motherless, fatherless, placeless, alone in the midst of turmoil and war. And she was also an old, old woman who had seen and lived too much.

The next night, as they stand on the boat watching the sea, Lin says to Ruth, weeping, “My mother, she is the dream in my cells, and him, Papa…” She can’t finish her sentence. The word sounds strange to Ruth. “I have felt all my life the blood I come from. Even this place I have always felt. It is like I know it here.

“On that terrible day he was taken away we all cried. And my father, the old men and women told him stories and sang to him.”