She can’t help remembering. It has been a long time, but it is only yesterday. “Then when he was gone, they said he was air. He was wind. He went into the sky and blew away. He was in every wind. Maybe my hope was only in my head like a light, incense burning with a prayer to make sure it gets to the sky.

“Even if Papa went back, he never would have found us. I returned once. The place was nothing but moss-covered ruins.” She recalls that day. There were a few men and women with one leg on the bus, people walking on the road. “Not a sign of us was there, except a once-blue door. Later, I remembered it. It must have been indestructible. He was the wind, even if he now seems like a rock.

“They took him away. Then there was no one but Old Uncle, nearly blind, and Grandmother and the old people we had to leave behind. There were other children, women, but I don’t remember where they went.” The words fell out of her.

“We all left because the old man said the government has changed again and this time you have to leave. He said, ‘you.’ Not himself. He stayed behind. Without a word we packed up a few things, tea, rice, a pot. We had to try to live, but the whole world said to me, I am the dying fields of poor planters. I am the fallen people, the ruined land, the blackened trees with no leaves.

“I was afraid to die at first, but here was so much that after a while it didn’t matter. I was also afraid of life. If I felt life too much I would miss it even more when I didn’t have it. I would break like a glass.”

She remembered her father standing in the fields or paddies working, bent over. He smiled when she brought him a jar of water.

He caught fish from the river for them to eat. He worked hard and made the field safe from land mines. He was everything. She still remembers the sweaty feel of his clothing, warm, his long black hair and the thrill of being pulled through the air by his arms.

“I chased the helicopter. I saw him crying as he left.”

At Witka’s place on the rock, Thomas opens his window, the side where the seals groom and talk and wrap about each other. He has been watching the north where he can still see the fishing boats despite the wall, watching for Ruth and Lin, thinking, She is here. Lin is here. And I am locked in, a key turned somewhere in my heart.

He sees the Marco Polo when it comes to shore. He knows they will tie up the boat and deliver the fish and return to clean the decks with scrub brushes and mops. They will pull together the floats. Do you do this all the time? Lin will probably ask Ruth or at least wonder. He even knows that. He knows it suddenly, as if he can see them and hear them, as if he is again close to them. He knows they will shower and dress before they come to him.