This time he is reading. So when they come back, he opens the door. He has opened a few windows. They can smell the sea and feel the air from inside Witka’s place on the dark rock.

“Where do you live now?” he asks Lin. He has put on a clean shirt.

She is surprised he has addressed her so directly and suddenly, and her face grows red. “Ho Chi Minh City,” she tells him. “Saigon, they used to say. I work there. I am married now.”

“Married?” He has shaved. His eyes look surprised at the new name of Saigon, always it surprises him. He didn’t see, as Lin did, how it became a sell-and-buy city so quickly. Saigon. His eyes see far away.

“Yes. I am a florist, I think you call them here, part of the time, and also an interpreter there for people searching for their loved ones.” And the interpreter in her knows that in their absence something has changed in him. Every night they slept on the boat she thinks he must have dreamed or remembered their past.

He fixes coffee, letting it drain through a paper towel. His hand shakes when he hands some to Lin. She is beautiful, he thinks. She looks like Ma and she is tall. How did she survive? Someday he will ask.

She looks at the fish, remembering how she had loved the fish her father gave her. She didn’t tell Ruth that one of the boys with guns threw it out of her hands. The fish lay on the ground, twisting, flopping. She would always remember the eyes of the boy. They were filled with a hatred of life as he stepped on it. And now she thought more, that maybe the boys and men had a fear of life, for to hold it dear and to lose it was a burden to carry, vulnerable as a fish in bottle and water, carried by a little girl in the middle of a war. Maybe it has been that way for her father, too.

“I almost forgot,” Lin says. She opens the large bag she bought at the airport with a Frida Kahlo face on it, a real prize. “Look! You’re in this painting.” She has postcards of a painting one woman in the village had made, a picture of people working in the rice fields. “It is in a museum now.” She hands several to him, a few to Ruth. Thomas studies it for a long time.

Lin laughs. “No one knows it is an American there! It’s you, and every time I see it I remember.” It had been their village, their put-together dwellings and the blue door to the shanty where Lin was born.

Ruth looks at it, too. She is silent. She recognizes him in the painting, though he is different there, his body, his looseness. It is part of the mystery of his disappearance. They sit without talking. But Ruth feels it is like the old days when the traditional people came together. They would sit for days in silence and decisions would be made in that way, knowledge passed, relationships renewed. Now it is like that. In silence, much is said.