“I do.”

“I had to stay. I couldn’t come home in the condition I was in. War is another world. Hell, Ruth, it’s another universe. It’s like one of those Brueghel paintings we’d look at.” He puts his head in his hands. “I couldn’t come home to you like that. Even now, after all these years, I can’t explain it, the feeling. Then…” He pauses, looking out the window as if he’d find answers in the darkness where they sometimes live. “It was all lies. You know? The boys didn’t even know what a communist was or why we fought them. And they were scared at first, thinking everyone was a communist. Then something else took over. They’d shoot at anyone or anything. The first night I was there I dropped down so scared I peed myself. I saw a beautiful forest. Suddenly the forest was gone. What about a little human?”

There are limits to what he can say.

But she hears the voices begin in him again.

“I am sorry to be a man,” he says. “I am sorry to be a human being. I used to think it was other people. But I am one of them. I became one. I even killed Americans. I had to.”

She has thought often about being a soldier. She thinks she would have killed herself on her first day in war just to have it over with.

“At the end, they dropped us outside the war zone. I had a map. It was all one fiery lie. I kept telling the pilot, Look, look where we are. We aren’t even supposed to be here. I kept telling him we were off course.”

She knew his love of maps, how he could follow them.

Then he is silent again. She thinks of how he used to show her the lines of demarcation, the legend, the way he used to show her sea monsters and how they thought California was an island.

“That was why you stayed all those years.”

He only nods, swallows.

Suddenly Thomas seems to grow small. Bent.

“You didn’t really have to tell me.” She sounds tired. “I already figured it out. I know what happened. I had years to think about it and then when she came, Lin told me more. You saved a village there.” She even sees them, the dirty American men, desperate, sweating, the way they moved, even their thinking. She knows how they approached the people. She sees the people about to be in a trench, some waiting to die while the men take a smoke break. The unborn Lin is an egg inside a woman about to be stabbed in the vagina. She loves Lin. She loves that Lin did not become a casualty.

She thinks of her own lone pregnancy. She doesn’t hate what he did. If she hates, she hates the men who sign the papers. On their own land, too. She thinks, I am capable of hatred. Suffering is our history. Oh yes, there is singing down by the water, dancing, and joy some nights. As if it is a little gift wrapped in stars to make up for all the rest.