The baby Marco, who already had watching eyes and showed signs of difference from other children, slept in the next room. He was a calm child, and the voices did not wake him. Or they did and he listened and understood.

“Here.” The messenger spoke to Aurora. “Her father-in-law told me to give this to her. I’m sorry, ma’am. We didn’t even know he had a wife. It wasn’t in our records.”

“No,” said Ruth’s mother. “It was a tribal wedding. It’s in our own records.”

He took something out of his pocket and handed it to the older woman. It was a dog tag, a single one. It fell into Aurora’s hand on its snake chain. “Thank you,” she said. Ruth heard the chain and metal. Dog tag and chain. Dog, that was a man in war. Dog. He had to follow orders. He had to sniff for danger, be willing to die for his owner. He had to hate strangers, be wary, be nothing, be kicked and hungry and still obey. He needed madness. Dog, what Thomas and so many others had been. The president had said about war that it was proof there was still madness in the world, only Ruth always wondered who the mad ones were. Anyway, even if she often thought he was one of them, the president’s words were the truth.

Anger and sorrow grew together in her like a single tree. Sorrow had knocked her down, but anger lifted her to her feet.

Standing tall, Ruth looked at the man. “He’s not dead.”

He’d heard the same thing so many times before. “I hope you’re right.”

The car backed away and left the way it had come.

“He’s alive, Mother. I feel it.”

“You’re probably right.” She took her daughter in her arms and held her. “You usually are.” She, still grieving her own man, smoothed down Ruth’s black hair.

Nevertheless, it was the end of laughter for a time.

The love between Thomas and Ruth was a love that existed in another dimension, just as Witka, the grandfather of Thomas, and his wife had a love that communicated from earth all the way through elements to the depths of water. Ruth had seen through space and time across this world through her own eyes and heart. Through distances across the ocean, with its pulsing jellyfish and swaying kelp forests, flying manta rays, sea turtles coming up to breathe, across all that and heavy clouds, too, she had seen him in her twilight sleep. Once there were firestorms. She had seen him encircled by fire and, like a salamander in the forest, surviving it by staying down in the wet earth, beneath it, breathing through a wet brown rag, not running like others. She saw him leap into a ditch. Once, more recently, he was standing at a brown river in a green world, and he was fishing, his black hair in a ponytail as he threw out fishing nets in their tribal fashion. But then, Ruth’s spirit had never remained in the hiding place of her body. It always traveled. “Last night your father was drunk,” she said to Thomas once when they were children. Tommy, as he was called then, nodded, accustomed to her and how, even shy and quiet, she knew things. He had looked down at the ground where they sat. She said, “And I know why.” She pulled at her braids. “Because he aches inside, because he will never be like your grandpa.”