Out loud one night, she said, “He’s standing in water,” waking her son. Hoist licked her face.

“My father?” Marco asked, half awake.

“Yes,” was all she said. “But it was only a dream.”

“No. He is there. He’s walking across a field of grass.”

Ruth stared at him in the moonlight a long time. “I think it’s rice,” she said.

“Me, too.” As if he’d know what rice looked like.

So, she thought, the boy saw these things, too. So she told Marco the stories about his father as a child, the time he tried to fly, how he also, like Marco, tried to hold his breath until it scared his mother, until she pretended to die of fear and Thomas came up one day gasping and found her lying down, her hands over her chest, posed like a corpse waiting for vultures. They laughed.

When she said the word vulture, she thought of her own father, over on the island, his body on a platform in the trees. But there was her son, and as time passed, Marco grew into a beautiful child. He helped her when he was not in school even though she worried about him getting hurt. Fishing was dangerous business. For a time, she began shore fishing. It suited them better. Marco, like her, hated to kill fish.

One chilly day Aurora rowed out to Ruth’s bay in her own dead husband’s dirty old rowboat as if rowing was still natural to her skinny old arms.

“Ruth!” she called out as she tried to change boats.

Hoist, with damp fur, licked the old woman’s face, barking happily as the exhausted old woman climbed aboard.

Ruth went to see what the noise was.

“Oh my God, Mom! You rowed all the way out here?” She helped the older woman up the ladder, grabbing her waist with her strong arms, lifting her, really, the skinny old legs finally touching wood. “Hoist, get back!”

In between breaths her mother said, “You were right! He’s alive, Thomas is. You were right all along.”

She’d been called that morning when a few flakes of snow began to drift down. He’d been found living in a village. “He was held by the enemy, brainwashed or injured, they think,” she said. “I’m freezing. I wish you could get a phone out here.”

Ruth wrapped her mother in a quilt that had been stitched of men’s old suits, ones they wore after the Catholics had converted them.

As the snow melted on Aurora’s hair, Ruth heated coffee water, hardly able to lift the kettle.

“You knew it all along. You were right and I’m sorry, but sometimes I didn’t believe you. And now they say he is coming back.”

“I know.” Ruth leaned across the table, smiling at her mother. She put her hands on each side of Aurora’s face and kissed her. “It’s okay. No one did.”

“Except me!” Marco, who had been studying snowflakes, jumped up and down, not his usual style, but he said, “I could see him. My father!”