They all laughed. “Cocoa, Marco Polo Just?”

The morning Thomas was to return, Ruth braided her hair down her back, undid it, brushed it again, and braided it until it was perfect. She wore jeans and a dark green silk shirt and sat up straight. Marco insisted on wearing a traditional woven men’s skirt over his jeans. He had gifts for his father, a wooden cedar box which held a bald eagle feather and a carved and painted canoe paddle. And he had himself, already with an air of authority. They waited. It was eight and Thomas was not due in until nearly ten, but Ruth was anxious.

He had been found, she was told, quarantined, hospitalized for examination, questioned by the army, and honorably discharged. But she’d heard nothing from him and she was puzzled and concerned. She had been waiting for a century even though Marco was only nine. The war had been over, at least for America, but she had never given up hope.

She and Marco sat in the small airport and looked out the window. Planes arrived and left on currents of heat and air. Light crossed their faces. It reflected off moving things, a woman’s pocketbook clasp, a van outside by the planes, silver on the luggage.

“Here, young man.” A stewardess gave the boy a pin with a pair of wings. He sat with it on his lap and waited. Ruth pulled him toward her and touched his hair. She watched him. He had, for some reason, lost his excitement about his father coming home.

The sun moved past where they now sat.

Ruth looked at her hand, then at her arm. Muscular and lean. It was hard work, the fishing boat. She looked in a mirror at her face, wondering how much she’d changed in these years, if he would recognize her, love her, if she was still beautiful as he’d once thought.

They had warned her that Thomas would be changed. Maybe in ways incomprehensible even to himself. The one witness to the massacre said he’d been hit in the head by something flying, something large. That one witness, the survivor, young Michael, said he’d seen Thomas fall. The last thing he himself recalled was that he panicked and ran to the water, turning toward it in the smoke of burning people and trees and land and then the fog, too, as he reached the water and jumped in so he wouldn’t burn. He was picked up from the water by a navy boat. “What luck!” said the man who found him. “And timing.” The boy was in shock. The words seemed cold after what he’d seen and told them. “Undress, soldier,” they said, and gave him dry clothes. He believed at the time that Thomas had died, or if not, desperately needed medical attention. He had every intention of getting help to him, but he could only cry. He cried when he told them the story and they had to keep moving away. Then he heard on the boat that city after city had fallen to the communists. For the first time he wondered what a communist really was.