The countries fell quickly, easily, to the north. Soon Saigon was invaded. They said the Americans were leaving the country. The army then had used nerve gas wherever they thought soldiers either had defected or were caught by the enemy. To keep them from suffering at the hands of a more cruel enemy, they said. He thought of Thomas. Sarin. Nerve gas. He wondered for years where they had dropped it. It occupied his daily thoughts. So did his guilt, his fractured conscience. He was thinking of it the day they found him and he’d think of it for a long time after, about the man, Thomas, who must have died that day, at least his name was on the Wall in DC along with the others.

Ruth’s mother arrived at the airport just before the plane, her hair in a sheer pink scarf, for it had become windy. She removed the scarf and fluffed up the white hair which framed her dark face with a circle of light. Ruth looked at her mother’s dark, ropy hands, her radiant skin. She carried flowers for “the soldier,” as she called him, and sweet rolls for Marco and Ruth. The flowers were red, white, and blue. Ruth could not look at them, still thinking of the soldiers as America’s dogs not cared for as much as she cared for Hoist. Then came the old friends of Thomas. Ruth did not sit near them or acknowledge them. She knew them. They were the men who wouldn’t stop a rape. Dwight. Dimitri. Cyrus. Dark men, not necessarily in skin color, for two of them were mixed, but of heart and spirit. She could see through them. And they had taken Thomas away. Them and their beer, or whatever it was. Ruth always thought that if there was justice in the world, one of them should have been the one who didn’t come back. Then she disliked herself for thinking it.

There was a smell of sugar and cinnamon, but the sweet rolls went untouched.

Ruth combed Marco’s hair as the plane arrived. Aurora, still the mother, patted down Ruth’s hair. “Do you remember before he left for the war? Your wedding. It was so beautiful.” She smiled, recalling the wedding on the beach, the firelight that night, almost the entire village there, even old Vince, the fisherman.

Years had passed since he’d been gone and Ruth’s hair still shone blue-black, with only a few gray strands. She still looked like her father. She thought of Thomas’s face. It was wide, and his eyes crinkled when he smiled, even when he was a child, even when confused. He had a sweetness about him, and an Asian look. She had teased him about his ancestors coming from China across the Bering Strait even though the people knew they had come from the caves out in the ocean, come out on strands of seaweed, some carried, with their stories in their arms and on their backs or carried on the fins of the water animals, and the story of the whale, their ancestor, was one of these. All their stories clung like barnacles to the great whale, the whale they loved enough to watch pass by. They were people of the whale. They worshiped the whales. Whalebones had once been the homes of their ancestors who covered the giant ribs with skins and slept inside the shelters. The whales were their lives, their comfort. The swordfish, their friends, sometimes wounded a whale and it would come to shore to die, or arrive already dead. It was an offering to the hungry people by their mother sea and friend, the swordfish.