He didn’t say to the doctors—because his body was a lie—that he’d lived with a tribe there and he wanted to stay and his only fear had been of the Americans. Even now. Instead he cried. For one of very few times.

“That’s healthy,” the doctor said, his brown eyes warm beneath his graying brows. “You’d be surprised at how many men can’t cry.”

Thomas hated the doctor and his all-knowing understanding of men like himself, but he couldn’t show it. The questions were over for then. Only then. With his extra-keen hearing, he heard the doctor in the next room say, “Keep a record on him. We’ll need to keep track of him.” Thomas wondered how long Dr. Christmas, as he called him, had been in war. Dr. Tannenbaum.

Outside in the blue tropics of Hawaii as he thought about what it all meant, the dolphins were leaping all together like one being. He himself was an island of a man surrounded by water, mystery, and being returned to a country he no longer knew or wanted. He was not a part of it, he in his hospital cloth scuff shoes and blue robe, watching the blue ocean.

THE WIFE OF MARCO POLO

No one wrote about the wife of Marco Polo, the first journeyer. As far as anyone knew, no one wrote about the women who were left at home when their husbands were at war or searching for other worlds or traveling out of pure longing. The wife combs her hair. She takes on a job, a mission, a love, or she becomes weak with sadness.

After Thomas did not return, Ruth knew another kind of sorrow, but a calm also set in, as if the solitude would give her over to her own self. Ruth took Marco to the sea and showed him the fish that lived with dolphins. They sat on the wet beach and wrote his name in sand as if it would last. They peered into the morning tide pools. Ruth was a tide pool, full of life that awaited the return of its element. Perhaps explorer Marco Polo’s wife was also a creature in a pool, she thought, awaiting the return of her beloved. She didn’t know that the women gods on all the islands Odysseus visited awaited any traveling sailors around the Mediterranean, to keep them from returning home.

When Thomas went to war, Ruth had never felt so abandoned. On television she watched the casualties, searching every face for his. They promised mail. At first the envelopes arrived with the APO numbers and then they dwindled. Ruth missed her hand touched by his.

Like all the women left behind in wars, she was young but old, both at the same time. Wars amputate the minds and souls of waiting women in different ways than they do the armless, legless bodies in khaki and olive drab or the children stepping on land mines. But it is an amputation all the same. Watching the bullets, the men surviving fire, the dying children, what the women saw on television gave them some truth and from then on American wars were not on the television because people would rise up against their own government if they saw what they had done.