The old people who lived in the white houses sat down on the stones carved by the old ones with spirals.

Someone brought Ruth a cup of the strong coffee the old people preferred, Starbucks. They always asked, “Are you going to the city? Don’t forget the French Roast,” and Ruth laughed as she crossed the water. “Or the Yukon.” Who would have thought the day would come when they would ask for Starbucks? She put her hand over her coffee cup. “No, no more coffee,” she said to the woman who wore her hair in braids above her head.

After this, in her mind, day and night, Ruth tried to speak with the whales and send them away. Nights from her boat, she had been singing songs, pieces of the songs she remembered and songs she made up to fill in for what was missing.

It was thirteen years after his anticipated arrival that Thomas came home. He carried a suitcase someone had left behind where he’d first worked as a doorman in the city, he always the quiet, invisible man at work, the missing, himself the deathless. He returned to the A’atsika village not thinking, I am a body of lies, but thinking now, I am a part of tradition, grandson of Witka the whaler. He heard the familiar sound of ravens and crows. He carried in his pocket a stone whale, which he touched. It had been through the war with him for a reason, he thought, and the two of them survived. He stepped down from the bus onto damp, giving earth, land he had always known. No one was there to meet him but the familiar wind. Neverthless, it touched him with invisible hands as he thought about his grandfather who could go underneath the water, hold his breath and communicate with whales.

He walked on the half sidewalk, grown over with grass and plants, walked past the man who still made chairs from driftwood all these years later. The sample chairs sat close to the road, visible to tourists driving by. The chair-maker’s hair was now long and gray. He nodded, but didn’t recognize Thomas, who had grown stocky and older, even with thinner hair.

Thomas went past the grocery and fish bait store that overcharged for food. Cans and boxes of macaroni decorated the dirty window. He passed the tiny Catholic shop with its books of saints and cards, paintings and prayers of Saint Anthony, the beloved saint of lost things, and the prayers of safe return bought by the wives of deep sea fishermen and tacked to the walls.

“Why do you keep that Catholic stuff?” he once asked his mother.

“You never know.” She, daughter-in-law of Witka, was going to cover all her bases. She even kept a small Buddha in the corner.

Despite the fact that his hair had grayed and was short, his neck redder and thicker, his eyes fitting for a man who had learned the art of war and then the practice of invisibility, word was out quickly. Thomas Just was back.