And of course there are other shadows here as well and a good many of them are my own. This place has been handed to me utterly without warrant: the house, the old orchard trees, even the remains of the home in which the Takahashi family once lived. It is difficult not to feel that the whole of it represents the spoils of some war in which I was, wittingly and unwittingly, a participant. Ray Takahashi’s bones are lost in the earth somewhere on Boulder Ridge even now, even as you read these words, his family inexorably changed in the aftermath of that incontrovertible fact. That the family was not destroyed by what the Wilsons—by what my family—did to them, a series of actions built upon a legacy of sanctioned violence both subtle and overt, is but a testament to their strength. And perhaps it is, too, a comment on my own weakness that, despite everything, I choose to live here with my own family, to occupy this place, a place which I have, in no conceivable way, earned.

Sometimes, when I fail to find my dreams, I sit at the upstairs window in what I still think must have been Helen’s room, a room which we have used only for storage. I have placed a chair under the window and it is here that I sit some nights, my daughter asleep in her own room and my dear wife asleep in our bed. I have said that I do this when I fail to find my dreams but in reality it is my dreams I am avoiding, for there remains, in the darker of my nights, a patch of rough water that runs through my thoughts, one which I recognize well enough to know that were I to drift into sleep under its influence I would find myself in the seeping heat again even after all these years. I light a cigarette and look out at the cool quietude of the night. On the opposite ridge, the roof of the little house in which the Takahashis once lived is like a slightly crooked line set upon the softness of the night canopy of the trees. What I think of there, what I am horrified to admit to, is that my location is a perfect one from which to call in an air strike. One-zero-Sierra. Foxtrot-Juliett. Six-zero. Two-seven. Zero-five. Three-six. And all of this would be transmuted into flame. It is, I think, a calling for relief more than anything else, for each time the heavy concussion came I could feel my heart unspooling in gratitude and deliverance.