But then something changed in the conversation, Mrs. ­Wilson embarking on a kind of story, a narrative about a time she had taken her daughter to Seattle, although even as she talked of it, it was difficult to unravel the point of the tale. Her daughter had been ill, it seemed, or no, not ill, perhaps pregnant. Could that have been why? Her words were coming quickly now and I realized with a start that this story was why she had come, that she needed to tell it, although I still could not understand any more than the basic outline of the narrative. There were nuns now. An orphanage perhaps. And she had signed something and the nuns had walked away and her daughter, Helen was her name, had been angry at her for all the years since. I assumed that Mrs. Takahashi could follow the story even if I could not, so it was surprising when that woman’s voice began to interject through the rising desperation of Mrs. Wilson’s pleading and nearly incomprehensible tale, interjections which did not grow in volume and yet seemed to increase in intensity until it was clear that Mrs. Takahashi was nearly as lost to the story’s meaning as I was.

But in many ways I could also understand Mrs. Wilson’s reticence to reveal exactly why she was there, not the specifics of that reticence, of course, not yet, but I knew truth’s great propensity to terrorize all too well. Even when Chiggers came to visit me later neither of us could really talk about what happened to us in Vietnam and certainly could not talk about what we had done there. It must have felt the same to Mrs. Wilson. Like me, she knew, I think, that what she had done had been wrong but, also like me, if given the opportunity she would do it all over again in precisely the same way. Only now, these years later, does it feel as if the story of Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Takahashi has come into a kind of focus, like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, the tiny image within the circle of the lens stark and crystalline, even what I did not yet know—what no one in the town really knew—held steady in the center of that black circle, that part, the most important part, blowing everything else into char.