It took her mind a few seconds to make sense of it. There was a girl. It was a photograph of a girl. She wore a locket. It could have been a clover shape. Plackets of sheer ruffles crossed her chest. The sleeves had more of the same. She was wearing a nightgown, and it flared into more ruffles, wider and stiffer. Everything she wore had been white. In the extravagant debris, she finally saw. The bomb had taken her legs.

There were more of these girls in white. She pushed the pages aside—one, two, three, and a fourth. Her hand felt filmy, superlight. She was sitting but losing balance. The nightgowns—identical, as if someone got a discount buying in bulk. They were donations, charity. They came that way. As they’d come to her, after her mother’s murder. She had twelve brown dresses, same size, same style—overstock.

She put her forehead to her knees and her hands on her ears—trying not to listen. As the sole witness, she had to say it. They made her practice. She walked through days repeating it: Pax huic domui, pax huic domui, pax huic domui. On the stand, they asked her, “Janeta, do you know what the words your father was saying meant?” She shook her head. The judge reminded her to say the word “no.”

“No, sir,” she said.

“What did you think it meant?”

She was afraid to say.

“Now who’s the dummy,” she said into the witness-stand microphone. At the defendant’s table, her father sat in his air-force uniform, his eyebrows near solid over the bridge of his nose. They’d bolted him to the floor and his chair. He tried to rise up after she spoke. Sighing from the spectators traveled from the back of the courtroom into the jury box. They had told her not to look at him, but she couldn’t help it. He was straining to stand. The judge was banging. The people were craning. She put her head in her lap. She put her hands on her head. She covered her ears. It got quiet. The lawyer translated the words for the jury. “Peace to this house.”

She’d been the one who insisted on her name change. Her aunt thought it wasn’t right. Your mother wanted “Janeta” for you, she told her. It’s only up to God to change it. But Mary thought a court and a judge could do it just as easily. She chose a pretty, fresh name, nothing like the most important thing that had ever happened to her. Janeta Enriquez became Mary Goodwin.

She sat up to get back to now. Her eye found the far end, the daylight. She listened to her breathing a few minutes. Then she saw it, a figure in the hangar, coming her way.