Ryan explained the situation to the first two patients, two women who would have been about the right age to be Blondie’s mother. One answered in English. The other just shook her head, her expression so sad that I felt like crying. I couldn’t help but wonder who she’d lost or who she was still looking for. I looked away from her. I didn’t want to imagine any body else’s tragedy.

“Hello,” Lulu said to the next woman. “I was wondering if you knew this—”

“Teti! Teti!” Blondie squealed. She was reaching over Lulu’s shoulder and scrambling, trying desperately to get out of her arms. “Teti!” She reached out again.

“Baiba!” a man cried from a bed on the other wall.

Lulu let the struggling Blondie down and the little girl ran right across the floor. We ran after her. She practically threw herself at the man, who wrapped his one good arm around her. His second arm and one leg were encased in plaster.

The man started crying and speaking, while Blondie buried her face in his chest and wrapped her arms around him tightly.

He looked up at us. “Ta ir mana meita…mana meita!”

“We don’t understand…we don’t know what you’re saying.”

“My daughter…this is my daughter…my Baiba…we thought she was…she was…” He started to cry again and hugged her even tighter.

“Mara! Nac! Nac! Mara!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. What was he saying? What was he doing?

A nurse came running over, and then a porter. A woman pushed past them and she threw her arms around Blondie and the man, and I knew—this was the mother! This was Blondie’s mother!

“I don’t think we have to check for identification,” Ryan said.

Lulu started to cry, and Ryan wrapped an arm around her. I started to cry as well, and they both hugged me. We all watched—the whole ward watched, dozens of people gathering around—while the three of them sobbed and hugged and talked in whatever language they were speaking.

The man looked up at last. He reached out and took Lulu’s hand and pulled her—pulled all of us—forward. The woman stood and hugged each of us.

“You have done…done…my English is no so…you have given back my life,” the woman, the mother, said, and she started sobbing again.

“She was in my wife’s arms when the wave overwhelmed her,” the man said. “She was lost…drowned…gone. How did this happen? How is she here?”

“She was brought to us by locals. We cleaned her up and started searching for her family. We didn’t even know her name.”

“Baiba, her name is Baiba. My mother’s name.”

“I heard her say that word, I think,” Lulu said. “We just couldn’t understand what she was saying.”

“What language are you speaking?” Ryan asked.

“Latvian…we are from Latvia.”

“Across the Baltic from Sweden. We thought she looked Swedish.”

“Her grandmother, my wife’s mother, is Swedish.”

Like my mother, I thought.

Blondie—Baiba, now—snuggled into her father’s chest.

“This is a miracle,” he said. “You have brought us a miracle! I do not know how we can ever repay you.”