She barely recognized her own child waiting at the end of the long ramp. In the years that had passed, Lindsey had become angular, thin, every trace of body fat gone. And standing beside my sister was what looked like her male twin. A bit taller, a little more meat. Samuel. She was staring so hard at the two of them, and they were staring back, that at first she didn’t even see the chubby boy sitting off to the side on the arm of a row of waiting-area seats.

And then, just before she began walking toward them – for they all seemed suspended and immobile for the first few moments, as if they had been trapped in a viscous gelatin from which only her movement might free them – she saw him.

She began walking down the carpeted ramp. She heard announcements being made in the airport and saw passengers, with their more normal greetings, rushing past her. But it was as if she were entering a time warp as she took him in. 1944 at Camp Winnekukka. She was twelve, with chubby cheeks and heavy legs – all the things she’d felt grateful her daughters had escaped had been her son’s to endure. So many years she had been away, so much time she could never recover.

If she had counted, as I did, she would have known that in seventy-three steps she had accomplished what she had been too afraid to do for almost seven years.

It was my sister who spoke first:

“Mom,” she said.

My mother looked at my sister and flashed forward thirty-eight years from the lonely girl she’d been at Camp Winnekukka.

“Lindsey,” my mother said.

Lindsey stared at her. Buckley was standing now, but he looked first down at his shoes and then over his shoulder, out past the window to where the planes were parked, disgorging their passengers into accordioned tubes.

“How is your father?” my mother asked.

My sister had spoken the word Mom and then frozen. It tasted soapy and foreign in her mouth.

“He’s not in the greatest shape, I’m afraid,” Samuel said. It was the longest sentence anyone had said, and my mother found herself disproportionately grateful for it.

“Buckley?” my mother said, preparing no face for him. Being who she was – whoever that was.

He turned his head toward her like a racheted gun. “Buck,” he said.

“Buck,” she repeated softly and looked down at her hands.

Lindsey wanted to ask, Where are your rings?

“Shall we go?” Samuel asked.

The four of them entered the long carpeted tunnel that would bring them from her gate into the main terminal. They were headed toward the cavernous baggage claim when my mother said, “I didn’t bring any bags.”

They stood in an awkward cluster, Samuel looking for the right signs to redirect them back to the parking garage.

“Mom,” my sister tried again.

“I lied to you,” my mother said before Lindsey could say anything further. Their eyes met, and in that hot wire that went from one to the other I swore I saw it, like a rat bulging, undigested, inside a snake: the secret of Len.

“We go back up the escalator,” Samuel said, “and then we can take the overhead walkway into the parking lot.”

Samuel called for Buckley, who had drifted off in the direction of a cadre of airport security officers. Uniforms had never lost the draw they held for him.

They were on the highway when Lindsey spoke next. “They won’t let Buckley in to see Dad because of his age.”

My mother turned around in her seat. “I’ll try and do something about that,” she said, looking at Buckley and attempting her first smile.

“Fuck you,” my brother whispered without looking up.

My mother froze. The car opened up. Full of hate and tension – a riptide of blood to swim through.

“Buck,” she said, remembering the shortened name just in time, “will you look at me?”

He glared over the front seat, boring his fury into her.

Eventually my mother turned back around and Samuel, Lindsey, and my brother could hear the sounds from the passenger seat that she was trying hard not to make. Little peeps and a choked sob. But no amount of tears would sway Buckley. He had been keeping, daily, weekly, yearly, an underground storage room of hate. Deep inside this, the four-year-old sat, his heart flashing. Heart to stone, heart to stone.

“We’ll all feel better after seeing Mr. Salmon,” Samuel said, and then, because even he could not bear it, he leaned forward toward the dash and turned on the radio.

It was the same hospital that she had come to eight years ago in the middle of the night. A different floor painted a different color, but she could feel it encasing her as she walked down the hall – what she’d done there. The push of Len’s body, her back pressed into the sharp stucco wall. Everything in her wanted to run – fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants and people.

Her mother’s ankles and oxford pumps, which she saw from the hallway, brought her back. One of the many simple things she’d lost by moving so far away, just the commonplace of her mother’s feet – their solidity and humor – seventy-year-old feet in ridiculously uncomfortable shoes.

But as she walked forward into the room, everyone else – her son, her daughter, her mother – fell away.

My father’s eyes were weak but fluttered open when he heard her enter. He had tubes and wires coming out of his wrist and shoulder. His head seemed so fragile on the small square pillow.

She held his hand and cried silently, letting the tears come freely.

“Hello, Ocean Eyes,” he said.

She nodded her head. This broken, beaten man – her husband.

“My girl,” he breathed out heavily.

“Jack.”

“Look what it took to get you home.”

“Was it worth it?” she said, smiling bleakly.

“We’ll have to see,” he said.

To see them together was like a tenuous belief made real.

My father could see glimmers, like the colored flecks inside my mother’s eyes – things to hold on to. These he counted among the broken planks and boards of a long-ago ship that had struck something greater than itself and sunk. There were only remnants and artifacts left to him now. He tried to reach up and touch her cheek, but his arm felt too weak. She moved closer and laid her cheek in his palm.

My grandmother knew how to move silently in heels. She tiptoed out of the room. As she resumed her normal stride and approached the waiting area, she intercepted a nurse with a message for Jack Salmon in Room 582. She had never met the man but knew his name. “Len Fenerman, will visit soon. Wishes you well.” She folded the note neatly. Just before she came upon Lindsey and Buckley, who had gone to join Samuel in the waiting room, she popped open the metal lip of her purse and placed it between her powder and comb.