1969

The kitchen table is a still life—peeled orange, half-eaten toast. His brown cardigan hangs on the chair, as though to warm it. She thinks of Mount Vesuvius, its explosion covering Pompeii, the household tableaux perfectly preserved under 30 feet of ash.

*

He walks away from his home quickly, taking nothing. His father once told him to never look back at a stray, or it will think you want it. His house is an old dog he must ignore as he hurries down the tree-lined street to the idling car.

1999

“Mom, what happened? You must have theories?”

Her son never stops asking. At 33, he's the same age as his father when he left.

“I don't think we'll ever know. It's one of the world's great mysteries, like the Bermuda Triangle.”

She speaks lightly to hide her pain, but it's always there, with the anger like a blaze not properly banked.

1971

In his new town, he has a different name and an apartment with one of everything—bowl, blanket, chair. He aches for his wife and boy. Their hands in his. The nights she warmed him. He knows now he never should have come forward. But he hadn't realized the high cost of honesty.

*

It always feels like people are watching her, judging. Next door, they'd heard them arguing early that morning. It's true she has a temper like a forest fire—quick and devastating. Now a tiny flame keeps her calling the police, the hospitals. But she knows. That morning she'd said to him, “Leave. Just go.” And he had.

1969

They'd told him that they'd watch over his family. That the people he'd implicated would want only him. He'd been instructed to leave no trace. He writes her a letter, anyway, cut into a heart shape. Closes with, “Know that I love you.”

*

The boy wakes, climbs easily out of his crib. Downstairs his father is in his daytime clothes, placing something on the table before leaving. Alone in the hallway, he sees it is a funny bit of paper. He puts it in his pajama pant pocket, where later it will go through the wash, the paper disintegrating like cinder.

2004

His new name grows old with him but never fits. He searches for them on the Internet. She's stayed in the house. Their son has married. One day he learns the last of those he accused is dead. Then he finds a birth announcement. He is a grandfather. He packs his bags.

*

The newborn starts crying in answer to the knock. She thinks it's another gift delivery. At the door is a man who looks like her husband, only shrunken, ashen. He smiles joyfully, like a child. Inside her something shakes and explodes.

*

This is how the boy who is now a man discovers them. They will burn in his memory just like this. Clinging to one another—two miraculous survivors unearthed long after the disaster is over.