IT NEVER FAILS TO AMAZE me what people can survive. Wars, disease, affairs, gossip, unemployment, drinking, husbands and wives, their parents, their children—good and bad—or their lack of children. Or, thinking of Angel, what animals have to live with, being at the mercy of humans. How they survive people period or even show what we think are signs of love for us.

I thought Bill would be a bachelor for life, consumed by his research and career and of course too damaged to seek love. But we underestimated him. He shocked us his senior year when he brought a woman home for Thanksgiving. A red-haired spitfire who was down-to-earth. We all liked her right off the bat. And she was crazy about Bill.

Six years ago we pooled our money with Claire so that Bill and Liz could fly down to Colombia and spend the few months it took processing the paperwork before they could bring home what we thought would be one child.

When we picked them up from the Minneapolis—St. Paul airport, they had two six-month-old baby girls and an eighteen-month-old boy.

“We had no choice.” Bill pantomimed helplessness, throwing up his hands. “I can’t speak or read Spanish. We signed the papers before we knew. How was I to know that tres means ‘three’?”

“Do you have names?” Claire asked after recovering from her laughter.

“Not yet,” Liz said.

We have a picture on our fireplace mantel of the day they were baptized. Bill told us to dress up, but he didn’t say where we were going. Ernie, Claire, and I were in our car, and we followed Bill and Liz in their van.

Claire and I gamely followed them in our heels down a sandy slope to the Chippewa River, holding on to each other so that we would not fall down like undignified broads on our aging asses. Ernie sweated and tugged at the tie he hadn’t worn in years and frowned at the new loafers on his feet. Bill’s best friend from college, Alan Willis, who is a landscape photographer, joined us.

There is nothing more blessed than standing near a river in spring. Especially one that is still somewhat wild. I have struggled for years to name the color of spring. That green. It is a yellow green, but even that doesn’t describe it accurately. And on that day the sun played off the leaves in such a way as to make you wish you could live forever.

I was given one little girl to hold, and Claire was given the other. Then Liz placed the baby boy in Ernie’s arms. While the photographer took pictures, Bill filled a pottery cup with river water. He was never one for long speeches. He poured a little bit of water over each child’s head.

“Water is life,” is all he said.

Then they shamelessly reduced the elderly to tears. The girls were named Isabella Rosemary and Maria Claire. The little boy they named James Ernest.

All three of them are the luscious color of milk chocolate, and it is visibly apparent when they are with their mother and father that they are adopted. But when we go out of town or go out to eat as a whole group, it is Ernie that people think the children really belong to.

Jimmy remains a mystery.

Happy endings are like buying lottery tickets. It’s a crapshoot, and you can keep buying them in the hope of winning, but it doesn’t happen very often. Still, you can die hoping.

There are some happy endings. The happy ending you want may not be the happy ending you get or need. I did get to be a mother and then a grandmother through circumstances I could never have foreseen or predicted, through the default and then generosity of first one woman and then two. Ernie is the only grand-father those children will have via Bill, and although he is not as demonstrative as I am, I know he treasures Bill and his family more than his own life.

But there is that lost child.

I watch Ernie sit on the porch and shiver. He stares at our field. He’ll catch pneumonia at his age. He is still troubled, and there seems to be nothing I can say to him to ease his conscience. For years he read everything he could about Vietnam. To try to understand it and therefore gain some peace of mind, but it only made it worse.

“I just want to see him one more time. I want to know why,” Ernie said to me the other night after dinner. He was wrapped up in a shawl I made for him. “How come I’ve never seen Frank LaRue? Patterson or McDougal? Or Scofield and Krenshaw? They were my best friends. They all died young. In the war.”

Ernie went on before I could answer. Angry this time.

“That goddamn Westmoreland. All of them. Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Kissinger. Even Kennedy in the beginning. But Westmoreland and Johnson just had to have their battle at Khe Sanh. What dumb-asses. The North Vietnamese must have laughed like hell over that one. We bombed the shit out of that area and threw away lives. Westmoreland just couldn’t get past World War Two and the big battles. After two hundred years of history he never did understand fighting Indian-style. Giap did, though. He loaded up that area with soldiers so that Westmoreland thought the big threat was there. Westy took the bait. Left Saigon and the lower half of Vietnam wide open. Like lifting a blanket off a baby in a crib. Jimmy and the rest of those guys were just bait,” he spit out. “Jimmy died for nothing. Jesus Christ!” he cried. “By 1966 they knew it was wrong. Why didn’t they stop?”

This anger and bitterness never go away. Ernie does not feel that way about our war. He has let that one go. But this one he’ll take in his fists to his grave.

“Why did Jimmy show up that day? What did he want from me?” he asked.

I love my husband, but he is a man. Even among the best of them, he’s still dense sometimes. This world would have gone to hell in a handbasket if it hadn’t been for women. We’ve always had to interpret the signs for them.

I pulled my chair up next to his and cupped his face in my arthritic hands. “Why do you think Jimmy showed up that day? To punish you?”

His lips trembled. I knew that was it. What he carried for years.

“Did it ever occur to you that he was coming to tell you first? I think that’s why he never told you he enlisted. He knew you would try to stop him. Just like he knew his own father wanted to get rid of him bad enough to sign those papers.”

I stroked his white hair and marveled at how handsome he still was at seventy-six. But the pain. I can’t stand to see him in this pain.

“I think he wanted,” I said, “to spare you whatever outcome his decision would have. Then the worst happened. Like many sons in trouble, he needed to tell the father who would have protected him. Always remember,” I said, feeling his tears wet my hands, “that he came to you in your own field.”

OH, BILLY. BILLY BABOON.

Don’t fuck it up! I wanted to scream at him that day, especially after he took a shot at the dog. It was so unlike Bill that I had trouble believing it. But I saw it, and I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. The way Bill walked, the way he held himself. As though his skin were in danger of sliding off.

I’d have given anything to be in his shoes. To be able to smell the sphagnum moss, the white pine, and the cedar in the swamp and to touch it. To chew on fresh wintergreen leaves and see wood anemone in the spring. To walk down to the Chippewa on a summer’s day and go fishing. I felt longing. Something I never thought I’d feel after I was dead. But watching my brother turn into my old man was too hard. I saw my mother’s helplessness. What could she do? Point a gun at his head and tell him to stop drinking?

I had to do something. I had to scare him. Just like the old days. I had to scare him so bad that he would turn around and run back toward his life. And not give up.

I lost my copies of Huckleberry Finn and The Man Who Killed the Deer at Khe Sanh or they were pinched. But it was something else Twain said, that Sister Maria read to us in class. She was my favorite teacher in high school because she had such a wacky sense of humor. She read it to us, knowing that Twain poked at religion. I never forgot it.

Twain said, “I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and then not until we have been dead years and years. People,” he said, “ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”

What had seemed like a bunch of fuckin’ nonsense to me at sixteen made perfect sense after I was dead.

In this way I will never leave them again.