"One second, ma'am. I just need to hear it from her." He smiled at Iris, broad and kind. "Ma'am, do you know this lady here? In the red coat?"
Iris looked at Petra. James watched it happen and could not stop it. He watched the old woman's pale eyes move over Petra's face, her freckles, her scar, her hat, the eyes searching the face for something, anything, and not finding it, and then sliding down, uncertain, to the red coat, and resting there, and then coming back up to the face again, lost.
"No," Iris said politely. "I don't believe so."
Petra stood there and took it. She did not flinch. That was what James would remember about her, of all the things: that she stood in the middle of the Great Hall of Union Station in her eleventh red sweater with her chin up, and the woman who had raised her looked straight at her and said I don't believe so, and Petra did not flinch at all.
"Okay," Officer Akers said, and his voice had changed, gone a little careful. "Okay. Ma'am, how about this gentleman here? Is this your husband?"
"That's James," Iris said. She sounded relieved to be asked something she knew. "He came in on the four-ten. He's just back from Germany. From the army."
"Okay." The young officer glanced up at James. James shook his head very slightly, trying to say a whole paragraph with it: don't, kid, please, don't. Officer Akers either did not see it or did not understand it. He turned back to Iris and asked, gently and clearly and exactly as he'd been taught, the orientation question, the one on every checklist in every training binder in the country. "Ma'am, can you tell me what year it is?"
"Nineteen sixty-one," said Iris Vesely.
"Ma'am," said Officer Akers, kindly, "it's twenty twenty-six."
There is a sound a person makes when the ground goes out from under them. James had heard it once before, at County, the night his mother died, from a woman in the next curtained bay. Iris made it now. It was not loud. It was a small, high, broken intake of breath, and her hands flew up from her lap and stopped in the air in front of her face, open, as if to catch something that was falling.
"No," she said. "No, no. That's not right. That's not—where is he? James? Where's James?"