The Thunderbird
The crisp fall air, sharp with the scent of dry leaves and distant chimney smoke, was the first thing that hit me when I stepped out of the cab. Yellow and amber leaves danced along the driveway. My duffel bag hung over one shoulder.
A small box of souvenirs was clutched in the other hand, things I had carried across oceans because I believed the people who lived in this house would want to hold something I had touched in the places they had never been. Everything looked smaller now. The house, the yard, even the street where I once rode my bike with the reckless abandon of a child who believed her family would always be there to pick her up when she fell.
A familiar ache swelled in my chest, the ache of homecoming, which is not the same as the ache of being welcomed but which you do not learn to distinguish until you have stood on enough porches and waited for enough doors to open. The knot in my stomach tightened. I had been gone for twenty years.
Not continuously, not without leave or phone calls or the occasional holiday that aligned with deployment schedules, but gone in the way that military service makes a person gone: present in spirit, absent in body, funding things from a distance, calling on Sundays when the signal held, sending money for the roof and the furnace and Harper’s college tuition and the medical bills my mother Eleanor never mentioned until they were overdue. Twenty years is a long time to be useful from far away. It is long enough to fund a new roof without being thanked.
Long enough to cover a sister’s rent during a rough patch and hear about it only when someone needs the next favor. Long enough to send birthday cards that are never acknowledged and holiday packages that arrive without comment and checks that are cashed with the efficiency of an institution rather than the gratitude of a family. I had been gone the way a person is gone when she has chosen to serve her country and has discovered, gradually, that the people she left behind have interpreted her absence not as sacrifice but as abandonment, and her contributions not as love but as obligation, and her return not as reunion but as inconvenience.
I paused on the cracked stone path and looked at the front door. For a fleeting moment I saw myself at nine or ten, standing quietly in that living room corner, clutching a book, while my parents showered Harper with praise for her science fair trophy. I had placed second.
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