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The last time they had been at that airport,
David had been with them.

A slicing stab of sadness burst into her
stomach and began to spread its way to her throat. She’d been
enduring and tolerating them all the way from Limerick nineteen
hours earlier. Everything about this trip felt wrong.

Even the guilt she felt about that.

“Will Nana and Granddad be waiting for us at
the airport?” John asked, not turning his head from the view.

Sarah had called them as soon as they landed
in Reagan National. It was difficult to understand her mother
through the excitement and inevitable tears.

“Yes,” she said.

The flight attendant came down the aisle and
smiled at them both. “We’ll be landing soon,” she said. “Are you
ready for this?”

She meant it in a nice way, Sarah knew. The
crew had been informed of their special circumstances.

Sarah forgot how intensely people smiled
back home. She tried to remember two times the whole time she had
known Fiona where her friend had smiled this broadly.

“As we’ll ever be,” she said. She turned to
pat John’s knee but he was focused on the upcoming landing and the
ground rushing ever closer as they descended.

Her parents looked like they had aged ten
years. When her mother saw her and John coming down the jet-way,
she mother collapsed and had to be supported by her father, who
looked like he wasn’t far behind her. Sarah watched John sprint
ahead to take his grandfather’s arm. She saw her dad look at him
with surprise.

It’s true,
she thought.
He’s not
the same boy who climbed on that plane two years ago. Now, if he
sees a situation he acts on it without asking permission
first
.

Maybe that worked fine in post-apocalyptic
Ireland.

Probably not so much back here.

She hurried to her parents and smiled, her
arms outstretched to them.

***

“And there’s nobody at all you can contact
about poor David?” her mother muted the television set and set down
two steaming mugs of coffee. Sarah noticed that they had a new
cappuccino machine in the kitchen.

“Not really.”

“You’ll get his 401K? And the house?”

Sarah frowned at her mother. “I suppose so,”
she said. “Everything he had, he left to me.”

“You might not have to work,” her mother
said. She was wearing a silk blouse tucked into a pair of pleated
linen slacks. Sarah knew her mother loved clothes—and at seventy,
she still looked good in them. She also knew her mother had never
worked a day in her life.

“Except for getting John enrolled in the
Brampton Middle School as soon as possible,” Sarah said, “I haven’t
thought too far ahead.”

Her father came into the room and leaned
down to kiss his wife. A tall, tan man who had always golfed more
than he’d worked, Sarah realized with a pang that there didn’t seem
to be much to her father.

Funny how living in an
environment where wit and courage trump wealth or status—especially
status you inherited—can really change your
perspective
. She blushed at her
uncharitable thoughts and forced her face into a smile for her
father. She loved him dearly, she reminded herself. Just because I
can’t imagine him chopping wood or riding a horse down to find a
goat trapped into a gully doesn’t mean he’s not amazing in his own
right.

“I can put a word in for you, if you like,”
he said, smiling. “Brampton is extremely difficult to get
into.”

“That’d be good, Dad. Thanks.”

“And it’s expensive.”

“I know,” Sarah said. “The government is
awarding me a settlement sum. I don’t know why. I guess they’re
afraid I’d blame them for what happened with David and try to sue
them.”

“Many people are doing exactly that.”

“Well, I’m happy to take the money,” Sarah
said. “Without David, I could use it.”

“Where’s John?” he asked, looking around the
large living room. The window opened up to a view of a private lake
lined with weeping willows.

Sarah had expected it would feel like a
dream—being here after having lived there. She knew she would have
to fight to keep her equilibrium after everything she’d
experienced. She hadn’t expected it to dissolve in her hands like
sand in water the moment she stepped back into her old world.

It hadn’t taken an hour to realize the
pleasures and luxuries she thought she could never in her life take
for granted again had clicked back into place as if she’d never
left. The first few moments of smelling the aroma wafting out of
the airport Starbucks quickly gave way to the assumption that it
would be there.

“The jet lag got him,” she said. “He’ll be
up later.”

“Is…is there anything you want to talk
about, sweetheart?” her mother asked, delicately sipping from her
coffee mug.

What in the world could she say to them?
That she’d seen David get his head blown off. That she’d nearly
been raped by a monster she then killed by slitting his throat.
That she’d eaten a rabbit raw to survive and slept in a ditch with
three corpses writhing with maggots.

Dear God, did any of that make sense? In
light of where she was now?

“Not really, Mom,” she said, standing. “But
I’d love to take advantage of the guest bath if you don’t mind.
It’s been awhile since I have seen a bar of soap and I’m really
looking forward to it.”

“Of course, darling. And then maybe later a
trip to the mall for some shopping?”

“Maybe. Oh, where’s Gunner? I’m surprised
John hasn’t asked about him yet.”

She watched her mother look up at her father
as if a previous discussion had placed this ball firmly in his
court.

Her father cleared his throat. “We couldn’t
take care of him ourselves, obviously,” he said. “And after it
became clear you weren’t coming home any time soon, well, the
holding facility wouldn’t keep him indefinitely.”

“You put him in a…you boarded him
somewhere?”

“Well, darling, you know we’re not dog
people. We certainly couldn’t keep him.”

“So you killed him? Is that the long and
short of it?”

“Well, we didn’t personally kill him, no,”
her father said, looking at her as if she were misbehaving in some
way.

No, because that would take some backbone.
You paid someone to do it for you.

Sarah knew she was going to overreact, and
knowing it helped stem the tide of her tears. She sat back down,
her face in her hands and began to weep without care or control.
She cried great groaning sobs for the family pet who never had a
chance, for the little gypsy girl not three days dead, for Mike who
she could still see in her mind as she left him—who was twice the
man her father was—and for the simple hideous fact that David
wasn’t by her side for this homecoming.

And for the truly terrible mistake she now
knew she had made.

Her parents hovered over her helplessly, not
actually touching her, but upset and unnerved. Her mother’s hands
fluttered around Sarah’s head and shoulders as she heaved and
rocked with her wracking sobs.

“Darling, we are so sorry! I told you,
James. I told you we should have found a temporary home for
him!”

“Now, now, Rebecca, the girl’s just
exhausted. God knows what she’s endured over there. Probably went
to bed hungry a time or two and I can already see she’s brown as a
berry so I’m sure it was no bed of roses. She’ll be fine.”

Sarah stood up and bolted for the bathroom.
“Please, excuse me,” she said over her shoulder, her voice still
cracked by the crying jag.

She laid in the bathtub of her parents’
home, the water as hot and high as she could stand it and tried to
remember what it took to attempt to get clean back home.

Back in Ireland.

Because she couldn’t stop
staring at everything, particularly the baristas at the airport
coffee kiosks, where her father had bought her a
grande latte
for the car
ride back to the upscale, gated neighborhood on the Intracoastal
where her parents lived.

The first sip hadn’t tasted like she
remembered it. The second sip was a little better, but it wasn’t
half as good as the memory of being wrapped in a thin wool rug
watching the starlight over the camp drinking weak tea with goat
milk.

Her parents had euthanized her perfectly
healthy dog. Sometime in the past two years they’d bought a fancy
new coffee maker. One that made steamed milk and kept the cups warm
until ready to use. Sarah tried to imagine her mother wandering
into a store by the Town Center Mall perusing the shelves,
determining which model would best suit her needs. She wondered if
she’d been fighting for her life at that moment. Or merely hungry
and terrified. She knew it wasn’t fair to think like that.

John’s school started in three weeks.

The following day, Sarah borrowed her
parents’ car and went to the house she had shared with David. She
cringed when she stepped past the threshold. No dog to greet her.
No David calling to her from the kitchen. She entered the family
room and walked around, touching her own furnishings as if she were
a stranger seeing it all for the first time.

She saw the childish ceramics in the kitchen
from John’s kindergarten years, the sweater she had tossed on the
back of her desk chair. A cereal bowl still sitting on the kitchen
counter.

She touched the sheet stuck
to the refrigerator with magnets. “A+ Good job, John!” was scrawled
across the top in red marker. The child who’d brought that test
paper home, so proud and excited…
that
child had gone on vacation to
Ireland and had never come home again.

She looked at her kitchen. The stove, the
refrigerator, the shelves still full of canned food. She went to
the counter under the kitchen window and threw up in the stainless
steel sink.

She let herself out without going upstairs.
She locked up and drove away.

The rest of the day she spent getting her
smartphone turned back on and updated, and renewing the tags on the
Highlander in the garage. She made appointments for the
orthodontist for John, and physicals for both of them. She went to
the mall and sat by the wheelchairs with the old ones, immobilized
and numb, as shoppers scurried around her. Later, she came back to
her parents and told her mother she hadn’t been able to find
anything.

By the end of the first
week, John had spent every day, all day, playing
Call of Duty
in his
grandparents’ guest room
.
He refused to go to the house with Sarah, refused
to call any of his old friends, refused to eat anything but
Pop-Tarts and Cokes.

Her mother urged her to be patient.

“
You were the same way when
you couldn’t get your way,” her mother said.

“I think we’re looking at something a little
deeper than teen angst.”

“That’s probably what he’d like you to think
anyway.”

“You don’t know him, Mom. John doesn’t play
games.”

“Well, whatever it is, I’m sure it’ll sort
itself out once he gets back in school with all his friends.”

“The same friends he refuses to see
now?”

“Well, then he’ll make new ones. It’s a new
school year after all. And won’t John have stories to tell?”

Oh, yeah, he will. Like how he buried his
murdered father in a cow pasture? Or maybe how he gave the order to
detonate a bomb that exterminated his father’s killer? He’ll keep
them riveted in the school cafeteria with the stories he has to
tell.

The thought occurred to her: along with the
dentist and his pediatrician, should she make an appointment for
him to see a psychiatrist?

“Meanwhile, you need to get yourself sorted
out, Sarah.”

Sarah looked at her mother in surprise.
“What do you mean? I’m going back to the mall. I know I need
clothes.”

“I meant start thinking about your future.
You know, dating, again.”

Sarah tried to see her mother as if she were
seeing her for the first time. A pretty woman, she loved her family
and she saw them exactly as she wanted to see them.

Just nothing like they really were.

“I’m nowhere near ready for that,” she
said.

“Well, David’s been gone over a year
now.”

“It’s not that. I’m in love with
someone.”

Her mother’s eyes widened. Up to this
moment, she had been trimming a tall bunch of Hydrangea blooms to
fit in a wide vase. She laid her scissors down on the hall table
and turned to look at Sarah. “Someone you met over there?”

No, Mom, the Air Force transport pilot.

“That’s right.”

Her mother frowned for a moment and then
turned to pick up the scissors again. “Well, all the more reason.
Nothing like getting back up on the horse to get someone out of
your mind, I always say.”

“I think I made a mistake, Mom.”

“How so, dear?”

“I shouldn’t have left.”

“Don’t be silly. John will snap out of this.
You just need to give him some time.” She paused. “Give yourself
time. You’ve been through a lot, I imagine.”

No, Mom, you really can’t.

“Why don’t you help me set the table? I
always feel better when I’m busy. Don’t you?”

19

The teenager squirmed in the hunched over
position that the wooden stocks forced him to conform to. He
couldn’t stand erect and he couldn’t shift his weight to put the
bulk of it on his back foot. His face looked bewildered,
afraid.

Fiona came away from the window and turned
to Declan where he sat on the couch. “Somebody has thrown a tomato
at the poor lad.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Fiona clapped her hands on her hips. “Well,
bloody hell, man! Is this new regime okay with wasting food?”