THE HOMECOMING NOBODY WANTED

The last thing I wanted when I got back was a welcome.

No balloons. No banner across the porch. No neighbours coming out onto their steps to shake my hand and thank me for my service, which is a thing people do with the best intentions in the world and which I have never once known how to answer.

After four years of sleeping in places that were not mine, of hearing things go off two ridges over, of counting down in a notebook I kept in my breast pocket, there was exactly one thing I wanted.

I wanted to see Gwen.

I wanted to put my arms round my wife in my own hallway and feel, finally, that the whole thing had been worth what it cost.

For four years that was the entire structure holding me up. Not patriotism. Not the unit, although I would have died for six of them and nearly did for one. It was a woman in a house in a town of nine thousand people who was waiting for me.

Every month, without missing once, I sent money home.

Ninety-four thousand dollars over forty-seven transfers. I know the number to the dollar now, because I have had to say it out loud in three separate rooms since.

It was not for luxury. I want that understood, because of what came later.

It was so that Gwen would not have to worry. It was so that my mother, Margaret, who had raised two children on a hospital laundry wage after my father went, would not have to worry either. And it was so that my sister Paige, who has never held a job longer than nine months, would have something behind her.

That is what family does.

That is what I believed, at thirty-one years old, sitting on a cot with a pen and a form, in a country I am not going to name.

The day I came home I made a decision.

No phone call. No warning. Nothing.

I wanted the door to open and I wanted to watch her understand.

I imagined it a great deal on the flight. I imagined her crying. I imagined her running at me the way she had at the airport before the second tour, hard enough that I had to take a step back to stay upright.

I imagined saying: I'm home.

But something was wrong before I got to the door, and I knew it from the end of the street.

The neighbourhood looked exactly the way it had always looked. Same maples. Same cracked kerb outside the Petrosians'.

My house did not.

I slowed the hire truck as I came up on the drive.

The house was the same house. Everything around it had changed.

There was a vehicle parked in front of it — not a car, a top-of-the-line pickup with dealer plates still in the window and a chrome package on it that costs more than my first year of pay.

The yard had been done. Not tidied. Done — professionally, with a plan, with stone edging where the wooden fence had been. New front door, solid, with a bevelled glass panel in it.

And through the front window, from the street, I could see furniture that did not belong to me.

My first thought — and I have gone over this a hundred times and it is genuinely what I thought — was *good*.

Maybe Gwen had finally been able to do something with the place. Maybe the money had done what money is for. Maybe I was looking at four years of my life standing there in stone and glass, and it had worked.

I smiled at my own house from the street like an idiot.

I got my bag out of the back and I walked up.

The key still fitted.

The lock turned.

I pushed it open quietly, because I still wanted the surprise.

Surprise, I said, to nobody, under my breath.

Nobody answered.

But there were voices.

Laughter, from towards the back. Somebody talking in the loose, unhurried way that people talk in a house they are comfortable in.

I stepped inside.

The first thing was the smell.

Perfume. Not a bottle of something from the drugstore. The heavy kind, the kind that sits in a room for an hour after the person has left it, and I knew immediately that it was not Gwen's, because Gwen did not buy perfume. She told me once, in the second year of our marriage, that she could not make herself pay forty dollars for something that evaporates.

Then I looked properly.

The floor was polished stone. Not the vinyl we had put down ourselves over two weekends in 2018 with a borrowed cutter.

The furniture was the sort you see in a hotel lobby. Deep, pale, with nothing on it.

There was a television on the far wall of the front room that was bigger than the wall of the room I slept in overseas.

Everything was expensive. Everything was new. And there was no sign anywhere — not a coat, not a mug, not a pair of shoes by the door — that anybody actually lived in it.

My smile came off my face somewhere in that hallway and I do not remember it going.

I went down the corridor quietly, and I did it the way I had been trained to move, which I did not decide to do.

And I heard a voice from the kitchen.

I knew it straight away.

My sister.

I don't care if it hurts, Paige said. Just scrub the damn pot.

I stopped.

I stood in my own hallway with a bag in my hand and could not make that sentence fit anything.

Who was Paige giving orders to? There was nobody in that house but the three of them.

Then my mother's voice, from further in.

You've always been so dramatic, Margaret said. If you'd taken better care of yourself in the first place none of this would have happened.

Something went tight in my stomach.

I moved up to the corner of the doorway and looked round it.

And that is where the four years stopped meaning what they had meant.

Paige was sitting at a kitchen island that had not existed when I left. She was in clothes I would have guessed at four hundred dollars, and I would have been low. She had a glass of champagne in one hand at four o'clock in the afternoon on a Thursday and her phone flat on the counter, and she was scrolling with one finger and not looking up.

My mother was in a leather chair by the window in a silk robe.

She had a necklace on. I found out later what it cost and I am not going to write the number down because it makes me feel something I do not want to feel while I am writing.

She looked comfortable. She looked well. She looked, and I am choosing the word carefully, prosperous.

Neither of them was doing anything.

Because the person doing it was Gwen.

My wife.

The woman I had spent four years getting back to.

She was at the sink with her back to the room.

And she was not the woman I had left.

My heart did something in my chest that I have only felt twice, and the other time was a vehicle door.

She was thin.

Not slim. Not a person who has lost some weight. She was fragile — the word people use loosely and which has an actual meaning, which is that you can see the architecture. Her wrists coming out of the sleeves of a sweatshirt three sizes too big for her looked like something you would find on a beach.

Her hands were shaking while she scrubbed at a cast-iron pan, and it was not effort. It was the other thing.

Her movements were slow and even and completely without any of her in them. Like a machine that has been left running.

And she was wearing a hat.

A thick knitted winter beanie, pulled all the way down to her eyebrows and down over the back of her neck.

Indoors. In a heated house. In the afternoon.

I did not understand it. I stood there for perhaps four seconds trying to make it mean something ordinary — cold, habit, a bad haircut — and I could not.

Then Gwen dropped the sponge.

It fell into the sink and made almost no sound at all.

And before she had got her hand back down to it, Paige picked up a rolled magazine off the counter and threw it.

It hit my wife on the shoulder.

Clumsy idiot, Paige said, and went back to her phone.

I want to describe what happened in me at that moment and I have never managed it in a way that satisfies me.

The nearest I can get is that everything went very quiet and very clear, the way it does about a second before something starts.

Four years.

Ninety-four thousand dollars.

Six thousand miles.

Everything I had put down and everything I had not been at — my own thirty-fourth birthday, a funeral, the whole of it — and this was what had been happening in my kitchen.

My boots moved before I had decided anything.

Step. Step. Step, on that polished stone, and it made a sound in that room like somebody knocking.

Everybody turned.

Paige's face came apart in stages, and the glass went out of her fingers before her expression had finished changing. It hit the floor and broke and neither she nor my mother looked down at it.

Margaret stood up so fast that the chair went back on the stone behind her.

Her eyes went very wide.

David?

Nobody moved. Nobody said anything else.

I looked at them. My mother. My sister. The two people whose names were on the transfers.

And then I looked at Gwen.

She had turned round from the sink with her hands still wet and she was completely still, and what was on her face was not surprise and it was not joy.

It was fear.

She looked at me the way you look at something coming towards you.

I started walking over.

Gwen.

Her lips moved and nothing came out for a second.

She did not come to me. She did not put her arms out. She did not cry.

She said, so quietly that I do not think either of the others heard it:

You shouldn't have come home yet.

I have been shot at. I have carried a man eleven hundred metres. I have had a briefing in which I was told the odds and did the thing anyway.

Nothing has ever hurt me like six words in my own kitchen.

Because I understood them instantly, and what I understood was this:

My wife was not afraid of what I was going to find.

She was afraid of what they were going to do to her afterwards.

I reached for her hand and she pulled it back. Not away from me — back, in towards her own body, fast, the way you move a hand near a stove.

And that told me the rest of it.