• Without hesitation, I reached out my hand. “Sure,” I said. “You’re safe with me.”

    ***

    The first glimpse of my family came as I cautiously climbed down the stairs towards security. It had been almost three years since I had seen them, and they had definitely changed during that time. As had I.

    My younger brothers seemed to be the most excited. But then again, I ought to have expected that as they seemed to think I was the most incredible person in the world, even after my injury. Especially since then.

    Just before I returned to the real world, I turned and checked my pack. It didn’t appear to have been touched, but that wasn’t unexpected. It was an army pack, and people have a tendency to keep away from soldiers, particularly the wounded sort. It didn’t help that I wasn’t exactly downplaying the damage or that I was still attired in army fatigues and jacket. I wasn’t about to stop wearing them, even now that I was off the active duty roster.

    At that time, I was nearly knocked over by two small shapes. Ah, the twins. Their enthusiasm and devotion to me was... overwhelming. My two sisters, in contrast, looked positively bored. Typical teenagers. My parents approached a little slower than the twins, wearing uneasy looks. It was as if they were worried that I was going to pull out a gun and start shooting. Yeah, right. I had turned in my gun back in the military hospital in Ottawa because I didn’t want one of my siblings accidentally shooting themselves. I smiled to set my parents’ minds at rest, but I knew it didn’t reach my eyes. They relaxed and came over to receive their own embrace while my sisters continued to stand off to the side. The twins, Elijah and Joel, though, had been pelting questions at me the instant I was close enough to hear them.

    “Back off, you two,” my father told the youngsters. “Let Shawn have some space.” I nodded gratefully, and then stepped forward to hug my parents stiffly. My mother quickly offered to take my pack, but I declined. The bag was heavy enough to give me problems; she wouldn’t stand a chance carrying it, unlike me. I had training, strength, and experiences she’d never know.

    Our slow parade made its way over to towards the baggage turnstile. My father picked up my other bag, refusing to acknowledge my protests and attempts to take it for myself. Did they think me weak? Perhaps it was a natural parental worry. In their minds, I was still their “little” boy, despite the fact that I was larger than either of them.

    “Hey, hey, hey!” It was Elijah and Joel again. “Guess what?”

    “I did what you told me-“

    “We did what you told us-“

    “Yeah, and I stood up to the bully-“

    “-and I held him down-“

    “-then I kicked him where the sun don’t shine-“

    “-and he doesn’t bother us anymore.”

    The pair beamed up at me, probably looking for some sort of congratulations, while my parents stared in opposite directions.

    “Um, good for you.” I tried to sound pleased, and apparently I succeeded, for the twins gave me identical grins and began dragging me towards the van.

    The ride home was unnaturally quiet. The twins had fallen asleep the instant we started driving away. I sat in the front, staring out the windshield after my mother refused to take the seat. What was with them today? I wasn’t a child; I didn’t need to be spoiled. I was used to not getting my way, as I wasn’t all that high ranked in the military.

    Brooke and Krysta, my sisters, 11 and 13 respectively, each stared out opposite windows, iPods blasting in their ears. Girls haven’t changed one bit from when I was their age. They were all like that. But I don’t remember them acting like this before I left. They had clung tearfully to my legs, trying to make me stay. But I couldn’t have stayed, even if I had wanted to. I owed Canada five years of service because I couldn’t have paid for university otherwise. I was determined to pay off that debt.

    During the drive home, I gazed out the windshield, trying to hide my dismay. Everything had changed. After three years, I should have expected that, but for some reason I had held out hope. Old stores had been demolished and replaced by shiny new apartments. Some of my old haunts, like the skateboard park, were covered in graffiti and filled with druggies. How could these places, so full of memories, have fallen so far? It must be because, like old Sergeant Johnson taught us, memories are unimportant. Emotional baggage. A thing to slow you down. I had to let those memories go.

    The old house wasn’t all too different. The ivy had crept even further towards the roof, covering the neat white paint. The garden evidently still flourished from what I could see. Here, everything had stayed the same.

    I knew my family, particularly my parents, wanted to know what had gone on “overseas”, but they refrained from actually asking. I suspected that they knew it would be a painful subject.

    While the other six returned to their daily routine, I climbed slowly towards my room. It was in the attic, which made for a difficult time, but I endured. I would not let my injury slow me down.

    After depositing my bags on the floor of my room, I quickly realised how much my family cared for my well-being. Everything was how I remember leaving it, right up to the piles of books on the floor. At least, I think it was the same. A recently cleaned desk was covered by a handful of sports magazines and some pens, all of them arranged haphazardly, as was my way. I spotted my sisters’ touch in the pot of flowers sitting on the windowsill. The plant had grown since I was last here, so they much have been caring for it. My mother’s hand was clearly visible in the neat sheets and the clean walls. She was such a stickler for cleanliness.

    A gentle tap at the door startled me out of my musings. My father’s head poked inside, wearing a small smile. “Settling back in all right?” he asked. I nodded, and he continued, “Good, good. We’ll be having dinner in about half an hour, okay? Mom’s cooking meatloaf again.” A slight wince crossed his face before he ducked out of my room again.

    With a sigh, I slumped on to my bed. I didn’t know whether I ought to come down for dinner; I’d just make everyone uncomfortable. It would be like having a little-known cousin invited over for dinner. I had never been especially close to my siblings because of our age difference, so I guess it had always been like this. Then what was it that was bothering me so much? Maybe I had distanced myself too much. Maybe it was me who would be uncomfortable at the dinner table.

    I’d have to fight that discomfort, I decided as I began getting changed. No need to perturb my family more than I had already. A clean shirt later, I stood in front of my mirror, pursing my lips at my uneven legs. They didn’t look all that different to the casual observer, but I knew exactly what to look for: too much loose fabric below my left knee, the glint of metal that occasionally showed up when I walked, and how I stood mostly on my right leg. It was all very noticeable to me.

    I grimaced and bent down, trying to rearrange the fabric of my pants so that the lack of leg beneath my left knee wouldn’t be so obvious. The thin metal construction that replaced it was all too evident in my opinion. I frowned and gave up. I’d deal with it later, when I had more time. Right now, I had to go “mingle” with everyone else.

    A painful climb down the stairs later, I was in the living room, watching as my brothers laughed at the TV screen. From the shuriken I saw flash past on the screen, I guessed that it was a show about ninjas. Elijah and Joel adored ninjas more than they adored me, if that was possible.

    As I had predicted, dinner was a quiet affair. Jet lag had begun to catch up to me, and I was struggling to stay awake. It wasn’t as bad as when I returned from the Middle East in November, but I never reacted well to time changes. Something to do with chemical imbalances or whatever it was that the doctors had told me.

    Fortunately, it was still April, so the other four had school tomorrow, and my parents probably had to work, which meant I’d most likely be on my own for the next while, until I was recalled to the service. My other option had been to go rent myself an apartment, but once again my parents had objected. I didn’t want to be a burden on them, but they wouldn’t let me do anything more than absolutely necessary.

    After the meal, I returned to my room while everyone else prepared for tomorrow. I wondered what I would do while they were all out. Probably just take a run, go find a small café somewhere and catch up on what had been going on around town.

    I must have fallen asleep not too much later, because I awoke in darkness. Well, it wasn’t all that dark; it couldn’t have been too long after dawn, but there was some light. My habits from having lived in the Middle East for three years died hard. Over there, everyone woke up at dawn, unless you were on the night shift. If you didn’t wake up quickly, someone often took advantage of that and tried to kill you. No fun.

    Now that I was awake, I wasn’t likely to get back to sleep, so I went downstairs to the kitchen to find some food for an early-morning snack. To my surprise, my father was already up, nursing a cup of steaming coffee. Most normal beings didn’t get up at such an ungodly hour, unless your name was Shawn Beckett, but then again, I must have inherited the early waking habit from somewhere.

    “There’s fresh coffee in the maker,” I heard him tell me without looking up from the newspaper he was reading. As I went to go get a cup, I frowned and wondered how he could have gotten so good at reading me. Actually, he probably just guessed. Most people required something strong and caffeinated at this time of the morning.

    “Shawn.” He was watching me now. “Are you going to be fine on your own today? I couldn’t get the day off work because they didn’t give us much warning when they said you were coming.” I didn’t have to ask who ‘they’ were. There was only one group of people my father would refuse to talk about, and that would be the military.

    “I’ll be okay,” I told him after taking a sip of the hot drink. “Really. I’ll probably just take a wander around town.” No need to burden him even more. There was no need for him to take time off work; I knew how much our family needed all the money we could get.

    “All right.” He stood and gave me a weary smile before climbing upstairs.

    The rest of the morning passed quickly. I left the house to go for a run as soon as I heard the telltale noises of the twins waking up. I didn’t want a repeat of the insanity of yesterday.

    Running was difficult, as it had been since my injury. But I’d been known to be stubborn, and I was not going to give up my daily runs just because of some land mine. It was a little uncomfortable, actually, watching everyone walk or drive by, getting on with their lives, lives that I might have been part of if I hadn’t gone and joined the army.

    It was like a glass wall had formed between me and the rest of the world. While I could watch them, and they me, I couldn’t interact with them. A connection had been severed between me and the real world, and I knew that it was this loss of relationships that pained me, more than any injury could.

    While it had been a long time since I was last in my home town, I still didn’t get lost. The route to the café hadn’t changed, even though the café itself had. It was called something different, and the decor was odd, but it still sold coffee and food, which was what I was after. Even though it had been a few years, my father’s coffee-making skills hadn’t improved.

    The conclusion I had come to on my run over here – that I was disconnected from the rest of the world – hadn’t surprised me. I had already figured that out back in Afghanistan. But it wasn’t until I was home, trying to fit back into a bunch of lives that weren’t used to me, that I realised how much it affected me. I hadn’t been truly aware of the distance between me and ‘normal’ people. But even as I sat in the corner of the café, I could feel it as surely as if it were a wall. I think I had expected the distance to disappear when I became physically closer to ‘normal’ people and their ‘normal’ lives. I had deluded myself.

    But did I really want to return to a ‘normal’ life? I was probably going to be shipped out again in a couple months, not overseas, but at least elsewhere in Canada. Did I want to get my old life back, just to abandon it again when I left? It would be hard on my family too, not just me. They’d have to go through the pain of me leaving for a second time, and I knew that it had been hard enough the first time.

    I finished my coffee and left the café. I wanted to be somewhere familiar, somewhere with happier memories.

    A little girl, no more than five, bumped into me as I stepped out onto the street. She gave a huge smile, reminding me all too much of my brothers before I left, then trotted off down the street after an older woman. As she ran off, the little girl left a trail of bubbles. For a moment, I was confused, until I noticed the small container of bubble soap hidden away in her hand and saw her stop to blow through the wand. It was amazing how an innocent little thing like blowing bubbles could lift my spirits.

    I returned home to an empty house. Everyone was either at school or at work, leaving me on my own. As I had told my father, that was okay with me. I didn’t want company right then.

    I picked up a newspaper and sat in the games room to read it. I was particularly interested in the world section, because that was where they reported the names of those who died. I feared that one of the names would be a friend of mine. Fortunately, I read the newspaper without encountering a single mention of Afghanistan. That was a good sign.

    Jet lag once again caught up to me as I sat there, so I gave in and went to sleep, where I dreamed the same dream I’d had for two months.
    ***
    “Hey Beckett, we’re going to finish our rounds, then head in. Save us some food, will ya?” I waved at my friends and smiled. That’s all anyone cared about here: good food. Not that we got too much of it, unfortunately.

    “I will, I will, don’t worry.” It wasn’t often that I finished up early, but there hadn’t been any trouble around here today. My lucky day. That meant I got first dibs on the food we got rationed. It also wasn’t often that I walked back to base on my own, but I figured that it would be safe enough, considering how things were going today.

    I noticed a small figure off to my left. It appeared to be one of the local kids, which wasn’t a surprise, but he was climbing through an area that we knew had been mined.

    “Hey, kid, get out of there!” I called, stepping cautiously towards him. He continued to walk through the sandy street. Annoyed that I was going to miss dinner to go save a kid, I took a step forward, prepared to fight my way through the minefield...

    Beep. Beep. Beep.

    Damn. That sounded like a heart-rate monitor. That meant a hospital. That usually meant that I was hurt. There were voices, too; the hushed voices of people who sounded like doctors.

    “... doing better than...”

    “... not sure that he’ll be back...”

    “Shawn!”

    That was clearly not part of my dream. I opened my eyes and saw that my brothers were practically leaping on me. It appeared I had gone and slept the day away.

    “Shawn! Mommy says we’re gonna go to the spring fair! And there’s gonna be a dunk tank!” The two seemed so excited about it that I decided, for their sakes, I would at least try to act ‘normal’. They didn’t deserve the unhappy creature I had become since the landmine.

    “Well, if you’re going to continue the Beckett family tradition, you’re going to have to knock that person into the water. Otherwise we’ll have to disown you.” The twins gave me identical, evil grins. They had a plan. I just knew it.

    Half an hour later, after much complaining on my sisters’ parts, we were all down the street at the local spring fair. The twins immediately left to go find the dunk tank, my sisters met u p with some friends and disappeared, and my parents wandered around, greeting people. That left me, awkward and on my own. The best thing to do would probably be to take a wander, like my parents. Who knew, maybe I’d even run into some people I knew.

    The fair wasn’t that bad. It was loud, crowded, and busy, but it served good food and everyone in the community seemed to have shown up. I walked around the edge of the festivities, wishing I could join in and not feel strange. Suddenly I felt a little hand tug at my shirt.

    “I can’t find my mommy.” It was the same girl I had run into earlier that morning, the one with the bubbles. But now she wasn’t smiling, and looked scared. I understood the feeling. It was really overwhelming. “Can you help me?”

    Without hesitation, I reached out my hand. “Sure,” I said. “You’re safe with me.” For some reason, this little girl had touched me in a way no one could. She didn’t seem afraid of me, or even worried that she was talking to a stranger. I had always assumed that most people didn’t like to be around me because I was so big, but I had heard somewhere that children often like big people.

    “I’m Shawn,” I told her, carefully leading her towards the crowd again. I just hoped her mother wasn’t one of those types who freaked out if someone came anywhere near their child.

    “I’m Kally,” she said. “My mommy says you’re bad. She says you hurt people. I don’t think so. That’s why I came to you.” An icy fist tugged at my heart. So that’s what people thought of me. But Kally didn’t believe her mother, and she was surprisingly eloquent for someone so young.

    “Well, you’re right. I don’t like to hurt people.” I paused for a moment and smiled. “And I think that you are a very smart girl, Kally. A lot of people would have been dangerous to talk to, but you managed to find one who wasn’t.”

    “They’re all strangers. I met you today, so you’re not a stranger.” Kally suddenly looked excited. “Mommy!” She let go of my hand and ran off to her mother. To my surprise, her mother didn’t look at all upset that her daughter had been with me.

    “So what they say isn’t true.” I raised an eyebrow, confused at the woman’s words. “You boys don’t become monsters over in the middle east.” She appeared to be surprised by her own words.

    “No ma’am. We mostly do humanitarian work, the peacekeeping stuff.” I felt a tug at my arm. It was Kally again.

    “Mommy, can I go play games? Shawn can come with me.” She looked expectantly up at me.

    “It’s no problem for me,” I told her. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do. She nodded and Kally grinned, attempting to drag me off somewhere. I noticed her bubble wand was out again, and she was creating her trail again.
    It was all so innocent, these bubbles, and this little girl who chose to trust me. Maybe it was the first step towards breaking that glass wall. Maybe it was the first step towards healing.