The first thing that hit me wasn’t the heat, though the heat was considerable, the thick Virginia August kind that sits on your chest and makes every breath feel like effort. It wasn’t the cicadas either, screaming in the oaks like someone had thrown a switch. It wasn’t even the smell of cut grass and warm asphalt that used to mean home when I was a child who understood what home was supposed to mean.
It was the open garage door.
Wide. Exposed. Hollow.
I stood at the end of my parents’ driveway with my duffel biting into my shoulder and my boots still carrying the dust of three airports and two foreign countries, and I looked at that open door and felt something drop out of the bottom of my chest. The sprinkler arced across my father’s lawn in its lazy, indifferent rhythm, turning the afternoon light into glitter. His newspaper lay folded on the porch swing the way it always had, right side up, the fold precise, as if the world were still running on its normal schedule. The wind chime my mother had hung after the last hurricane scare clinked softly in the breeze.
