Return (,Waiting for)

I was a young girl when it happened, a very young girl. I barely remember what my father even looked like; I have only vague recollection of an unshaved face rubbing against my soft, baby-like cheek and bright blue eyes gazing lovingly into mine. I was just over two when he left.

As I grew a little older, perhaps four or five, and began to wonder what had happened, that was when my mother reassured me, told me that my father had gone to save the world, but that these things took time. She told me he had gone off to be a hero. At the time, I thought it sounded like praise, but in retrospect, I wonder if she had been just a little bitter. She had loved him, I know that, but I wonder how much you would really continue to love someone who chooses to leave you with a baby girl on the vague notion that he is required to "save the world."

By the time I was eight or nine, my mother stopped lying to me. When I asked if my father was coming home this year, she finally told me he wasn't coming back. Now you have to understand when I say she stopped lying, what I really mean is that she started telling me what she believed to be true. I never stopped believing that my father was going to return.

When I turned 13, I was told I should start thinking about finding a husband. I wanted to ask how my mother had found my father, but somehow I knew better. I knew she would make some comment about not wanting me to find a man who would only leave me, if she made any reference to my absent father at all. Based on the fact that she had remarried the year before and was pregnant with her new husband's baby, I was pretty certain she had forgotten him all together.

As it turned out, I didn't have to do any searching for a husband since he found me. He started courting me just a few months before my 14th birthday and my mother was thrilled. He was a good, hard-working man from a respectable family. I wouldn't say that I loved him, but I at least appreciated him, and I felt I could grow to love him. I could see why my mother wanted me to marry him. He was clean-shaven, brown-eyed, and seemed to have no aspirations of saving the world, nothing like my vague and almost forgotten memory of my father.

I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow, I ended up happy. My husband was a good man; he provided for me, it was clear that he loved me, and just as I had thought, I had grown to love him. I also believed, still, even after all these years, that my father would one day return to meet my husband and his grandchild who was now on the way, and it turned out I was at least partially right.

I was 17 and pregnant when the strangers came. Five men dressed in beaten clothing and covered with mud. I was sweeping our porch when I saw them walking through town. I knew I had never seen them before, and yet they felt familiar. It wasn't the familiarity that struck me though, it was the pain. They didn't have to look at me for me to feel it, but one of them did anyway, and my heard nearly skipped a beat when I saw his beaten face, rough beard, and bright blue eyes. Could it really be that after 15 years the father I barely knew but loved anyway had returned?

All I could do was stare. He sighed and looked away, and I know he wished more than anything that he hadn't returned.