Free When She Came Home by Drusilla Campbell

cream, Glory collapsed in whiny exhaustion and only Rick could comfort her, saying to Harry as he held her on his lap that some days an eight-year-old was just a taller version of a four-year-old. For a minute Frankie felt like a stranger in the family. In the time she had been deployed Rick had learned how to be a single parent and required no help from her.
    At home he carried Glory upstairs, and she did not stir except to tighten her arms about his neck. Following behind them Frankie reached for the banister to steady herself, staggered by a wave of soul-sapping weariness. Jared Westcott, the conference at Arcadia, and her father’s baiting: it was more than she knew how to handle. And the worst of it had been those moments upstairs, confronted by the fierce little girl she and Rick had made.She had failed to do the right thing, to be the mother she wanted to be.
    She sank to the stairs and sat with her head in her hands, her fingers pressed hard against her closed eyes.
    At Three Fountain Square she had failed to be the Marine she wanted to be. So little had been asked of her. All she had to do was force open the door of the Humvee and step out. But she had done nothing.
    Lions and bears and two or three different floppy-eared dogs, a pony the color of Pepto-Bismol, Zee-Zee the chartreuse cobra, and more creatures whose names Frankie did not know were arranged in a protective wall around Glory. Frankie’s impulse was to clear the bed and give her room to uncurl like a blossom from a tight bud. She had once tried to do this but the results were unhappy. Glory had awakened in the darkness without her protectors, screaming for Daddy, her eyes alight with a nightmare she could not remember.
    Frankie didn’t think she had ever screamed for her daddy in that way. But then she hadn’t ever had a “daddy.” Her father had been either “the General” or “Sir” for as far back as she could remember, a formidable and sometimes frightening figure. Even so her memories of childhood were mostly happy. Eight had been a year of wonders, of falling into bed exhausted at the end of every day and being asleep before her head touched the pillow. It was a time of bikes and Rollerblades and Boogie-boarding, sleepovers andlearning to sail and horseback ride, of finding that she was strong and naturally adept at a lot of things, that when she made a suggestion, the other girls agreed and went along with her. Somewhere around age eight she had begun to sense that she was a leader.
    She could not remember ever being afraid at Glory’s age.
    And then, without warning, an experience leapt out of memory to contradict her. The General had gone on a Canadian fishing trip and been away ten days. At eight she had only a map-gazing knowledge of where Canada was, even less of British Columbia and a lake called Ruination. She looked the word up and the meaning raised the hair on her arms when she realized that the General had gone to a place named for destruction and death. He might never come back from Ruination. In this way she had first understood that her demanding, powerful, and awe-inspiring father could die. And, therefore, so could she.
    Children died all the time.
    Glory shifted under her patchwork comforter. “Hi, Mommy.” In half sleep, her voice was whispery and moist. “Sing the blackbird song, okay?”
    “I can’t, honey.”
    “Please?”
    “It hurts my throat.”
    Bye, bye, Blackbird.
    Frankie and Rick lay in the dark, neither of them ready to sleep. Through the window the fog reflected and dispersedthe city’s light, illuminating the room with an ashy glow.
    “It’s not really dark in here,” she said. “Maybe we should get blackout curtains.”
    “I like being able to see you.”
    “In the desert, if there’s cloud cover, the darkness is so thick sometimes you can be looking right down at your feet and not see them. You just put one foot in front of the other and hope you’re going in the right