Coming Home

Dusk was setting in, and everyone had gone home except for Johnny. It was the last place he wanted to be right now. Instead, he gazed at the stars that began to emerge in the indigo twilight for their debut now that the sun was taking its exit from the stage, leaving nothing but a burnished glow on the horizon.

He clenched the chains of the swing as if it were a lifeline, tilting his head back further until he was looking directly up into the center of the universe, where the blue had deepened to black, and the stars all peered at him like a tiny billion eyes. They had come to watch the trainwreck that became his life.

It wasn’t long before he heard footsteps approaching, lightly trudging their way through the grassy lawn of Toro Park towards his place on the swing. He closed his eyes for a moment, somewhat agitated – he recognized those steps anywhere. It was amazing that someone with such a boisterous and obnoxious personality could carry themselves so lightly across the earth, as if they were raised among mice.

He knew the truth though – it was the rats that raised them.

Reopening his eyes but not taking them off the stars, he listened to the footsteps transition from grass to tanbark, crunching their way to take a place in the swing next to him. The whine of chains screeched against the weight of a body that bore itself on the seat, groaning its last resistance as they settled in. They sat so quietly that Johnny almost believed a ghost had been messing with him. 

“You’re too quiet, Kayleigh.” He barked at his sister, finally unsettled by her silence. It was not within her nature to keep her mouth shut for more than five minutes.

“What, you mean you want me to talk this time?” she retorted.

Johnny huffed, more annoyed with her now that she had a valid point and glanced at her. Kayleigh’s head hung low, her amber hair acting as a wispy curtain that covered her face, and she seemed to be looking down at her hands clasped neatly in her lap. She was grinding her dirty sneakers into the tanbark, burrowing her foot into the ground as if it sought to hide from the truth of everything. Then, as if right on cue, Kayleigh blurted out the thoughts she seldom put through a filter or kept to herself.

“I don’t think dad is coming back this time.”

“Yeah? How so?”

 Johnny was indifferent to this revelation, but decided to humor her for once, glancing back up at a sky obscured by the metal pipeline of the swing set.

“It’s been two weeks since he left. Normally he’s gone for five days at most, and even then, he calls at least once. He would tell us if he won big at the slots, or if he crapped out and was coming home. No matter what, he would call. This time, it has been what? Nine days since we last heard from him…?”

Kayleigh had launched into her anxious tailspin of recounting the last two weeks with a cadence like she was gossiping about the latest drama amongst her friends, as if Johnny needed the recap. He sighed as she continued her tirade, continuing to look up at the sky. There were more stars - more bright eyes - coming out to watch these children on the swing.

“Not to mention in his last phone call dad said he found another girlfriend – what was her name again? Holly? Hannah? Whatever it is, he did that thing again where he swears that she’s the one and he’s gonna bring her home to be our new mom and its different this time…”

Johnny knew the tale all too well; he and his sister lived it many times. Their father would bring home some bimbo he picked off the Vegas strip and demand they call her mom. Things would be hunky-dory for two weeks at most, until dad ran out of money and “mom” would up and disappear. Dad gets depressed, drinks himself into oblivion talking about “the good old days”, then decides he’s going to get back to the strip to make his fortune.

“We’ll live like kings, kiddo, you’ll see.” He could hear his father’s voice echoing in his mind, the same thing he always told Johnny as he stepped out the front door for the umpteenth time.

Like a rat on an exercise wheel, the man was running to the same place and going nowhere.

“So, what if he’s found another girlfriend, doesn’t that mean he’s coming back soon – y’know when the cash piles up, Detective Monk?” Johnny asked his sister in a dismissive tone, kicking himself in a light swing, the chain grinding in protest of motion. Kayleigh stopped digging her foot and shot him a look; in the bleak lighting of nearby streetlights flickering to life, he could see that he hit a nerve.

“No, Johnathon, that’s exactly my point…” She drew out his full name in retaliation and he clenched his jaw. He hated being named after the deadbeat that was supposed to be taking care of them.

Before he could deliver a comeback Kayleigh looked away from him, hearing her draw a shaky breath. “What if he has found the one…that makes him never come back?” Her voice trembled in a way that made Johnny angry – at her, his dad, the stars, everything.

“So?” He snapped, kicking himself into a full swing now “So what if that rat bastard never comes back?! It’s the best thing he ever did for us! No more empty promises, no more fake moms! We’ll be free of him!”

Johnny thought many times about what he would do if his dad never returned home, anticipating how to make ends meet. He thought how he was old enough to get a worker’s permit and would have to quit school to get a job for both of them to get by. He didn’t feel bad about leaving high school; it sucked anyway, all his friends had moved or were getting ready for college, which was never his scene to begin with. Plus, he thought to himself, I can always go back in a few years after Kayleigh graduates to finish my degree.

With each pump of his legs, the swing groaned its displeasure with each attempt to catapult him into the universe. Johnny looked at the stars, drawing closer and then farther away as he made himself a human pendulum. He felt envious of those stars. They mocked him with their consistent indifference and the distance they held from the world’s problems. So, on his next upswing, he shouted his truth to the heavens, the one that had been building up for two weeks when his so-called father walked out the door for the last time.

“I’m glad he’s gone!”

Johnny fell back to the Earth, his feet contacting the ground again. He roughly skid himself to a violent halt with chunks of dirt and wood spraying out beneath his heels. Panting heavily from his effort, he snarled victoriously towards the night sky before giving way to devastated sighs, tears leaking from his eyes. He resented that he had to think about this stuff at seventeen years old; rather than living up his last summer before senior year, he instead had to figure out how to put food on the table and keep the roof over his head.

“I’m scared.” Kayleigh whispered to him, her voice shaking and uncertain. Johnny quickly wiped his eyes and turned to look at his younger sister. Despite the warmth of the night, she trembled in the dark, gripping her hands together so tight that her white knuckles glowed against the darkness. She was two months from her thirteenth birthday, and already the weight of the world was pushing heavy on her shoulders.

Johnny decided that although they shared the same name, he did not have to share the same fate that befell his father.

“Me too.” He responded to her softly, and then stood from his seat, letting the swing drift gently away from him. “Let’s go home – I’ll make us some bacon mac.” He bribed Kayleigh with her favorite meal, offering a hand to help her up. She hesitated momentarily before nodding and taking his hand to walk the half mile back home.

The swings drifted gently in the empty air for a little while after they left before finding their stillness, suspended in abandoned silence. The stars, blinking and flickering, continued to watch the world as they always did, before disappearing within the bleary dawn of a new day.