It's a Long Way Home

By Insomniac Owl

"Welcome to Minneapolis," the cab driver says, dropping Lumen's bags into the trunk. "Where can I take you?"

Lumen's stopped with one hand on the cab roof, staring out to where the sky disappears behind the tarmac. She'd forgotten how much land there was in Minnesota.

"Home, I guess."

Her parents live on the outskirts of Minneapolis, barely in the city at all. It takes forty-five minutes to get there by cab, through the city and then through empty fields and orchards. It doesn't take long enough. When she stands in front of the house, the cab pulling away behind her, Lumen still doesn't know what to do. Doesn't know if she should ring the doorbell, or if she should go in at all, if she shouldn't just turn around and walk away. She owes her family this much, though, after so long without news.

Her mother answers the door, in the middle of saying something. When she turns, the words stop. She'd been smiling. That stops too. Then her face crumbles and she pulls Lumen into a hug, all close and warm, just like Lumen remembers, but when Lumen smiles it still feels strange.

"Oh, baby." Her mother presses a kiss to her forehead. "You're back. You're back."

"You should call Owen," her mother says the next morning. "Tell him you're home."

Lumen looks up from her cereal. "I thought he was seeing the world."

"No, he's here. In Minneapolis. He didn't want to go without you."

"That's not what he told me," Lumen says. The harshness of her voice surprises her. Once, this conversation would have come and gone painlessly. Now she feels wounded and eager to wound; she wants to reach out with her words and dig into her mother's skin, make her bleed, wants to force her to her knees and make her suffer the way Lumen suffered without caring if she understands.

Lumen swallows, sick and angry and silent. She moves to drop her bowl in the sink, but it slips from her hand, fragments of glass exploding across the floor, and she remembers another kitchen, another broken dish. All the anger drains out of her. Pressing her hands against the counter, all she feels is sick.

The news story catches her by surprise. Usually her father listens to local news, or politics, but they're driving to the grocery store and the man on the radio is talking about a string of murders in Miami, about six bodies found encased in concrete. He is telling her: this is what you could be doing right now. The world settles, hard, everything muffled and thick like she's listening through a pillow pressed over her face.

In the driver's seat, her father grimaces. "Mind if I change this?"

They drive the rest of the way with the radio on classic rock, and her father doesn't notice when her hands shake. At the grocery store, she pulls out her phone, finds Dexter's name - but she can't dial. She doesn't know what she'd say.

The house in Minnesota is nothing like the clean lines of Dexter's apartment, or the banal normality of the house in the suburbs – nothing, either, like the cabin at Camp Jordan. In a way that's comforting. In others it's too familiar, because everything is exactly the same as she remembers it. Her father still has a two-egg omelet every morning; her mother wears the same dog-shaped slippers. Nothing has changed except Lumen, and it feels like her skin is itching, all her experiences leaking through. These people are her family; sooner or later they'll notice how different she is. They have to.

And yet, some things have changed, because her parents don't have all her possessions. Some went into storage; some migrated to extended family members or Goodwill donation boxes. Her mother apologizes for giving things away, for the missing dresser, for the empty space above it, but Lumen just shrugs. She's used to loss. She knows now that the only things she can count on keeping are the things she carries in her, because once something's out of sight, there's no guarantee it will come back. Even the knife Dexter gave her is missing, though she's searched her bags six times and emptied them over her bedroom floor.

She goes for a run, down to the end of the road and then back again, in the shoes she'd worn when she was taken. It's not a difficult route. She makes it harder by veering into orchards and fields, by running harder than her body can stand, and when she finally stops all she can hear is her own breath rattling in her lungs. Her body is limp, and weak, and it still isn't enough. She isn't far enough away from who she used to be, or the life she stumbled back into without meaning to.

Dexter had called his need a Dark Passenger. Hers is gone, now, but it's left ragged teeth at the edges of the space it used to occupy, and nothing to fill it with.

Lumen breathes, clasps her hands behind her head. She waits until her heart slows, then kicks off her shoes and goes in to shower.

Twenty-two days after she comes back to Minneapolis, her mother walks in on her when she's changing. Lumen, forgetting, whirls with her shirt held up over her chest, like her breasts are the only things she has to hide.

"Lumen," her mother breathes, and then Lumen remembers. The scars.

"Mom, it's –"

"What happened to you?"

Lumen pauses, pulls her shirt over her head. "A dog," she says. "I was running past this junkyard near where I –"

"No." Her mother shakes her head. "I've seen dog bites before."

"I know, but it wasn't a bite; it scratched me. I fell."

"Lumen", her mother says again.

When she came home, there had been one terrible second when Lumen thought her parents wouldn't recognize her. Jordan had seen a change in her and he'd only known her a few months; there are times when she doesn't recognize herself. The blood in her veins is different. Even she can see that. But her parents, who have known her for thirty years, see nothing. How is it possible? How can her mother look at her and know she's lying, but not that she'd been raped and tortured, that she's taken a man's life and reveled in it?

"Mom," Lumen says, and then hesitates. Nothing else comes.

Late that night, she packs her bags and goes out to the front porch.

"Hey," she says into her phone. "Dexter?"