He changed into jeans and a gray t-shirt he had left in the dresser. It still smelled faintly of cedar and of the life before. Then he went down and ate dinner with his family.
Afterward he would remember how normal it had been. Owen talked the whole meal. Claire asked about the flight, and he told her. She asked if he was tired, and he said he was. They didn't look at each other much, but they didn't look away from each other either. They were careful, like two people carrying something heavy up a narrow staircase. Owen didn't notice. Owen was busy telling him that a girl named Priya in his class could burp the alphabet as far as Q, that the school had a new principal who wore bow ties, and that there had been a huge storm in the summer that knocked down part of the oak and made the power go out for four days. He said they had cooked hot dogs on the grill in the rain and it was the best. He didn't mention Mom's friend again. Daniel saw, at the edge of his vision, Claire's fork stop at the word storm and then start again.
He gave Owen his bath. He hadn't done it in eleven months, and the boy was almost too old for it now, could mostly manage alone, but he let his father kneel by the tub and wash his hair with the green-apple shampoo and pour cups of water over his head while he squeezed his eyes shut. Daniel looked at the knobs of his spine, the healed scrape on one knee, the narrow wet shoulders, and thought: he's fine. Whatever else, he's fine. Someone took care of him. He's clean and fed and he laughs easily and he is not afraid. He held onto that like a rail.
He read two chapters of a book about a boy and a dragon. Owen fought sleep and lost in the middle of the second chapter. His hand stayed tangled in the ball chain at his neck. Daniel sat on the floor beside the bed with the book closed in his lap and listened to his son breathe. The nightlight was a plastic moon. The window was open an inch, and the crickets were going, the deep late-season chorus of Virginia in September. He had missed it with an ache he had never been able to explain to anyone over there. It had been the soundtrack of his whole childhood in the Blue Ridge foothills outside Roanoke, and it came in now through the screen as if nothing in the world had changed.